We talk Venezuela, JPM coin, and what celebrities could impact BTC price most

Coin Talk

Mar 15, 2019·40 min read

COIN TALK is produced in partnership with Medium and hosted by Aaron Lammer and Jay Caspian Kang. Press “Listen to the story” above to play the episode. (You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, download the MP3, or email us at hi@cointalk.show)

Show Notes

• Coinbase adds XRP
• When ICOs snitch on themselves
• Elon Musk and Bitcoin
• JP Morgan Coin (JMP) and Programmable Centralized Stablecoins
• The Venezuela Op-Ed and Local Bitcoins

Transcript

Jay Kang: Hey, what was that intro?

Aaron Lammer: I don’t know. I think I’m out of practice. I take one week off … You know when you go, when you’ve been working out and then you take a couple weeks off-

Jay Kang: No. Never had that. It seemed like you had become a YouTube blogger or something like that.

Aaron Lammer: Well, I will say I was hoping that you would come by for this taping ’cause I did buy a green screen.

Jay Kang: Oh, yeah. You have been talking about this green screen. How big is a green screen?

Aaron Lammer: This is a pretty big green screen.

Jay Kang: I know they roll up, but …

Aaron Lammer: This one rolls up. I’d say it’s eight feet across.

Jay Kang: Oh, wow. Wow. We could take Coin Talk to the next level, then we could …

Aaron Lammer: I’m going to confess something here. It’s not a flattering confession, but I’ll tell you about why I ordered this green screen in the first place. After we taped our episode where we briefly touched on Quadriga … Do you remember the Quadriga, the founder died lost $190 million?

Jay Kang: Yeah.

Aaron Lammer: Okay. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole of reading everything on Reddit about this, made an extremely elaborate document with a timeline. Somehow I was like, “Maybe I should talk about this on Coin Talk.” But, I was like, “But, the images are important and these documents that I’ve compiled.” I was like, “Oh, I’ll make a video where I explain all my thoughts about it.” I bought the green screen for that. Then, when it came, I had a flash of clarity and I imagined myself on YouTube, spinning conspiracy theories and I was like, “Oh, man. This is the first step down a super dark corridor of your life.”

Jay Kang: You’ve created basically audio/visual Reddit, which I actually think might be a good idea, but also probably is 90% of YouTube at this point.

Aaron Lammer: Well, I just thought it was funny how so much news is breaking about YouTube’s role in spreading conspiracy theory. I was like, “I’ve got a conspiracy theory. I know just where to take it. All I need is this eight-foot-long green screen.”

Jay Kang: Yeah, then I’ll record in my actual basement surrounded by antiquated audio equipment. I think that your channel would be pretty good though, Aaron.

Aaron Lammer: Okay. Well, let’s let the people weigh in. If you’re listening and you’d like an AV episode of Coin Talk and would you like to see what Jay and actually look like, Jay who has never taken two weeks off of working out ever, what we actually look like-

Jay Kang: No, I just never actually worked out enough where that two weeks would be cheating.

Aaron Lammer: Oh, okay. Okay. You were taking the under not the over. I gotcha. I gotcha.

Jay Kang: I wasn’t like, “Aaron, what are you talking about?” I’m almost the fattest I’ve ever been.

Aaron Lammer: Wait, speaking of the over and under, before we get into it, I feel like occasionally I want a little sidebar gambler, Jay, like non-crypto gambler Jay. I feel like this is the first year I was hearing a lot of action on the Oscars.

Jay Kang: Yeah, that’s not a mistake by the way. I think it was because the New Jersey sportsbooks opened up and that a lot of people could bet on the Oscars on an app for the first time because you could do it on a FanDuel app or whatever New Jersey betting app. I think that that plus the fact that there’s a lot more places where you can get gambling content because everybody is prepping for the day in which anybody in the United States can bet on sports. I think that’s why there is so much talk about that.

Aaron Lammer: Did you hear in last week’s episode when I talked to Ledger about Hero and how much FOMO did you experience while listening to it?

Jay Kang: It was too complicated for me.

Aaron Lammer: Yeah, yeah, I was like-

Jay Kang: It’s just like that’s way too complicated. I think I would rather just play video games.

Aaron Lammer: While I was talking to him about it, I was like, “Jay is just laying a bed on division two for beer league at this point.” Too much work for him. It is interesting how as this stuff becomes more legal, all these things like how the movement of the lines, it becomes a lot more real. Previously, you’d hear about odds on something like the Oscars and it was like, “Oh, yeah. This is 40:1.” It’s like, “Is it really or is that just what it was listed as in some sort of blog post?”

Jay Kang: You mean is the actual bet the thing that people are reporting when they are talking about it? Is that what you’re asking?

Aaron Lammer: As I understand it, this year in the Oscar betting, a bunch of these lines moved a bunch after they opened, particularly, and I’m interested in your take on this as an expert in these fields, I think it was the best director race. What’s the guy who directed ‘Dogtooth’? He’s Greek, I believe.

Jay Kang: Yorgos something.

Aaron Lammer: Yeah. Yorgos.

Jay Kang: Yeah, he does a lot of stuff. He did ‘The Favorite’ this time.

Aaron Lammer: ‘The Favorite’, yeah. He started off as super long odds, and then-

Jay Kang: Yeah, I think he was 40:1 or something, maybe 250:1, something crazy like that.

Aaron Lammer: Looking at it, me and you as filmgoers, he’s a pretty long shot I’d say there. You’ve got several people who seem like they’re much, much better picks, Alfonso Cuarón, I think Spike Lee was in the mix. At some point, the odds started getting much and much better for him to win. Up to the point where I think it peaked at 15:1 or 10:1 and then they just froze betting on it.

