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EPISODE: 109
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TOPICS: concerns around binance, implications of potential ETFs, macro environment, nostr is the future
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(00:01:26) Introduction and discussion of Binance
(00:03:20) Concerns about Binance and its impact on the market
(00:18:03) Comparison of Binance to other exchanges and the issue of rehypothecation
(00:36:42) Binance's accounting practices and potential asset liability mismatches
(00:37:27) The regulatory challenges and potential legal actions against Binance
(00:39:40) The role of Tether and stablecoins in the regulatory scrutiny of Binance
(01:12:22) Bitcoin correlation with equity markets
(01:19:14) Borrowing against Bitcoin
(01:25:12) BlackRock's interest in Bitcoin
(01:45:48) Receiving lightning on custodial wallets
(01:46:31) Pain points on the app side
(01:47:11) Elon's vision of social and financial surveillance
(01:47:26) Primal app and its features
(01:48:39) Different Bitcoin clients and their features
(01:49:33) Using Nostr instead of Twitter
(01:50:40) The potential of Nostr and its integrations
(01:53:04) Final thoughts on Bitcoin and Nostr
[00:00:29]
ODELL:
Happy Bitcoin Wednesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for the 2nd Citadel Dispatch in a row, the interactive live show focused on actionable Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. I am joined here by rider die freak, good friend, return guest, Dylan LeClaire, to talk Binance, state of the market, ETFs. We're gonna yesterday, we we were in it for the tech. Today, we're just gonna go straight d gen and and go that route. So very excited. How's it going, Dylan? Doing great. I guess I'm the I'm the d gen guest. You're the d gen guest. Yes. Yesterday, we were talking about training Bitcoin developers.
[00:01:10] Dylan LeClair:
Nice.
[00:01:13] ODELL:
So where should we start? I mean, let's start, with Binance. I mean, Binance is the topic of the week or last couple of weeks. Dylan and and some others have concerns over over Binance, and and they are the largest exchange in the world by far. And so let's go into that. So, Dylan, what are your what are you seeing here? Do you want me to pull up anything you just sent me?
[00:01:43] Dylan LeClair:
I mean, we can hold on to that, but I guess so I'll I also just sent you one of my threads too. He's sending me charts. This is how the best time this is gonna get. Yep. Alright. So where do we start here? Well, there's a lot of things. One, you know, the title here is Bank Run on Binance. Question mark. You know, question mark. Yeah. There's still you know, Binance has a whole lot of Bitcoin. A whole lot of, I guess, quote, unquote, crypto, like, 600, 700,000 Bitcoin as it stands. So It's like $18,000,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. Yeah. There's no Bankron at the current moment.
In my opinion, there should be, you know, I would not hold funds on Binance.
[00:02:23] ODELL:
So if you're bankrupt, there should be a bankrupt. Yeah. Essentially.
[00:02:29] Dylan LeClair:
And and here's why, I guess, I would say. And and and, you know, the state of crypto Twitter, is pretty ridiculous whenever you raise these points. Like, just to be clear here. A lot of people when I when I say this, whether it's about FTX or or Binance or, you know, previously FTX or literally any crypto bucket shop, derivative, yield farm, whatever, they're always like, oh, you're fudding or, like, you're a bear or, like, you know, you missed the bottom or, like, blah blah blah blah blah. It's like, okay. You know, I have a a significant amount of my net worth in Bitcoin. My parents have that money in Bitcoin. Like, I trust me. I like, people that are thinking, like, I'm fudging, you know, I have a vested interest in, like, Bitcoin collapsing or whatever, are just, like, out of their minds, don't even know what they're talking about, and are completely the point is going completely over their head.
Why do I care about Binance? Why am I, like, you know, commentating on Binance? Well, 1, you know, generally, I guess, my job, you could title it, you know, I don't really have an official title or care for all of that stuff, but, like, a Bitcoin analyst. Right? You know, I guess you could frame it as as such. So why do I care about Binance? Well, reportedly, you know, there's 70 to 80% of the spot volume, for Bitcoin and, you know, crypto pricing. Right? And when did I first start talking about Binance? Well, you know, it was shortly after, the collapse of of FTX when, you know, the same patterns that we saw with SPF, leading up to, their collapse with token price, with public statements from, SBF, you know, CZs, a kind of attitude or not attitude, but actions and statements and words being very similar to to SBF. And this isn't just anecdotal. Right? So what did SBF do? Right? You see all, you know, Celsius collapse and and Luna and 3AC and GBTC and all these yield carry trades and whatever blow up.
And SBF, you know, throughout the summer is, like, you know, f FTX is this giant that came out unscathed, and they're, like, we're gonna bail out BlockFi, and we're gonna write a term sheet for Voyager and, like, you know, industry bailouts. And he's going on CNBC and being like, you know, we're here for the industry and for the ecosystem. SPF the modern day JPMorgan? And and, like, all these dumb narratives. And, you know, I didn't I didn't, like, suspect that FTX was mass and solvent at this point, but it was like It's like it was literally a Ponzi scheme from Yeah. It was like, well, this is odd. And so someone over the summer sent me a balance sheet, or, it was a marketing pitch for Alameda from the summer of 2018. And it was that was, you know, following the the 2017 bull market, obviously, when Bitcoin went from, like it hadn't yet fallen to 3,000, I think. It was, like, 20 k to, like, 6 k. Right? And it's, like, super volatile up and down. And it was an Alameda pitch deck of, like, hey, we're a quant hedge fund, blah blah blah. You know, here are our returns, and their equity curve was like a straight line. Right. And it's like, we're compounding at this time and the other thing. And and it's like, these loans and they called them, like, loans to their to the Alameda. They're like, these are risk free. And someone sent me this, and I was like, yeah. It was a high return risk free is what we Yeah. I was like and it was like, we you know, these are, like, 20% APR loans that, like, we you know, are are risk free. And I was like, yeah. Like, you know, you fabricated this to try to make Alameda look bad. Like, this is, like, literally, obviously, a made off style Ponzi scheme as such. There's no way this like, these guys actually posted this. Like, anybody with half a brain would know this is fake.
And and as it became increasingly clear, you know, we basically with The CoinDesk coming out, that Alameda, you know, this Titan hedge fund that people thought was, like, you know, the smartest people in the in the room for crypto, ironically, were, you know, levered their entire you know, all their net equity on a liquid shit coins. And as it turns out, you know, we're commingling funds with, the FTX balance sheet. Right? And that became clear when, you know, Caroline was, like, hey, we'll buy all your tokens at $22. Right. And, you know, the and it was, like, holy crap. And he pulled up, and I'll get to why how this relates to Binance.
But you pull up the FTP chart when she tweets this, and I I live I live posted this off the hip all on Twitter. Yeah. I remember. It was lit. I was, like, holy shit. I, like, had never looked at an FTT chart before. I couldn't care less about FTT's stupid fraud exchange token. I look it up, and I was like, holy shit. She just tweeted her line in the sand. And you look at the chart, and it's like FTT went from $2 to $22 or, like, to, like, 80 or whatever. Yeah. It went way It went from, like, 2 to 20 on no volume, no price action, no price discovery, straight line in, like, late 2020, early 2021. And I was like, oh my god. Because, like, okay. For instance, Matt. Right? Stay humble, stack stats. We're like, yeah. Nope. Bitcoin. We'll buy as much as we want. We don't care. We're in it for the long game. We wanna acquire the asset. I don't care about that near term exchange rate. So if someone's like, you know, hey. We'll, defend this price, you know, of of, you know, our own token especially.
Like like, Warren Buffett wants the price of his assets he wants to own to go down. You know? Bitcoin is, like, you know, send a nuke. We wanna buy the we wanna buy the the bloody, like, red candle. When someone's like, you know, hey, yeah, we'll defend this price and, you know, like, that is obviously a red flag. Right? Right. You know, it gets lined in the sand. There were a lot of FX flags, but that's They were levered against our shit. Broke the camel back. They they blew up. So post FTX collapse, you know, which, you know, ironically so, was CZ calling their bluff. He was like, hey. We're dumping all of our FTT tokens, like couple 100 mil. And then you saw, like, a bunch of speculators on BitMax, on Binance, ironically, in FTX. People were shorting FTT, shorting the hell out of it, you know, and and it was basically a call call on the FTX solvency. K? They blow up, people lose their Bitcoin, etcetera. Just two things I would add here, if we're gonna do if we're doing a timeline.
[00:08:28] ODELL:
Binance was a, essentially incubated FTX. When Alameda first started, they were on BitMex. They wanted to launch their own exchange so they could own the house as well, and Binance basically gave the start up seed money for that. Yep. Then, FTX thought that Binance was a black eye on their, cap table, and they were having trouble, with all the suits that they were friends with in America. So they wanted to get Binance off the cap table, and that deal that, FTX basically bought back their equity from Binance involved a large portion of FTT token.
So when c z so and then, the way the story goes is, SBF and his suit friends were in Washington, and they were basically trying to and and this is everyone knows that he he he donated to a shit ton of politicians. He brought a shit ton of politicians. That what he was trying to do was basically say, put up this regulatory moat, make FTX the de facto champion, and we'll crush Binance together. And he heard basically through the grapevine that that SPF was angling to take him down, and he took that FTT token that he had. And right before he dumped it on the market, he tweeted out we are dumping them all on the market, which caused the initial panic and then the rest is history.
[00:09:57] Dylan LeClair:
Yep. And so what did CZ do after? Right? Biggest competitor goes down. It's a it's a massive win at first. Right? Their biggest competitor, FTX, kind of this meteoric Not even a competitor, but okay. Yeah. Well, you know, in theory,
[00:10:13] ODELL:
Do you remember when CZ went on CNBC during it and was like, we're not we don't like thinking about other smaller exchanges that we don't compete with. We we like to focus on growing the industry.
[00:10:24] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. And, initially, you know, you could interpret it as, like, a relative and it was, I guess, a relative win for Binance. Right? It's like, you know, this this other derivative casino that, you know, was so dominant, came out of nowhere, SPF, poster boy, you know, Forbes covers, whatever. They're gone, you know. There's really the money rentals. There's no there's no other place to go for crypto, g gents. I mean, there is, but, like, if you just think about the derivative kind of marketplaces and, like, the the kind of the preferred bucket shops, it was like the BitMex's of the world, and then Binance came along. And it was Binance and Well, like, BitMex particularly got very neutered when the 3 founders got arrested and Yep. Added to UIC. And we've kinda seen, like, this this hop of, like, you know, there's kind of this new new, you know, exchange or, you know, unregulated bucket shop where everybody can go and you can be John Smith from whatever country with a VPN and you can trade and it's all great. And then, you know, it takes a year or 2 and international law comes in. And, like, let's be clear. I'm no statist. I'm not, like, shut them down. People can do what they want with their money. Yeah. But we've seen, you know, kind of this this relative rise and fall of all these exchanges. And so it was like, okay. Great. You know, Binance took out, helped to take out, you know, their fraud competitor, all good. Bunch of market share, bunch of coins, bunch of volume flows to Binance. Okay. Great. CZ comes out and it's like, you know, the one thing and and to me, you know, kind of like the art of war, like, playbook starts to play through my mind. And I'm like, you know, look look strong when you are weak, you know. Right. When you when you are strong, don't show it, you know. Like, that's I forget the original quote. But it was, like, it was it was very, very reminiscent of what SPF did with kind of a public projection of strength. It was like it was like, hey, guys. The lessons we learned and CZ literally tweeted this out. It's like, the lessons we learned from FTX is, you know, never trade against your customers, never leverage against your own exchange token, never take loans. We have no outside loans. And no leverage period. No leverage period. Right? Great. Good. You know? Great rule, CZ. Love it. You know, he's like, also, like, you know, we're gonna bail out the industry with a $1,000,000,000 of BUSD.
And everyone's like, CZ, you're awesome. You're the man. Like, thank you for, you know, having a vested interest in crypto and forwarding this movement, yada yada. Okay. So, you know, me, and I wasn't the only one to do this, just curious, was like, alright, you know, $1,000,000,000 of BUSD, here's the blog post, copy paste address, Etherscan. It's like, oh, great. Etherscan labeled 1, you know, industry bailout recovery funds. Awesome. Click one click over. That was a it was a 2 hop. One click over, another click. A day before that, it's in Binance 8 wallet. So I'm like, wait. What? Binance 8's an exchange reserves.
And and people, like, also, you know, in the comments were, like, wait, TZ, what? You know? And they put out the day after. They put out this, and I can, you know, I can pull up the link if you give me a couple seconds. When was it? It was like It was like late November. Right? Right after. About almost almost a year ago, like, 10 months ago. Yeah. And it was, like, basically a blog post that said roundabout way, you know, our security is so good that we keep our corporate funds in the same exchange addresses. Right. And it was like, wait, what?
Like and and this is right after FTX gets run, and they say, you know, you know, what's the most important? Transparency, auditability, blah blah blah blah blah. Proof of reserves. Here's our proof of reserves. You know? And this company, this, Mazar company, he CZ goes, you know, he was audited, audited proof of reserves, hashtag transparency. Shares this Mazar's audit. First of all, it's not an audit. It's an attestation. It's just it's a company instructing a a firm, an accounting firm, that their instructed way of measuring whatever they they want you to measure is how they say it. And so Binance literally has their a bunch of listed addresses. They say, here's our addresses. Here's how much money we say we have.
It's, you know, verify if it's correct. Yeah. And and Mazars is, like, I mean, yeah. Sure. And and a bunch of people, including, like, you know, one of the ones that was, like, pretty laughable to me was, like, Willy Woo was, like, oh, you know, great. Thanks for sharing. What are your liabilities? And CZ is, like, oh, you know, well, liabilities are harder, but we don't have any. Just ask around. And to me, I would just laugh. I literally, verbally, audibly laughed out loud because it was like a month before we had FTX, you know, this dominant player who was leveraged, not I mean, they did have Voyager on a credit line of Voyager. Alameda did.
But when Susie's like, oh, you know, ask around. We don't have any liabilities. And it's like, you have, you know, 1,000,000,000 upon 1,000,000,000 upon 1,000,000,000 of dollars of notional assets and liabilities on the Binance platform via derivative exposure. So so, okay, how do we connect all these dots, and why why am I and I kind of going on this weird long tirade? So what are the big similarities with Binance and FTX aside from their derivative bucket shop, shitcoin casino? Well, one of them, the most obvious one is an exchange token. Right? And if we think about literally every crypto company besides essentially BlockFi that collapsed in 2022, what do they have in common?
In hindsight, they had an exchange token, you know, the Celsius. Right? That model where, you know, there whether it was a yield offering or whatever, it was the this exchange token This is this was BNB pioneered this, and they all copied BNB. Yeah. It was like, oh, FTX went down SBF, you know, criminal blah blah blah. Where do you think SPF and FTX learned? You know, what model did they copy? They didn't copy the BitMex model. The BitMex model was Bitcoin only. We're gonna you you can't there's no stable coins. There's no crypto. It's just Bitcoin denominated derivatives. Right? And that was, like, a pretty simple model. It was I mean, honestly, it was kind of, like, you know, a a really cool cyberpunk kinda model of, like, hey. Truck on a VPN. You don't need anything. You just log on with the email. You can trade free market, whatever. And they did they trade against you? Of course, they did. But everybody knew that and just Understood territory. Yeah. Yeah. It was like, yeah. You know? They trade against us, but, like, everybody knows us. Shadow Bank bucket shop. You know? Yeah. You know? It was just like it was just like the golden age of, like, a casino. And so, you know, being, Binance comes in, you know, pioneers this, like, we're gonna list every shit coin ever. We're gonna list the perpetuals and derivatives, and we're gonna make every single trading pair.
And, you know, and p and the generate crypto traders love it. Right? It's like, oh, you know, I can trade, like, literally every shit coin pair against Bitcoin, against Tether, against whatever. BNB. BNB. Right? And so, I guess, Matt, if you want, pull up the first chart I sent you. This is the b and b market cap.
[00:17:48] ODELL:
And I just before we get there, just really quick, we're 17 minutes in. Freaks, regardless of any of this, it's just don't trust any custodians, not your keys, not your coins. Just hold learn how to hold Bitcoin yourself. It's not that difficult. Okay. Dylan agrees with me. Dylan, what do you want me to open?
[00:18:07] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. No. I mean, that's that's the entire point of all this. This is a long roundabout way of I mean, people think I'm, like, you know, accusing me of being some paid actor against Binance, whatever. It's not Binance unique. And I've said this multiple times. It's not an agenda against CZ or Binance. It's not even isolated to just the quote unquote crypto ecosystem. Like, also, like, don't trust Bank of America. Yeah. No. It's like yeah. This is what Bitcoin fixes. It's like no counterparty risk. You know, you you hold your own money.
[00:18:32] ODELL:
Okay. I interrupted you, Dylan. Where where am I going here? Do you want?
[00:18:38] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. Well, we're going back to why do I say why do I question Binance. Right? And so I you know, looking at similarities of FTX and and Binance, I look at the exchange token. Right? And this is back in November I first looked at it. And there's a Fiat valuation and there's a Bitcoin valuation. And if you look if you look at literally every single Altcoin, and I don't even care about these things. I had never looked at BNB until last November after CZ started tweeting like a, you know, s SBF summer clone. But every single altcoin against Bitcoin, people always think it's, like, some magical story, you know, Ethereum, Future of Finance, Solana, all this garbage.
All it is is just is just beta to Bitcoin with speculators. It's super liquid, low float garbage. It goes way up in a bull run and crashes. And every single altcoin crashed against Bitcoin in 2022, all of them, because Bitcoin crashed 85% or 80%. Binance, BNB, and Bitcoin terms went to all time highs, floated to all time highs. And it traded in 2021, it traded with, like, 2 to 3 times some volatility of Bitcoin. And in 2020, in 2021. And in 2022, it trades with the same volatility of Bitcoin and and goes all time highs in the Bitcoin pair. And, you know, this is when CZ is tweeting about all this stuff, about how virtuous he is, whatever. And I'm like, this makes no sense. BNB, you know, this ETH clone ghost chain that nobody uses is worth 2,830,000 Bitcoin.
That makes no sense to me. And so CZ being like, oh, you know, we have no liabilities. Whatever. And also tweeting at the same time of, like, we have never sold any BNB. And it's like, Matt, what would you do? First of all, like, this is just the assumption that, you know, the BNB price is organic, and and, you know, no one sent it, like, soaring to a $100,000,000,000 valuation. But in 2017, they create a shitcoin from nothing. 4 years later, literally 4 years, maybe 4 and a half, it's worth a $100,000,000,000 and you own half the float.
Yeah. Right? But who sent the market that high? Right? It wasn't retail. Right? Like, it wasn't, like, bleb stacking BNB. Who pushed it there? Right? Who pushed Celsius token? Who pushed FTT? No. No. But okay. Wait. So first of all, like, can you explain
[00:21:00] ODELL:
what the mech like, what if if you if you were talking to cz, what would he tell you the value prop of buying it BNB is, and what would he tell you, like, the mechanism they use to increase its
[00:21:13] Dylan LeClair:
value? It's you get a discount on Binance fees, and it's an ETH clone. And, you can, you know, use it in the Binance, quote, unquote, Binance ecosystem. The Binance Smart Chain. But no. But, also,
[00:21:25] ODELL:
they take, like, a portion of trading fees, and then they burn they buy buy BNB, and then they take it, and then they burn it. Privately burn it. Right?
[00:21:35] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. But there there this is the thing. They're not actually burning anything. They're just, like, taking their stake that they that they gave themselves and being, like, oh, you know, I guess we're reducing the supply. But they send it to a burn address. Right? Yeah. But, like and people are like, oh, I guess that makes it more valuable. And so The where I'm going at this, where I'm where I'm coming from on this is, like,
[00:21:56] ODELL:
like, Coinbase is traded on the Nasdaq. You're like you can buy Coinbase shares. Yep. And what Binance would tell you what cz would tell you is that BNB was a way for people to get exposure to Binance's success, ex exposure to Binance's success without a, you know, a proper proper equity stake. It's not actually stock. It's not actually shares in the company, but you have some exposure to upside of Binance being successful. That's his shill, basically, at BNB. Obviously, I'm not I'm not I'm not endorsing. I'm not saying it's the case. I mean, as Dylan said, you know, BNB is up tremendously against or it's it's outperformed Bitcoin over a certain period of time. I'm pretty sure when I first started telling people, don't trust BNB, do not hold BNB, it's, you know, centralized custodian on steroids and completely propped up by Binance.
It was, like, 5000% ago. Yeah. But my point is is the mechanism behind BNB is literally, like, in I don't know if they have a white paper or whatever, but in the press release that released BNB, it's like, we are going to prop up the price based on our revenues. As revenues come in, we're gonna burn BNB and reduce the supply. Right?
[00:23:04] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. You know, and there's, like, a whole roundabout way of doing this. But, yeah, essentially, that's that's supposedly the value prop. Right? But when I look at this, and this isn't a really Binance specific thing, I just look at, like, if it was Tesla stock or Apple stock or Bitcoin even kinda similar to, like, how Bitcoin traded at, like, you know, 30 k middle of 2022, and it was, like, this multiyear kind of support thing, and you're, like, holy shit. You know, take TA for a grain of salt, but you're like, this looks pretty damn ugly. Right? In the same way that FDT did. You know, it's like multiyear support trades from $20 to $200 in a straight line from 2020.
And against Bitcoin, like, Bitcoin's at 27 k, Matt. The first time Bitcoin trade at 27 k, BNB was was 80% lower in Bitcoin terms. So it's up from the first time Bitcoin touched 27 k. BNB in Bitcoin terms is up 500, 600%. Right? And every shit coin is lower. So it's like, oh, you know, maybe Binance is, like, hyper successful. Maybe. But me being skeptical, have my doubts. And I personally think they have put 100 of 1,000,000, maybe 1,000,000,000 of dollars more than advertised and probably, in in my opinion, this is pure speculation. I don't have insight in balance sheet, and and no one does. It's a it's a black box. But I personally think that there's there's a lot of shady stuff going on, and I don't think that the the price of their shit coin is has a non zero relationship with the notional solvency. It's all I've said,
[00:24:39] ODELL:
and people, like, get all upset and mad at me for it. You think, like you think if I mean, you keep saying this 212 number. You think if BNB goes below 212, then then they become insolvent. No.
[00:24:49] Dylan LeClair:
Well, it it already has. But here here is what I I guess what I'm saying is they have a ton of ammo, and the ammo is all their customer funds. Right? FTX wasn't exposed until their Bitcoin got drained. So Binance at 700,000 Bitcoin isn't you know, they're not they're not gonna ever seize it. They're not gonna be like, oh, well, guys, guess what? Our assets and liabilities don't match up match up. We're closing down shop. Right? That's not gonna happen. But not only just, like, you know, me being kind of, like, some conspiracy theorist, whatever. They've been proven to have to multiple times to to have rehypothecated funds by the 1,000,000,000. 1, putting a $1,000,000,000 of the industry fund from customer wallets.
We keep our our own corporate money in the same thing because our addresses are so secure. Yeah. But, like, that's not
[00:25:43] ODELL:
I don't know. So, like, look, I'm no fan of CZ. I've been an outspoken critic of him. I think that, you know, I I he's he's intentionally, you know, misleading, about his messaging. He tells people not to self custody. He does all this shit. Right? Propping up BNB. Definitely propping up BNB. But all that said, like, I don't I just don't think it's a fair comparison to compare him to FTX or Celsius. Like, CZ is a different breed. He's from a different generation, of Bitcoiners. And, I mean, Muczynski was just a straight up scammer. And then, like, FTX, BlockFi, Gemini. I guess Gemini like, maybe I can't group into the same era diagnosis, but, like The yield product was shit. But yeah. But a lot of it was like, look. We're suits. We're Fiat Maxis.
All banks rehypothecate. Like, of course, we're gonna generate yield. We wanna generate yield. Yield is everything. We gotta put our money to work. And they were all, like, massive, massive degens. But c z, you know, is first of all, the exchange is on a completely different level. Like, it's hard to measure these things because volume can be faked. A bunch of different metrics can be faked. But if you look at the on chain balances, it's a significant difference. Yeah. And if you just are in the space, it's very obvious. Like, it's Binance and then just a big drop off even when FTX existed. Yep. Binance completely demolished FTX. It's this massive exchange that's been operating for a long fucking time outside of government purview, like, massive target on their back from the US government. I would like they're more comparable to, like, a Bitfinex and a Tether. Yeah. Bitfinex and Tether are tied at the hip. And, first of all, wouldn't it be ironic if all the suits that said they were gonna come to save us were the massive d gens and CeCe wasn't?
He was just, like, humbly scamming people with trading fees and propping up BNB that he owned a shit ton of. And then, second of all, like, I think I think if you look back at old Bitcoin history, like, that was not a ridiculous setup to have. You had your cold storage that you had some, like, you know, ridiculous multisig scheme completely cold, and then you had your hot wallets. And, like, Suits would call that commingled and, like, not an ideal situation from accounting purposes. But, like, to me, that's not necessarily the red flag that it would be. Yeah. If you look back at FTX even, you know, right now, we're looking at the on chain balances of Binance. It's way higher than everyone else, but we agree that, obviously, it's it's not a prop proof of reserves is bullshit. There's no proof of liabilities. There's no way there's no way to even do it. Yep.
But with FTX, you remember FTX days? Like, Glassnode and shit weren't even tracking FTX wallets. Everyone was like, oh, they have great fucking OPSEC, but they just didn't have any fucking Bitcoin whatsoever. Yeah. So I just,
[00:28:54] Dylan LeClair:
yeah. I I I really Let's be clear. You labeled it. You labeled the episode Bankron on Binance, not me. But I agree. It's a it's a completely different level. I just it's weird because I am
[00:29:06] ODELL:
in this weird situation where I I feel like I'm defending Binance. Yep. Because there's so much conversation and speculation around them being like FTX and being insolvent. I mean, I titled the episode bank run on Binance question mark because it's clickbait. It's like but, but that is the conversation. Like, is there a bank run on Binance? Right? And I think a lot of people think there is. A lot of people think it's like an FTX type of situation. You see a lot of suits that got rugged by FTX calling it the same exact thing, a lot of comparisons to it. And I just don't think the comparison holds water. I I I put it more in, like, like, a tether Bitfinex camp. Like, the biggest threat is probably a cruise missile or, you know, regulations, but, like, I I like the term cruise missile diplomacy, where, like, the US government takes them down. Yep. And and a lot of the arguments against Binance to me feel more in the Tether truther camp. And that that's what I'm trying to unpack there because, I mean, I know you look at the numbers. You have a lot of analysis there. Like, I have tons of respect for you. So
[00:30:14] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. Well, there's a there's a few more instances. 1, the $1,000,000,000 thing was just kind of 1 notch, 1 arrow in the in the quiver. One another few things is, like, you know, the whole with the whole BNB Binance chain. Right? They had, like, this and this was just another kind of red flag that wasn't like a, you know, smoking gun in of itself, but just another kind of thing that was like, really? Right? So they have, like, this b n BNB they call it, like, b n, b tokens. Right? They they wrap an asset, quote, unquote. Yeah. And then they issue it on Binance Smart Chain. Okay. Right. Fine. Right? Like, all a bunch of the shit coins have done. And you get DeFi, quote unquote. Yeah. Quote unquote DeFi. And, like, let's be clear. Right? Like, BNB is is not even like, I shit on ETH all the time. Right? We we talk about we talk about risk factors and it being centralized and the development and all that stuff.
But, you know, since since the DAO hack, right, ETH hasn't been, like, okay, guys. Like, stop creating. We're rolling this back. We're gonna they haven't done that since
[00:31:18] ODELL:
since you know Compared to BNB, ETH looks very decentralized. Is your American BNB. Like BNB is literally just a single company controls it. Boom. BNB got hacked in
[00:31:27] Dylan LeClair:
or or a bridge got exploited in September 2022. They straight up halted the thing. Right? They straight up halted the chain, like, all the centralized validators on Binance. Right? So it's different in that sense. But let's go back to the the the the b token. Right? So there there's there's all these there's Bitcoin, Tether, BUSD, Ethereum, 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of dollars of this. Their their backing of this of these tokens, particularly the BUSD. Right? Paxos issues a stable coin. Paxos is pretty legitimate US financial institution. They hold the treasuries for finance. They have attestation. They have CUISP kind of debt issuance, numbers, so you can look it up. You can verify that these these are real. These are real debt securities that are backing it.
It's all legitimate. They issue a BUSD. Binance, you know, kind of labeled names, Stablecoin. Great. It goes up to $20,000,000,000. And then Binance, you know, takes 1,000,000,000 of dollars of the Stablecoin, parks it in a wrapped contract, and issues it on the other side as a Binance, a a BNB chain. So it's not trading on ETH as Paxos issues it. It's trading on Binance Smart Chain. Well, post mortem come to find out that throughout 2021 and early 2022, there was 1,000,000,000 of dollars of unbacked BUSD issued on Binance Smart Chain.
Also come to find out that there was 1,000,000,000 of dollars of USDC, Tether, and a 100,000 200,000, plus of Ethereum and some Bitcoin that were backed in the literally in the Binance regular exchange, exchange wallet balances. Right? So you would say or maybe you could steal Mana and say, well, that's the addresses of their, you know, most sound security or their their biggest multisigs or whatever. Right. I would say, listen. They're taking one asset, and they're issuing 2 liabilities against it. One liability is the is the asset that they're supposedly pegging on the other side. So they're taking one asset, and they're they're owing one to their customers, and they're creating another asset on the other side that's a wrapped token. Right. And there's no way for us to know the customer's off chain balances, meaning, like, what you see on the UI UX. Like, Binance, I have 1 Bitcoin. See, like, look at it says 1 Bitcoin here. There's no way to determine what that Bitcoin is or how much of the how much they say they owe to their customers versus what's in the actual address. So for months on end, they had 1,000,000,000 and probably 1,000,000,000 of dollars issued on Binance Smart Chain backed by the same exchange wallets that they used in the proof of reserves out of station. If you are not an incompetent account, like, if from an accounting perspective, if you're not extremely incompetent, best case best case is extreme incompetence, then you segregate them. Worst case, and I'm not saying this and merely posing the ability.
The worst case is it's outright fraud, and you're double counting
[00:34:34] ODELL:
you're double counting an asset. Right? That's literally accounting fraud. And so, obviously, you're not sue you for calling him fraudulent.
[00:34:41] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. And I'm not saying that right, like but just just, you know, this is how accounting works. And so, you know, I I went through, did a bunch of digging, like, there was 1,000,000,000 upon 1,000,000,000 of dollars of this. And it wasn't just, you know, Tether, USCC, whatever. It was literally, you know, the the shittiest bottom of the barrel shit coins that they were doing this with. It was, like, post FTX, CZ starts, like, Schizo tweeting with, you know, transparency, proof of reserves, and then goes to his back end engineers. He's like, guys, we need to figure out this accounting stuff. And his and his guys are, like, wait, what? And he's, like, I don't care. Just throw an address on there. And and so, like, you look at you look at this, and you can look at the Internet archive.
And the the proof of reserves backing, the address is backing the same amount of output tokens on b, you know, b and b chain. Right? So the same amount of tokens are on the pegged outside. You look at the Internet archive, and the addresses that are pegging the tokens are changing, like, sometimes by the day. They're just changing them. They're reworking them. They're shuffling the balances. And then finally, as of, like, a couple months back when Bloomberg and Reuters called them out on it, they're now segregated and in their own address. Right? So it's like, okay, you know They are segregated now.
They are. But the point is is that Binance has, you know, 600 or 700,000 Bitcoin. How much? And we have no idea. No one does. But all I'm posing is, like
[00:36:09] ODELL:
and and, again, they're not being bank run. They're gonna have a long time, you know, unless they, like, freeze your account, which they've done for a lot of people. Yeah. You know, for, like, compliance or whatever. No. I mean, if Binance did theoretically go down, like, it's not gonna be like FTX. They're not he's not gonna, like, call his mommy and be like, oh, let's do a bankruptcy process, get lawyers involved, restructure, and, like, maybe relaunch again or some shit. They they like, it's gonna be a long drawn out process where there's no, like, withdrawals are getting frozen. They're getting delayed. Like, this You're more snappy than than SBF in that sense. Right? It seems like It's a good old fashioned, you know, crypto bucket shop.
[00:36:42] Dylan LeClair:
Yep. And so, like, again, this is just it was just another example of, like, okay. I you know, he's, like, we have all of our customers' addresses segregated and whatnot. It's, like, it's just a big pool of crypto assets where they have a, you know, they have, like, notional, like, $55,000,000,000 of assets, right, of, you know, every shit, crypto, stable coin, Bitcoin, and, you know, that you can think of, wrap Bitcoin, whatever. But, the on the other side, like, there there's clearly, it's somewhere, some way asset liability mismatches, because they have no idea what they're doing from an accounting perspective. So, like, no. Is Binance, like, imminent failure? No. Right? The DOJ is coming. The SEC is already the I SCC. Like, I raised all of these points. Yeah. But none of that means anything. You have to isolate it
[00:37:35] ODELL:
because that's like saying, like, the DOJ is going after Tether, so Tether is a scam or, like, Tether is insolvent. No. I mean, it's not saying like, again, I'm not saying that. Because like, they're an enemy of this they're an enemy of the US financial hegemony. It's like it's the same answer to your competitors. All of them. Buying and Finfinex, Tethers, Tethers is.
[00:37:56] Dylan LeClair:
Tether I mean, Tether dude, Tether owns more treasuries than, like, Mexico. Probably supposedly. Right? The Tether
[00:38:02] ODELL:
Tether is a shadow dollar that is is is is used mostly in situations where you can't use a regulated dollar, and that's what everyone missed when they thought, like, USDC and, like, PayPal coin and all these fucking regulated stable coins competed with it. Yeah. Because that's not the that's not the point. If you can get something regulated somewhere, then you don't use Tether. Yeah. I don't know. In my mind, like, Tether has a massive target on its back from US regulators. Bitfinex does, and Binance does. And always they always will until they die. Yeah. Like, that is that is the situation in my opinion.
[00:38:40] Dylan LeClair:
Yep. Well, I I agree there. I think I disagree a bit on I think, and then maybe this is completely flat out wrong, but I think Tether is given a little bit of a special circumstance regardless of, like, you know, having all these, like, you know, stable coin kinda euro dollars issued on, like, Bitcoin chain chains that, you know, can be used to facilitate whatever kind of I mean, it's a transparent blockchain, but you don't know who's using
[00:39:03] ODELL:
it. Right? Like, it's not regulated or compliant, you know, to They'll occasionally freeze addresses, but, like On occasion. Yeah. Wink wink. Right? They're slow about it. Like, Tornado Cash even, they like, Tether delayed it as long as they could possibly delay it while, like, USDC did it right away. Yeah. Like, all of these, I treat like they're just they're essentially shadow banks. They're outside of US financial regulations.
[00:39:23] Dylan LeClair:
Yep. You know, so, like I mean and, again, I raised I raised these points before SEC, CFTC, whatever. I think DOJ is still coming and maybe that means anything, maybe it it doesn't. But, like, all the things that the points that I raised about, you know, the accounting stuff. Right? Like, we saw they stood up Binance US as essentially it was a a sham of, like, a separate entity. They funneled all of that money through CZ's, you know, separate companies to Paxos. They were taking customer money to issue their BUSD stable coin. Right? Stable coin pumps at the 20 bill. They pump BNB, BTC rises in tandem. It's definitely pumping shit. Yeah. And so it's like you know, and and here's the thing also. It's like, the narrative was with FTX. Right? And and everybody was, like this is how everybody got duped was, like, they're a money printing machine.
You know, they're the look at their volume. They're It's true Goldman. Yeah. It's like they're gonna yeah. And he's like, maybe we buy Goldman Sachs. It's like, they're making 1,000,000,000 of dollars in trading fees. Like, how the, you know, the f could they be insolvent blah blah blah. And it's like, yeah. They do. Right? They make 1,000,000,000 of dollars. In the same way that, like, supposedly, Binance is, like, printing 1,000,000,000 upon 1,000,000,000 of dollars of It's a bank comparison. But, like, here's the thing, is that is that Binance, CZ, we look at you're like you're looking at the volumes and you're like, they're making so much money. Right? Like, there's, you know, a 1000000 Bitcoin of trading volume on, like, the perps or the the spot or whatever. And then it comes out and, like, this was, you know, what what people inferred. Right? Like, the conspiracy theorists that were, like, there's no way this volume's real on, like, Tether or This is 0% trading fees. Right? Yeah. 0% trading fees, but it comes out that, like the volume's not real. That's by design.
Yeah. It's like well, oh, yeah. They're like CZ has, like, 300 bots. Well, this is what, like, the the SEC or CFTC
[00:41:23] ODELL:
suit says, but, like, It's not even just t z. Like, if you give someone 0% trading fees, like, you're gonna pump your volume numbers up, and then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy because you pump your volume numbers up because just external people come in, and they trade back and forth because they don't have to worry about trading fees so they can try and scalp shit. Yeah. And then that fake volume or fake ish volume, then attracts real volume into the system, and then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
[00:41:48] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. And, you know, the one of the points that I've raised, and who knows if this is right or not in the face of the gray scale news yesterday, but if you read, like, past and maybe this transitions us to, like, the ETF talk. But if you read past ETF denials, there's one, like, one for, like, the New York Stock Exchange or Yeah. ARCA suit, back in, like, March of 2022. It was one of the the earlier kind of, like it wasn't exactly a a spot, like, a one to one spot Bitcoin ETF. It was something like stupid carbon credit Bitcoin fund, but the redemption mechanism was was like that of, a spot ETF.
And so they weren't trying to issue a spot ETF, quote, unquote, but it was like a fund that had Spot Bitcoin exposure with with creation and redemption. It wasn't a one way trust. Right. And the SEC comes back and was like, you know, hey, we have a few problems, that are still not resolved and you haven't given us any info on how how we're gonna deal with this. 1, like, we're concerned about manipulation of the Bitcoin market by a dominant entity. 2, we're we're you know, and they listed, like, 7 or 8 things. And, like, 4 of them read, you know, if you read between the lines, they read in all caps Binance. It was like
[00:42:57] ODELL:
it like, you know Yeah. That's the real conspiracy, Dylan. Is what? That that the ETF is waiting on. Like, look where we started. The this all started a year ago when SBF tried to knife Binance behind the scenes with suits. Yep. And CZ responded in kind, took out FTX, took out a bunch of suits that were all intermingled and leveraged degen craziness, like, wiped them all fucking out, made them all look like fucking idiots, Yep. Including, like, top tier venture funds, like, the biggest names in the world all got fucking wrecked. Mister Wonderful is, like, fucking on TV. Tom Brady got rugged. Like, he just takes them all fucking out. Yep. But that doesn't change the core of it. The core of it was let's kill Binance.
They start trying to kill Binance. Binance responds back, and now they're still continuing to try and and kill Binance. Like, if you look at it if you look at, if if you if you look at US suit control over Bitcoin markets Yep. Right? When they say they don't want manipulation, what they mean is they want manipulation that they control. They wanna be able to manipulate the markets. They want circuit breakers. They want to be able to rehypothecate funds and not worry about spikes that go down and liquidate them. They they want full and complete control over the market as they has been their privilege historically before Bitcoin existed on all these assets Yep. Including gold. And what stands in their way of doing that? What stands in their way of doing that is is 2 things. First of all, that it's incredibly easy to self custody Bitcoin, and and people humble stackers are just constantly just taking Bitcoin off the market, holding it in self custody, ideally spending it in a circular economy eventually, if not already.
And there's also all these smaller p to p markets, that are even harder to stop almost you know? And they could become black markets if they become if they get criminalized. Right now, they're not in most parts of the world, but they would become black markets if p to p got criminalized. And then you have Binance, Bitfinex, Tether. Right? Like, if you look at the metrics that can't be faked, which is exchange wallets, The list of exchanges goes Binance, Coinbase Pro, you know, selling surveillance software to the US government and wants to be the surveillance package for all the ETFs and wants to hold custody for all the ETFs, and then Bitfinex. And then there's a drop off. There's a big cliff. You know? Right after that, like, 3 to 4 there's no 4th best.
Put put that on your quote, Mike. So to me, like, the conspiracy is let's fucking kill Binance. Let's kill Bitfinex by any means necessary. We can change the rules however we want. We can hit them for this. We can hit them for that. Maybe they fucked up an accounting thing here. Maybe they did this here. Maybe they did that here. Yeah. And that's what we're I think that's what we're witnessing. And part of it is fueled by influencers and fund managers that got wrecked on FTX and are embarrassed and and and want to see the whole thing taken out. Yep.
[00:46:03] Dylan LeClair:
No. I I agree there. The like, you know, Coinbase, essentially, and and who knows, but I think this the secret or not maybe not so secret, the SEC motive, the suit motive is is get, you know especially with, like, the flurry of new ETF, applications that came out in, you know, midsummer. What was the change that kind of spurred, like, this, you know, increased approval odds and and change the game and with BlackRock and all that other stuff? It was a Coinbase surveillance agreement. Yeah. And that is irrelevant
[00:46:35] ODELL:
if Coinbase is only doing, quote, unquote, 5% of the volume of Yeah. If Binance and Bitfinex are out there, it's irrelevant. And then when you go back to the p to p markets, who's the largest p to p player in the developing world in African Latin markets? Binance p to p. Yep.
[00:46:51] Dylan LeClair:
And so, you know, again, like, I'm not not a a sadist per se. I let I'm I'm a big proponent of free markets, but what I think that they're gonna hit, be hit with, aside from if you just look at, like, fiat rails for for cryptos firms. Right? Just look at the Fiat rails, especially, you know, particularly for Binance. Right? What was it? It was Silvergate Signature who both had 247, 365, essentially, like, fiat ramps. They weren't a stable coin, but it was like a dollar transfer rail. Right. And all the cryptocurrency
[00:47:25] ODELL:
spreadsheets.
[00:47:26] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. Yeah. It was an Excel spreadsheet, SQL database, dollar transfer system with every single crypto entity, gone. Right? Axos, BUSD, Stablecoin, $20,000,000,000 ordered ordered to wind down now at 3,000,000,000. Right? The Fiat rails closed in. Binance u Binance US kind of like shell company entity to get dollar rails shut off. Right? And Reuters Reuters comes out and it's like, oh, hey. Like, this is just a shell entity that they're using to funnel money to to the main Binance platform.
[00:47:55] ODELL:
Right? Shut down. The SEC comes in. Which also should not have been a surprise to anyone. No. No. No. Mean that they're insolvent, though.
[00:48:03] Dylan LeClair:
No. It doesn't. I mean, it just means that they're, you know, either incompetent from an accounting perspective or commingling funds. But, correct.
[00:48:12] ODELL:
And so, yeah, I Oh, and, also, that, like, literally, Binance US was set up as a front to try and get American customers into Binance in the region. See this. Like, It was surprising to me that people were surprised by it because, like, multiple times
[00:48:25] Dylan LeClair:
with Tether, I think with a couple times with Ethereum, with, like, Bitcoin Cash, some, like, you know, random shit coins, it was, like, we need to, like, wallet wallet rebalance, like, what, withdrawals are paused. Like, just give us a little bit, and then you literally can just, like, pull it up and just, like, look at the the withdrawal address, and you just see funds from binance.com labeled wallets just flow in, you know, like 1,000,000 of dollars. Exactly. It's like, oh, it's like, yeah. Well, we knew, you know, 6 months before the SCC told us that they're obviously commingling funds. That's not news to anybody. But, like, you know, the the grayscale news came come out yesterday, everybody celebrating. Like, what's shadowed by it is like Oh, Carrie Silbert.
Yeah. Still owes 1,000,000,000 of dollars to people. It's been a long time. I haven't Yeah. Apparently, there was some some creditor news yesterday that I didn't really follow, but, apparently, it's a pretty shit deal for the creditors. Oh, yeah. So let's talk I mean, continue. No. I I just think, you know, we see, like, the SEC comes out with a sealed document, yesterday against Binance. They never seal anything. There were some SEC kind of Do they not? No. Sealed documents apparently, and, you know, I'm no expert on this, but I just read some some opinions from, like, well informed, ex ex, chiefs of SEC and and some other commentary on Twitter. And it's, like, very, very rare if they do that. And they only really do that if it's it's disclosing information that's,
[00:49:44] ODELL:
in an ongoing criminal investigation, likely DOJ. So I think DOJ is doing something, so SCC doesn't want to blow up their spot. Yeah. And so, you know, the the So does anyone see the sealed document? Do they send it to Binance, or is it just, like, we have a document in an envelope
[00:50:00] Dylan LeClair:
sent to you? I think that's basically it. And and they can and Binance can Binance can upload fucking
[00:50:05] ODELL:
scam.
[00:50:07] Dylan LeClair:
Binance play like, hey. We want this revealed, but then Look, Dylan. I I
[00:50:12] ODELL:
it logically would flow that they could would you know, if if they've they're gonna try everything to take down Binance. If they can incite a bank run, like, they might as well poke the bear and see if, you know, how weak it is. Well, yeah. I mean, I don't know if they Sealed a sealed indictment or whatever whatever whatever SCC calls it statement.
[00:50:31] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. I mean, what they're gonna slap Binance with and, like, if this inside the bank run or not, I I don't probably doesn't. It definitely doesn't because crypto degens don't care. Like, a lot of the feedback I've gotten on, like, the the data I put forward is, like, yeah, and they're like, oh, like, Binance commingles funds and trades against the customer. That's what I'm saying. I'm like, I know. Of course. Yeah. They're like they're like, yeah. You know? But we don't really have anywhere else, so, like, you know, just showed up. I'm like, alright. Yeah. I guess that's fair. But they're gonna probably slap, the DOJ is gonna slap, like, money laundering, whatever charges on them. You know? Again, whether it's right or not, whether KYC, AML is bullshit or not, different topic, but this is the, I guess, the reality of it. So, unfortunately, I don't think it that's the thing. The problem is is that
[00:51:16] ODELL:
the suits commingle. You know, Binance is commingling customer funds with corporate funds, but the suits commingle breaking US financial regulation with insolvency. Right? Like, there's a it's like, oh, you're breaking US regs? Like, you're clearly FTX. Like, this is clearly SPF situation. That's the issue. The issue is that that is not separated in my book.
[00:51:40] Dylan LeClair:
That's interesting.
[00:51:42] ODELL:
It's 2 different risks.
[00:51:44] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. Yeah. That's fair. I don't think I don't think Binance goes away. It'll be interesting to see how resilient they are when the hammer comes down, if the hammer comes down. But I think that that the e the reason, like, the spot ETF hasn't come out is is probably because of a lot of this stuff. So it'll be interesting to see if Binance, all these other kind of crypto bucket shops are still standing and if the SEC is gonna be, you know, forced because of court's decision to release this stuff. Look. And, again Obviously, Binance is gonna,
[00:52:16] ODELL:
you know, collapse sometime soon because I'm defending them, so it's it would just it would jinx it. Yeah. M and A. But, don't you think it's interesting that, you know, we saw the BlockFi degens blow up. We saw the 3 Arrow Capital guys blow up. We saw Gemini blow up. We saw Barry Silbert blow up, and and and all of those guys blew up. Do Kwon blew up. And a bunch of those balance sheets we got to see. Yep. And you almost I've never seen CZ in any of them or Binance in any of them. And, like, obviously, like, the lack of seeing something doesn't mean it doesn't exist or whatever. The lack of whatever. I don't know the phrase. You butchered a different phrase earlier, so I just butchered that one.
But, like, you don't see they were all trading amongst each other Yep. In, like, massive circular loans, like, ridiculous leverage, like, like, fucking Barry, like, had a massive loan on Luna or Terra, one of the 2. One's the derivative or the other. Like, they were using it as collateral.
[00:53:22] Dylan LeClair:
Yep.
[00:53:23] ODELL:
Like, what if, like, CZ was just, like, a survival Bitcoiner that obviously also became like a shit corner, but, like, actually does not have much leverage. May I mean, 0 leverage is almost unbelievable, but doesn't have that much leverage. Like, when he takes leverage, he borrows against Bitcoin, which is, like, the best sovereign individual collateral ever. And he keeps all of his own personal wealth and everything commingled with all corporate funds and all that shit. It's all just fucking commingled to fucking kingdom come. And he's like, in any day, Delta Force could just land a helicopter. Remember what happened to BTCE?
Like, the guy was the Russian guy was, like, vacationing in Greece, and they, like, rammed an unmarked car into his gate. And then when he came out in his underwear, they arrested him, and he was still logged into his computer. Like, that's cz's threat model. Like, cz's threat model is, like, he could be on vacation somewhere and fucking the long arm of the US government just comes back blowing through the door while he's showering.
[00:54:23] Dylan LeClair:
Yep. Yeah. I mean, it's it is possible. You know, that's, I mean, that's why you, self sovereign Bitcoin custody is is, is where it's at. I agree. Like, I I people because I analogize
[00:54:38] ODELL:
some of the stuff that finance has done to to FTX, people are like, oh, shit. You that does it the majority of the time. Like, I Yeah. I'm mostly talking about other people. Yeah. And a lot of those people told me to shut the fuck up when I was saying Barry Silbert owes 1,000,000,000 of dollars and that DCG was fine. Can we, like, appreciate particularly angry at them, and, I have a bone to pick, so I'm just doing it through you.
[00:55:00] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. No. It's it's totally fair. Yeah. I, you know, I think one of the things that I think about, from, like, an analysis perspective that I didn't appreciate as much as the time. And in hindsight, it's super obvious. But, you know, your particular, like, kind of, beef with with berries totally warranted in this sense because of how much of a role. And that it's not it's very much not appreciated. Like, everybody, when you think of the 2020, 2021 bull run, they're like, MicroStrategy and corporate adoption and, like, whatever. And, like, DCG and GBTC I mean, deep like, really Grayscale Bitcoin Trust was a massive, massive, massive, massive driver of the bull run. The biggest, in my opinion, by far. And it's not very it's not very Yeah. That ridiculous trade they were doing. The fucking Like, not only the spot inflows. Right? Let's everyone
[00:55:55] ODELL:
fucking do this high risk trade that we pretend is low risk against our own in house wrapped Bitcoin shit coin. Yeah.
[00:56:02] Dylan LeClair:
It was it you know, not only did they buy 300,000 Bitcoin. So spot flows were just, you know, a a super, like, constrained Bitcoin supply for, you know, that's been, you know, 3 years post 2017, bunch of, you know, hardcore hodlers that aren't selling shit versus, like, you know, Silbert's 1,000,000,000 upon 1,000,000,000 of dollars of just buying. But, also, on the other side, they have their they have Genesis, which is saying, oh, you know, we just created a GBTC share that's at 20% of your, you know, 20% premium to spot Bitcoin. You can use that as collateral, borrow more money, and pummel into the trade again. And so, like, the whole crypto yield thing, like, Bitcoin yield, BlockFi, you know, 3 arrows, FTX, all of this was, like, an extension and derivative of of the grayscale Bitcoin Trust carry trade. And so, like, in hindsight, it's super obvious, but, like, I think it's just very much not appreciated that, like, we the spot flows were obvious, but, like, the the carry trade that was, you know, that all of crypto became dependent on, or not all of crypto, but, like, the yield products, that was all that was all GBTC.
And then when the GBTC discount premium went to a discount and the futures leverage and that carry trade blew up, the last leg of this, you know, the last gasp of a of a bull cycle that they tried in 2022 was UST. Right? It was like the Luna Ponzi. That was the last yield gasp, and then everything blew up. And so for the most part, you know, the good news is we've cleared that out. You know, now Bitcoin's at, you know, 25 k. We're still 60% from the highs. There's no volume, and no one gives a shit. So Bitcoin's dead again. It's great. And now we're just kinda waiting, and and the plugs are kind of in a waiting game. I think we're, like I I would say, like, market conditions are similar to, like, 2019 midsummer, you know, where we're just chopping around, like, people, like the the the emotions and the volatility of just, like, flirting with flirting with a bull market, but then just kind of, like, insta dumping for no reason, pretty similar. The traffic conditions are pretty similar, and we probably got, like, you know, 12, 18, who knows, maybe 24 months before, like, what people think of as, like, a Bitcoin bull run really manifests. And maybe I'm super wrong with that timeline, but, that's kinda how I think of things.
[00:58:24] ODELL:
Dylan, I have to pull you back because you let your rant distract from the fact that Barry Silverdosed 1,000,000,000 of dollars and the culpability he has in the last fucking cycle dynamics. Yeah. And, like, it cannot be understated. Like, I feel like that's the lesson that is being missed here, and we're letting the suit set the narratives. We're letting the suit set the narratives. So I pulled up this tweet from December 2022. I don't know if you remember it, but it's literally the exact conversation we're having right now. It is great that many are skeptical of Binance. Users should not trust custodians and withdraw Bitcoin from all custodians ASAP. That said, do not let Binance concerns distract us from the fact that Barry Silver still owes Gemini users $900,000,000.
Withdrawals remain frozen. Yep. And why do I bring this up again and just wanna reiterate it? Like, Barry, Gemini, Coinbase Mafia, FTX guys, not all of them failed that I'm listening. BlockFi. Like, they were all part of this suit contingency that I have the Gemini advertisement right here. Crypto needs rules. New money, new rules. Crypto without chaos. The regulated cryptocurrency exchange. KYC AML, it will protect you. Like, we are the the suits, and we're here to protect you. And any fucked the hardest. They were the guys that were the most degen last last cycle. Yep. Like The yield products, all a scam.