Jay Kang: I think it got to 5:2 almost.

Aaron Lammer: Five, okay.

Jay Kang: It was insane. It was the biggest swing. It would be like if the Warriors were playing Bowdoin College or something like that where I went to school, and so the odds are like 7000:1. Then, Bowdoin College announces that Kevin Durant and Giannis and all … Basically, the Monstars from ‘Space Jam’ are all going to be paying in the game. That was the type of odds swing it was. It’s not something that can be explained away by any natural betting pattern. It has to be that a bunch of money that thinks it’s sharp money comes in and completely influences a line. Usually, when that happens, a line only moves a couple spots.

Aaron Lammer: Yeah, I think I heard your old boss, Bill Simmons, once say that Brady playing or not playing would be like the biggest swing possible in a football game and even that would only be seven points.

Jay Kang: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is basically if everyone on the Patriots ended up being arrested in some sort of sex slavery type of thing.

Aaron Lammer: Murdered their close friend in a parking lot kind of situation.

Jay Kang: Yeah, exactly.

Aaron Lammer: Purely hypothetical.

Jay Kang: And, have all been arrested and couldn’t play in the game. Basically, they were trotting out the cheerleaders and the equipment staff to play against the Pittsburgh Steelers. That’s what this type of swing of odds would be.

Aaron Lammer: Okay, when you heard about this swing, what did you make of it? What I initially thought was, “Holy shit! He’s going to win. Someone knows and that’s a pretty crazy upset. There’s going to be a major scandal and it’s going to end betting on the Academy Awards because it’s too soft. It’s too easy to know.”

Jay Kang: Yeah. Well, that’s was I thought, but I guess I had a few thoughts. The first was that even if the lines were affected not by the number of bets really but by the amount of money that is bet on it. If you have two other bets for $20 and then you have one bet for $50,000, the $50,000 bet is going to move the line.

Aaron Lammer: Wait a minute. May I pause you briefly and ask a question? ’Cause I think this pertains actually to crypto. When you say that it’s volume not the number of people that moves the line, is there data broken out? When all that action that was on Argo-

Jay Kang: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It tells you. Yeah.

Aaron Lammer: Do we know how many people that was spread around? Could that potentially be one mega whale coming in?

Jay Kang: No, that’s the problem, right? Which is that on the book that I use, allegedly, I guess I should say … I don’t know if it’s legal, but let’s say the book that I sometimes use for an online sportsbook, the most money I could put into one bet was $430. That was for best picture. It wasn’t for best director, which I imagine was lower. There’s no way that any of these companies are going to let you bet $10,000 on these, on best director.

Jay Kang: I just think well, there’s no way this is a mega whale because the bet caps are so low. It has to be a flood of hundreds of people betting this thing in a short period of time, which is why then it’s taken off the books because essentially these New Jersey … I think it was the FanDuel app that ended up taking it off the books first. They must have just gotten a flood of action on him and they didn’t know what was up so they took him off the books.

Aaron Lammer: If I’m in Macau, I’m a high-rolling poker player turned Bitcoin whale and I want to put down a million bucks on ‘Green Book’, I can’t make that bet?

Jay Kang: I don’t think so. I think you could make a lot of $10,000 bets, but probably not enough to add up to a million dollars. Actually, that would be insane. You would have to find 100 bet takers to get to a million. Yeah, I can’t see that that was possible. Maybe I’m wrong. That’s way out of my price range in general.

Aaron Lammer: It’s possible that there’s a private broker on the private market who will try to pair you with some super secret Triad book, but-

Jay Kang: Sure, but that wouldn’t move the line at the New Jersey sportsbook.

Aaron Lammer: Not only would that move the line, it’s crazy for an event that is as big as the Oscars. This is one of the world’s biggest nights behind, let’s say, the Super Bowl and a few sporting events. Considering how far into gambling legalization we are, it’s crazy how little liquidity there is in a lot of these markets. Much like there’s zero liquidity in Augur right now.

Jay Kang: I’m glad that you brought that full circle and not just talking about gambling.

Aaron Lammer: Well wait, we didn’t finish the story. Cuarón won and he was wrong. What do you think happened? Where was all that money coming from?

Jay Kang: Well, the story came out. It was allegedly a guy at Penn State who’s in a fraternity who said that his dad was in the Academy and that his dad had told him that Yorgos was going to win. He posted it somewhere where a bunch of people saw it and then all the money started coming in.

Aaron Lammer: Basically, a Tron getting listed to Coinbase rumor kind of thing.

Jay Kang: Yeah, but there was one other level where it was the … Have you seen the frat aliens episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force?

Aaron Lammer: I have. I have.

Jay Kang: Where the guy keeps going, “My dad owns a dealership.” It’s like that, but it’s like, “My dad is in the Academy and he’s saying it’s Yorgos.” Then, suddenly, thousands and thousands of dollars are coming in on Yorgos. It’s hilarious. I do think that it probably makes these sportsbooks uncomfortable, though. Because there are all sorts of pain points that would make this harder to do when there aren’t tens of thousands of people on an app where they can just get to the bet really quickly like before. For example, if you actually have to go to the sportsbook to put down a bet, you’re probably going to do that a lot less than just pull out your phone.

Jay Kang: If you have to sign up for a semi-legal sports betting site, that’s only a certain type of person who does that. In a world where every sucker has this app or every sucker is into sports has this app, then the possibilities for misinformation go up pretty high. I imagine at every sportsbook right now there’s probably a lot of talk about how they can avoid this happening again.