[01:00:01] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. Yep. No. I mean, I, I'm really curious actually, and I guess we'll find out the answer in a couple years. Maybe that there, you know, really will be nothing new under the sun. But, you know, I I wasn't around for the for the, you know, the previous few cycles, where, you know, kind of a big you know, Like, can't even comprehend it now. I'm curious to see if the Bitcoin yield stupid games, arise, and if if so, in in what fashion or form? Yes.
[01:00:50] ODELL:
Yeah. The degens will there's like people always be degenerate. Yeah. And, ultimately, like, you know, like, freedom freedom tech is hope, but also, like, you know, you can't stop people from being with it. Like, that that's the whole point of freedom technology. Yeah. Because, like, people have to have personal responsibility to make their own decisions, and it just turns out that a lot of humans really like to gamble and play crazy games. And just because they're wearing a suit doesn't mean they don't, I guess is my point. We see data in the Nostra chat.
That's at sill dispatch.com/stream, saying, was CZ a Bitcoiner before? Yeah. I feel like most people like, this also, like, doesn't come up with the SPF stuff, and a lot of new corners just don't realize, I think. Like, CZ is a long time big corner. Like, he's been around for over a decade. The guy started as, like, I think, like, a small time pleb at Blockchain dot info. I'll Yeah. Never use that wall don't use that wallet, shitty wallet. Jenna didn't say it, but that's where he was. It was, like, the number one wallet at the time. Then he was at Okcoin for a while. I might have mixed up the order.
And then I think after Okcoin, he left and created Binance and went off on his own and created his own exchange. And for a long time, what was happening was there was, there was, like, a new bucket shop would open. They'd have no KYC. Everyone would go full on it. They'd have shit tons of volume, and then the founder would either exit scam, there'd be a theft, or the US government shut them down, and then there'd be a new bucket shop. And we saw this happen, like, 6, 7, 8 times. Like, who would control the top volume? And the last 2 that did that before Binance was Bittrex.
US regulators took them down and Poloniex, and then Binance took over all the volume. And there if you go back on tweets, like, I'll own it completely. Like, I said, you know, Binance is gonna get replaced as the bucket shop. But Binance has remained top dog. He is fucking ruthless, as an operator. But, also, I think what happened was there was this transition in degen crypto land to these, quote, unquote, decentralized exchanges, DEXs, that took a lot of that no KYC volume, and he made sure to take his piece of that. Right? Like, there's DEX quote, unquote DEXs on b s on Binance Smart Chain, and their buy BNB is all part of it. And he was very deliberate in that effect because most of these exchanges, they became they were flash in the pants. It's like whoever had no KYC, the most leverage, least friction were the ones that were dominated, and then the new one would pop up. Yep. So I guess know your history, freaks. Yeah. No. I mean, I do, like you know, it's maybe some people will, like, disagree with this, but no. I I mean, to be frank, like, I think CZ is a Bitcoiner. Obviously, he's a shit coiner too on top of it. Yeah. All the shit like, all the major shit coiners were, like, Bitcoiners first until the I don't think SPF was. I think SPF Until the new breed. He's a he came in as a Fiat Maxi. Yeah. Yeah. SBF was always just a grifter. But yeah. I mean, like, the ETH people. Like, people that came in post ETH, for the most part are like, they came in just, like, Fiat Maxi's directly into shitcoins.
Yep. Like, I honestly believe that SPF thought FTT was a solid collateral. Yeah. I I think he believed his own shit. He was like, this is the best collateral in the world. I like, I don't think CZ believes that about BNB. I think he's like, BNB is my Ponzi token. Like, I'm I'm not gonna overleveraged myself on my Ponzi token. Like, it's doing its job already and making me a lot of fucking money. And, like, if you compare like, the example I would say is, like, you know, Delta Force is, like, rated they're making money on BNB, though. They're not using money. Here's my here's my point, Dylan. My point is is, like, SPF like, Delta Force comes in and tries to take out SPF in a hypothetical situation, and he runs with his go bag. Like, his go bag has, like, FTT serum, like, all the Sam coins.
You know? But, like, CZ's go bag is just Bitcoin. Like, he doesn't like, it's not like he's like, oh, I can still use my BNB and all my fucking bullshit.
[01:05:06] Dylan LeClair:
Yep. Perverted BNB things after the fact. Yep. No. I agree. I think oh, yeah. Yeah. C z seizing is just a Bitcoiner that's that's using that's you like, utilize crypto. Yeah. Yeah.
[01:05:18] ODELL:
That's fair. That's a fair assessment. I don't know what you know, I mean and then, like, that's s b I you know, there were very few of us sounding alarm in FTX before it happened because they were just so buttoned up. But, like like, Block 5 was, like, very obvious for a long fucking time. Yep. Fucking Celsius? Like, anyone grandstanding about calling Celsius a scam before it came out? Like, congratulations. You have at least an IQ of 20. Yeah. It's like that was the most obvious fucking scam in the fucking book. Yep. It's a different level. Like, I just it seems like false comparisons. Yeah. That's fair. That's a fair statement. Okay. So you wanna talk some Moon Juice on the ETF news? Like, how do you feel about this ETF stuff? I feel like we've just talked about cz for an hour, and now you're you're gonna exit Yeah. Yeah. Sorry for the shit going content. You can literally exit scam tomorrow, and I'm just I'll just say sorry, freaks. I'd hold your own keys.
[01:06:14] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. No. I agree. The only reason I I like, listen. Like, I'm am I trading BNB? No. I would to be frank, I would short it if I could find a counterparty that I'm comfortable with, but I can't.
[01:06:24] ODELL:
Yeah. That was FTT had the same issue. Yeah. It's like, you know, where do you where do you oh, I think I mess I think I messaged you that, as, like, the FTTX collapses was happening. I was like, did you find a place to short FTT?
[01:06:37] Dylan LeClair:
You're like, no, man. Everyone wishes they had one. Yeah. Like, so many idiots were shorting FTT on FTX, which is funny. But, never mind the shit coins. The only reason I even pay attention to that stuff is because I'm interested in the the Bitcoin market. Anyway, I do not advise shorting a Yeah. Sensibly propped up controlled asset. It's very dangerous thing to short. Yeah. Keep that in mind. Agreed there. Not an endorsement at all. Okay. Yeah. The ETF stuff. No. I mean, I think it's it's obviously good. The market is absent flows. Right? The the plebs are stacking, you know, TM.
It's true. It's been true for a while. There is a small amount of passive flows that come into the market and buy Bitcoin every day and put it away and don't sell it. And you can see the Bitcoin supply just becoming more and more constrained. And a bull market happens when supply becomes constrained, meets an equal or greater greater amount of flows and price goes parabolic or, you know, price starts to rise and it becomes a kind of, like, a reflexive loop and, you know crackers at the floor and then FOMO intensifies. Yeah. And then FOMO intensifies outside capital dumps in. All the cans get washed out. Yep. You know, coins transfer. Some hodlers, like the narrative is like, hodlers never sell. No. Like, hodlers sell every time. There's the people that accumulated for 3 years dump on the new the new bags, and then there's just not enough money to come in and refresh. Eat.
[01:07:55] ODELL:
Like, if you're all in Bitcoin, you gotta sell some Bitcoin. Yeah. No. I mean, that's that's
[01:07:59] Dylan LeClair:
your your game right for buying knives and the bear. But yeah. I mean, so where are we right now? There's, I mean, there's no real meaningful flows, outside of, like, the people that have right? Like, no one at this point and maybe they are under the surface. Maybe we, you know, see, you know, a micro strategy like announcement come in. But I think a lot of people, based on kind of the some of the stuff that we discussed in the first hour, the US people, maybe it'd be interested public companies or hedge funds or, you know, the likes of, like, a MassMutual or Stan Druckenmiller or Paul Tudor Jones are sitting here and saying, okay. Well, let's just wait a bit for some of the stuff to clear out. So who's buying the Bitcoin? Well, it's the Bitcoiners. Right? It's the Bitcoiners that are buying every day. They're holding the way. It's their it's their, you know, their rainy day fund, and they're they don't care. They're not selling.
What are, like, the near short term, medium term, headwinds? Well, we probably we probably get a recession. We've been talking about it for a while. We're in a recession, Dylan. Yeah. Well, I guess I mean, not technically. Market stock market's doing really really well unemployment. Officially, you know, the data is saying, the employment the labor market's really strong. And, you know, what we see, we've been talking about it for a while. Admittedly, I was a bit wrong on the timeline. I'll I'll own that a 100%. But what we see, you know, these fed kind of rate hike, and then cut cycles. Right?
They don't cut until pain comes. And so everybody is kind of, like, conditioned from, like, COVID to be, like, oh, you know, shit gets bad, fed money printer go burn, I'll get money. Let's go. Like, fed pivot can't come soon enough. Right. And, like, you look at, like, besides COVID Chili's. Yeah. You look at besides COVID. Right? Like, look at when the Fed cut. Look at the Fed funds rate, line it up with the S and P 500 or or, you know, you can line it up with, like, you know, economic data. But just look at, like, the indices. Who cares? Look at when they cut and then look at how equity markets perform. The last, like, 3, 4, 5, cut cycles.
Markets crashed. Well, why? The Fed the Fed, like, cuts rates and then all of a sudden conditions get bad? No. The Fed's cutting rates because conditions get shit. Right? So, like, the Fed funds rate, they haven't cut once yet. So they're gonna hold, and they're gonna hold, and they're gonna hold until shit gets bad. Shit's gonna get bad and they're gonna cut and shit's gonna get worse. And then that kind of reaction function of, like, maybe they print money or the fiscal stimulus. Who knows what president we have? But, like, you know, just being honest, like, we still got that ahead of us, and the timeline on that is sometime in probably 2024.
So the ETF is good. It's gonna open up a lot of, well, it's not approved yet, obviously, but it's gonna open up a lot of, ease of access for US institutions to to put money into Bitcoin. It's gonna be obviously, you know, a shit coin wrapper on it. It's gonna be custody at Coinbase. You know, BlackRock's gonna take their 50 basis point fee. Yeah. We we know all of that. But it does open, you know, for better or worse, like, if we're if we're thinking about how Bitcoin's gonna become financialized. Right?
[01:10:58] ODELL:
And it does it does It was inevitable. It was gonna happen. Yeah. But It's gonna happen eventually. And the the whole point of Bitcoin is that we can't stop them from launching an ETF regardless. Yep. If you think it's an ethical product or not. A 100%.
[01:11:13] Dylan LeClair:
And, like, you know, a lot of people will say, oh, well, the gold thing. Well, you know, the gold can't be transferred in in, you know, a day's time. Can't be, you know, traded on Binance 247 either. Yeah. That is true. Right? Gold doesn't have, you know, robust peer to peer markets. But, like, this and I've, you know, was talking to this with some, other people. I think one of the things that's not really appreciated is that, like, I can take, you know, my index fund, you know, that's held in my Goldman Sachs account. Not me, but, like, say, I'm a high net with individual or an investment bank or whatever. And I can pledge my Tesla stock or my S and P 500 index or my GLD Gold Trust, and I can borrow, you know, 1,000,000,000 upon 1,000,000,000 of dollars of that collateral. Yeah. The Fiat maxis love borrowing against fucking equities. Yep. I mean, that's the game. Right? Because they have a cap gains tax.
Yep. You know, rich people don't sell assets. They borrow against it or they maybe they buy, you know, they buy pots or whatever. It's a sole financialized game, but, like, yeah, you don't sell you don't sell your assets when you're a billionaire. You you borrow against them, whether it's your real estate or whether it's, you know, your your family offices index funds that you haven't sold in 20 years. Right? So this Bitcoin thing, it's it's gonna open up a bunch of this the ETF thing, it's gonna open up a bunch of flows. I don't think it happens immediately, and I think Bitcoin becomes even more correlated with equity markets. Right? Like, people say it's like a bad thing. It's like, no. It's not a bad thing actually. Like, oh, it's correlated with equities. Bitcoin got neutered. It's, like, well, no. Like, how do you how do equities trade? Right? They trade based on, like, credit expansion or credit contraction of the fiat system. Right? It's like the USD denominator is the fed pumping money in, is credit expanding, or is it contracting?
And that's how equity markets trade. Right? It's like, stocks go Well, I think it it'll be correlated until it isn't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And when it's not, everyone will pretend that was always the case. Yeah. Well, and there and there will be points where, like Right. Bitcoin has a 20% day and equities are flat or something. Right? Will trade as a risk asset
[01:13:12] ODELL:
until it's the most it's, like, the safe haven asset of the world. It's like and then there's a point there. It's just I don't know. Parker, gradually then suddenly. It's, like, hard to measure the point, and then after that fact, everyone will pretend they always knew that was the case. Yep.
[01:13:26] Dylan LeClair:
And I you know, I've I agree with that statement. I've I've said that before. I think, you know, saying that to, like, someone that's not, like, a super orange built Bitcoiner, they they look at you a little crazy, and they're like, you know, maybe putting the cart before the horse.
[01:13:40] ODELL:
That's a bit that's a bit of a waste away. All I do is put the cart before the horse.
[01:13:45] Dylan LeClair:
But, like, you know, to get there, Bitcoin to get to that point, Bitcoin has to make it or is, you know, has to make its way on basically every institutional balance sheet, in the world. Right? The the way that we get, you know, the way that you get to this, like, crazy hypothetical, you know, hyperbitcoinization moment that people always talk about. Well, I see. Myself. I've talked about it. Right? Like, how how does it get there? Well, I'll tell you how it gets there. You get Bitcoin on the asset side of every balance sheet, whether it's spot in a cold storage, multisig.
[01:14:16] ODELL:
There'll be a bunch of different flavors. Or some, you know, bullshit ETFs. Everyone will get rugged constantly.
[01:14:22] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. And there'll be a bunch of rugs, but you get you get it to the point where it's saturated enough where it becomes, like, from an asset liability perspective. Like, why why does the Fed bail out, you know, the the housing market and print a bunch of money in 2008? Why does the Fed come in and buy corporate bonds in 2020? Well, it's because, like, the system, if they let things online, would be fucking insolvent. That's Right. That's the the fact of the matter. The system is literally insolvency by design. Like, everything you speculated
[01:14:52] ODELL:
Yeah. About Binance Yeah. Is literally in the public disclosures of Bank of America. I mean, not the not the commingling funds,
[01:15:01] Dylan LeClair:
Jim. But, like, they just don't have funds. Yeah. They're just, like, Charles Schwab is insolvent right now. Charles Schwab is mark to market insolvent. They hold a bunch of long duration debt. They pumped a bunch of their customers' money in. Fractional reserve banking. Yeah. Right? And so, like, yeah, I I give a bunch of shit to the crypto firms because, like, in theory and practice, you know, they're one to 1, not fractional not fractional reserves. And all these rugs are when people attempt that. And so maybe Binance has or hasn't. That's a different story. But, yeah, the fiat system, right, of, like, where money creation is from new debt issuance has to expand forever. That's just a fact. Right? That's, like, you know, pretty regardless of, like, how bullish you are on, like, the Bitcoin adoption itself, which is, like, the main the main, value prop of, like, oh, there's a there's a scarce asset that people continue to adopt in waves.
Like, the Fiat denominator is is going to 0 or, you know, the supply of Fiat is going to infinity by design. Like, that's a core component of the system. So, like, yeah, we win by dollars trending to 0. Yeah. And, like, you know, that's a simplified, you know, thesis or whatnot. But, like, look at Everything's trending to 0 sets. Yeah. That's that's how that's how it works. And so, like, from an ETF, the thing that gets me excited, I guess, is, like, yeah, that'll be flows. It'll be in the 1,000,000,000 of dollars. Yeah. Like, I I think that I don't think Bitcoin's gonna, like, go to a 100 k, go to the moon if equity markets are tanking, if there's a recession. But, like, we know what comes on the other side of a recession. We know what comes on the other side of, like, any sort of taper tantrum meltdown.
Fed balance sheet number go up. Can't taper a Ponzi. Can't taper a Ponzi. So, like, I they're they're still in the point where they are pretending we're all collectively pretending they can taper a Ponzi. It's like a classic, like, fed tightening playbook right now. We're seeing all the signs of, like, holy crap. Like, we might actually get a soft landing. Like Imagine
[01:16:53] ODELL:
so so, Dylan, like, imagine you're flying to visit family. You're on an American Airlines flight, and, like, all of a sudden, there's a bunch of turbulence, and then the power shuts real quick. The power comes back on, and the plane starts going down, and the pilot gets on the on the prompter and goes, we're we're not going to be crashing here today. We will be soft landing. Yeah. Like, that's what's happening. Yeah. 100%. And, like, you know the term soft landing itself just sounds so fucking Orwellian or double speed.
[01:17:26] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. No. Like, you wouldn't if the flight was going great, you wouldn't announce
[01:17:30] ODELL:
any you know, it's, it's called a crash. Like, you're crashing.
[01:17:34] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. And so that's, you know, that's what's gonna come. I to what severity, will you know, has yet to be seen. Right? But that's you know, this the the the boom and bust cycle, right, like, is a function of as, you know, as a fraction reserve credit based system with cent with a centrally planned cost of capital. Right? Like, the fed literally engineered, they like, all of the things that were problems in 2022 and I guess now. Right? Like, the inflation and and all of this stuff that, like, they had to raise rates to fix. They were asking for in 2020. They were like, holy crap. Like, we need a bunch of inflation. Right? Like, what inflation needs to be higher. It needs to be higher. It needs to be higher. Print more money. 0 rates. 0 for you know, through 2024.
You know, they finally get to inflation. They're like, great. This is good. Equity market's all time highs. You know, economy is flying, and then all of a sudden they're like, oh, shit. Like, this is way higher than we wanted. You know, they're gonna cut they're gonna cut rates or they're they're gonna raise rates to 5%. And now what are they saying? They're saying literally the opposite, the inverse of what they were saying in 2020. They're like, well, we just need a little bit of unemployment to get inflation down, and then and then we'll be all good. Right? And it's like, the same guys that wanted a little bit of inflation Yep. To fix this debt problem, now only wanna generate a small recession and a little bit of unemployment to fix the inflation problem. Yeah. And and people are, like, taking it at face value as, like, oh, yeah. It'll it'll be great.
So, like, I'm super bullish on Bitcoin. I hold a bunch of Bitcoin, like, a a relatively large percent of my net worth in Bitcoin. Not a 100%, to be to be frank. But, like, you know and I don't I don't know what what's price recession
[01:19:14] ODELL:
coming up. Above or under 50%?
[01:19:16] Dylan LeClair:
I'm above at the current moment, but that's, you know, that's not, I'm I'm I'm, you know, I'm young twenties. Like, I don't really give a shit about the volatility.
[01:19:24] ODELL:
Yeah. I'm essentially all in if you don't include home equity.
[01:19:28] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. Love it.
[01:19:30] ODELL:
And, you know, levered against the house, probably. You know? Oh, yeah. I mean, look. Don't borrow against your Bitcoin, but, like, if you can get if you can get fiat denominated loans, like, that's a pretty good deal. Yep. 100%. The 30 year fixed rate mortgage is Beautiful thing. One of the best welfares systems in the in America. It is a welfare system, and if you don't take advantage of it, someone else will. Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, rates are, like, 8% now. But, yeah. It just depends what inflation is. Yeah. And so, you know And that you can handle if if prices drop, you can't necessarily refi Yeah. Because you might have less equity. Like, you might need to increase your down payment, so you need to have money on the side to be able to refi. But
[01:20:13] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. Yeah. Definitely, maintaining, you know, cash flows and and solvency is is the biggest thing when you're thinking about borrowing against fiat. But, like, you know, what is what is the next what does the rest of the year look like? What does 2024 look like? You know, that's anybody's that's anybody's guess, but I I would say with a decent amount of confidence that this time is not different, in terms of, like, the business cycle, the credit cycle, in fiat world. And, they don't like, the the Fed reaction function is essentially they don't they don't, you know, ease. Things don't get better. They don't they don't, you know, turn turn the the printer back on, cut rates, etcetera, until things get bad.
So, you know, where does Bitcoin trade in that scenario? Where is it gonna trade in the next 6 months? I I don't know. But that's you know, my plan is 100 k, Dylan. Yeah. That's you know, who knows? But my plan is essentially to, you know, whenever that point comes, significantly, increase my Bitcoin allocation, you know, probably some miners, whatever. Who cares what I do? If you wait till, like, the trend reverses or whatever, then you then you jump in. Yeah. I mean, like, you know and and the ETF is obviously a bullish thing. Like, who knows when that gets approved? But, like, the TradFi guys all are are, you know, thinking the same. Right? Like like, for better or worse, Bitcoin's like a risk asset. It's levered beta, NASDAQ, whatever.
So, you know, I think they they end up buying, you know, billions upon billions upon billions of dollars Bitcoin. We're gonna see a ton of inflows. But if their equities are crashing, you know, if their, you know, tech stock portfolio is getting hammered, they're, you know, they're they're not gonna punt, a huge amount of Bitcoin, in my opinion. So I kinda think we still got, you know, some turbulence whether it's 12 month timeline, a little bit longer, a little bit shorter, who knows? But for better or worse, Bitcoin is, you know, the macro game now. It's, it's less of a independent asset than ever, and I think that's a good that's a good thing if you are in favor of number go up. Obviously, like, you know, it's still gonna have its black markets, still gonna have, you know, people that don't really give a shit about the fiat exchange rate and are just, you know, denominating in Bitcoin, but the suits are coming.
They The suits are already here, Dylan, and they all got wrecked. But not the but not the legitimate suits. Like, the the little minnow the minnow suits, you know? Like everybody, like The wannabe suits. Like, well, no. I mean, like, I mean, Sailor's like a real suit. Right? But, like, we've we've joked about this before. Like, Sailor is like a small fish billionaire. You know what I mean? Like Yeah. He's a poor billionaire. He's a billionaire, but he's just like a small fish billionaire. Well, if you understand, he's actually the wealthiest billionaire in the world
[01:22:54] ODELL:
because most of them don't own Bitcoin. Yeah. True. True true stuff. You're not wealthy if you don't own Bitcoin. Yeah. No. I agree on that, take. I have Grindr in the comments on my borrow comment. Let me just, like, unpack that just real quick. If you borrow against Bitcoin and you take dollars, Bitcoin should be the best collateral in the world. It's incredibly easy to liquidate. Markets trade 247. It's easy to custody. Like, it is it is a fantastic collateral item. Yep. But if you if if you're borrowing against it for any period of time, you wanna make sure you have a very trusted counterparty. You don't wanna necessarily borrow against your Bitcoin with BlockFi, for instance, who is gonna be hypothecating it. Yep. And if you look at the responsible counterparties that offer Bitcoin backed loans right now, the rates are are quite high. They're, like, 12 to 14%. And why is that? Well, that's for two reasons. First of all, the world really hasn't priced in the fact that Bitcoin is great collateral. Most people that realize that would rather buy Bitcoin than lend you dollars.
So they're not on the lending side of the equation. Those rates should be the lowest in the world at at some point in the future. In the future, at some time, if Bitcoin is your collateral, you are gonna get the best rates possible. We are not there yet. Should be lower than a mortgage. Right. On the opposite side, mortgages and stuff are all backed by the US government, and they're artificially kept low. Like, you get a new home mortgage, it's almost immediately sold to the government, like, 2 days afterwards. All those rates are pegged and fixed and manipulated downwards. And on top of that, you also have all these different companies that live in a world that we were at 0 rates for a while, and they took a while to come off of them. Like, I got, like, an HVAC loan at 0% for 4 years. Like, I just fucking highway robbery.
And it's just because 2 things. They haven't, like, updated their systems yet, and they're just used to 0%, and they were hoping the Fed was gonna come back down. And second of all, they know a lot of people go into delinquency, and then they start charging, like, like, 25% or something like that. But you said, send it to autopay. Anyway, that's my thinking. If you can get, like, lower percentage fee out loans, denominated in inflating currency, then it's not the worst idea in the world, but you need to have good cash flows. You need to have good risk management. You don't wanna get wrecked, wrecked, and that's kinda, like, how I'm looking at it. Yeah. On the ETF side, Dylan, correct me if I'm wrong. GBTC is trying to convert to an ETF for a while. They're trading at a discount.
Theory is that if GBTC I mean, it's not the theory. GBTC gets approved it gets converted to an ETF. It should go back up to par. Yep. So there's a bunch of traders trying to trade that difference. Yep. But this decision doesn't automatically turn it into an ETF. The SEC can technically appeal. And even if they don't appeal, GBTC needs to refile. Yep. So but what it does do is it pretty much paves the way for BlackRock Fidelity and these others. It's, like, almost guarantees their approval, which a lot of us have already been speculating anyway because BlackRock owns the fucking world. So, like, if corrupt BlackRock is trying to launch an ETF, they probably have some inside knowledge that they think it's gonna get approved. Yep. But all that aside, obviously, there's a bunch of money waiting on the sidelines for BlackRock ETF. I think the BlackRock ETF is gonna get approved eventually.
But I have like, there must be like, I'm feeling a little bit of rumblings, but less than I thought, that there's just this signaling mechanism of BlackRock and fuck BlackRock. Like, to be absolutely clear, like, BlackRock can go fuck themselves, incredibly corrupt organization, and I hope they get wrecked. I hope they try and play games with Bitcoin and get wrecked as a result. But, anyway, that's not my point. My point is BlackRock is a granddad ESG. They're, like, the largest fund in the world, fund manager in the world. They have $11,000,000,000,000 in assets.
They've been flooding Bitcoin forever. Larry Fink said it was like a token of money laundering, like, all this fucking shit. And now they're launching a Bitcoin ETF. It's this mass of signaling mechanism that they now approve of Bitcoin as an asset, that they would rather get involved and take their cut than than sit it out. And you gotta imagine that there's a bunch of rich people, family offices, corporate types, suits, if we wanna call them that, definitely suits, that are, like, we need to front run BlackRock. Mhmm. Right? Like, I mean, what what in history do you get to front run BlackRock? Like, it's very rare that you that you get to come in. I mean, obviously, the Humble Stackers, we've been front running them this whole fucking time. It's been an honor and a privilege.
But, like, you still can. Like, what how much time do they have? 3 months, 6 months maybe, maybe even less? But they have time to front run BlackRock, and I wouldn't I mean, that's my little dose of Hopium for the day. Like, I wouldn't discount this idea that people start front running it. Most weekends have gotten washed out already. Yep. Entering a global depression, Like, it could be the most crazy like, them fucking and when I say them, I mean the blue checks. Them flocking around with delaying the ETFs for this long Yeah. Could create this perfect self fulfilling prophecy narrative, whatever you wanna say, where there's a global depression and equities start dropping, but BlackRock and Fidelity release their ETFs at the same time, and we get the ETF bump. And then, you know, everyone just goes out, like, Bitcoin's a store of value. And it's like, oh, store of value and store of value. And then everyone just goes into it, And then we we disconnect very quick. Like, you know, within a matter of years rather than in a matter of decades, we disconnect from, yep, like, global macro. Like, it could be that situation.
[01:28:37] Dylan LeClair:
No. I agree. I and I think when I when I refer to, like, the correlation thing, I think it's, like you said, it's correlated until it's not. It's gonna be it's you know, the correlation on a long time frame is gonna be very, very positive, but you're gonna have days, maybe weeks, or whatever where, like, I think similar to maybe, like, the fall of 2020 when, you know, Bitcoin's, like, after it's kind of chilling at 10 k for months on end Yeah. And it just starts going parabolic and, like, equities up down 1%, dollar up down 1%. It doesn't matter. Right? Bonds, like, who gives a shit? Bitcoin. Bitcoin's chart is breaking out of the Yeah. You take a picture. You post a screenshot. You go, like, Bitcoin's a safe haven. Yeah. It's like that. Yeah. Like that. Yeah. Bitcoin will be a store value again in that moment at the moment. So I agree.
[01:29:19] ODELL:
I think, you know, the front running BlackRock thing yeah. 100% legit. Would be ripping at the same time. Like, it could be, like, the most crazy scenario.
[01:29:27] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. No. I I, I'm fully prepared for for max, max chaos in terms of, like, 2024 and what we got in the coming years. And I think what you said about the BlackRock or or the the borrowing against Bitcoin thing, and not that, like, you're endorsing or whatever, but that's just the reality of, like, and, and also, here's another point, and this is, like, one that Pierre Richard raised back in 2014. He wrote this thing, like, speculative attack, and it reads, like, some hyperbitcoinization crazy scenario, but, like, there's a lot of truth to it of, like, you know, dollars are fungible. Assets, liabilities, everybody has a personal balance sheet, corporate balance sheet, institutional balance sheet. Right?
If you just if you have dollar debt, whether it's credit card debt, mortgage like, Matt, you have a mortgage. Maybe you have a credit card. Maybe you don't. Maybe you have a And I'll run credit card. I mean, besides, like, the 30 days. Yeah. We'll run, like, a balance on a credit card. But we're, you know, we're out. You have to get a credit card. Are good. That's a this is an interesting little thing they got going on there. So, like, every time and I I, you know, I get that it's secured. Technically, it's secured by the house. Right? But every time you buy Bitcoin instead of paying down your mortgage, right,
[01:30:39] ODELL:
you're you're actively making a decision to stack Bitcoin. Pay down a 30 year mortgage in an inflationary economy. Yeah. Yeah. But the the point is is that Sailor did. He called what Sailor did, basically. Yep. Like, 6 years earlier or whatever.
[01:30:53] Dylan LeClair:
And so yeah. 100%. Borrowing 1,000,000,000 of dollars of currency that is mispriced. You know? And he was doing it at, like, 0% or whatever, like, fucking nothing. Yep. And and now it's long dated, like, 2027 or something. He has to pay it back. You you know, had a bunch of different ones, but, like, that is going to happen in mass when the BlackRock ETF is approved and when, you know, this economic cycle goes from, you know, whenever we trough, whenever the fed kind of, you know, eases, whenever we go from, like, the bust phase to the recovery phase to the boom phase again because it's going to happen. It's not like we're in the last economic fiat cycle ever. Right? Naturally, you know, procyclical. And so what's gonna happen during the next economic cycle? Right? Bitcoin, like, yes, it's like if you look at the having cycles, like, yeah, Bitcoin pumps up to the having. But you know what it also, like, really correlates with? Like, PMIs. Right? Like like, the the Bitcoin, the the US economic cycle. Bitcoin cycle is, like, in tandem with it. Right? So, like, it's a liquidity play, obviously. We've we've known that. But when the next the next full run comes around and, again, who knows the timing exactly? Nobody does, and nobody can realistically say that with certainty. But when it happens By conference. That that yeah.
By 2025 conference, it's 200 k. When it happens, it's not gonna be, you know, Barry Silbert and, you know, Alex Mashinsky and Sam Bankman Fried. You know, it's gonna be Larry Fink. Well, maybe not him buying it, but it's gonna be, like there's gonna be this, you know, quote, unquote stamp of approval. There's gonna be legitimate. I mean, there's always been legitimate ways to buy Bitcoin. Any any way you can get funds in, get them out, and hold cold storage. But for the suits, right, there's gonna be that that legitimate way to get exposure, not GBTC. Right? Like, anybody that wanted any institution that wanted Bitcoin exposure last bull market, they either had to go to CME and have all of these, you know, certifications and whatever, or buy GBDC, which was OTC and was just kind of, like, wild wild west trading at a premium discount, whatever. Nobody wanted that. Or you buy new merchandise.
[01:33:00] ODELL:
Well, it was trading at a premium for a while.
[01:33:03] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. Until until it wasn't. Until it wasn't. But all these all these these big boy institutions are going to they're gonna go into the most liquid, avenue they can get, which is gonna be they're not gonna be buying Bitcoin on Coinbase, unfortunately. They're gonna be buying Larry Fink's Bitcoin wrapper that's held on Coinbase, and they're going to be able to borrow 1,000,000,000 upon 1,000,000,000 of dollars against it. And so that's, you know, that's the fun ride. That's the ETF hopium. Right? It's like, they're going to have, you know, I I really hope that, and I'm I'm a little doubtful skeptical. I don't think Coinbase is gonna be, like, fraudulent with it, but I would love if there was, like, you know, a real real time balance. I think, like, I hope I hope it's like a transparent thing where they have, like, you know, daily hourly proof of reserves with ETF. I doubt it.
But that would be cool if they have, like, kind of a real time transparent ledger of, like, ETF holdings and I thought it'd be cool if they rugged. Yeah. I mean, maybe. But, yeah, that's I mean, that's Imagine BlackRock ETF rugs in 10 years? Like, that'd be crazy. I don't think they're gonna I mean, you know, like and this is also another thing with the Blackhawk narrative. Like, I've seen I've commented on this yesterday. Like, there's so many posts on Twitter that's, like, the institutions are accumulating, and it's, like, screenshots of, like, the Bitcoin miners, and it's, like, there's they're, you know, the top shareholders or, like, the second top shareholders is, like, BlackRock, and it's, like I I'm I'm guilty of that in the blue my blue check war,
[01:34:30] ODELL:
because I it's just a very people don't like BlackRock. So Well, it's like BlackRock owns Tesla.
[01:34:37] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. Well BlackRock owns the blue checks. They own every company that trades in the Nasdaq and S and P 500. Right? I know them and Vanguard, and then Vanguard is the highest shareholder of Vanguard is BlackRock.
[01:34:48] ODELL:
Yeah. It's a big, institutional It's just a massive Ponzi.
[01:34:52] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah.
[01:34:53] ODELL:
And, you know, they Ponzi is all the way down. Like, you look everywhere, it's fucking Ponzi. The dollar is a fucking Ponzi. Real estate, like, do you know what 1031 tax swaps are? No. I'm not not familiar. If you sell real estate in a jurisdiction, you have to pay your cap gains tax. Right? Was that, like, 30% or whatever? Yep. But if if within 90 days or however many days in that jurisdiction, you just flip it into another piece of real estate, you don't pay the cap gains. Yep. So, like, all the real estate's fucking it's literally Ponzi Omics. Like, it's that's like tokenomics right there.
Yeah. It's like you're just running that shit. Everything's like, it's all Ponzi. Everything's a fucking Ponzi. And, like, let's be the Bitcoin Bitcoin is like a Ponzi for the people. Like, it's not controlled by anybody. That's the difference. Sound clip that. It's it's it's for the people by the like, think about it. Like, I mean, this is key. Right? All the conspiracy theories about BlackRock and Bitcoin revolve around this idea that BlackRock will accumulate a lot of Bitcoin in their ETF, which they will. Yeah. If if they're first, who's ever first, is gonna get the lion's share unless they royally fuck it up. That's, like, almost always the case. It was the case with the gold ETF. It's it makes sense. It logically makes sense. There's network effect, whatever.
Liquidity begets liquidity. Right? BlackRock ETF is gonna get a lot of Bitcoin. But the whole point of Bitcoin is that if you have more Bitcoin, you don't have more control over the network. That is the fucking core of it. Yep. And and that's that's the difference with almost every other asset Yep. Is that every other asset is is corrupted by those with control,
[01:36:33] Dylan LeClair:
and Bitcoin doesn't have that. BlackRock's used to getting getting,
[01:36:37] ODELL:
like, board seats. You know? Exactly. They're not getting any board seats on this one. No. They have their node, or Coinbase has their node. No surge of breakers. They can't stop shit. You know, they can't force changes. It's a whole different beast. They have no choice but to play the game. What's that? We we already quoted Pierre that bit steam.
[01:36:54] Dylan LeClair:
Yep. No. I agree. It's gonna be, it can be an interesting ride. Relatedly, I think, kind of on your Barry Silbert, Fuck Barry. Your Barry Silbert points. It'll be very, very interesting, to see the reason I am interested to see who's first is that, I tweeted yesterday and got some pushback about, I said, regardless of their stated intentions, and I think Grayscale realizes that an ETF is is in it, like, inevitable anyway, so they just want, you know, to be to be part of it. But Grayscale's interest is the status quo. They Grayscale would love if there was no ETFs for the next 10 years. Because they're making that 2% fucking fee. Dude, they print 30 Bitcoin a day Yeah. In fees. 30 Bitcoin a day in fee revenue.
Yeah. Right? So, like, very sober, DCG owns owes all that money to the to Gemini and, you know, there's all that like, you know, they blew up. Right? Or no. It's not, DCG. It's, Genesys, and then DCG loaned to Genesys
[01:37:55] ODELL:
and whatever. Right? Talking about commingling.
[01:37:58] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. The only way yeah. But it's a it's an a suit way of commingling. Right? Yeah. DCG loaned it to their subsidiary,
[01:38:06] ODELL:
borrowed it from Gemini users. Yep.
[01:38:09] Dylan LeClair:
Completely above board. When I'm thinking about, like, DCG's interest or Grayscale's interest, right, it's like, well, they have 600,000 Bitcoin. They're printing 2% a year and you can't redeem. You can't get out of the trust. The only way that the their revenue stays flat never like, if we're just thinking in Bitcoin terms. Right? Because price, you know, USD price goes up or down. Is if they 4 x if we're just assuming, right, I'm I'm assuming that the the fee for the ETF will be 50 basis points. They have to drop it to compete. Right. Yeah. So either the fee is gonna be 50 basis points once the the ETF is 200 instead of 2%. Instead of 2%. So fees are going down 75%.
So the only way Grayscale's revenue stays the same is if they drop the fee if the fees go to 50%, is if they 4 x their their Bitcoin holdings. So they hold you know, in that case, they would have to hold 12% of all Bitcoin ever.
[01:39:04] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, they're playing a dangerous game. Right? Because the game is, they want an ETF to be delayed as long as possible. Yep. But if an ETF is going to be approved, they need to be the first one approved. Yeah. Because if there's another ETF that gets approved first, then the discount actually widens because there's gonna be a bunch of money that's had enough of Barry and moves over. Like, most of the money is, like, bag holder cope right now. Mhmm.
[01:39:32] Dylan LeClair:
Yep. It's, and and then, you know, another interesting point about the gbt GBTC thing is that there's a bunch of people that, in one way or another, whether, you know, it was through CME or, you know, unregulated futures exchanges or whatever or, you know, OTC borrow is they've been buying they bought GBTC at a big discount. It was basically the opposite of the other trade, and they've been shorting Bitcoin.
[01:39:55] ODELL:
Hoping that GBTC increases to par, and then they're good. But meanwhile, GBTC charges fees on the top number. They charge fees on par value, the full 100% value, not the 50%. Yeah. So so at at the bottom A good scam. Yeah. At the bottom,
[01:40:11] Dylan LeClair:
people were buying GBTC or anybody that held GBTC, you're getting a 4% fee on your holdings. It's insane. Yeah. So that was a big mess. You know, looking forward to that, kind of weight being off the Bitcoin market. You know, a lot of GBTC holders got wrecked. You know, some activist plays made some good money on the discount narrowing. You know, GBTC is up, like, a 100 something percent this year, but after a pretty shit year, 2022 still at a 50% discount or something. Right? What is that? Like, 15.
[01:40:39] ODELL:
15 discount? Yeah. Like, 16, 17%, 15% something. Oh, shit. So many degens, man. Yeah. It was I don't remember people talking about that trade, like, years ago. You know? Like, oh, how it's such an easy trade. There's no risk. It's gonna obvious when an ETF gets approved, it's gonna go up to 1.
[01:40:57] Dylan LeClair:
Yep. Yeah. That was a big big, bear market,
[01:41:01] ODELL:
play that people got wrecked on. I was like, when this is I you gotta love when the right side IQ guys get wrecked. It's just so funny. Yeah. Yeah. Here's a 20 here's a 20 part thread that ages horribly in 7 months. Yeah. Fucking amazing. Yeah. And it's like, stay humble, stack sets. Yeah. Exactly. Just left left side. Stay on stack sets. Yeah. It's the key it's the key to winning. Last but not least, Dylan, you see this awesome Noster live chat I got going on here? We're, like Yeah. What's up with that? How does that work? So this is zap dot stream.
K. These two guys, Kieran and Carnage, Kieran is the head of Snort Social. He's the maintain lead maintainer of Snort Social, one of the Noster clients. Yep. They basically built this thing in, like, a weekend and have been iterating on it. It uses it uses Nostr for communications and zaps. Like, everything is is built on top of on top of Nostr, so they didn't have to, like, reinvent the wheel. Like, all these people's accounts are their regular, you know, normal Nostr accounts, and then they can just send Bitcoin natively through it because my lightning address is attached to it. And I didn't have to the crazy thing is I didn't have to change anything on my side. Like, it just uses normal RTMP.
Like, if you're if you're using Restream or, one of these services to to stream out to, like, YouTube and Twitch and stuff, you can just go straight to here. And then, of course, they have server costs, so I just pay them sats for my server costs. So, like, the audience is is donating sats live on air, and then I give them it's like this beautiful open So I I have a few questions. Thanks.
[01:42:41] Dylan LeClair:
One's I mean, not so much related to to this. It just seems like a pretty damn cool app, and, the Lightning Noser stuff is super exciting because it's all open source and, you know, you kinda get this, like, really, really, you know, not cypherpunk, but, like, this, like, utopian kinda digital economy that's, like, super, super, it's, like, you know, seamless. Like, there's no there's no intermediaries. It's, like, kind of, like, you know, this digital it's like digital cash. It's beautiful. One of the questions I have for no future, is well, what this is maybe personal. It's not too deep, but, like, what NoSr clients do you like best for for Mac or for laptop and then phone? And then the second one is and I haven't done too much digging on this, but what are your thoughts on I believe right now, there's, like, not an option to, change, password or, like, key credentials.
Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. If you get rugged with your private key, you're just rugged. Yeah. How does you know, how how do is there a fix to that? Is there any fix, or is that
[01:43:41] ODELL:
Look. Nostra's cool because it's simple and robust. It's a very simple protocol. And, a lot of people have tried to reinvent the wheel. You know, you have the Mastodon guys. You have the Blue Sky guys. Like, the million different the DID guys over, like, Microsoft Ion and stuff. They all come up with all these, like, crazy fucking schemes, but at the core of it, what they miss is is is is the actual you know? Like, what is the value prop? The value prop is you don't wanna be rugged. You want you wanna be unruggable from 3rd parties or rug resistant from 3rd parties. And, you know, Nastr is incredibly simple and and that some trade offs are made. And one of those is that you have this fixed private key that you're, like, pasting into different apps.
Yeah. There's different ways we can work around it. I'm sure people we'll we'll figure out something. There's a couple different proposals. There's this thing that, Pablo has been working on. Pablo is, like, this legendary developer in the Nostra ecosystem, called Nsec Bunker. And then, like, you can if you're on desktop, you can use something like ALBE or no s two x where that that's called nip 7. So nip is like a Noster improvement put proposal. So nip 7 was this improvement proposal where the key is held somewhere else, but they sign a message to approve that you're you're part of it. So, like, if if you have your nsec in ALB or no set or no s two x or your private key there, The individual web apps you use can't rug you, but, obviously, Albie or no s two x could rug you. Do you use either?
Yeah. I use both. Because both? Yeah. They're both good. Albi's nice because Albi has the the lightning wallet stuff built built into it too. Yep. So I use Alby with my my is in Alby. Please don't rug me. And because I feel like that's a that's a risk. Right? Like, I'll be Yeah. I'll be the risk there. Yeah. But my lightning is, is my own lightning node. So I'm not using a custodial lightning node. That is a little bit more difficult right now. The Unity Wallet guys are doing some really cool work on that front, at least for sending zaps. There's still a lot of work to be done on the receiving lightning side. Most people it is a pain point. Most people are receiving on custodial wallets, but at least it's an interoperable standard. Right? So, like, there's many different custodial wallets that are people are using too many wallets at Toshiba. But, anyway, my point is is, like, I think this trade off of and I'm gonna eat my fucking like, I obviously, I'm not gonna feel this way if my end set gets fucking rugged. But, look, things have trade offs.
And the fact of the matter is is is Elon can't just, like, wake up one morning and flip a switch and ban you from his platform. Yeah. But as a result, you have to protect your private key. Yep.
[01:46:29] Dylan LeClair:
Got
[01:46:31] ODELL:
it. And we we can work on that in the future, but in the meantime, it gets the job done. And I think more of the pain points are honestly on the app side. And the apps are making, you know, increased development. And I just don't think we have, I don't think we have an option. I think, these centralized platforms have way too much control, and it's not just x or Twitter's new, you know, Elon's new Twitter with that he wants to be WeChat or whatever. It's all of them. TikTok, Facebook. You're you're dead on, by the way. I say this to someone that's verified, you know, WeChat, whatever. But you're you're a 100% right.
[01:47:08] Dylan LeClair:
The vision is of Elon's Panopticon.
[01:47:11] ODELL:
You know, he wants to not only get social media surveillance, but financial surveillance. Full control. They all want full control as a service. Right? Like, that is their business model, and we need protocols. And Noster Noster is going to be the answer, and it's it's gonna take a tiny bit of time to build out, but we're already close. Like, it's it's growing it's growing really quickly. My favorite client, is Primal, primal.net. Yep. And they released an iPhone app, so you can download on iPhone. Nice. Fully open source.
So primal has, like, a controversial feature, where they they cache between your relays, and and and there's a lot of nuance here between trust and stuff. But, like, the caching server as currently implemented adds the trusted element, and in the future, they wanna make it so anyone can run a caching server. It's fully open source so anyone can run 1 now, and that your client will, like, check and make sure that the caching service isn't lying to you. And if the caching service isn't lying to you, then it just uses the caching service. But if it catches it lying, then it could go directly to the relays or it can go to a different caching service. And why does that matter?
Because most people are not gonna be in it for the freedom at first. Mhmm. If you use this, like, primal is close to the point where it loads quicker than Twitter. It has no censorship. You know? It's it's just a better fucking social media app. Nice. Right? It's just better.
[01:48:40] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. I use desktop on the iPhone one though.
[01:48:42] ODELL:
Yeah. And and yeah. There's just there's a lot of improvement being made. I, you know, I we're doing a lot of support. Yeah. Say we have studio 314 official. Say not not a big primal fan. Well, that's what's cool about it. You can put your end sec in whatever client you wanna put in. There's a lot of great fucking clients out there. Obviously, I shouted out Snort Dust Social earlier. Domus and jb 55 are fucking awesome. Amethyst is fantastic. Iris is solid, and it's cool. There's, like, this open competing marketplace for clients. And Primal itself is false, so people can go and fork Primal if they don't like Primal and then build on top of what Primal has already built.
So you have all these different clients. It's very rug resistant. And in the meantime, I, you know, I wanna practice what I preach. So I've just I've stopped using Twitter, and I just use Nostra only and Twitter completely? Yeah. I don't I everyone's you'll see me post an occasional tweet, but, like, I didn't even announce this show on Twitter. Yeah. I do. Twitter people know is because you posted it on Twitter. Yeah. I just and, like, do I get hit for that? Yeah. Early on, like, you always get hit for it. Like, do I get hit on on dispatch that I try and operate dispatch with high integrity? Like, yeah. Like, I could have way more viewers if I sold out.
And the same with this, but, you know, you wanna be the change you wanna see in the world. Respect. And I think, I'll tell you. I'll tell you, dude. If I post something on Nasr, and it's interesting or controversial, everyone on Twitter knows about it already at this point. That's what people don't realize. Like, there's a there's a there's a shift at some point where most even even if Nasr doesn't have the majority of users, where most interesting content on any centralized, platform gets post cross posted on Nasr because people want the engagement and the stats and whatnot and vice versa where if there's something interesting posted on Nasr, it gets cross posted to the centralized platforms.
And we're very close to that point. Like, we're really, really close, and the people that have larger audiences or whatever are already there. Like, if I post something ever like, within 15 minutes, I'll post something on Nostra Controversial. Within 15 minutes, my phone's blown up on people asking me why I said that. I was like, oh, so you are checking Oscar. Yeah. Like, good good to know. You see you see Arconox comment
[01:50:59] Dylan LeClair:
with his app?
[01:51:01] ODELL:
What? Delete your Twitter on stream of the I'm torn on the deleting my Twitter on stream because it's kind of used as a Gnostic beacon right now. Yeah. No. That's right. But I I go back and forth on it because, like, there's a 2 of them did it. Yeah. 20 k sats. I can't be bought, but maybe 10,000,000 sats and I'll sit before. Yeah. Love it. But, yeah, that's how I feel about like, Noster and, dude, what's crazy about Noster and we can have I know we've been going for 2 hours. Like, I could go for another 2 hours on Nasr alone, but, like, in the beginning, Bitcoiners bootstrap Nasr. Like, it's almost all Bitcoiners are using it. There's a bunch of other people that are starting to use it now, but early days was all Bitcoiners. All the developers were mostly Bitcoin developers. Bitcoiners bootstrap Nostr, and are bootstrapping Nostr.
But there's gonna be a turning point where social media like, our society is so addicted to fucking social media. Mhmm. And there's gonna be a turning point where Nostr becomes the on ramp to Bitcoin for people because it's it it takes a paradigm shift in your head to actually go out and buy Bitcoin. Yep. But it doesn't just shit post on a social media app that's just a better social media app, and you get paid freedom money. Yeah. You just get fucking freedom money for shit posting. Yep. And I think a lot of people there's gonna be billions of people that their first stats are on Noster. And it's just beautifully complementary in that result. And that's just on the social media side. That's not even, like, wallets communicating with each other using Nostr or, like, AI payments with Nasr using Pablo's data vending machine where, like, the payments are done with Bitcoin and the AI communicates with the customer using Nasr. And, like, there's all these crazy different integrations you can do on on different apps, and services just using this interoperable communication protocol that has a payment protocol built into it.
But even if you just take out just the social media, it's fucking massive. But then you add everything else and just blows your mind.
[01:53:01] Dylan LeClair:
It's exciting shit, man. That's my show. Love it. I got it. You're you're firing me up. I I've reposted a couple, you know, admittedly not as much, original content, but I've reposted a few of my tweets on Noister recently, And, I'll do I'll start doing that more and maybe then chime in some original,
[01:53:18] ODELL:
hot takes on there. Dude, people whom who might be joining us might think that this is just a little Nostra part I added on to the end of a different conversation that we're having. But the whole reason this conversation happened was because I saw you post on Nostra after not posting there for a little bit. And I was like, we should rip a dispatch. I I invited you on on Noster, and I was always intending to try and encourage you to use Noster more often. So come join us in the revolution. Yeah, man. I'll, I'll be there. Appreciate the appreciate the input as well. Fuck you. Dylan, this was a pleasure as always. You wanna before we wrap up, you wanna hit us with some final thoughts?
[01:53:55] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah, man. I mean, we started this on a Binance tirade, you know, talking shit coins and, you know, a bunch of a bunch of a bunch of nonsense. The entire point of it is that, you shouldn't trust anybody. Don't trust talking heads. Don't trust charismatic actors. Don't trust CEOs. That's, you know, that's always my my signal my my messaging signal is it's it's not about c z. It's not about any of these, you know, shitcoin, Ponzi people. It's not about, you know it's it's about don't trust verify, you know, once you come to understand Bitcoin at a at a, you know, deep fundamental level. That's, you know, that's where I come from from a point of view. There's no other agenda than that, and, you know, you can make your own trade offs or or decisions that have their own trade offs from there once you kind of understand that. So yeah. I mean, it was awesome to catch up. 2 hours flew by.
I'm super pumped to see what happens with Noister. Excited to see what happens in the next year with Bitcoin and the price action. But being honest, I mean, I understand. I I mean, I am a a Bitcoin analyst. I spend a lot of time looking at traditional financial markets, but, like, being real, like, a lot of the day to day, week to week exchange rate volatility is a bunch of noise. And when when you actually understand where all this is going, the innovation, that Bitcoin that Satoshi brought to the world, of freedom money, you know, not much else matters when, you kind of understand the trend. So, yeah, man. I'm, super super pumped and excited that that I got to join here for a 2 hour rip.
It was, like, our second or third one, I believe. But, let's see what happens. Let's see what unfolds, and I'm excited to start using Nostra more. I think it was our third one. I'm looking forward to the 4th one already.
[01:55:41] ODELL:
Well, thank you for joining me. Fuck yeah. So, Freaks, you might have noticed that we did, like, a cold open, the last two episodes. I'm trying to do I'm I'm reading the podcasting 2.0 boostograms at the end. So I'm gonna read those right now. Obviously, the last episode was yesterday, so only 2 ride or die freaks got boostergrams in via podcasting 2 point o apps. We have at Eric 99 with 50,000 sets. Stay humble, stack sets. And we had at piz, p I e z, with a 1000 sets saying thank you all. I consider you guys to listen to that one. It was a nice we're in it for the tech episode, with some really just great open source contributors that that this mission relies on. It's incredibly important.
Freaks, if you enjoyed the episode, let me know. Feedback if you didn't enjoy the episode, let me know as well. Feedback is appreciated. Trying to build this thing, to provide as much value as possible for you. All of our links are at cildispatch.com. You can find it on your favorite platform by searching sill dispatch. Easiest way to support the show, is just to subscribe and share it on your favorite platform, whether that's any podcasting app, YouTube, Twitch, zap.stream. And then last but not least, huge shout out to the freaks who joined us in the live chat. I fucking love this Nostra chat. I'm gonna give people a little bit more time to a couple more episodes where they talk through the Twitch chat and the YouTube chat, and then we're gonna go noster only is the plan. But, huge shout out to, the freaks who who, zapped live. And as you can see, we got the the great gazelle Gazoo? Gazoo.