Aaron Lammer: Well, what it makes me think is that the age of the open sportsbook and the age of the Reddit rumor/hoax is going to be pretty wild. This is just one frat guy.

Jay Kang: It’s going to be amazing.

Aaron Lammer: What is that website called? Total Frat Move. Remember that website?

Jay Kang: That was a total frat move.

Aaron Lammer: I’ve manipulated the Oscar’s market. Total frat move.

Jay Kang: It’s a really good troll, honestly. I find it all funny. I only put that one bet for the Oscars.

Aaron Lammer: What did you bet?

Jay Kang: I bet ‘Green Book’ best picture.

Aaron Lammer: Well done.

Jay Kang: Thank you, thank you.

Aaron Lammer: You are, in the same way that in Augur we generally try to fade Libertarianism, you were fading woke internet takes?

Jay Kang: Yeah, yeah. That’s exactly what my thought process was.

Aaron Lammer: I’d like to think that on the show if we can’t share in the crypto moderate movement, we can at least share the babe-like, cheap blonde post sentiment wherever you can be it in the entertainment media or the crypto media.

Jay Kang: I don’t think that the criticisms for the ‘Green Book’ are cheap or unwarranted.

Aaron Lammer: Oh, no, no, but the idea that it won’t wind because of this-

Jay Kang: Yeah, that’s the thing that I don’t get.

Aaron Lammer: That’s what we’re talking about. When we fade Libertarianism it’s not because we don’t believe in Libertarianism.

Jay Kang: Yeah, we don’t also believe in Libertarianism.

Aaron Lammer: But, wearing our betting hats, it’s just a good bet. You’re just getting value on it.

Jay Kang: For Augur, remember we bet the price of Ethereum wouldn’t be over $500 on December 31st, 2018 and that was just a fade of maximalism basically. It didn’t feel like maximalism reflected anything. I think it’s the same thing you can do for these Oscar things where the discussion around it, if you read the internet, is so one-way. In the end, you realize that what it is, it’s like a couple thousand old people watching screeners or not watching screeners and voting for the Oscars. They either don’t know what’s happening on Twitter or they don’t give a shit about what’s happening on Twitter. It seemed like they were just going to pick ‘Green Book’ because that’s the exact type of movie that they always pick, so wouldn’t they pick it?

Aaron Lammer: Couldn’t we make a similar argument about Bitcoin being mostly controlled by a few mega whales and-

Jay Kang: I like these redirects you’re doing today.

Aaron Lammer: Keeping it on topic.

Jay Kang: Let’s go.

Aaron Lammer: We think Bitcoin is defined by how many people want to go and put $100 in their Coinbase account, but when we really look at the distribution of coins, the people who own full percentage points worth of Bitcoin are probably influencing price a lot more than me and you.

Jay Kang: Oh, yeah. For sure. That one guy who is one of the trustees of Mt. Gox, he was moving the market by himself.

Aaron Lammer: That guy was awesome. I wish he would reappear in a different plot line.

Jay Kang: He is just market selling. [crosstalk 00:16:45].

Aaron Lammer: He was honestly just like, “I don’t care. I know you guys care, but I don’t.”

Jay Kang: Yeah, yeah. You guys are really mad at me, but honestly, I just want this to be out of my hair and I’m going to do the easiest way possible. I don’t care how much money I lose in the process. That’s actually an admirable thing. I don’t know.

Jay Kang: This actually is relevant with crypto. I think it’s probably, at this point, a smart move where there’s a consensus of really loud and well-followed and intense people on Twitter about anything whether it be crypto maximalism or politics and pop culture, you should just fade that. You should just auto-fade that if you’re going to make any sort of bet on anything. You should just be like, “Yeah, I’m going to take the opposite route.”

Jay Kang: That goes to things like Amazon even. This idea that Amazon is in trouble because it didn’t come to New York and AOC and some of the new Democrats are going to have them on the run. I’m just like, “Look, outside of whether or not that’s a good or bad thing, I would tend to say that’s probably a good thing-

Aaron Lammer: You’d probably be buying Facebook right now on the same grounds basically, right?

Jay Kang: Yeah, I tried that.

Aaron Lammer: [crosstalk 00:18:02] got wrecked.

Jay Kang: I got a few months on [crosstalk 00:18:07] wrecked.

Aaron Lammer: Jay, I feel like we’re just trying to derive strategies to get wrecked into crypto and something else right now. What else could we bring our unique blend of failure and hubris to?

Jay Kang: Exactly, and misanthropy. Like, “Okay, if I hate everybody and everybody’s wrong except me, what should I bet on?”

Aaron Lammer: Well, look, you won with the ‘Green Book’ so you’re on a hot streak of one. Let’s keep it going. You want to run through a little news?

Jay Kang: Yeah. Let’s do it.

Aaron Lammer: Okay, this is hot, breaking, won’t be breaking anymore when this comes out, but we can still enjoy it in the moment, Ripple going to Coinbase. This is like NBA trade deadline we’re in.

Jay Kang: It’s not Ripple, right? I believe you mean XRP is going to Coinbase.

Aaron Lammer: Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Jay, I think we got off on the wrong foot. Can we start that again?

Jay Kang: You of all people with our XRP hat.

Aaron Lammer: XRP is going to Coinbase.

Jay Kang: Yeah, I’m surprised. Are you surprised?

Aaron Lammer: I am surprised. Well, this reminds me of … Today’s going to be all me doing comparisons.

Jay Kang: Sure.

Aaron Lammer: It reminds me of the way now in the NBA someone will say something as if it’s totally absolute and then it’s a total lie. Like when Kyrie was like, “Yeah, I’m planning to stay in Boston,” and then two months later he was like, “We’re considering all the other options.” Coinbase literally wrote a document that in all but name said we will never add XRP.