Seems to have gotten the most has has contributed the most apps, but I don't know how to click around in this interface, and I think I just fucked it up. So don't look at the screen, but there. It's back. Thank you guys for supporting the show. Thank you for listening live. Thank you, Dylan, for joining us. Stay on BullStackSats. Appreciate you all. Peace. Thanks, Adele. See you, brother.
Happy Bitcoin Wednesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for the 2nd Citadel Dispatch in a row, the interactive live show focused on actionable Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. I am joined here by rider die freak, good friend, return guest, Dylan LeClaire, to talk Binance, state of the market, ETFs. We're gonna yesterday, we we were in it for the tech. Today, we're just gonna go straight d gen and and go that route. So very excited. How's it going, Dylan? Doing great. I guess I'm the I'm the d gen guest. You're the d gen guest. Yes. Yesterday, we were talking about training Bitcoin developers.
[00:01:10] Dylan LeClair:
Nice.
[00:01:13] ODELL:
So where should we start? I mean, let's start, with Binance. I mean, Binance is the topic of the week or last couple of weeks. Dylan and and some others have concerns over over Binance, and and they are the largest exchange in the world by far. And so let's go into that. So, Dylan, what are your what are you seeing here? Do you want me to pull up anything you just sent me?
[00:01:43] Dylan LeClair:
I mean, we can hold on to that, but I guess so I'll I also just sent you one of my threads too. He's sending me charts. This is how the best time this is gonna get. Yep. Alright. So where do we start here? Well, there's a lot of things. One, you know, the title here is Bank Run on Binance. Question mark. You know, question mark. Yeah. There's still you know, Binance has a whole lot of Bitcoin. A whole lot of, I guess, quote, unquote, crypto, like, 600, 700,000 Bitcoin as it stands. So It's like $18,000,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. Yeah. There's no Bankron at the current moment.
In my opinion, there should be, you know, I would not hold funds on Binance.
[00:02:23] ODELL:
So if you're bankrupt, there should be a bankrupt. Yeah. Essentially.
[00:02:29] Dylan LeClair:
And and here's why, I guess, I would say. And and and, you know, the state of crypto Twitter, is pretty ridiculous whenever you raise these points. Like, just to be clear here. A lot of people when I when I say this, whether it's about FTX or or Binance or, you know, previously FTX or literally any crypto bucket shop, derivative, yield farm, whatever, they're always like, oh, you're fudding or, like, you're a bear or, like, you know, you missed the bottom or, like, blah blah blah blah blah. It's like, okay. You know, I have a a significant amount of my net worth in Bitcoin. My parents have that money in Bitcoin. Like, I trust me. I like, people that are thinking, like, I'm fudging, you know, I have a vested interest in, like, Bitcoin collapsing or whatever, are just, like, out of their minds, don't even know what they're talking about, and are completely the point is going completely over their head.
Why do I care about Binance? Why am I, like, you know, commentating on Binance? Well, 1, you know, generally, I guess, my job, you could title it, you know, I don't really have an official title or care for all of that stuff, but, like, a Bitcoin analyst. Right? You know, I guess you could frame it as as such. So why do I care about Binance? Well, reportedly, you know, there's 70 to 80% of the spot volume, for Bitcoin and, you know, crypto pricing. Right? And when did I first start talking about Binance? Well, you know, it was shortly after, the collapse of of FTX when, you know, the same patterns that we saw with SPF, leading up to, their collapse with token price, with public statements from, SBF, you know, CZs, a kind of attitude or not attitude, but actions and statements and words being very similar to to SBF. And this isn't just anecdotal. Right? So what did SBF do? Right? You see all, you know, Celsius collapse and and Luna and 3AC and GBTC and all these yield carry trades and whatever blow up.
And SBF, you know, throughout the summer is, like, you know, f FTX is this giant that came out unscathed, and they're, like, we're gonna bail out BlockFi, and we're gonna write a term sheet for Voyager and, like, you know, industry bailouts. And he's going on CNBC and being like, you know, we're here for the industry and for the ecosystem. SPF the modern day JPMorgan? And and, like, all these dumb narratives. And, you know, I didn't I didn't, like, suspect that FTX was mass and solvent at this point, but it was like It's like it was literally a Ponzi scheme from Yeah. It was like, well, this is odd. And so someone over the summer sent me a balance sheet, or, it was a marketing pitch for Alameda from the summer of 2018. And it was that was, you know, following the the 2017 bull market, obviously, when Bitcoin went from, like it hadn't yet fallen to 3,000, I think. It was, like, 20 k to, like, 6 k. Right? And it's, like, super volatile up and down. And it was an Alameda pitch deck of, like, hey, we're a quant hedge fund, blah blah blah. You know, here are our returns, and their equity curve was like a straight line. Right. And it's like, we're compounding at this time and the other thing. And and it's like, these loans and they called them, like, loans to their to the Alameda. They're like, these are risk free. And someone sent me this, and I was like, yeah. It was a high return risk free is what we Yeah. I was like and it was like, we you know, these are, like, 20% APR loans that, like, we you know, are are risk free. And I was like, yeah. Like, you know, you fabricated this to try to make Alameda look bad. Like, this is, like, literally, obviously, a made off style Ponzi scheme as such. There's no way this like, these guys actually posted this. Like, anybody with half a brain would know this is fake.
And and as it became increasingly clear, you know, we basically with The CoinDesk coming out, that Alameda, you know, this Titan hedge fund that people thought was, like, you know, the smartest people in the in the room for crypto, ironically, were, you know, levered their entire you know, all their net equity on a liquid shit coins. And as it turns out, you know, we're commingling funds with, the FTX balance sheet. Right? And that became clear when, you know, Caroline was, like, hey, we'll buy all your tokens at $22. Right. And, you know, the and it was, like, holy crap. And he pulled up, and I'll get to why how this relates to Binance.
But you pull up the FTP chart when she tweets this, and I I live I live posted this off the hip all on Twitter. Yeah. I remember. It was lit. I was, like, holy shit. I, like, had never looked at an FTT chart before. I couldn't care less about FTT's stupid fraud exchange token. I look it up, and I was like, holy shit. She just tweeted her line in the sand. And you look at the chart, and it's like FTT went from $2 to $22 or, like, to, like, 80 or whatever. Yeah. It went way It went from, like, 2 to 20 on no volume, no price action, no price discovery, straight line in, like, late 2020, early 2021. And I was like, oh my god. Because, like, okay. For instance, Matt. Right? Stay humble, stack stats. We're like, yeah. Nope. Bitcoin. We'll buy as much as we want. We don't care. We're in it for the long game. We wanna acquire the asset. I don't care about that near term exchange rate. So if someone's like, you know, hey. We'll, defend this price, you know, of of, you know, our own token especially.
Like like, Warren Buffett wants the price of his assets he wants to own to go down. You know? Bitcoin is, like, you know, send a nuke. We wanna buy the we wanna buy the the bloody, like, red candle. When someone's like, you know, hey, yeah, we'll defend this price and, you know, like, that is obviously a red flag. Right? Right. You know, it gets lined in the sand. There were a lot of FX flags, but that's They were levered against our shit. Broke the camel back. They they blew up. So post FTX collapse, you know, which, you know, ironically so, was CZ calling their bluff. He was like, hey. We're dumping all of our FTT tokens, like couple 100 mil. And then you saw, like, a bunch of speculators on BitMax, on Binance, ironically, in FTX. People were shorting FTT, shorting the hell out of it, you know, and and it was basically a call call on the FTX solvency. K? They blow up, people lose their Bitcoin, etcetera. Just two things I would add here, if we're gonna do if we're doing a timeline.
[00:08:28] ODELL:
Binance was a, essentially incubated FTX. When Alameda first started, they were on BitMex. They wanted to launch their own exchange so they could own the house as well, and Binance basically gave the start up seed money for that. Yep. Then, FTX thought that Binance was a black eye on their, cap table, and they were having trouble, with all the suits that they were friends with in America. So they wanted to get Binance off the cap table, and that deal that, FTX basically bought back their equity from Binance involved a large portion of FTT token.
So when c z so and then, the way the story goes is, SBF and his suit friends were in Washington, and they were basically trying to and and this is everyone knows that he he he donated to a shit ton of politicians. He brought a shit ton of politicians. That what he was trying to do was basically say, put up this regulatory moat, make FTX the de facto champion, and we'll crush Binance together. And he heard basically through the grapevine that that SPF was angling to take him down, and he took that FTT token that he had. And right before he dumped it on the market, he tweeted out we are dumping them all on the market, which caused the initial panic and then the rest is history.
[00:09:57] Dylan LeClair:
Yep. And so what did CZ do after? Right? Biggest competitor goes down. It's a it's a massive win at first. Right? Their biggest competitor, FTX, kind of this meteoric Not even a competitor, but okay. Yeah. Well, you know, in theory,
[00:10:13] ODELL:
Do you remember when CZ went on CNBC during it and was like, we're not we don't like thinking about other smaller exchanges that we don't compete with. We we like to focus on growing the industry.
[00:10:24] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. And, initially, you know, you could interpret it as, like, a relative and it was, I guess, a relative win for Binance. Right? It's like, you know, this this other derivative casino that, you know, was so dominant, came out of nowhere, SPF, poster boy, you know, Forbes covers, whatever. They're gone, you know. There's really the money rentals. There's no there's no other place to go for crypto, g gents. I mean, there is, but, like, if you just think about the derivative kind of marketplaces and, like, the the kind of the preferred bucket shops, it was like the BitMex's of the world, and then Binance came along. And it was Binance and Well, like, BitMex particularly got very neutered when the 3 founders got arrested and Yep. Added to UIC. And we've kinda seen, like, this this hop of, like, you know, there's kind of this new new, you know, exchange or, you know, unregulated bucket shop where everybody can go and you can be John Smith from whatever country with a VPN and you can trade and it's all great. And then, you know, it takes a year or 2 and international law comes in. And, like, let's be clear. I'm no statist. I'm not, like, shut them down. People can do what they want with their money. Yeah. But we've seen, you know, kind of this this relative rise and fall of all these exchanges. And so it was like, okay. Great. You know, Binance took out, helped to take out, you know, their fraud competitor, all good. Bunch of market share, bunch of coins, bunch of volume flows to Binance. Okay. Great. CZ comes out and it's like, you know, the one thing and and to me, you know, kind of like the art of war, like, playbook starts to play through my mind. And I'm like, you know, look look strong when you are weak, you know. Right. When you when you are strong, don't show it, you know. Like, that's I forget the original quote. But it was, like, it was it was very, very reminiscent of what SPF did with kind of a public projection of strength. It was like it was like, hey, guys. The lessons we learned and CZ literally tweeted this out. It's like, the lessons we learned from FTX is, you know, never trade against your customers, never leverage against your own exchange token, never take loans. We have no outside loans. And no leverage period. No leverage period. Right? Great. Good. You know? Great rule, CZ. Love it. You know, he's like, also, like, you know, we're gonna bail out the industry with a $1,000,000,000 of BUSD.
And everyone's like, CZ, you're awesome. You're the man. Like, thank you for, you know, having a vested interest in crypto and forwarding this movement, yada yada. Okay. So, you know, me, and I wasn't the only one to do this, just curious, was like, alright, you know, $1,000,000,000 of BUSD, here's the blog post, copy paste address, Etherscan. It's like, oh, great. Etherscan labeled 1, you know, industry bailout recovery funds. Awesome. Click one click over. That was a it was a 2 hop. One click over, another click. A day before that, it's in Binance 8 wallet. So I'm like, wait. What? Binance 8's an exchange reserves.
And and people, like, also, you know, in the comments were, like, wait, TZ, what? You know? And they put out the day after. They put out this, and I can, you know, I can pull up the link if you give me a couple seconds. When was it? It was like It was like late November. Right? Right after. About almost almost a year ago, like, 10 months ago. Yeah. And it was, like, basically a blog post that said roundabout way, you know, our security is so good that we keep our corporate funds in the same exchange addresses. Right. And it was like, wait, what?
Like and and this is right after FTX gets run, and they say, you know, you know, what's the most important? Transparency, auditability, blah blah blah blah blah. Proof of reserves. Here's our proof of reserves. You know? And this company, this, Mazar company, he CZ goes, you know, he was audited, audited proof of reserves, hashtag transparency. Shares this Mazar's audit. First of all, it's not an audit. It's an attestation. It's just it's a company instructing a a firm, an accounting firm, that their instructed way of measuring whatever they they want you to measure is how they say it. And so Binance literally has their a bunch of listed addresses. They say, here's our addresses. Here's how much money we say we have.
It's, you know, verify if it's correct. Yeah. And and Mazars is, like, I mean, yeah. Sure. And and a bunch of people, including, like, you know, one of the ones that was, like, pretty laughable to me was, like, Willy Woo was, like, oh, you know, great. Thanks for sharing. What are your liabilities? And CZ is, like, oh, you know, well, liabilities are harder, but we don't have any. Just ask around. And to me, I would just laugh. I literally, verbally, audibly laughed out loud because it was like a month before we had FTX, you know, this dominant player who was leveraged, not I mean, they did have Voyager on a credit line of Voyager. Alameda did.
But when Susie's like, oh, you know, ask around. We don't have any liabilities. And it's like, you have, you know, 1,000,000,000 upon 1,000,000,000 upon 1,000,000,000 of dollars of notional assets and liabilities on the Binance platform via derivative exposure. So so, okay, how do we connect all these dots, and why why am I and I kind of going on this weird long tirade? So what are the big similarities with Binance and FTX aside from their derivative bucket shop, shitcoin casino? Well, one of them, the most obvious one is an exchange token. Right? And if we think about literally every crypto company besides essentially BlockFi that collapsed in 2022, what do they have in common?
In hindsight, they had an exchange token, you know, the Celsius. Right? That model where, you know, there whether it was a yield offering or whatever, it was the this exchange token This is this was BNB pioneered this, and they all copied BNB. Yeah. It was like, oh, FTX went down SBF, you know, criminal blah blah blah. Where do you think SPF and FTX learned? You know, what model did they copy? They didn't copy the BitMex model. The BitMex model was Bitcoin only. We're gonna you you can't there's no stable coins. There's no crypto. It's just Bitcoin denominated derivatives. Right? And that was, like, a pretty simple model. It was I mean, honestly, it was kind of, like, you know, a a really cool cyberpunk kinda model of, like, hey. Truck on a VPN. You don't need anything. You just log on with the email. You can trade free market, whatever. And they did they trade against you? Of course, they did. But everybody knew that and just Understood territory. Yeah. Yeah. It was like, yeah. You know? They trade against us, but, like, everybody knows us. Shadow Bank bucket shop. You know? Yeah. You know? It was just like it was just like the golden age of, like, a casino. And so, you know, being, Binance comes in, you know, pioneers this, like, we're gonna list every shit coin ever. We're gonna list the perpetuals and derivatives, and we're gonna make every single trading pair.
And, you know, and p and the generate crypto traders love it. Right? It's like, oh, you know, I can trade, like, literally every shit coin pair against Bitcoin, against Tether, against whatever. BNB. BNB. Right? And so, I guess, Matt, if you want, pull up the first chart I sent you. This is the b and b market cap.
[00:17:48] ODELL:
And I just before we get there, just really quick, we're 17 minutes in. Freaks, regardless of any of this, it's just don't trust any custodians, not your keys, not your coins. Just hold learn how to hold Bitcoin yourself. It's not that difficult. Okay. Dylan agrees with me. Dylan, what do you want me to open?
[00:18:07] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. No. I mean, that's that's the entire point of all this. This is a long roundabout way of I mean, people think I'm, like, you know, accusing me of being some paid actor against Binance, whatever. It's not Binance unique. And I've said this multiple times. It's not an agenda against CZ or Binance. It's not even isolated to just the quote unquote crypto ecosystem. Like, also, like, don't trust Bank of America. Yeah. No. It's like yeah. This is what Bitcoin fixes. It's like no counterparty risk. You know, you you hold your own money.
[00:18:32] ODELL:
Okay. I interrupted you, Dylan. Where where am I going here? Do you want?
[00:18:38] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. Well, we're going back to why do I say why do I question Binance. Right? And so I you know, looking at similarities of FTX and and Binance, I look at the exchange token. Right? And this is back in November I first looked at it. And there's a Fiat valuation and there's a Bitcoin valuation. And if you look if you look at literally every single Altcoin, and I don't even care about these things. I had never looked at BNB until last November after CZ started tweeting like a, you know, s SBF summer clone. But every single altcoin against Bitcoin, people always think it's, like, some magical story, you know, Ethereum, Future of Finance, Solana, all this garbage.
All it is is just is just beta to Bitcoin with speculators. It's super liquid, low float garbage. It goes way up in a bull run and crashes. And every single altcoin crashed against Bitcoin in 2022, all of them, because Bitcoin crashed 85% or 80%. Binance, BNB, and Bitcoin terms went to all time highs, floated to all time highs. And it traded in 2021, it traded with, like, 2 to 3 times some volatility of Bitcoin. And in 2020, in 2021. And in 2022, it trades with the same volatility of Bitcoin and and goes all time highs in the Bitcoin pair. And, you know, this is when CZ is tweeting about all this stuff, about how virtuous he is, whatever. And I'm like, this makes no sense. BNB, you know, this ETH clone ghost chain that nobody uses is worth 2,830,000 Bitcoin.
That makes no sense to me. And so CZ being like, oh, you know, we have no liabilities. Whatever. And also tweeting at the same time of, like, we have never sold any BNB. And it's like, Matt, what would you do? First of all, like, this is just the assumption that, you know, the BNB price is organic, and and, you know, no one sent it, like, soaring to a $100,000,000,000 valuation. But in 2017, they create a shitcoin from nothing. 4 years later, literally 4 years, maybe 4 and a half, it's worth a $100,000,000,000 and you own half the float.
Yeah. Right? But who sent the market that high? Right? It wasn't retail. Right? Like, it wasn't, like, bleb stacking BNB. Who pushed it there? Right? Who pushed Celsius token? Who pushed FTT? No. No. But okay. Wait. So first of all, like, can you explain
[00:21:00] ODELL:
what the mech like, what if if you if you were talking to cz, what would he tell you the value prop of buying it BNB is, and what would he tell you, like, the mechanism they use to increase its
[00:21:13] Dylan LeClair:
value? It's you get a discount on Binance fees, and it's an ETH clone. And, you can, you know, use it in the Binance, quote, unquote, Binance ecosystem. The Binance Smart Chain. But no. But, also,
[00:21:25] ODELL:
they take, like, a portion of trading fees, and then they burn they buy buy BNB, and then they take it, and then they burn it. Privately burn it. Right?
[00:21:35] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. But there there this is the thing. They're not actually burning anything. They're just, like, taking their stake that they that they gave themselves and being, like, oh, you know, I guess we're reducing the supply. But they send it to a burn address. Right? Yeah. But, like and people are like, oh, I guess that makes it more valuable. And so The where I'm going at this, where I'm where I'm coming from on this is, like,
[00:21:56] ODELL:
like, Coinbase is traded on the Nasdaq. You're like you can buy Coinbase shares. Yep. And what Binance would tell you what cz would tell you is that BNB was a way for people to get exposure to Binance's success, ex exposure to Binance's success without a, you know, a proper proper equity stake. It's not actually stock. It's not actually shares in the company, but you have some exposure to upside of Binance being successful. That's his shill, basically, at BNB. Obviously, I'm not I'm not I'm not endorsing. I'm not saying it's the case. I mean, as Dylan said, you know, BNB is up tremendously against or it's it's outperformed Bitcoin over a certain period of time. I'm pretty sure when I first started telling people, don't trust BNB, do not hold BNB, it's, you know, centralized custodian on steroids and completely propped up by Binance.
It was, like, 5000% ago. Yeah. But my point is is the mechanism behind BNB is literally, like, in I don't know if they have a white paper or whatever, but in the press release that released BNB, it's like, we are going to prop up the price based on our revenues. As revenues come in, we're gonna burn BNB and reduce the supply. Right?
[00:23:04] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. You know, and there's, like, a whole roundabout way of doing this. But, yeah, essentially, that's that's supposedly the value prop. Right? But when I look at this, and this isn't a really Binance specific thing, I just look at, like, if it was Tesla stock or Apple stock or Bitcoin even kinda similar to, like, how Bitcoin traded at, like, you know, 30 k middle of 2022, and it was, like, this multiyear kind of support thing, and you're, like, holy shit. You know, take TA for a grain of salt, but you're like, this looks pretty damn ugly. Right? In the same way that FDT did. You know, it's like multiyear support trades from $20 to $200 in a straight line from 2020.
And against Bitcoin, like, Bitcoin's at 27 k, Matt. The first time Bitcoin trade at 27 k, BNB was was 80% lower in Bitcoin terms. So it's up from the first time Bitcoin touched 27 k. BNB in Bitcoin terms is up 500, 600%. Right? And every shit coin is lower. So it's like, oh, you know, maybe Binance is, like, hyper successful. Maybe. But me being skeptical, have my doubts. And I personally think they have put 100 of 1,000,000, maybe 1,000,000,000 of dollars more than advertised and probably, in in my opinion, this is pure speculation. I don't have insight in balance sheet, and and no one does. It's a it's a black box. But I personally think that there's there's a lot of shady stuff going on, and I don't think that the the price of their shit coin is has a non zero relationship with the notional solvency. It's all I've said,
[00:24:39] ODELL:
and people, like, get all upset and mad at me for it. You think, like you think if I mean, you keep saying this 212 number. You think if BNB goes below 212, then then they become insolvent. No.
[00:24:49] Dylan LeClair:
Well, it it already has. But here here is what I I guess what I'm saying is they have a ton of ammo, and the ammo is all their customer funds. Right? FTX wasn't exposed until their Bitcoin got drained. So Binance at 700,000 Bitcoin isn't you know, they're not they're not gonna ever seize it. They're not gonna be like, oh, well, guys, guess what? Our assets and liabilities don't match up match up. We're closing down shop. Right? That's not gonna happen. But not only just, like, you know, me being kind of, like, some conspiracy theorist, whatever. They've been proven to have to multiple times to to have rehypothecated funds by the 1,000,000,000. 1, putting a $1,000,000,000 of the industry fund from customer wallets.
We keep our our own corporate money in the same thing because our addresses are so secure. Yeah. But, like, that's not
[00:25:43] ODELL:
I don't know. So, like, look, I'm no fan of CZ. I've been an outspoken critic of him. I think that, you know, I I he's he's intentionally, you know, misleading, about his messaging. He tells people not to self custody. He does all this shit. Right? Propping up BNB. Definitely propping up BNB. But all that said, like, I don't I just don't think it's a fair comparison to compare him to FTX or Celsius. Like, CZ is a different breed. He's from a different generation, of Bitcoiners. And, I mean, Muczynski was just a straight up scammer. And then, like, FTX, BlockFi, Gemini. I guess Gemini like, maybe I can't group into the same era diagnosis, but, like The yield product was shit. But yeah. But a lot of it was like, look. We're suits. We're Fiat Maxis.
All banks rehypothecate. Like, of course, we're gonna generate yield. We wanna generate yield. Yield is everything. We gotta put our money to work. And they were all, like, massive, massive degens. But c z, you know, is first of all, the exchange is on a completely different level. Like, it's hard to measure these things because volume can be faked. A bunch of different metrics can be faked. But if you look at the on chain balances, it's a significant difference. Yeah. And if you just are in the space, it's very obvious. Like, it's Binance and then just a big drop off even when FTX existed. Yep. Binance completely demolished FTX. It's this massive exchange that's been operating for a long fucking time outside of government purview, like, massive target on their back from the US government. I would like they're more comparable to, like, a Bitfinex and a Tether. Yeah. Bitfinex and Tether are tied at the hip. And, first of all, wouldn't it be ironic if all the suits that said they were gonna come to save us were the massive d gens and CeCe wasn't?
He was just, like, humbly scamming people with trading fees and propping up BNB that he owned a shit ton of. And then, second of all, like, I think I think if you look back at old Bitcoin history, like, that was not a ridiculous setup to have. You had your cold storage that you had some, like, you know, ridiculous multisig scheme completely cold, and then you had your hot wallets. And, like, Suits would call that commingled and, like, not an ideal situation from accounting purposes. But, like, to me, that's not necessarily the red flag that it would be. Yeah. If you look back at FTX even, you know, right now, we're looking at the on chain balances of Binance. It's way higher than everyone else, but we agree that, obviously, it's it's not a prop proof of reserves is bullshit. There's no proof of liabilities. There's no way there's no way to even do it. Yep.
But with FTX, you remember FTX days? Like, Glassnode and shit weren't even tracking FTX wallets. Everyone was like, oh, they have great fucking OPSEC, but they just didn't have any fucking Bitcoin whatsoever. Yeah. So I just,
[00:28:54] Dylan LeClair:
yeah. I I I really Let's be clear. You labeled it. You labeled the episode Bankron on Binance, not me. But I agree. It's a it's a completely different level. I just it's weird because I am
[00:29:06] ODELL:
in this weird situation where I I feel like I'm defending Binance. Yep. Because there's so much conversation and speculation around them being like FTX and being insolvent. I mean, I titled the episode bank run on Binance question mark because it's clickbait. It's like but, but that is the conversation. Like, is there a bank run on Binance? Right? And I think a lot of people think there is. A lot of people think it's like an FTX type of situation. You see a lot of suits that got rugged by FTX calling it the same exact thing, a lot of comparisons to it. And I just don't think the comparison holds water. I I I put it more in, like, like, a tether Bitfinex camp. Like, the biggest threat is probably a cruise missile or, you know, regulations, but, like, I I like the term cruise missile diplomacy, where, like, the US government takes them down. Yep. And and a lot of the arguments against Binance to me feel more in the Tether truther camp. And that that's what I'm trying to unpack there because, I mean, I know you look at the numbers. You have a lot of analysis there. Like, I have tons of respect for you. So
[00:30:14] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. Well, there's a there's a few more instances. 1, the $1,000,000,000 thing was just kind of 1 notch, 1 arrow in the in the quiver. One another few things is, like, you know, the whole with the whole BNB Binance chain. Right? They had, like, this and this was just another kind of red flag that wasn't like a, you know, smoking gun in of itself, but just another kind of thing that was like, really? Right? So they have, like, this b n BNB they call it, like, b n, b tokens. Right? They they wrap an asset, quote, unquote. Yeah. And then they issue it on Binance Smart Chain. Okay. Right. Fine. Right? Like, all a bunch of the shit coins have done. And you get DeFi, quote unquote. Yeah. Quote unquote DeFi. And, like, let's be clear. Right? Like, BNB is is not even like, I shit on ETH all the time. Right? We we talk about we talk about risk factors and it being centralized and the development and all that stuff.
But, you know, since since the DAO hack, right, ETH hasn't been, like, okay, guys. Like, stop creating. We're rolling this back. We're gonna they haven't done that since
[00:31:18] ODELL:
since you know Compared to BNB, ETH looks very decentralized. Is your American BNB. Like BNB is literally just a single company controls it. Boom. BNB got hacked in
[00:31:27] Dylan LeClair:
or or a bridge got exploited in September 2022. They straight up halted the thing. Right? They straight up halted the chain, like, all the centralized validators on Binance. Right? So it's different in that sense. But let's go back to the the the the b token. Right? So there there's there's all these there's Bitcoin, Tether, BUSD, Ethereum, 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of dollars of this. Their their backing of this of these tokens, particularly the BUSD. Right? Paxos issues a stable coin. Paxos is pretty legitimate US financial institution. They hold the treasuries for finance. They have attestation. They have CUISP kind of debt issuance, numbers, so you can look it up. You can verify that these these are real. These are real debt securities that are backing it.
It's all legitimate. They issue a BUSD. Binance, you know, kind of labeled names, Stablecoin. Great. It goes up to $20,000,000,000. And then Binance, you know, takes 1,000,000,000 of dollars of the Stablecoin, parks it in a wrapped contract, and issues it on the other side as a Binance, a a BNB chain. So it's not trading on ETH as Paxos issues it. It's trading on Binance Smart Chain. Well, post mortem come to find out that throughout 2021 and early 2022, there was 1,000,000,000 of dollars of unbacked BUSD issued on Binance Smart Chain.
Also come to find out that there was 1,000,000,000 of dollars of USDC, Tether, and a 100,000 200,000, plus of Ethereum and some Bitcoin that were backed in the literally in the Binance regular exchange, exchange wallet balances. Right? So you would say or maybe you could steal Mana and say, well, that's the addresses of their, you know, most sound security or their their biggest multisigs or whatever. Right. I would say, listen. They're taking one asset, and they're issuing 2 liabilities against it. One liability is the is the asset that they're supposedly pegging on the other side. So they're taking one asset, and they're they're owing one to their customers, and they're creating another asset on the other side that's a wrapped token. Right. And there's no way for us to know the customer's off chain balances, meaning, like, what you see on the UI UX. Like, Binance, I have 1 Bitcoin. See, like, look at it says 1 Bitcoin here. There's no way to determine what that Bitcoin is or how much of the how much they say they owe to their customers versus what's in the actual address. So for months on end, they had 1,000,000,000 and probably 1,000,000,000 of dollars issued on Binance Smart Chain backed by the same exchange wallets that they used in the proof of reserves out of station. If you are not an incompetent account, like, if from an accounting perspective, if you're not extremely incompetent, best case best case is extreme incompetence, then you segregate them. Worst case, and I'm not saying this and merely posing the ability.
The worst case is it's outright fraud, and you're double counting
[00:34:34] ODELL:
you're double counting an asset. Right? That's literally accounting fraud. And so, obviously, you're not sue you for calling him fraudulent.
[00:34:41] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. And I'm not saying that right, like but just just, you know, this is how accounting works. And so, you know, I I went through, did a bunch of digging, like, there was 1,000,000,000 upon 1,000,000,000 of dollars of this. And it wasn't just, you know, Tether, USCC, whatever. It was literally, you know, the the shittiest bottom of the barrel shit coins that they were doing this with. It was, like, post FTX, CZ starts, like, Schizo tweeting with, you know, transparency, proof of reserves, and then goes to his back end engineers. He's like, guys, we need to figure out this accounting stuff. And his and his guys are, like, wait, what? And he's, like, I don't care. Just throw an address on there. And and so, like, you look at you look at this, and you can look at the Internet archive.
And the the proof of reserves backing, the address is backing the same amount of output tokens on b, you know, b and b chain. Right? So the same amount of tokens are on the pegged outside. You look at the Internet archive, and the addresses that are pegging the tokens are changing, like, sometimes by the day. They're just changing them. They're reworking them. They're shuffling the balances. And then finally, as of, like, a couple months back when Bloomberg and Reuters called them out on it, they're now segregated and in their own address. Right? So it's like, okay, you know They are segregated now.
They are. But the point is is that Binance has, you know, 600 or 700,000 Bitcoin. How much? And we have no idea. No one does. But all I'm posing is, like
[00:36:09] ODELL:
and and, again, they're not being bank run. They're gonna have a long time, you know, unless they, like, freeze your account, which they've done for a lot of people. Yeah. You know, for, like, compliance or whatever. No. I mean, if Binance did theoretically go down, like, it's not gonna be like FTX. They're not he's not gonna, like, call his mommy and be like, oh, let's do a bankruptcy process, get lawyers involved, restructure, and, like, maybe relaunch again or some shit. They they like, it's gonna be a long drawn out process where there's no, like, withdrawals are getting frozen. They're getting delayed. Like, this You're more snappy than than SBF in that sense. Right? It seems like It's a good old fashioned, you know, crypto bucket shop.
[00:36:42] Dylan LeClair:
Yep. And so, like, again, this is just it was just another example of, like, okay. I you know, he's, like, we have all of our customers' addresses segregated and whatnot. It's, like, it's just a big pool of crypto assets where they have a, you know, they have, like, notional, like, $55,000,000,000 of assets, right, of, you know, every shit, crypto, stable coin, Bitcoin, and, you know, that you can think of, wrap Bitcoin, whatever. But, the on the other side, like, there there's clearly, it's somewhere, some way asset liability mismatches, because they have no idea what they're doing from an accounting perspective. So, like, no. Is Binance, like, imminent failure? No. Right? The DOJ is coming. The SEC is already the I SCC. Like, I raised all of these points. Yeah. But none of that means anything. You have to isolate it
[00:37:35] ODELL:
because that's like saying, like, the DOJ is going after Tether, so Tether is a scam or, like, Tether is insolvent. No. I mean, it's not saying like, again, I'm not saying that. Because like, they're an enemy of this they're an enemy of the US financial hegemony. It's like it's the same answer to your competitors. All of them. Buying and Finfinex, Tethers, Tethers is.
[00:37:56] Dylan LeClair:
Tether I mean, Tether dude, Tether owns more treasuries than, like, Mexico. Probably supposedly. Right? The Tether
[00:38:02] ODELL:
Tether is a shadow dollar that is is is is used mostly in situations where you can't use a regulated dollar, and that's what everyone missed when they thought, like, USDC and, like, PayPal coin and all these fucking regulated stable coins competed with it. Yeah. Because that's not the that's not the point. If you can get something regulated somewhere, then you don't use Tether. Yeah. I don't know. In my mind, like, Tether has a massive target on its back from US regulators. Bitfinex does, and Binance does. And always they always will until they die. Yeah. Like, that is that is the situation in my opinion.
[00:38:40] Dylan LeClair:
Yep. Well, I I agree there. I think I disagree a bit on I think, and then maybe this is completely flat out wrong, but I think Tether is given a little bit of a special circumstance regardless of, like, you know, having all these, like, you know, stable coin kinda euro dollars issued on, like, Bitcoin chain chains that, you know, can be used to facilitate whatever kind of I mean, it's a transparent blockchain, but you don't know who's using
[00:39:03] ODELL:
it. Right? Like, it's not regulated or compliant, you know, to They'll occasionally freeze addresses, but, like On occasion. Yeah. Wink wink. Right? They're slow about it. Like, Tornado Cash even, they like, Tether delayed it as long as they could possibly delay it while, like, USDC did it right away. Yeah. Like, all of these, I treat like they're just they're essentially shadow banks. They're outside of US financial regulations.
[00:39:23] Dylan LeClair:
Yep. You know, so, like I mean and, again, I raised I raised these points before SEC, CFTC, whatever. I think DOJ is still coming and maybe that means anything, maybe it it doesn't. But, like, all the things that the points that I raised about, you know, the accounting stuff. Right? Like, we saw they stood up Binance US as essentially it was a a sham of, like, a separate entity. They funneled all of that money through CZ's, you know, separate companies to Paxos. They were taking customer money to issue their BUSD stable coin. Right? Stable coin pumps at the 20 bill. They pump BNB, BTC rises in tandem. It's definitely pumping shit. Yeah. And so it's like you know, and and here's the thing also. It's like, the narrative was with FTX. Right? And and everybody was, like this is how everybody got duped was, like, they're a money printing machine.
You know, they're the look at their volume. They're It's true Goldman. Yeah. It's like they're gonna yeah. And he's like, maybe we buy Goldman Sachs. It's like, they're making 1,000,000,000 of dollars in trading fees. Like, how the, you know, the f could they be insolvent blah blah blah. And it's like, yeah. They do. Right? They make 1,000,000,000 of dollars. In the same way that, like, supposedly, Binance is, like, printing 1,000,000,000 upon 1,000,000,000 of dollars of It's a bank comparison. But, like, here's the thing, is that is that Binance, CZ, we look at you're like you're looking at the volumes and you're like, they're making so much money. Right? Like, there's, you know, a 1000000 Bitcoin of trading volume on, like, the perps or the the spot or whatever. And then it comes out and, like, this was, you know, what what people inferred. Right? Like, the conspiracy theorists that were, like, there's no way this volume's real on, like, Tether or This is 0% trading fees. Right? Yeah. 0% trading fees, but it comes out that, like the volume's not real. That's by design.
Yeah. It's like well, oh, yeah. They're like CZ has, like, 300 bots. Well, this is what, like, the the SEC or CFTC
[00:41:23] ODELL:
suit says, but, like, It's not even just t z. Like, if you give someone 0% trading fees, like, you're gonna pump your volume numbers up, and then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy because you pump your volume numbers up because just external people come in, and they trade back and forth because they don't have to worry about trading fees so they can try and scalp shit. Yeah. And then that fake volume or fake ish volume, then attracts real volume into the system, and then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
[00:41:48] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. And, you know, the one of the points that I've raised, and who knows if this is right or not in the face of the gray scale news yesterday, but if you read, like, past and maybe this transitions us to, like, the ETF talk. But if you read past ETF denials, there's one, like, one for, like, the New York Stock Exchange or Yeah. ARCA suit, back in, like, March of 2022. It was one of the the earlier kind of, like it wasn't exactly a a spot, like, a one to one spot Bitcoin ETF. It was something like stupid carbon credit Bitcoin fund, but the redemption mechanism was was like that of, a spot ETF.
And so they weren't trying to issue a spot ETF, quote, unquote, but it was like a fund that had Spot Bitcoin exposure with with creation and redemption. It wasn't a one way trust. Right. And the SEC comes back and was like, you know, hey, we have a few problems, that are still not resolved and you haven't given us any info on how how we're gonna deal with this. 1, like, we're concerned about manipulation of the Bitcoin market by a dominant entity. 2, we're we're you know, and they listed, like, 7 or 8 things. And, like, 4 of them read, you know, if you read between the lines, they read in all caps Binance. It was like
[00:42:57] ODELL:
it like, you know Yeah. That's the real conspiracy, Dylan. Is what? That that the ETF is waiting on. Like, look where we started. The this all started a year ago when SBF tried to knife Binance behind the scenes with suits. Yep. And CZ responded in kind, took out FTX, took out a bunch of suits that were all intermingled and leveraged degen craziness, like, wiped them all fucking out, made them all look like fucking idiots, Yep. Including, like, top tier venture funds, like, the biggest names in the world all got fucking wrecked. Mister Wonderful is, like, fucking on TV. Tom Brady got rugged. Like, he just takes them all fucking out. Yep. But that doesn't change the core of it. The core of it was let's kill Binance.
They start trying to kill Binance. Binance responds back, and now they're still continuing to try and and kill Binance. Like, if you look at it if you look at, if if you if you look at US suit control over Bitcoin markets Yep. Right? When they say they don't want manipulation, what they mean is they want manipulation that they control. They wanna be able to manipulate the markets. They want circuit breakers. They want to be able to rehypothecate funds and not worry about spikes that go down and liquidate them. They they want full and complete control over the market as they has been their privilege historically before Bitcoin existed on all these assets Yep. Including gold. And what stands in their way of doing that? What stands in their way of doing that is is 2 things. First of all, that it's incredibly easy to self custody Bitcoin, and and people humble stackers are just constantly just taking Bitcoin off the market, holding it in self custody, ideally spending it in a circular economy eventually, if not already.
And there's also all these smaller p to p markets, that are even harder to stop almost you know? And they could become black markets if they become if they get criminalized. Right now, they're not in most parts of the world, but they would become black markets if p to p got criminalized. And then you have Binance, Bitfinex, Tether. Right? Like, if you look at the metrics that can't be faked, which is exchange wallets, The list of exchanges goes Binance, Coinbase Pro, you know, selling surveillance software to the US government and wants to be the surveillance package for all the ETFs and wants to hold custody for all the ETFs, and then Bitfinex. And then there's a drop off. There's a big cliff. You know? Right after that, like, 3 to 4 there's no 4th best.
Put put that on your quote, Mike. So to me, like, the conspiracy is let's fucking kill Binance. Let's kill Bitfinex by any means necessary. We can change the rules however we want. We can hit them for this. We can hit them for that. Maybe they fucked up an accounting thing here. Maybe they did this here. Maybe they did that here. Yeah. And that's what we're I think that's what we're witnessing. And part of it is fueled by influencers and fund managers that got wrecked on FTX and are embarrassed and and and want to see the whole thing taken out. Yep.
[00:46:03] Dylan LeClair:
No. I I agree there. The like, you know, Coinbase, essentially, and and who knows, but I think this the secret or not maybe not so secret, the SEC motive, the suit motive is is get, you know especially with, like, the flurry of new ETF, applications that came out in, you know, midsummer. What was the change that kind of spurred, like, this, you know, increased approval odds and and change the game and with BlackRock and all that other stuff? It was a Coinbase surveillance agreement. Yeah. And that is irrelevant
[00:46:35] ODELL:
if Coinbase is only doing, quote, unquote, 5% of the volume of Yeah. If Binance and Bitfinex are out there, it's irrelevant. And then when you go back to the p to p markets, who's the largest p to p player in the developing world in African Latin markets? Binance p to p. Yep.
[00:46:51] Dylan LeClair:
And so, you know, again, like, I'm not not a a sadist per se. I let I'm I'm a big proponent of free markets, but what I think that they're gonna hit, be hit with, aside from if you just look at, like, fiat rails for for cryptos firms. Right? Just look at the Fiat rails, especially, you know, particularly for Binance. Right? What was it? It was Silvergate Signature who both had 247, 365, essentially, like, fiat ramps. They weren't a stable coin, but it was like a dollar transfer rail. Right. And all the cryptocurrency
[00:47:25] ODELL:
spreadsheets.
[00:47:26] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. Yeah. It was an Excel spreadsheet, SQL database, dollar transfer system with every single crypto entity, gone. Right? Axos, BUSD, Stablecoin, $20,000,000,000 ordered ordered to wind down now at 3,000,000,000. Right? The Fiat rails closed in. Binance u Binance US kind of like shell company entity to get dollar rails shut off. Right? And Reuters Reuters comes out and it's like, oh, hey. Like, this is just a shell entity that they're using to funnel money to to the main Binance platform.
[00:47:55] ODELL:
Right? Shut down. The SEC comes in. Which also should not have been a surprise to anyone. No. No. No. Mean that they're insolvent, though.
[00:48:03] Dylan LeClair:
No. It doesn't. I mean, it just means that they're, you know, either incompetent from an accounting perspective or commingling funds. But, correct.
[00:48:12] ODELL:
And so, yeah, I Oh, and, also, that, like, literally, Binance US was set up as a front to try and get American customers into Binance in the region. See this. Like, It was surprising to me that people were surprised by it because, like, multiple times
[00:48:25] Dylan LeClair:
with Tether, I think with a couple times with Ethereum, with, like, Bitcoin Cash, some, like, you know, random shit coins, it was, like, we need to, like, wallet wallet rebalance, like, what, withdrawals are paused. Like, just give us a little bit, and then you literally can just, like, pull it up and just, like, look at the the withdrawal address, and you just see funds from binance.com labeled wallets just flow in, you know, like 1,000,000 of dollars. Exactly. It's like, oh, it's like, yeah. Well, we knew, you know, 6 months before the SCC told us that they're obviously commingling funds. That's not news to anybody. But, like, you know, the the grayscale news came come out yesterday, everybody celebrating. Like, what's shadowed by it is like Oh, Carrie Silbert.
Yeah. Still owes 1,000,000,000 of dollars to people. It's been a long time. I haven't Yeah. Apparently, there was some some creditor news yesterday that I didn't really follow, but, apparently, it's a pretty shit deal for the creditors. Oh, yeah. So let's talk I mean, continue. No. I I just think, you know, we see, like, the SEC comes out with a sealed document, yesterday against Binance. They never seal anything. There were some SEC kind of Do they not? No. Sealed documents apparently, and, you know, I'm no expert on this, but I just read some some opinions from, like, well informed, ex ex, chiefs of SEC and and some other commentary on Twitter. And it's, like, very, very rare if they do that. And they only really do that if it's it's disclosing information that's,
[00:49:44] ODELL:
in an ongoing criminal investigation, likely DOJ. So I think DOJ is doing something, so SCC doesn't want to blow up their spot. Yeah. And so, you know, the the So does anyone see the sealed document? Do they send it to Binance, or is it just, like, we have a document in an envelope
[00:50:00] Dylan LeClair:
sent to you? I think that's basically it. And and they can and Binance can Binance can upload fucking
[00:50:05] ODELL:
scam.
[00:50:07] Dylan LeClair:
Binance play like, hey. We want this revealed, but then Look, Dylan. I I
[00:50:12] ODELL:
it logically would flow that they could would you know, if if they've they're gonna try everything to take down Binance. If they can incite a bank run, like, they might as well poke the bear and see if, you know, how weak it is. Well, yeah. I mean, I don't know if they Sealed a sealed indictment or whatever whatever whatever SCC calls it statement.
[00:50:31] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. I mean, what they're gonna slap Binance with and, like, if this inside the bank run or not, I I don't probably doesn't. It definitely doesn't because crypto degens don't care. Like, a lot of the feedback I've gotten on, like, the the data I put forward is, like, yeah, and they're like, oh, like, Binance commingles funds and trades against the customer. That's what I'm saying. I'm like, I know. Of course. Yeah. They're like they're like, yeah. You know? But we don't really have anywhere else, so, like, you know, just showed up. I'm like, alright. Yeah. I guess that's fair. But they're gonna probably slap, the DOJ is gonna slap, like, money laundering, whatever charges on them. You know? Again, whether it's right or not, whether KYC, AML is bullshit or not, different topic, but this is the, I guess, the reality of it. So, unfortunately, I don't think it that's the thing. The problem is is that
[00:51:16] ODELL:
the suits commingle. You know, Binance is commingling customer funds with corporate funds, but the suits commingle breaking US financial regulation with insolvency. Right? Like, there's a it's like, oh, you're breaking US regs? Like, you're clearly FTX. Like, this is clearly SPF situation. That's the issue. The issue is that that is not separated in my book.
[00:51:40] Dylan LeClair:
That's interesting.
[00:51:42] ODELL:
It's 2 different risks.
[00:51:44] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. Yeah. That's fair. I don't think I don't think Binance goes away. It'll be interesting to see how resilient they are when the hammer comes down, if the hammer comes down. But I think that that the e the reason, like, the spot ETF hasn't come out is is probably because of a lot of this stuff. So it'll be interesting to see if Binance, all these other kind of crypto bucket shops are still standing and if the SEC is gonna be, you know, forced because of court's decision to release this stuff. Look. And, again Obviously, Binance is gonna,
[00:52:16] ODELL:
you know, collapse sometime soon because I'm defending them, so it's it would just it would jinx it. Yeah. M and A. But, don't you think it's interesting that, you know, we saw the BlockFi degens blow up. We saw the 3 Arrow Capital guys blow up. We saw Gemini blow up. We saw Barry Silbert blow up, and and and all of those guys blew up. Do Kwon blew up. And a bunch of those balance sheets we got to see. Yep. And you almost I've never seen CZ in any of them or Binance in any of them. And, like, obviously, like, the lack of seeing something doesn't mean it doesn't exist or whatever. The lack of whatever. I don't know the phrase. You butchered a different phrase earlier, so I just butchered that one.
But, like, you don't see they were all trading amongst each other Yep. In, like, massive circular loans, like, ridiculous leverage, like, like, fucking Barry, like, had a massive loan on Luna or Terra, one of the 2. One's the derivative or the other. Like, they were using it as collateral.
[00:53:22] Dylan LeClair:
Yep.
[00:53:23] ODELL:
Like, what if, like, CZ was just, like, a survival Bitcoiner that obviously also became like a shit corner, but, like, actually does not have much leverage. May I mean, 0 leverage is almost unbelievable, but doesn't have that much leverage. Like, when he takes leverage, he borrows against Bitcoin, which is, like, the best sovereign individual collateral ever. And he keeps all of his own personal wealth and everything commingled with all corporate funds and all that shit. It's all just fucking commingled to fucking kingdom come. And he's like, in any day, Delta Force could just land a helicopter. Remember what happened to BTCE?
Like, the guy was the Russian guy was, like, vacationing in Greece, and they, like, rammed an unmarked car into his gate. And then when he came out in his underwear, they arrested him, and he was still logged into his computer. Like, that's cz's threat model. Like, cz's threat model is, like, he could be on vacation somewhere and fucking the long arm of the US government just comes back blowing through the door while he's showering.
[00:54:23] Dylan LeClair:
Yep. Yeah. I mean, it's it is possible. You know, that's, I mean, that's why you, self sovereign Bitcoin custody is is, is where it's at. I agree. Like, I I people because I analogize
[00:54:38] ODELL:
some of the stuff that finance has done to to FTX, people are like, oh, shit. You that does it the majority of the time. Like, I Yeah. I'm mostly talking about other people. Yeah. And a lot of those people told me to shut the fuck up when I was saying Barry Silbert owes 1,000,000,000 of dollars and that DCG was fine. Can we, like, appreciate particularly angry at them, and, I have a bone to pick, so I'm just doing it through you.
[00:55:00] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. No. It's it's totally fair. Yeah. I, you know, I think one of the things that I think about, from, like, an analysis perspective that I didn't appreciate as much as the time. And in hindsight, it's super obvious. But, you know, your particular, like, kind of, beef with with berries totally warranted in this sense because of how much of a role. And that it's not it's very much not appreciated. Like, everybody, when you think of the 2020, 2021 bull run, they're like, MicroStrategy and corporate adoption and, like, whatever. And, like, DCG and GBTC I mean, deep like, really Grayscale Bitcoin Trust was a massive, massive, massive, massive driver of the bull run. The biggest, in my opinion, by far. And it's not very it's not very Yeah. That ridiculous trade they were doing. The fucking Like, not only the spot inflows. Right? Let's everyone
[00:55:55] ODELL:
fucking do this high risk trade that we pretend is low risk against our own in house wrapped Bitcoin shit coin. Yeah.
[00:56:02] Dylan LeClair:
It was it you know, not only did they buy 300,000 Bitcoin. So spot flows were just, you know, a a super, like, constrained Bitcoin supply for, you know, that's been, you know, 3 years post 2017, bunch of, you know, hardcore hodlers that aren't selling shit versus, like, you know, Silbert's 1,000,000,000 upon 1,000,000,000 of dollars of just buying. But, also, on the other side, they have their they have Genesis, which is saying, oh, you know, we just created a GBTC share that's at 20% of your, you know, 20% premium to spot Bitcoin. You can use that as collateral, borrow more money, and pummel into the trade again. And so, like, the whole crypto yield thing, like, Bitcoin yield, BlockFi, you know, 3 arrows, FTX, all of this was, like, an extension and derivative of of the grayscale Bitcoin Trust carry trade. And so, like, in hindsight, it's super obvious, but, like, I think it's just very much not appreciated that, like, we the spot flows were obvious, but, like, the the carry trade that was, you know, that all of crypto became dependent on, or not all of crypto, but, like, the yield products, that was all that was all GBTC.
And then when the GBTC discount premium went to a discount and the futures leverage and that carry trade blew up, the last leg of this, you know, the last gasp of a of a bull cycle that they tried in 2022 was UST. Right? It was like the Luna Ponzi. That was the last yield gasp, and then everything blew up. And so for the most part, you know, the good news is we've cleared that out. You know, now Bitcoin's at, you know, 25 k. We're still 60% from the highs. There's no volume, and no one gives a shit. So Bitcoin's dead again. It's great. And now we're just kinda waiting, and and the plugs are kind of in a waiting game. I think we're, like I I would say, like, market conditions are similar to, like, 2019 midsummer, you know, where we're just chopping around, like, people, like the the the emotions and the volatility of just, like, flirting with flirting with a bull market, but then just kind of, like, insta dumping for no reason, pretty similar. The traffic conditions are pretty similar, and we probably got, like, you know, 12, 18, who knows, maybe 24 months before, like, what people think of as, like, a Bitcoin bull run really manifests. And maybe I'm super wrong with that timeline, but, that's kinda how I think of things.
[00:58:24] ODELL:
Dylan, I have to pull you back because you let your rant distract from the fact that Barry Silverdosed 1,000,000,000 of dollars and the culpability he has in the last fucking cycle dynamics. Yeah. And, like, it cannot be understated. Like, I feel like that's the lesson that is being missed here, and we're letting the suit set the narratives. We're letting the suit set the narratives. So I pulled up this tweet from December 2022. I don't know if you remember it, but it's literally the exact conversation we're having right now. It is great that many are skeptical of Binance. Users should not trust custodians and withdraw Bitcoin from all custodians ASAP. That said, do not let Binance concerns distract us from the fact that Barry Silver still owes Gemini users $900,000,000.
Withdrawals remain frozen. Yep. And why do I bring this up again and just wanna reiterate it? Like, Barry, Gemini, Coinbase Mafia, FTX guys, not all of them failed that I'm listening. BlockFi. Like, they were all part of this suit contingency that I have the Gemini advertisement right here. Crypto needs rules. New money, new rules. Crypto without chaos. The regulated cryptocurrency exchange. KYC AML, it will protect you. Like, we are the the suits, and we're here to protect you. And any fucked the hardest. They were the guys that were the most degen last last cycle. Yep. Like The yield products, all a scam.
[01:00:01] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. Yep. No. I mean, I, I'm really curious actually, and I guess we'll find out the answer in a couple years. Maybe that there, you know, really will be nothing new under the sun. But, you know, I I wasn't around for the for the, you know, the previous few cycles, where, you know, kind of a big you know, Like, can't even comprehend it now. I'm curious to see if the Bitcoin yield stupid games, arise, and if if so, in in what fashion or form? Yes.
[01:00:50] ODELL:
Yeah. The degens will there's like people always be degenerate. Yeah. And, ultimately, like, you know, like, freedom freedom tech is hope, but also, like, you know, you can't stop people from being with it. Like, that that's the whole point of freedom technology. Yeah. Because, like, people have to have personal responsibility to make their own decisions, and it just turns out that a lot of humans really like to gamble and play crazy games. And just because they're wearing a suit doesn't mean they don't, I guess is my point. We see data in the Nostra chat.