Jay Kang: Yep. No, they really did and now they added XRP.

Aaron Lammer: Look, this show’s only been on for a little over a year and we talked about it on the show it can’t have been more than a year ago.

Jay Kang: Yeah, and I don’t think that it’s the same thing as the NBA players just giving out misinformation to make their lives easier. I think that Coinbase just didn’t know back then.

Aaron Lammer: Don’t you think Kyrie just changed his mind? That’s what I think Brian Armstrong did.

Jay Kang: Yeah. No, no, that’s what I meant. I think they were talking about … It’s two things. The first is that you have to give much more statements now than you ever had to and they’re disseminated. Kyrie said that thing at a dinner for season ticket holders or something like that. There’s no way that that would have been reported on at any other point.

Aaron Lammer: Yeah.

Jay Kang: Same thing with Coinbase and Ripple, all the attention on Coinbase I’m sure they have said a lot of things that they now wish that they could take back. The nice thing about our current landscape in media and relative to truth is that you can just go the other way. You don’t have to explain yourself. You’re just like, “Look, that was back then. This is now. Who cares?”

Aaron Lammer: If we’re going to take anything away from it, I think we’re going to take that Coinbase is just going to keep doing whatever is best for Coinbase. I feel like our initial take on Coinbase circa episode one was probably right, which is it’s always going to be better for Coinbase than that anything other than Bitcoin wins. Anything Coinbase can do to at least balance the seesaw of the entire bundle other than Bitcoin versus Bitcoin, they’re going to do. They thought they would not have to dirty themselves with the Ripple sauce, but now-

Jay Kang: Okay, I do have a question for you, which is that you, as the owner of an XRP hat, right?

Aaron Lammer: Yes. I’m taking it down and putting it on.

Jay Kang: Because of the generous interview that you gave to a Ripple stand where you were like, “Let’s try and understand these people”

Aaron Lammer: I’m still beloved in the Ripple community.

Jay Kang: You’re like a celebrity in the Ripple community.

Aaron Lammer: Beloved.

Jay Kang: Yeah. I think you understand the Ripple stand better than I do, but the thing that I don’t quite understand is why is it dirty for Coinbase to introduce this extremely well-known and extremely centralized, but still much, much-discussed cryptocurrency? Why is it bad?

Aaron Lammer: I think you said it. It’s extremely centralized.

Jay Kang: But, we’ve crossed that Rubicon already. Coinbase-

Aaron Lammer: Did we cross that Rubicon and decide that Ripple was basically not a crypto?

Jay Kang: But, Coinbase does offer other coins that are highly centralized, right? BAT and other things.

Aaron Lammer: I agree.

Jay Kang: Yeah, it’s not like Coinbase can be like, “Well, we’re pure.” They’ve muddied themselves with a lot of centralized coins. At this point, why not just add Ripple? That’s my thought.

Aaron Lammer: I think that’s probably what the meeting where they decided to greenlight Ripple was. I wonder if they might have wanted to do Ripple before and had been waiting on some sort of a nod from the authorities that Ripple was not going to be trouble if they added it. Yeah, I think that if what you’re saying is you’re already a sellout, why not really sell out. Yeah, I think that’s accurate.

Aaron Lammer: My question is why they felt they had to get in this business? I guess you could say that they’re just giving the customer what they want, that they’re probably getting a gazillion emails that are like, “I want to buy Ripple at Coinbase.” Who are they to not sell it? On the other hand, in terms of the Bitcoin narrative to have a company that was at one point, I feel like, the most powerful company in Bitcoin so clearly just bagging on Bitcoin, it kind of sucks.

Jay Kang: Well, I think this is an example of the gap in context between how much people on Twitter hate Ripple and how much the Twitter Ripple fans are psychotic, and the reality of their business, which is that if you ignore all that then what Coinbase still a large part of their business is through transaction fees on buys and sells, right?

Aaron Lammer: Yep.

Jay Kang: Why would they not try and offer every single cryptocurrency that is bought and sold a lot? I would say that Ripple is probably still bought and sold quite a bit. If they can tune out the screaming hoards on both sides, then for them, it’s a pretty clear business decision. I don’t know. Again, as we said, their purity is gone. It’s been gone. I would say that the final blow to it was the way that they introduced Bitcoin Cash. That’s when we started to think of them as a purely capitalistic … Capitalistic is not the right word, but their much-

Aaron Lammer: Opportunistic.

Jay Kang: Yeah, they’re much more opportunistic … They were much less interested in the theory and philosophy of decentralization than we had thought. Why not just put on Ripple? I don’t know. This doesn’t make me mad at all. Coinbase, sponsor our show.

Aaron Lammer: Wow, Jay. Jay’s come full circle on Coinbase.

Jay Kang: Toshi’s great.

Aaron Lammer: Here’s my counter take on why I think it’s a bad decision for Coinbase. I’m not mad about it. I have not placed a lot of faith in Coinbase other than the fact that I use them as a business. Here’s why I think it’s a bad business decision, though. I feel like Coinbase and Ripple, the company, not the currency, are on some deep, deep level competitors. I know that sounds crazy, but remember when we didn’t think of Apple and Google and Facebook as competitors. We’re like, “Oh, they’re all completely in their own lane.” Then, once they get big enough, everything is competitive.

Aaron Lammer: Ripple is a company. It’s a startup. It’s a for-profit startup that has a shit ton of money for not doing very much. I think that ultimately the ambitions of that company are going to run contrary to Coinbase’s. I think they’re both going to try to become IPOed, biggest crypto companies in the world, taking different paths. That’s not really a risk you run with Bitcoin or even to a lesser extent, Ethereum in so far as Ethereum is designed more as a nonprofit foundation.