That's at sill dispatch.com/stream, saying, was CZ a Bitcoiner before? Yeah. I feel like most people like, this also, like, doesn't come up with the SPF stuff, and a lot of new corners just don't realize, I think. Like, CZ is a long time big corner. Like, he's been around for over a decade. The guy started as, like, I think, like, a small time pleb at Blockchain dot info. I'll Yeah. Never use that wall don't use that wallet, shitty wallet. Jenna didn't say it, but that's where he was. It was, like, the number one wallet at the time. Then he was at Okcoin for a while. I might have mixed up the order.
And then I think after Okcoin, he left and created Binance and went off on his own and created his own exchange. And for a long time, what was happening was there was, there was, like, a new bucket shop would open. They'd have no KYC. Everyone would go full on it. They'd have shit tons of volume, and then the founder would either exit scam, there'd be a theft, or the US government shut them down, and then there'd be a new bucket shop. And we saw this happen, like, 6, 7, 8 times. Like, who would control the top volume? And the last 2 that did that before Binance was Bittrex.
US regulators took them down and Poloniex, and then Binance took over all the volume. And there if you go back on tweets, like, I'll own it completely. Like, I said, you know, Binance is gonna get replaced as the bucket shop. But Binance has remained top dog. He is fucking ruthless, as an operator. But, also, I think what happened was there was this transition in degen crypto land to these, quote, unquote, decentralized exchanges, DEXs, that took a lot of that no KYC volume, and he made sure to take his piece of that. Right? Like, there's DEX quote, unquote DEXs on b s on Binance Smart Chain, and their buy BNB is all part of it. And he was very deliberate in that effect because most of these exchanges, they became they were flash in the pants. It's like whoever had no KYC, the most leverage, least friction were the ones that were dominated, and then the new one would pop up. Yep. So I guess know your history, freaks. Yeah. No. I mean, I do, like you know, it's maybe some people will, like, disagree with this, but no. I I mean, to be frank, like, I think CZ is a Bitcoiner. Obviously, he's a shit coiner too on top of it. Yeah. All the shit like, all the major shit coiners were, like, Bitcoiners first until the I don't think SPF was. I think SPF Until the new breed. He's a he came in as a Fiat Maxi. Yeah. Yeah. SBF was always just a grifter. But yeah. I mean, like, the ETH people. Like, people that came in post ETH, for the most part are like, they came in just, like, Fiat Maxi's directly into shitcoins.
Yep. Like, I honestly believe that SPF thought FTT was a solid collateral. Yeah. I I think he believed his own shit. He was like, this is the best collateral in the world. I like, I don't think CZ believes that about BNB. I think he's like, BNB is my Ponzi token. Like, I'm I'm not gonna overleveraged myself on my Ponzi token. Like, it's doing its job already and making me a lot of fucking money. And, like, if you compare like, the example I would say is, like, you know, Delta Force is, like, rated they're making money on BNB, though. They're not using money. Here's my here's my point, Dylan. My point is is, like, SPF like, Delta Force comes in and tries to take out SPF in a hypothetical situation, and he runs with his go bag. Like, his go bag has, like, FTT serum, like, all the Sam coins.
You know? But, like, CZ's go bag is just Bitcoin. Like, he doesn't like, it's not like he's like, oh, I can still use my BNB and all my fucking bullshit.
[01:05:06] Dylan LeClair:
Yep. Perverted BNB things after the fact. Yep. No. I agree. I think oh, yeah. Yeah. C z seizing is just a Bitcoiner that's that's using that's you like, utilize crypto. Yeah. Yeah.
[01:05:18] ODELL:
That's fair. That's a fair assessment. I don't know what you know, I mean and then, like, that's s b I you know, there were very few of us sounding alarm in FTX before it happened because they were just so buttoned up. But, like like, Block 5 was, like, very obvious for a long fucking time. Yep. Fucking Celsius? Like, anyone grandstanding about calling Celsius a scam before it came out? Like, congratulations. You have at least an IQ of 20. Yeah. It's like that was the most obvious fucking scam in the fucking book. Yep. It's a different level. Like, I just it seems like false comparisons. Yeah. That's fair. That's a fair statement. Okay. So you wanna talk some Moon Juice on the ETF news? Like, how do you feel about this ETF stuff? I feel like we've just talked about cz for an hour, and now you're you're gonna exit Yeah. Yeah. Sorry for the shit going content. You can literally exit scam tomorrow, and I'm just I'll just say sorry, freaks. I'd hold your own keys.
[01:06:14] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. No. I agree. The only reason I I like, listen. Like, I'm am I trading BNB? No. I would to be frank, I would short it if I could find a counterparty that I'm comfortable with, but I can't.
[01:06:24] ODELL:
Yeah. That was FTT had the same issue. Yeah. It's like, you know, where do you where do you oh, I think I mess I think I messaged you that, as, like, the FTTX collapses was happening. I was like, did you find a place to short FTT?
[01:06:37] Dylan LeClair:
You're like, no, man. Everyone wishes they had one. Yeah. Like, so many idiots were shorting FTT on FTX, which is funny. But, never mind the shit coins. The only reason I even pay attention to that stuff is because I'm interested in the the Bitcoin market. Anyway, I do not advise shorting a Yeah. Sensibly propped up controlled asset. It's very dangerous thing to short. Yeah. Keep that in mind. Agreed there. Not an endorsement at all. Okay. Yeah. The ETF stuff. No. I mean, I think it's it's obviously good. The market is absent flows. Right? The the plebs are stacking, you know, TM.
It's true. It's been true for a while. There is a small amount of passive flows that come into the market and buy Bitcoin every day and put it away and don't sell it. And you can see the Bitcoin supply just becoming more and more constrained. And a bull market happens when supply becomes constrained, meets an equal or greater greater amount of flows and price goes parabolic or, you know, price starts to rise and it becomes a kind of, like, a reflexive loop and, you know crackers at the floor and then FOMO intensifies. Yeah. And then FOMO intensifies outside capital dumps in. All the cans get washed out. Yep. You know, coins transfer. Some hodlers, like the narrative is like, hodlers never sell. No. Like, hodlers sell every time. There's the people that accumulated for 3 years dump on the new the new bags, and then there's just not enough money to come in and refresh. Eat.
[01:07:55] ODELL:
Like, if you're all in Bitcoin, you gotta sell some Bitcoin. Yeah. No. I mean, that's that's
[01:07:59] Dylan LeClair:
your your game right for buying knives and the bear. But yeah. I mean, so where are we right now? There's, I mean, there's no real meaningful flows, outside of, like, the people that have right? Like, no one at this point and maybe they are under the surface. Maybe we, you know, see, you know, a micro strategy like announcement come in. But I think a lot of people, based on kind of the some of the stuff that we discussed in the first hour, the US people, maybe it'd be interested public companies or hedge funds or, you know, the likes of, like, a MassMutual or Stan Druckenmiller or Paul Tudor Jones are sitting here and saying, okay. Well, let's just wait a bit for some of the stuff to clear out. So who's buying the Bitcoin? Well, it's the Bitcoiners. Right? It's the Bitcoiners that are buying every day. They're holding the way. It's their it's their, you know, their rainy day fund, and they're they don't care. They're not selling.
What are, like, the near short term, medium term, headwinds? Well, we probably we probably get a recession. We've been talking about it for a while. We're in a recession, Dylan. Yeah. Well, I guess I mean, not technically. Market stock market's doing really really well unemployment. Officially, you know, the data is saying, the employment the labor market's really strong. And, you know, what we see, we've been talking about it for a while. Admittedly, I was a bit wrong on the timeline. I'll I'll own that a 100%. But what we see, you know, these fed kind of rate hike, and then cut cycles. Right?
They don't cut until pain comes. And so everybody is kind of, like, conditioned from, like, COVID to be, like, oh, you know, shit gets bad, fed money printer go burn, I'll get money. Let's go. Like, fed pivot can't come soon enough. Right. And, like, you look at, like, besides COVID Chili's. Yeah. You look at besides COVID. Right? Like, look at when the Fed cut. Look at the Fed funds rate, line it up with the S and P 500 or or, you know, you can line it up with, like, you know, economic data. But just look at, like, the indices. Who cares? Look at when they cut and then look at how equity markets perform. The last, like, 3, 4, 5, cut cycles.
Markets crashed. Well, why? The Fed the Fed, like, cuts rates and then all of a sudden conditions get bad? No. The Fed's cutting rates because conditions get shit. Right? So, like, the Fed funds rate, they haven't cut once yet. So they're gonna hold, and they're gonna hold, and they're gonna hold until shit gets bad. Shit's gonna get bad and they're gonna cut and shit's gonna get worse. And then that kind of reaction function of, like, maybe they print money or the fiscal stimulus. Who knows what president we have? But, like, you know, just being honest, like, we still got that ahead of us, and the timeline on that is sometime in probably 2024.
So the ETF is good. It's gonna open up a lot of, well, it's not approved yet, obviously, but it's gonna open up a lot of, ease of access for US institutions to to put money into Bitcoin. It's gonna be obviously, you know, a shit coin wrapper on it. It's gonna be custody at Coinbase. You know, BlackRock's gonna take their 50 basis point fee. Yeah. We we know all of that. But it does open, you know, for better or worse, like, if we're if we're thinking about how Bitcoin's gonna become financialized. Right?
[01:10:58] ODELL:
And it does it does It was inevitable. It was gonna happen. Yeah. But It's gonna happen eventually. And the the whole point of Bitcoin is that we can't stop them from launching an ETF regardless. Yep. If you think it's an ethical product or not. A 100%.
[01:11:13] Dylan LeClair:
And, like, you know, a lot of people will say, oh, well, the gold thing. Well, you know, the gold can't be transferred in in, you know, a day's time. Can't be, you know, traded on Binance 247 either. Yeah. That is true. Right? Gold doesn't have, you know, robust peer to peer markets. But, like, this and I've, you know, was talking to this with some, other people. I think one of the things that's not really appreciated is that, like, I can take, you know, my index fund, you know, that's held in my Goldman Sachs account. Not me, but, like, say, I'm a high net with individual or an investment bank or whatever. And I can pledge my Tesla stock or my S and P 500 index or my GLD Gold Trust, and I can borrow, you know, 1,000,000,000 upon 1,000,000,000 of dollars of that collateral. Yeah. The Fiat maxis love borrowing against fucking equities. Yep. I mean, that's the game. Right? Because they have a cap gains tax.
Yep. You know, rich people don't sell assets. They borrow against it or they maybe they buy, you know, they buy pots or whatever. It's a sole financialized game, but, like, yeah, you don't sell you don't sell your assets when you're a billionaire. You you borrow against them, whether it's your real estate or whether it's, you know, your your family offices index funds that you haven't sold in 20 years. Right? So this Bitcoin thing, it's it's gonna open up a bunch of this the ETF thing, it's gonna open up a bunch of flows. I don't think it happens immediately, and I think Bitcoin becomes even more correlated with equity markets. Right? Like, people say it's like a bad thing. It's like, no. It's not a bad thing actually. Like, oh, it's correlated with equities. Bitcoin got neutered. It's, like, well, no. Like, how do you how do equities trade? Right? They trade based on, like, credit expansion or credit contraction of the fiat system. Right? It's like the USD denominator is the fed pumping money in, is credit expanding, or is it contracting?
And that's how equity markets trade. Right? It's like, stocks go Well, I think it it'll be correlated until it isn't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And when it's not, everyone will pretend that was always the case. Yeah. Well, and there and there will be points where, like Right. Bitcoin has a 20% day and equities are flat or something. Right? Will trade as a risk asset
[01:13:12] ODELL:
until it's the most it's, like, the safe haven asset of the world. It's like and then there's a point there. It's just I don't know. Parker, gradually then suddenly. It's, like, hard to measure the point, and then after that fact, everyone will pretend they always knew that was the case. Yep.
[01:13:26] Dylan LeClair:
And I you know, I've I agree with that statement. I've I've said that before. I think, you know, saying that to, like, someone that's not, like, a super orange built Bitcoiner, they they look at you a little crazy, and they're like, you know, maybe putting the cart before the horse.
[01:13:40] ODELL:
That's a bit that's a bit of a waste away. All I do is put the cart before the horse.
[01:13:45] Dylan LeClair:
But, like, you know, to get there, Bitcoin to get to that point, Bitcoin has to make it or is, you know, has to make its way on basically every institutional balance sheet, in the world. Right? The the way that we get, you know, the way that you get to this, like, crazy hypothetical, you know, hyperbitcoinization moment that people always talk about. Well, I see. Myself. I've talked about it. Right? Like, how how does it get there? Well, I'll tell you how it gets there. You get Bitcoin on the asset side of every balance sheet, whether it's spot in a cold storage, multisig.
[01:14:16] ODELL:
There'll be a bunch of different flavors. Or some, you know, bullshit ETFs. Everyone will get rugged constantly.
[01:14:22] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. And there'll be a bunch of rugs, but you get you get it to the point where it's saturated enough where it becomes, like, from an asset liability perspective. Like, why why does the Fed bail out, you know, the the housing market and print a bunch of money in 2008? Why does the Fed come in and buy corporate bonds in 2020? Well, it's because, like, the system, if they let things online, would be fucking insolvent. That's Right. That's the the fact of the matter. The system is literally insolvency by design. Like, everything you speculated
[01:14:52] ODELL:
Yeah. About Binance Yeah. Is literally in the public disclosures of Bank of America. I mean, not the not the commingling funds,
[01:15:01] Dylan LeClair:
Jim. But, like, they just don't have funds. Yeah. They're just, like, Charles Schwab is insolvent right now. Charles Schwab is mark to market insolvent. They hold a bunch of long duration debt. They pumped a bunch of their customers' money in. Fractional reserve banking. Yeah. Right? And so, like, yeah, I I give a bunch of shit to the crypto firms because, like, in theory and practice, you know, they're one to 1, not fractional not fractional reserves. And all these rugs are when people attempt that. And so maybe Binance has or hasn't. That's a different story. But, yeah, the fiat system, right, of, like, where money creation is from new debt issuance has to expand forever. That's just a fact. Right? That's, like, you know, pretty regardless of, like, how bullish you are on, like, the Bitcoin adoption itself, which is, like, the main the main, value prop of, like, oh, there's a there's a scarce asset that people continue to adopt in waves.
Like, the Fiat denominator is is going to 0 or, you know, the supply of Fiat is going to infinity by design. Like, that's a core component of the system. So, like, yeah, we win by dollars trending to 0. Yeah. And, like, you know, that's a simplified, you know, thesis or whatnot. But, like, look at Everything's trending to 0 sets. Yeah. That's that's how that's how it works. And so, like, from an ETF, the thing that gets me excited, I guess, is, like, yeah, that'll be flows. It'll be in the 1,000,000,000 of dollars. Yeah. Like, I I think that I don't think Bitcoin's gonna, like, go to a 100 k, go to the moon if equity markets are tanking, if there's a recession. But, like, we know what comes on the other side of a recession. We know what comes on the other side of, like, any sort of taper tantrum meltdown.
Fed balance sheet number go up. Can't taper a Ponzi. Can't taper a Ponzi. So, like, I they're they're still in the point where they are pretending we're all collectively pretending they can taper a Ponzi. It's like a classic, like, fed tightening playbook right now. We're seeing all the signs of, like, holy crap. Like, we might actually get a soft landing. Like Imagine
[01:16:53] ODELL:
so so, Dylan, like, imagine you're flying to visit family. You're on an American Airlines flight, and, like, all of a sudden, there's a bunch of turbulence, and then the power shuts real quick. The power comes back on, and the plane starts going down, and the pilot gets on the on the prompter and goes, we're we're not going to be crashing here today. We will be soft landing. Yeah. Like, that's what's happening. Yeah. 100%. And, like, you know the term soft landing itself just sounds so fucking Orwellian or double speed.
[01:17:26] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. No. Like, you wouldn't if the flight was going great, you wouldn't announce
[01:17:30] ODELL:
any you know, it's, it's called a crash. Like, you're crashing.
[01:17:34] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. And so that's, you know, that's what's gonna come. I to what severity, will you know, has yet to be seen. Right? But that's you know, this the the the boom and bust cycle, right, like, is a function of as, you know, as a fraction reserve credit based system with cent with a centrally planned cost of capital. Right? Like, the fed literally engineered, they like, all of the things that were problems in 2022 and I guess now. Right? Like, the inflation and and all of this stuff that, like, they had to raise rates to fix. They were asking for in 2020. They were like, holy crap. Like, we need a bunch of inflation. Right? Like, what inflation needs to be higher. It needs to be higher. It needs to be higher. Print more money. 0 rates. 0 for you know, through 2024.
You know, they finally get to inflation. They're like, great. This is good. Equity market's all time highs. You know, economy is flying, and then all of a sudden they're like, oh, shit. Like, this is way higher than we wanted. You know, they're gonna cut they're gonna cut rates or they're they're gonna raise rates to 5%. And now what are they saying? They're saying literally the opposite, the inverse of what they were saying in 2020. They're like, well, we just need a little bit of unemployment to get inflation down, and then and then we'll be all good. Right? And it's like, the same guys that wanted a little bit of inflation Yep. To fix this debt problem, now only wanna generate a small recession and a little bit of unemployment to fix the inflation problem. Yeah. And and people are, like, taking it at face value as, like, oh, yeah. It'll it'll be great.
So, like, I'm super bullish on Bitcoin. I hold a bunch of Bitcoin, like, a a relatively large percent of my net worth in Bitcoin. Not a 100%, to be to be frank. But, like, you know and I don't I don't know what what's price recession
[01:19:14] ODELL:
coming up. Above or under 50%?
[01:19:16] Dylan LeClair:
I'm above at the current moment, but that's, you know, that's not, I'm I'm I'm, you know, I'm young twenties. Like, I don't really give a shit about the volatility.
[01:19:24] ODELL:
Yeah. I'm essentially all in if you don't include home equity.
[01:19:28] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. Love it.
[01:19:30] ODELL:
And, you know, levered against the house, probably. You know? Oh, yeah. I mean, look. Don't borrow against your Bitcoin, but, like, if you can get if you can get fiat denominated loans, like, that's a pretty good deal. Yep. 100%. The 30 year fixed rate mortgage is Beautiful thing. One of the best welfares systems in the in America. It is a welfare system, and if you don't take advantage of it, someone else will. Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, rates are, like, 8% now. But, yeah. It just depends what inflation is. Yeah. And so, you know And that you can handle if if prices drop, you can't necessarily refi Yeah. Because you might have less equity. Like, you might need to increase your down payment, so you need to have money on the side to be able to refi. But
[01:20:13] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. Yeah. Definitely, maintaining, you know, cash flows and and solvency is is the biggest thing when you're thinking about borrowing against fiat. But, like, you know, what is what is the next what does the rest of the year look like? What does 2024 look like? You know, that's anybody's that's anybody's guess, but I I would say with a decent amount of confidence that this time is not different, in terms of, like, the business cycle, the credit cycle, in fiat world. And, they don't like, the the Fed reaction function is essentially they don't they don't, you know, ease. Things don't get better. They don't they don't, you know, turn turn the the printer back on, cut rates, etcetera, until things get bad.
So, you know, where does Bitcoin trade in that scenario? Where is it gonna trade in the next 6 months? I I don't know. But that's you know, my plan is 100 k, Dylan. Yeah. That's you know, who knows? But my plan is essentially to, you know, whenever that point comes, significantly, increase my Bitcoin allocation, you know, probably some miners, whatever. Who cares what I do? If you wait till, like, the trend reverses or whatever, then you then you jump in. Yeah. I mean, like, you know and and the ETF is obviously a bullish thing. Like, who knows when that gets approved? But, like, the TradFi guys all are are, you know, thinking the same. Right? Like like, for better or worse, Bitcoin's like a risk asset. It's levered beta, NASDAQ, whatever.
So, you know, I think they they end up buying, you know, billions upon billions upon billions of dollars Bitcoin. We're gonna see a ton of inflows. But if their equities are crashing, you know, if their, you know, tech stock portfolio is getting hammered, they're, you know, they're they're not gonna punt, a huge amount of Bitcoin, in my opinion. So I kinda think we still got, you know, some turbulence whether it's 12 month timeline, a little bit longer, a little bit shorter, who knows? But for better or worse, Bitcoin is, you know, the macro game now. It's, it's less of a independent asset than ever, and I think that's a good that's a good thing if you are in favor of number go up. Obviously, like, you know, it's still gonna have its black markets, still gonna have, you know, people that don't really give a shit about the fiat exchange rate and are just, you know, denominating in Bitcoin, but the suits are coming.
They The suits are already here, Dylan, and they all got wrecked. But not the but not the legitimate suits. Like, the the little minnow the minnow suits, you know? Like everybody, like The wannabe suits. Like, well, no. I mean, like, I mean, Sailor's like a real suit. Right? But, like, we've we've joked about this before. Like, Sailor is like a small fish billionaire. You know what I mean? Like Yeah. He's a poor billionaire. He's a billionaire, but he's just like a small fish billionaire. Well, if you understand, he's actually the wealthiest billionaire in the world
[01:22:54] ODELL:
because most of them don't own Bitcoin. Yeah. True. True true stuff. You're not wealthy if you don't own Bitcoin. Yeah. No. I agree on that, take. I have Grindr in the comments on my borrow comment. Let me just, like, unpack that just real quick. If you borrow against Bitcoin and you take dollars, Bitcoin should be the best collateral in the world. It's incredibly easy to liquidate. Markets trade 247. It's easy to custody. Like, it is it is a fantastic collateral item. Yep. But if you if if you're borrowing against it for any period of time, you wanna make sure you have a very trusted counterparty. You don't wanna necessarily borrow against your Bitcoin with BlockFi, for instance, who is gonna be hypothecating it. Yep. And if you look at the responsible counterparties that offer Bitcoin backed loans right now, the rates are are quite high. They're, like, 12 to 14%. And why is that? Well, that's for two reasons. First of all, the world really hasn't priced in the fact that Bitcoin is great collateral. Most people that realize that would rather buy Bitcoin than lend you dollars.
So they're not on the lending side of the equation. Those rates should be the lowest in the world at at some point in the future. In the future, at some time, if Bitcoin is your collateral, you are gonna get the best rates possible. We are not there yet. Should be lower than a mortgage. Right. On the opposite side, mortgages and stuff are all backed by the US government, and they're artificially kept low. Like, you get a new home mortgage, it's almost immediately sold to the government, like, 2 days afterwards. All those rates are pegged and fixed and manipulated downwards. And on top of that, you also have all these different companies that live in a world that we were at 0 rates for a while, and they took a while to come off of them. Like, I got, like, an HVAC loan at 0% for 4 years. Like, I just fucking highway robbery.
And it's just because 2 things. They haven't, like, updated their systems yet, and they're just used to 0%, and they were hoping the Fed was gonna come back down. And second of all, they know a lot of people go into delinquency, and then they start charging, like, like, 25% or something like that. But you said, send it to autopay. Anyway, that's my thinking. If you can get, like, lower percentage fee out loans, denominated in inflating currency, then it's not the worst idea in the world, but you need to have good cash flows. You need to have good risk management. You don't wanna get wrecked, wrecked, and that's kinda, like, how I'm looking at it. Yeah. On the ETF side, Dylan, correct me if I'm wrong. GBTC is trying to convert to an ETF for a while. They're trading at a discount.
Theory is that if GBTC I mean, it's not the theory. GBTC gets approved it gets converted to an ETF. It should go back up to par. Yep. So there's a bunch of traders trying to trade that difference. Yep. But this decision doesn't automatically turn it into an ETF. The SEC can technically appeal. And even if they don't appeal, GBTC needs to refile. Yep. So but what it does do is it pretty much paves the way for BlackRock Fidelity and these others. It's, like, almost guarantees their approval, which a lot of us have already been speculating anyway because BlackRock owns the fucking world. So, like, if corrupt BlackRock is trying to launch an ETF, they probably have some inside knowledge that they think it's gonna get approved. Yep. But all that aside, obviously, there's a bunch of money waiting on the sidelines for BlackRock ETF. I think the BlackRock ETF is gonna get approved eventually.
But I have like, there must be like, I'm feeling a little bit of rumblings, but less than I thought, that there's just this signaling mechanism of BlackRock and fuck BlackRock. Like, to be absolutely clear, like, BlackRock can go fuck themselves, incredibly corrupt organization, and I hope they get wrecked. I hope they try and play games with Bitcoin and get wrecked as a result. But, anyway, that's not my point. My point is BlackRock is a granddad ESG. They're, like, the largest fund in the world, fund manager in the world. They have $11,000,000,000,000 in assets.
They've been flooding Bitcoin forever. Larry Fink said it was like a token of money laundering, like, all this fucking shit. And now they're launching a Bitcoin ETF. It's this mass of signaling mechanism that they now approve of Bitcoin as an asset, that they would rather get involved and take their cut than than sit it out. And you gotta imagine that there's a bunch of rich people, family offices, corporate types, suits, if we wanna call them that, definitely suits, that are, like, we need to front run BlackRock. Mhmm. Right? Like, I mean, what what in history do you get to front run BlackRock? Like, it's very rare that you that you get to come in. I mean, obviously, the Humble Stackers, we've been front running them this whole fucking time. It's been an honor and a privilege.
But, like, you still can. Like, what how much time do they have? 3 months, 6 months maybe, maybe even less? But they have time to front run BlackRock, and I wouldn't I mean, that's my little dose of Hopium for the day. Like, I wouldn't discount this idea that people start front running it. Most weekends have gotten washed out already. Yep. Entering a global depression, Like, it could be the most crazy like, them fucking and when I say them, I mean the blue checks. Them flocking around with delaying the ETFs for this long Yeah. Could create this perfect self fulfilling prophecy narrative, whatever you wanna say, where there's a global depression and equities start dropping, but BlackRock and Fidelity release their ETFs at the same time, and we get the ETF bump. And then, you know, everyone just goes out, like, Bitcoin's a store of value. And it's like, oh, store of value and store of value. And then everyone just goes into it, And then we we disconnect very quick. Like, you know, within a matter of years rather than in a matter of decades, we disconnect from, yep, like, global macro. Like, it could be that situation.
[01:28:37] Dylan LeClair:
No. I agree. I and I think when I when I refer to, like, the correlation thing, I think it's, like you said, it's correlated until it's not. It's gonna be it's you know, the correlation on a long time frame is gonna be very, very positive, but you're gonna have days, maybe weeks, or whatever where, like, I think similar to maybe, like, the fall of 2020 when, you know, Bitcoin's, like, after it's kind of chilling at 10 k for months on end Yeah. And it just starts going parabolic and, like, equities up down 1%, dollar up down 1%. It doesn't matter. Right? Bonds, like, who gives a shit? Bitcoin. Bitcoin's chart is breaking out of the Yeah. You take a picture. You post a screenshot. You go, like, Bitcoin's a safe haven. Yeah. It's like that. Yeah. Like that. Yeah. Bitcoin will be a store value again in that moment at the moment. So I agree.