Jay Kang: Yeah, but at that point-

Aaron Lammer: I just think it’s a little like when Apple allows Amazon Prime videos on Apple TV.

Jay Kang: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I was thinking about that as an example, but I don’t think it’s quite the same way because what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to monopolize the on-ramp space if you’re Coinbase, right? If Ripple, if they can establish enough with the Ripple community that the best way to buy and sell XRP is through Coinbase, then Ripple, as the company, has a harder time trying to dissuade people from using the easy on-ramp that they are used to. Does that make sense? You then have to deal with a paid in point where people now have to go to …

Jay Kang: It’s like Spotify with podcasts right now. They bought Gimlet for $230 million and the question that’s out there is, okay, now if all of Gimlet’s podcasts are on Spotify instead of the Apple podcast app, are people still going to listen to them or is it just like, “It’s another click and I don’t feel like doing that.” Those are real questions I think that … I think that Coinbase by getting all this information and all this on-ramp stuff for Ripple is probably in a good position there. I don’t quite see what the problem would be there for them.

Aaron Lammer: I like your Spotify metaphor because the way I read that acquisition is basically as I understand it, Spotify has a ton of paying customers. They’ve signed up 10 million people. They’re doing well in terms of converting people, but based on the cost basis of streaming music, they operate at a loss by streaming music because of the amount of money they have to pay out to artists for that streaming. I know artists feel like Spotify gives them pennies on the dollar of what they should get and I’m sympathetic to that, but even so, Spotify is actually not a good growth business model for streaming music.

Aaron Lammer: However, if they own a bunch of podcasts, which are a fixed one-time cost, and that’s what people were doing on Spotify and they were converting new users who were basically just there to listen to those podcasts, it’s a much better business to be in. That’s more or less where I feel like Coinbase has ended up. They’re just not satisfied with the Bitcoin business.

Jay Kang: Yeah, and they’re also future-proofing themselves in case Ripple does become the dominant company and-

Aaron Lammer: I think it’s a bad call.

Jay Kang: What do you mean?

Aaron Lammer: I just think that-

Jay Kang: Wait, it doesn’t really-

Aaron Lammer: … Ripple becomes as big as Bitcoin, there’s going to be no role for Coinbase anyway. I feel like Coinbase is being a little naïve letting these snakes rise up out of the grass.

Jay Kang: I know, but Coinbase didn’t pay anything for this. They didn’t pay $230 million to buy Ripple or $6 billion or whatever Ripple would cost.

Aaron Lammer: Let me play game theory with you.

Jay Kang: Okay.

Aaron Lammer: I’m coming to Coinbase, I have a million dollars cash from my personal wealth that I want to invest in crypto. All I know is I want it to be in crypto.

Jay Kang: Don’t do it!

Aaron Lammer: Okay. First, don’t do it. Nothing on this show is investment advice. That’s a terrible idea. No, I demand to do it. I’m a cranky man. I’ve always had Libertarian sympathies. I want to get my money out of the banks and into crypto. It’s like, “Okay. Well, what do you want to buy?” It’s like, “Well, I want to buy one of the ones that Coinbase has because obviously, that’s all I know, the only method I had for buying it. Okay.” I have pick of everything on Coinbase.

Aaron Lammer: Now, I think the thing Coinbase would most like you to do is buy that Coinbase bundle that’s just equally weighted all of the things they sell based on their market share. Remember that?

Jay Kang: Yeah.

Aaron Lammer: They still have yet. That’s spreading out all of the risk and upside completely equally so you’re keeping everyone from getting too big. But, if I demand to get a specific currency, would you rather that I have Bitcoin or Ripple if you’re Coinbase?

Jay Kang: I don’t think I would care at all. I would just want the one that you moved around the most so I could get transaction fees off of you, right?

Aaron Lammer: That’s a pretty fair point. That’s how banks look at it too. It’s not Fidelity cares what stock I buy. They’re just like, “Buy stocks on Fidelity.”

Jay Kang: Yeah, we get our-

Aaron Lammer: Keep your retirement account here.

Jay Kang: We get our $5.99 or whatever per trade. Okay, you want to move on?

Aaron Lammer: Yeah, let’s move on. Did you hear about this thing about Gladius, this ICO which basically reported itself to the FTC?

Jay Kang: No. No, they self-owned?

Aaron Lammer: Yeah. There’s not that much more to the story. Basically, the FTC was like, “Yes, you are in the wrong. If you return all the money to investors you won’t face criminal charges or fines.” So, they just returned all the money. This might be the new ICO model is to go right up to the lip and be like, “Do we really want to face jail time?”

Jay Kang: Yeah, but also maybe it’s a business strategy where you snitch on yourself and therefore when you start your next project you can be like, “Listen, we’re totally above board now. We’re the ones that snitched on yourself.” Plus, you get a bunch of free press for an obscure coin like Gladius, which I had no idea what it was and I’m sure you didn’t either until this happened.

Aaron Lammer: Still don’t.

Jay Kang: Now, we’re discussing it.

Aaron Lammer: Still don’t. Didn’t even get as far as looking up what the thing was.

Jay Kang: If we were better at the podcast and researched it better, we could actually do that, but a more prepared host would at least now know what Gladius is. Maybe it’s good.

Aaron Lammer: I don’t want to use up any more brain space for any ICOs that have already closed down, but I like your exit scam, snitching on yourself. A good way to do that would be to just build the company heavily before you snitch on yourself, like do a lot of consulting services, drain a lot of the money out, and then snitch on yourself, return the money to investors, but you don’t return money that’s already been spent.

Jay Kang: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Self-snitching is generally a good idea, I think. Amy Klobuchar, the woman who’s running for president from Minnesota. She has all those stories about how she was an abusive boss and would throw binders at people, I feel like she should have just self-snitched on all of that when the story started coming out. She should have just been, “I did all of this and it’s because I’m tough and I’m the person who can take on Donald Trump.”

Jay Kang: Now, in general, I actually think that it probably is helping her that all these stories are coming out ’cause everybody’s discussing her and also most people don’t care if you abuse a 23-year-old aid.

Aaron Lammer: Whoa, Jay. Whoa, whoa.

Jay Kang: No, that’s true. That’s true. I’m not saying I don’t care. I do care, but I think that most people, especially older people, are just like, “That Millennial deserved it.”

Aaron Lammer: Beat that intern’s ass.

Jay Kang: I’m just saying, if she had self-snitched, I think she would have gotten in front of all of this. Then, any other news story, people would have been like, “Yeah, but she already admitted it, so who cares?” Anyway, that was my politics take of the last week.

Aaron Lammer: I was talking to a friend of mine who is an attorney, a criminal defense attorney, and saying something about that Tekashi69 case.

Jay Kang: Yeah.

Aaron Lammer: Tekashi69.

Jay Kang: Yeah.

Aaron Lammer: It was like, really, I know people are making fun of him online for snitching, but that was totally the right decision.

Jay Kang: Yes, except now he might end up dead.

Aaron Lammer: Yeah, but he was like, “If you’re facing life in jail anyway, you should just take whatever deal is offered you.”

Jay Kang: Yeah, I guess his recording career is going to be a little difficult now, but maybe like Gladius, you can rebrand and be somebody else. I do enjoy his music.

Aaron Lammer: I do too. I’m not going to go around trying to defend it or get into some sort of argument with someone about it, but in a purely aesthetic level, I think he’s talented. I am sad that he will spend the rest of his life in witness protection or whatever.

Jay Kang: His songs are good.

Aaron Lammer: He’s also a person who is a little too early for the ICO era. You know who has been saying positive things about Bitcoin in the week since we last spoke is Elon Musk.

Jay Kang: Oh, the inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi. That’s my favorite-

Aaron Lammer: Of course, he’s praising.

Jay Kang: That’s my favorite Satoshi theory. I used to bother him on Twitter about it. I’d be like, “Are you Satoshi?” every time he would tweet and he never responded. Yeah, I thought-

Aaron Lammer: Wow, actually based on your theory, what he tweeted this week on February 21st fits your theory, which is he tweeted, “However owns the early BTC deserves a Nobel Prize in delayed gratification.” You could read that as a self-boast.

Jay Kang: Yeah, he might have Satoshi’s wallet keys. I know that we’ve discussed this several times on this show, but I do think that Elon Musk cracks the top 10 on betting odds for who Satoshi is.

Aaron Lammer: I don’t think that and I will take that bet.

Jay Kang: I still think the odds are very long, but his odds have to be better than Craig … Maybe they’re not better than Craig Wright, but they’re better than some of the other people who are rumored as to be Satoshi.

Aaron Lammer: Okay, let me ask you a question. There was also the whole thing with Jack Dorsey was in a big Twitter interview about Bitcoin. I think he tweeted out his tippin.me lightning wallet. Oh, hey, Jay, did you know that we have a tippin.me lightning wallet?

Jay Kang: Did [inaudible 00:36:18] make us one?

Aaron Lammer: No, I just made it for us today.

Jay Kang: Nice. Nice.

Aaron Lammer: It’s tippin.me/@cointalkshow. Send us a tip. If we get one tip, we’ll talk about the tip on air. If you send us a tip, and I don’t know if you can put a notes field or something on it, we will say something on the air. That’s a promise.

Aaron Lammer: What does it mean that the Elon Musks and Jack Dorseys in the world are talking about Bitcoin?

Jay Kang: I don’t know. It probably means a little bit more than when Jamie Diamond and …

Aaron Lammer: Warren Buffet.

Jay Kang: Warren Buffet. I almost said Wayne Buffet and then I was like, “That’s not right.” Then I was like, “Walter Buffet.”

Aaron Lammer: Warren Buffet was talking about Bitcoin also this week. He was like, “It has no value, and it attracts charlatans.”

Jay Kang: [inaudible 00:37:08]. Look, fair. It’s a fair take.

Aaron Lammer: A, true. B, totally period.

Jay Kang: Do you remember when Warren Buffet was talking anyone Bitcoin earlier, maybe nine months ago or something like that?

Aaron Lammer: When he called it rat poison squared or something?

Jay Kang: His take was essentially, “Look, I don’t know about all that, but we’ve looked at it and it seems cool, but I don’t know. The only way I would invest in it is it I could buy a put on it.” This is when Bitcoin was $16,000 or something like that. I bet he did actually figure out a way to buy a put on it given that it’s Warren Buffet, but I think about that quite a bit being like, “I wish I had listened to him and just shorted Bitcoin or at least sold my Bitcoin at that point.”

Aaron Lammer: I don’t think any of these guys … Musk said he had like 0.25 Bitcoin to his name. It doesn’t seem like that many celebrities are mega whales.

Jay Kang: I don’t think it really matters. Elon Mush talks about everything at this point. Does it matter that Azealia Banks’ career had a revitalization because of her interactions with Elon Musk? I don’t know. I don’t know why that’s relevant.

Aaron Lammer: That seems legitimately irrelevant.

Jay Kang: No, just saying the celebrity-

Aaron Lammer: My counter take is I don’t think that Azealia Banks reference makes any sense.