[01:29:19] ODELL:
I think, you know, the front running BlackRock thing yeah. 100% legit. Would be ripping at the same time. Like, it could be, like, the most crazy scenario.
[01:29:27] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. No. I I, I'm fully prepared for for max, max chaos in terms of, like, 2024 and what we got in the coming years. And I think what you said about the BlackRock or or the the borrowing against Bitcoin thing, and not that, like, you're endorsing or whatever, but that's just the reality of, like, and, and also, here's another point, and this is, like, one that Pierre Richard raised back in 2014. He wrote this thing, like, speculative attack, and it reads, like, some hyperbitcoinization crazy scenario, but, like, there's a lot of truth to it of, like, you know, dollars are fungible. Assets, liabilities, everybody has a personal balance sheet, corporate balance sheet, institutional balance sheet. Right?
If you just if you have dollar debt, whether it's credit card debt, mortgage like, Matt, you have a mortgage. Maybe you have a credit card. Maybe you don't. Maybe you have a And I'll run credit card. I mean, besides, like, the 30 days. Yeah. We'll run, like, a balance on a credit card. But we're, you know, we're out. You have to get a credit card. Are good. That's a this is an interesting little thing they got going on there. So, like, every time and I I, you know, I get that it's secured. Technically, it's secured by the house. Right? But every time you buy Bitcoin instead of paying down your mortgage, right,
[01:30:39] ODELL:
you're you're actively making a decision to stack Bitcoin. Pay down a 30 year mortgage in an inflationary economy. Yeah. Yeah. But the the point is is that Sailor did. He called what Sailor did, basically. Yep. Like, 6 years earlier or whatever.
[01:30:53] Dylan LeClair:
And so yeah. 100%. Borrowing 1,000,000,000 of dollars of currency that is mispriced. You know? And he was doing it at, like, 0% or whatever, like, fucking nothing. Yep. And and now it's long dated, like, 2027 or something. He has to pay it back. You you know, had a bunch of different ones, but, like, that is going to happen in mass when the BlackRock ETF is approved and when, you know, this economic cycle goes from, you know, whenever we trough, whenever the fed kind of, you know, eases, whenever we go from, like, the bust phase to the recovery phase to the boom phase again because it's going to happen. It's not like we're in the last economic fiat cycle ever. Right? Naturally, you know, procyclical. And so what's gonna happen during the next economic cycle? Right? Bitcoin, like, yes, it's like if you look at the having cycles, like, yeah, Bitcoin pumps up to the having. But you know what it also, like, really correlates with? Like, PMIs. Right? Like like, the the Bitcoin, the the US economic cycle. Bitcoin cycle is, like, in tandem with it. Right? So, like, it's a liquidity play, obviously. We've we've known that. But when the next the next full run comes around and, again, who knows the timing exactly? Nobody does, and nobody can realistically say that with certainty. But when it happens By conference. That that yeah.
By 2025 conference, it's 200 k. When it happens, it's not gonna be, you know, Barry Silbert and, you know, Alex Mashinsky and Sam Bankman Fried. You know, it's gonna be Larry Fink. Well, maybe not him buying it, but it's gonna be, like there's gonna be this, you know, quote, unquote stamp of approval. There's gonna be legitimate. I mean, there's always been legitimate ways to buy Bitcoin. Any any way you can get funds in, get them out, and hold cold storage. But for the suits, right, there's gonna be that that legitimate way to get exposure, not GBTC. Right? Like, anybody that wanted any institution that wanted Bitcoin exposure last bull market, they either had to go to CME and have all of these, you know, certifications and whatever, or buy GBDC, which was OTC and was just kind of, like, wild wild west trading at a premium discount, whatever. Nobody wanted that. Or you buy new merchandise.
[01:33:00] ODELL:
Well, it was trading at a premium for a while.
[01:33:03] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. Until until it wasn't. Until it wasn't. But all these all these these big boy institutions are going to they're gonna go into the most liquid, avenue they can get, which is gonna be they're not gonna be buying Bitcoin on Coinbase, unfortunately. They're gonna be buying Larry Fink's Bitcoin wrapper that's held on Coinbase, and they're going to be able to borrow 1,000,000,000 upon 1,000,000,000 of dollars against it. And so that's, you know, that's the fun ride. That's the ETF hopium. Right? It's like, they're going to have, you know, I I really hope that, and I'm I'm a little doubtful skeptical. I don't think Coinbase is gonna be, like, fraudulent with it, but I would love if there was, like, you know, a real real time balance. I think, like, I hope I hope it's like a transparent thing where they have, like, you know, daily hourly proof of reserves with ETF. I doubt it.
But that would be cool if they have, like, kind of a real time transparent ledger of, like, ETF holdings and I thought it'd be cool if they rugged. Yeah. I mean, maybe. But, yeah, that's I mean, that's Imagine BlackRock ETF rugs in 10 years? Like, that'd be crazy. I don't think they're gonna I mean, you know, like and this is also another thing with the Blackhawk narrative. Like, I've seen I've commented on this yesterday. Like, there's so many posts on Twitter that's, like, the institutions are accumulating, and it's, like, screenshots of, like, the Bitcoin miners, and it's, like, there's they're, you know, the top shareholders or, like, the second top shareholders is, like, BlackRock, and it's, like I I'm I'm guilty of that in the blue my blue check war,
[01:34:30] ODELL:
because I it's just a very people don't like BlackRock. So Well, it's like BlackRock owns Tesla.
[01:34:37] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. Well BlackRock owns the blue checks. They own every company that trades in the Nasdaq and S and P 500. Right? I know them and Vanguard, and then Vanguard is the highest shareholder of Vanguard is BlackRock.
[01:34:48] ODELL:
Yeah. It's a big, institutional It's just a massive Ponzi.
[01:34:52] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah.
[01:34:53] ODELL:
And, you know, they Ponzi is all the way down. Like, you look everywhere, it's fucking Ponzi. The dollar is a fucking Ponzi. Real estate, like, do you know what 1031 tax swaps are? No. I'm not not familiar. If you sell real estate in a jurisdiction, you have to pay your cap gains tax. Right? Was that, like, 30% or whatever? Yep. But if if within 90 days or however many days in that jurisdiction, you just flip it into another piece of real estate, you don't pay the cap gains. Yep. So, like, all the real estate's fucking it's literally Ponzi Omics. Like, it's that's like tokenomics right there.
Yeah. It's like you're just running that shit. Everything's like, it's all Ponzi. Everything's a fucking Ponzi. And, like, let's be the Bitcoin Bitcoin is like a Ponzi for the people. Like, it's not controlled by anybody. That's the difference. Sound clip that. It's it's it's for the people by the like, think about it. Like, I mean, this is key. Right? All the conspiracy theories about BlackRock and Bitcoin revolve around this idea that BlackRock will accumulate a lot of Bitcoin in their ETF, which they will. Yeah. If if they're first, who's ever first, is gonna get the lion's share unless they royally fuck it up. That's, like, almost always the case. It was the case with the gold ETF. It's it makes sense. It logically makes sense. There's network effect, whatever.
Liquidity begets liquidity. Right? BlackRock ETF is gonna get a lot of Bitcoin. But the whole point of Bitcoin is that if you have more Bitcoin, you don't have more control over the network. That is the fucking core of it. Yep. And and that's that's the difference with almost every other asset Yep. Is that every other asset is is corrupted by those with control,
[01:36:33] Dylan LeClair:
and Bitcoin doesn't have that. BlackRock's used to getting getting,
[01:36:37] ODELL:
like, board seats. You know? Exactly. They're not getting any board seats on this one. No. They have their node, or Coinbase has their node. No surge of breakers. They can't stop shit. You know, they can't force changes. It's a whole different beast. They have no choice but to play the game. What's that? We we already quoted Pierre that bit steam.
[01:36:54] Dylan LeClair:
Yep. No. I agree. It's gonna be, it can be an interesting ride. Relatedly, I think, kind of on your Barry Silbert, Fuck Barry. Your Barry Silbert points. It'll be very, very interesting, to see the reason I am interested to see who's first is that, I tweeted yesterday and got some pushback about, I said, regardless of their stated intentions, and I think Grayscale realizes that an ETF is is in it, like, inevitable anyway, so they just want, you know, to be to be part of it. But Grayscale's interest is the status quo. They Grayscale would love if there was no ETFs for the next 10 years. Because they're making that 2% fucking fee. Dude, they print 30 Bitcoin a day Yeah. In fees. 30 Bitcoin a day in fee revenue.
Yeah. Right? So, like, very sober, DCG owns owes all that money to the to Gemini and, you know, there's all that like, you know, they blew up. Right? Or no. It's not, DCG. It's, Genesys, and then DCG loaned to Genesys
[01:37:55] ODELL:
and whatever. Right? Talking about commingling.
[01:37:58] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. The only way yeah. But it's a it's an a suit way of commingling. Right? Yeah. DCG loaned it to their subsidiary,
[01:38:06] ODELL:
borrowed it from Gemini users. Yep.
[01:38:09] Dylan LeClair:
Completely above board. When I'm thinking about, like, DCG's interest or Grayscale's interest, right, it's like, well, they have 600,000 Bitcoin. They're printing 2% a year and you can't redeem. You can't get out of the trust. The only way that the their revenue stays flat never like, if we're just thinking in Bitcoin terms. Right? Because price, you know, USD price goes up or down. Is if they 4 x if we're just assuming, right, I'm I'm assuming that the the fee for the ETF will be 50 basis points. They have to drop it to compete. Right. Yeah. So either the fee is gonna be 50 basis points once the the ETF is 200 instead of 2%. Instead of 2%. So fees are going down 75%.
So the only way Grayscale's revenue stays the same is if they drop the fee if the fees go to 50%, is if they 4 x their their Bitcoin holdings. So they hold you know, in that case, they would have to hold 12% of all Bitcoin ever.
[01:39:04] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, they're playing a dangerous game. Right? Because the game is, they want an ETF to be delayed as long as possible. Yep. But if an ETF is going to be approved, they need to be the first one approved. Yeah. Because if there's another ETF that gets approved first, then the discount actually widens because there's gonna be a bunch of money that's had enough of Barry and moves over. Like, most of the money is, like, bag holder cope right now. Mhmm.
[01:39:32] Dylan LeClair:
Yep. It's, and and then, you know, another interesting point about the gbt GBTC thing is that there's a bunch of people that, in one way or another, whether, you know, it was through CME or, you know, unregulated futures exchanges or whatever or, you know, OTC borrow is they've been buying they bought GBTC at a big discount. It was basically the opposite of the other trade, and they've been shorting Bitcoin.
[01:39:55] ODELL:
Hoping that GBTC increases to par, and then they're good. But meanwhile, GBTC charges fees on the top number. They charge fees on par value, the full 100% value, not the 50%. Yeah. So so at at the bottom A good scam. Yeah. At the bottom,
[01:40:11] Dylan LeClair:
people were buying GBTC or anybody that held GBTC, you're getting a 4% fee on your holdings. It's insane. Yeah. So that was a big mess. You know, looking forward to that, kind of weight being off the Bitcoin market. You know, a lot of GBTC holders got wrecked. You know, some activist plays made some good money on the discount narrowing. You know, GBTC is up, like, a 100 something percent this year, but after a pretty shit year, 2022 still at a 50% discount or something. Right? What is that? Like, 15.
[01:40:39] ODELL:
15 discount? Yeah. Like, 16, 17%, 15% something. Oh, shit. So many degens, man. Yeah. It was I don't remember people talking about that trade, like, years ago. You know? Like, oh, how it's such an easy trade. There's no risk. It's gonna obvious when an ETF gets approved, it's gonna go up to 1.
[01:40:57] Dylan LeClair:
Yep. Yeah. That was a big big, bear market,
[01:41:01] ODELL:
play that people got wrecked on. I was like, when this is I you gotta love when the right side IQ guys get wrecked. It's just so funny. Yeah. Yeah. Here's a 20 here's a 20 part thread that ages horribly in 7 months. Yeah. Fucking amazing. Yeah. And it's like, stay humble, stack sets. Yeah. Exactly. Just left left side. Stay on stack sets. Yeah. It's the key it's the key to winning. Last but not least, Dylan, you see this awesome Noster live chat I got going on here? We're, like Yeah. What's up with that? How does that work? So this is zap dot stream.
K. These two guys, Kieran and Carnage, Kieran is the head of Snort Social. He's the maintain lead maintainer of Snort Social, one of the Noster clients. Yep. They basically built this thing in, like, a weekend and have been iterating on it. It uses it uses Nostr for communications and zaps. Like, everything is is built on top of on top of Nostr, so they didn't have to, like, reinvent the wheel. Like, all these people's accounts are their regular, you know, normal Nostr accounts, and then they can just send Bitcoin natively through it because my lightning address is attached to it. And I didn't have to the crazy thing is I didn't have to change anything on my side. Like, it just uses normal RTMP.
Like, if you're if you're using Restream or, one of these services to to stream out to, like, YouTube and Twitch and stuff, you can just go straight to here. And then, of course, they have server costs, so I just pay them sats for my server costs. So, like, the audience is is donating sats live on air, and then I give them it's like this beautiful open So I I have a few questions. Thanks.
[01:42:41] Dylan LeClair:
One's I mean, not so much related to to this. It just seems like a pretty damn cool app, and, the Lightning Noser stuff is super exciting because it's all open source and, you know, you kinda get this, like, really, really, you know, not cypherpunk, but, like, this, like, utopian kinda digital economy that's, like, super, super, it's, like, you know, seamless. Like, there's no there's no intermediaries. It's, like, kind of, like, you know, this digital it's like digital cash. It's beautiful. One of the questions I have for no future, is well, what this is maybe personal. It's not too deep, but, like, what NoSr clients do you like best for for Mac or for laptop and then phone? And then the second one is and I haven't done too much digging on this, but what are your thoughts on I believe right now, there's, like, not an option to, change, password or, like, key credentials.
Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. If you get rugged with your private key, you're just rugged. Yeah. How does you know, how how do is there a fix to that? Is there any fix, or is that
[01:43:41] ODELL:
Look. Nostra's cool because it's simple and robust. It's a very simple protocol. And, a lot of people have tried to reinvent the wheel. You know, you have the Mastodon guys. You have the Blue Sky guys. Like, the million different the DID guys over, like, Microsoft Ion and stuff. They all come up with all these, like, crazy fucking schemes, but at the core of it, what they miss is is is is the actual you know? Like, what is the value prop? The value prop is you don't wanna be rugged. You want you wanna be unruggable from 3rd parties or rug resistant from 3rd parties. And, you know, Nastr is incredibly simple and and that some trade offs are made. And one of those is that you have this fixed private key that you're, like, pasting into different apps.
Yeah. There's different ways we can work around it. I'm sure people we'll we'll figure out something. There's a couple different proposals. There's this thing that, Pablo has been working on. Pablo is, like, this legendary developer in the Nostra ecosystem, called Nsec Bunker. And then, like, you can if you're on desktop, you can use something like ALBE or no s two x where that that's called nip 7. So nip is like a Noster improvement put proposal. So nip 7 was this improvement proposal where the key is held somewhere else, but they sign a message to approve that you're you're part of it. So, like, if if you have your nsec in ALB or no set or no s two x or your private key there, The individual web apps you use can't rug you, but, obviously, Albie or no s two x could rug you. Do you use either?
Yeah. I use both. Because both? Yeah. They're both good. Albi's nice because Albi has the the lightning wallet stuff built built into it too. Yep. So I use Alby with my my is in Alby. Please don't rug me. And because I feel like that's a that's a risk. Right? Like, I'll be Yeah. I'll be the risk there. Yeah. But my lightning is, is my own lightning node. So I'm not using a custodial lightning node. That is a little bit more difficult right now. The Unity Wallet guys are doing some really cool work on that front, at least for sending zaps. There's still a lot of work to be done on the receiving lightning side. Most people it is a pain point. Most people are receiving on custodial wallets, but at least it's an interoperable standard. Right? So, like, there's many different custodial wallets that are people are using too many wallets at Toshiba. But, anyway, my point is is, like, I think this trade off of and I'm gonna eat my fucking like, I obviously, I'm not gonna feel this way if my end set gets fucking rugged. But, look, things have trade offs.
And the fact of the matter is is is Elon can't just, like, wake up one morning and flip a switch and ban you from his platform. Yeah. But as a result, you have to protect your private key. Yep.
[01:46:29] Dylan LeClair:
Got
[01:46:31] ODELL:
it. And we we can work on that in the future, but in the meantime, it gets the job done. And I think more of the pain points are honestly on the app side. And the apps are making, you know, increased development. And I just don't think we have, I don't think we have an option. I think, these centralized platforms have way too much control, and it's not just x or Twitter's new, you know, Elon's new Twitter with that he wants to be WeChat or whatever. It's all of them. TikTok, Facebook. You're you're dead on, by the way. I say this to someone that's verified, you know, WeChat, whatever. But you're you're a 100% right.
[01:47:08] Dylan LeClair:
The vision is of Elon's Panopticon.
[01:47:11] ODELL:
You know, he wants to not only get social media surveillance, but financial surveillance. Full control. They all want full control as a service. Right? Like, that is their business model, and we need protocols. And Noster Noster is going to be the answer, and it's it's gonna take a tiny bit of time to build out, but we're already close. Like, it's it's growing it's growing really quickly. My favorite client, is Primal, primal.net. Yep. And they released an iPhone app, so you can download on iPhone. Nice. Fully open source.
So primal has, like, a controversial feature, where they they cache between your relays, and and and there's a lot of nuance here between trust and stuff. But, like, the caching server as currently implemented adds the trusted element, and in the future, they wanna make it so anyone can run a caching server. It's fully open source so anyone can run 1 now, and that your client will, like, check and make sure that the caching service isn't lying to you. And if the caching service isn't lying to you, then it just uses the caching service. But if it catches it lying, then it could go directly to the relays or it can go to a different caching service. And why does that matter?
Because most people are not gonna be in it for the freedom at first. Mhmm. If you use this, like, primal is close to the point where it loads quicker than Twitter. It has no censorship. You know? It's it's just a better fucking social media app. Nice. Right? It's just better.
[01:48:40] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah. I use desktop on the iPhone one though.
[01:48:42] ODELL:
Yeah. And and yeah. There's just there's a lot of improvement being made. I, you know, I we're doing a lot of support. Yeah. Say we have studio 314 official. Say not not a big primal fan. Well, that's what's cool about it. You can put your end sec in whatever client you wanna put in. There's a lot of great fucking clients out there. Obviously, I shouted out Snort Dust Social earlier. Domus and jb 55 are fucking awesome. Amethyst is fantastic. Iris is solid, and it's cool. There's, like, this open competing marketplace for clients. And Primal itself is false, so people can go and fork Primal if they don't like Primal and then build on top of what Primal has already built.
So you have all these different clients. It's very rug resistant. And in the meantime, I, you know, I wanna practice what I preach. So I've just I've stopped using Twitter, and I just use Nostra only and Twitter completely? Yeah. I don't I everyone's you'll see me post an occasional tweet, but, like, I didn't even announce this show on Twitter. Yeah. I do. Twitter people know is because you posted it on Twitter. Yeah. I just and, like, do I get hit for that? Yeah. Early on, like, you always get hit for it. Like, do I get hit on on dispatch that I try and operate dispatch with high integrity? Like, yeah. Like, I could have way more viewers if I sold out.
And the same with this, but, you know, you wanna be the change you wanna see in the world. Respect. And I think, I'll tell you. I'll tell you, dude. If I post something on Nasr, and it's interesting or controversial, everyone on Twitter knows about it already at this point. That's what people don't realize. Like, there's a there's a there's a shift at some point where most even even if Nasr doesn't have the majority of users, where most interesting content on any centralized, platform gets post cross posted on Nasr because people want the engagement and the stats and whatnot and vice versa where if there's something interesting posted on Nasr, it gets cross posted to the centralized platforms.
And we're very close to that point. Like, we're really, really close, and the people that have larger audiences or whatever are already there. Like, if I post something ever like, within 15 minutes, I'll post something on Nostra Controversial. Within 15 minutes, my phone's blown up on people asking me why I said that. I was like, oh, so you are checking Oscar. Yeah. Like, good good to know. You see you see Arconox comment
[01:50:59] Dylan LeClair:
with his app?
[01:51:01] ODELL:
What? Delete your Twitter on stream of the I'm torn on the deleting my Twitter on stream because it's kind of used as a Gnostic beacon right now. Yeah. No. That's right. But I I go back and forth on it because, like, there's a 2 of them did it. Yeah. 20 k sats. I can't be bought, but maybe 10,000,000 sats and I'll sit before. Yeah. Love it. But, yeah, that's how I feel about like, Noster and, dude, what's crazy about Noster and we can have I know we've been going for 2 hours. Like, I could go for another 2 hours on Nasr alone, but, like, in the beginning, Bitcoiners bootstrap Nasr. Like, it's almost all Bitcoiners are using it. There's a bunch of other people that are starting to use it now, but early days was all Bitcoiners. All the developers were mostly Bitcoin developers. Bitcoiners bootstrap Nostr, and are bootstrapping Nostr.
But there's gonna be a turning point where social media like, our society is so addicted to fucking social media. Mhmm. And there's gonna be a turning point where Nostr becomes the on ramp to Bitcoin for people because it's it it takes a paradigm shift in your head to actually go out and buy Bitcoin. Yep. But it doesn't just shit post on a social media app that's just a better social media app, and you get paid freedom money. Yeah. You just get fucking freedom money for shit posting. Yep. And I think a lot of people there's gonna be billions of people that their first stats are on Noster. And it's just beautifully complementary in that result. And that's just on the social media side. That's not even, like, wallets communicating with each other using Nostr or, like, AI payments with Nasr using Pablo's data vending machine where, like, the payments are done with Bitcoin and the AI communicates with the customer using Nasr. And, like, there's all these crazy different integrations you can do on on different apps, and services just using this interoperable communication protocol that has a payment protocol built into it.
But even if you just take out just the social media, it's fucking massive. But then you add everything else and just blows your mind.
[01:53:01] Dylan LeClair:
It's exciting shit, man. That's my show. Love it. I got it. You're you're firing me up. I I've reposted a couple, you know, admittedly not as much, original content, but I've reposted a few of my tweets on Noister recently, And, I'll do I'll start doing that more and maybe then chime in some original,
[01:53:18] ODELL:
hot takes on there. Dude, people whom who might be joining us might think that this is just a little Nostra part I added on to the end of a different conversation that we're having. But the whole reason this conversation happened was because I saw you post on Nostra after not posting there for a little bit. And I was like, we should rip a dispatch. I I invited you on on Noster, and I was always intending to try and encourage you to use Noster more often. So come join us in the revolution. Yeah, man. I'll, I'll be there. Appreciate the appreciate the input as well. Fuck you. Dylan, this was a pleasure as always. You wanna before we wrap up, you wanna hit us with some final thoughts?
[01:53:55] Dylan LeClair:
Yeah, man. I mean, we started this on a Binance tirade, you know, talking shit coins and, you know, a bunch of a bunch of a bunch of nonsense. The entire point of it is that, you shouldn't trust anybody. Don't trust talking heads. Don't trust charismatic actors. Don't trust CEOs. That's, you know, that's always my my signal my my messaging signal is it's it's not about c z. It's not about any of these, you know, shitcoin, Ponzi people. It's not about, you know it's it's about don't trust verify, you know, once you come to understand Bitcoin at a at a, you know, deep fundamental level. That's, you know, that's where I come from from a point of view. There's no other agenda than that, and, you know, you can make your own trade offs or or decisions that have their own trade offs from there once you kind of understand that. So yeah. I mean, it was awesome to catch up. 2 hours flew by.
I'm super pumped to see what happens with Noister. Excited to see what happens in the next year with Bitcoin and the price action. But being honest, I mean, I understand. I I mean, I am a a Bitcoin analyst. I spend a lot of time looking at traditional financial markets, but, like, being real, like, a lot of the day to day, week to week exchange rate volatility is a bunch of noise. And when when you actually understand where all this is going, the innovation, that Bitcoin that Satoshi brought to the world, of freedom money, you know, not much else matters when, you kind of understand the trend. So, yeah, man. I'm, super super pumped and excited that that I got to join here for a 2 hour rip.
It was, like, our second or third one, I believe. But, let's see what happens. Let's see what unfolds, and I'm excited to start using Nostra more. I think it was our third one. I'm looking forward to the 4th one already.
[01:55:41] ODELL:
Well, thank you for joining me. Fuck yeah. So, Freaks, you might have noticed that we did, like, a cold open, the last two episodes. I'm trying to do I'm I'm reading the podcasting 2.0 boostograms at the end. So I'm gonna read those right now. Obviously, the last episode was yesterday, so only 2 ride or die freaks got boostergrams in via podcasting 2 point o apps. We have at Eric 99 with 50,000 sets. Stay humble, stack sets. And we had at piz, p I e z, with a 1000 sets saying thank you all. I consider you guys to listen to that one. It was a nice we're in it for the tech episode, with some really just great open source contributors that that this mission relies on. It's incredibly important.
Freaks, if you enjoyed the episode, let me know. Feedback if you didn't enjoy the episode, let me know as well. Feedback is appreciated. Trying to build this thing, to provide as much value as possible for you. All of our links are at cildispatch.com. You can find it on your favorite platform by searching sill dispatch. Easiest way to support the show, is just to subscribe and share it on your favorite platform, whether that's any podcasting app, YouTube, Twitch, zap.stream. And then last but not least, huge shout out to the freaks who joined us in the live chat. I fucking love this Nostra chat. I'm gonna give people a little bit more time to a couple more episodes where they talk through the Twitch chat and the YouTube chat, and then we're gonna go noster only is the plan. But, huge shout out to, the freaks who who, zapped live. And as you can see, we got the the great gazelle Gazoo? Gazoo.
Seems to have gotten the most has has contributed the most apps, but I don't know how to click around in this interface, and I think I just fucked it up. So don't look at the screen, but there. It's back. Thank you guys for supporting the show. Thank you for listening live. Thank you, Dylan, for joining us. Stay on BullStackSats. Appreciate you all. Peace. Thanks, Adele. See you, brother.
Introduction and discussion of Binance
Concerns about Binance and its impact on the market
Comparison of Binance to other exchanges and the issue of rehypothecation
Binance's accounting practices and potential asset liability mismatches
The regulatory challenges and potential legal actions against Binance
The role of Tether and stablecoins in the regulatory scrutiny of Binance
Bitcoin correlation with equity markets
Borrowing against Bitcoin
BlackRock's interest in Bitcoin
Receiving lightning on custodial wallets
Pain points on the app side
Elon's vision of social and financial surveillance
Primal app and its features
Different Bitcoin clients and their features
Using Nostr instead of Twitter
The potential of Nostr and its integrations
Final thoughts on Bitcoin and Nostr