Jay Kang: I was just saying if the proximity of something to Elon Musk outside of news about Tesla doesn’t seem to be that important.

Aaron Lammer: Okay. What top five … Who coming out as being a pro-Bitcoin/holder-of-Bitcoin, who would be the biggest market movers? I thought Elon Musk would move the market. Did not move the market. No one gave a shit.

Jay Kang: In the U.S?

Aaron Lammer: Yeah.

Jay Kang: Number one would be Obama, I think.

Aaron Lammer: That’s what I was going to say. If Obama was like, “I think Bitcoin’s a good idea and I’m adding some to my portfolio,” I’d be like, “What?!”

Jay Kang: Yeah, I think Obama’s probably number one. I don’t know. Number two probably would be Warren Buffet. If Warren Buffet made a big change of heart.

Aaron Lammer: Yeah.

Jay Kang: There are just a lot of people who just do everything that Warren Buffet says.

Aaron Lammer: It’s weird, though because when I think of the modern financial guruish dudes, not guruish, but Marc Cuban types, those people have already come out as being interested in Bitcoin and are probably-

Jay Kang: Yeah, but they don’t have the same following as Warren Buffet.

Aaron Lammer: Either than Warren Buffet, who is the most respected financial thinker in America? What if Alan Greenspan said he was holding Bitcoin?

Jay Kang: I think that they would more check out Greenspan’s medication.

Aaron Lammer: They would be like, “Who’s been feeding lines?”

Jay Kang: Exactly. We think that your levels of something are very off. I would be more concerned about Alan Greenspan than I would think take that very seriously. I don’t know. I think the list is very short. It might just be Barack Obama and Warren Buffet. I don’t think there’s any other celebrity or famous person that would have any effect on the market at all.

Aaron Lammer: Oprah?

Jay Kang: No, not Oprah.

Aaron Lammer: You don’t think if Oprah started shilling Bitcoin it would move the market.

Jay Kang: You know what? She does-

Aaron Lammer: You’re all, “Maybe I would get in on that.”

Jay Kang: Instead of ‘The Secret’ … Remember when she was puffing that book ‘The Secret’?

Aaron Lammer: Yeah.

Jay Kang: Instead of ‘The Secret’ she was just talking about Bitcoin like that. Instead of being make a vision board and picture the success that you have in the world and it will come true, she was just like, “Buy cryptocurrency and enjoy the decentralized utopia,” yeah, that would have some effect, I think.

Aaron Lammer: Yeah. I think that the next stage of Bitcoin is going to have a lot of celebrity stuff.

Jay Kang: That’s the three. I don’t think anyone other than those three, though. And, Oprah is a distant third there I think.

Aaron Lammer: Lebron?

Jay Kang: No way. It would have on effect.

Aaron Lammer: Really?

Jay Kang: No.

Aaron Lammer: If Lebron starts talking about crypto?

Jay Kang: Nobody trusts Lebron with financial advice or their lives. They’re just like, “Oh, he’s a really good basketball player,” then half the country hates him. There’s nobody else who would move the needle, I don’t think, in any of this.

Aaron Lammer: Okay, we’ll come back to that. I have a feeling we’ll think of some more possible influencers. You want to talk main course here? We’ve not really gotten to talk about JP Morgan coin yet.

Jay Kang: Yeah.

Aaron Lammer: I thought it was going to go away and it kind of did go away, but I feel like, we’re going to have to talk about it.

Jay Kang: Yeah, our friend Joe Weisenthal who wrote about it, he was on vacation when JPM hit. He withheld his thoughts and he wrote about it in his morning newsletter, or his section of the morning newsletter, which Bloomberg puts out.

Aaron Lammer: It’s like a Bloomberg market newsletter.

Jay Kang: Yeah, I read it. I actually get it every day and I’m always interested in Joe’s thoughts. It’s short and it’s cogent and I think one of Joe’s talents as a writer is to crystallize something down into two interesting points that you can think about, which I think is a great talent.

Aaron Lammer: I’ve generally been enjoying newsletters recently particularly as a way to get crypto news. I needed to get off Twitter and Reddit. Tony Sheng, Marty’s Bent from Marty Bent, it’s a good way to keep up to date. I plan most of our show based on newsletters I feel like.

Jay Kang: I haven’t joined that yet because you can’t get in newsletter fights and …

Aaron Lammer: Oh, right. It’s true. Newsletters won’t fight with you, which to me is a plus, to Jay is a minus.

Jay Kang: Huge minus.

Aaron Lammer: We try to come in with different takes. My take is that fighting is bad. Jay’s take is that fighting is good.

Jay Kang: Yeah.

Aaron Lammer: Okay.

Jay Kang: I would object if you don’t paint me in a corner, but that is actually a very coherent and accurate assessment of our general thoughts on this.

Aaron Lammer: For what JP Morgan Coin is it’s another stable coin backed to the dollar similar to Tether I guess you could say.

Jay Kang: Yeah. Well, yeah, it’s a stable coin and JP Morgan is basically saying, “It’s always going to be worth a dollar.” What Joe says is, “Look, this might sound silly,” but he does come up with an interesting thought which is that with something like JP Morgan … This is me quoting him now. “With something like JPM Coin, money could have rules attached to it. Parents of college-aged students could give them money that is only able to be spent on book or food at the cafeteria. A charity might specify in code that their dollars only go to a certain cause and not be used for administrative expenses. Investors in a startup could theoretically put it in dollars that only go to buy Facebook ads. It can’t be used for fancy offices or the CEO’s salaries.”

Jay Kang: “There are ways of arranging all these things now, of course, but they require human oversight or other kludgy systems.” I don’t know what that word is, but it’s a good word, kludgy.

Aaron Lammer: Kludgy. Kludgy means hacky, duck-taped together.

Jay Kang: Yeah, it’s a good word. Lot of countenance.

Aaron Lammer: Jerry-rigged and kludgy are synonymous.

Jay Kang: “Money in which the rules of how they’re spent have a lot of potential in the future. It’s nothing like what Bitcoin’s all about, but it doesn’t mean it’s not interesting.” What do you think of that, Aaron?

Aaron Lammer: Well, first another thing I wanted to note in there, he says, “JP Morgan … “ This is a quote again, “JPM makes clear only permission clients will have access to the coin.” That’s a big important thing to know up front, which is like, “This is for people who are like logged into the JPM system. This is not open market at all.

Aaron Lammer: It’s terrifying. It’s basically going to be like here is Aaron’s allowance. No buying weed. No buying your legal weed-

Jay Kang: I feel like-

Aaron Lammer: … teenage Aaron in the 2030s.

Jay Kang: That seems like a good argument for JPM Coin honestly.

Aaron Lammer: You try and swipe my hologram eye thing and it will set off an alarm in the store and they’ll be like, “No weed. You cannot buy weed with these JPM.”

Jay Kang: Yeah, you can buy these bottles of water and that’s it. I don’t know. I tend to agree with Joe what I for you take out the implications of all of this that there is a use for it. Outside of allowance, I don’t quite know what those would be. The problems that he’s citing here, outside of teenage Aaron, aren’t not real problems. When you give money to a charity, you have no idea how that’s spent. There are all sorts of examples like the breast cancer awareness groups and stuff like that where a lot of people who have given them money come to regret it because there are journalists who go in and look at all of it and say, “Look all of this money is going to things that have nothing to do with breast cancer research.” If you could specify things like that then I don’t know, I don’t think that that’s a bad thing.

Aaron Lammer: I’ve come to the point on this show where I feel like we can’t only cover the things that we think are cool or a good thing. At a certain point, I’m sort of interested in all of this stuff. When I actually think of this, this feels more realistic to me than the Ethereum amusement park. The programmable JP Morgan buck …

Aaron Lammer: Let me propose an even simpler programming, which is say I want to put five percent of my earnings into a retirement account every year and you buy some sort of a coin that automates that process or something or knows not to be taxed because it’s a pre-taxed buck rather than a post-tax [crosstalk 00:47:44].

Jay Kang: Sure.

Aaron Lammer: I don’t know, somehow the fact that you’re already in a financial infrastructure, it makes that kind of a thing realistic and I could almost see it operating as a budgeting tool also that it basically manages the flow of your income and holds money for taxes, pays money for expenses, and gives you a living allowance or something. I know it’s a dystopian vision, but what are people really going to do with programmable money other than program it to move around in an automated way?

Jay Kang: Why is that a dystopian vision?

Aaron Lammer: I don’t know. I just don’t like someone being able to tell me I can’t buy weed at the 7–11. It’s legal, God dammit!

Jay Kang: You’re entire take on this is you putting yourself in a time machine and going back to when you were 16-years-old in a world where you can buy weed and then imagining that your parents would be like, “Here’s your allowance. You can’t spend it on this.” You’re like, “This is dystopian.”

Aaron Lammer: Jay, what if these were programmed so they were like no gambling bucks.

Jay Kang: Yeah, it would probably help me.

Aaron Lammer: You try to bring them in a casino and it’s like …

Jay Kang: God, I wish every single one … I’m being totally serious here. If I could go to my employer and say, “Can you give me the money that you can’t use at a casino?” I would do it in a heartbeat.

Aaron Lammer: This would create another level in this de-platforming financial wars that are happening now. If you to say the JP Morgan buck can’t be sent to these political groups or it can’t be used for these various purposes … I’m not trying to be paranoid here. I actually think some of this is positive, but we’re putting more and more extrajudicial rules upon how money [crosstalk 00:49:42].

Jay Kang: Oh, yeah. Sure. In a world where every dollar is JP Morgan bucks, I think that they’re probably a lot of privacy and potential for state control and all this, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In a world where it’s just an opt-in thing, I don’t know, I don’t really see that big of a problem with it. It’s interesting to me. I would say that my general politics would be JP Morgan shouldn’t have all this power over things and they shouldn’t have power over how people spend their money.

Jay Kang: From a purely conceptual point, is there a use for this, not whether I like it? Yeah, there’s a use for that vision that Joe’s putting out there. I think that’s what Joe is saying too by the way. I don’t think he is saying this would be cool. I think he’s just being yeah, there’s something you could do with it. It’s not totally vaporware.

Aaron Lammer: Yeah, I appreciate people like Joe for taking in our same fade prevailing sentiment way. We probably should be taking the Facebook crypto project and the JP Morgan Coin seriously. I realize that they get zero respect on the internet, but Ripple gets almost zero respect and lots of things that succeed are generally doubted by the entire technology press. I don’t take the fact that JP Morgan Coin is a joke as any sort of an indication that it won’t work.

Jay Kang: Yeah, it’s like North Carolina Tar Heel basketball team. Disrespected and put out for dead and then come back to beat Duke. Yeah, I don’t know, I think that generally, you should not listen to the internet. If at all, you should just fade the internet at all points possible which means should we be buying JP Morgan Coin then?

Aaron Lammer: I don’t think we have permission to.

Jay Kang: Oh, yeah. Sure. I don’t have a JP Morgan account ’cause I don’t have that much money.

Jay Kang: All right, let’s go to the last one. I got to go pick up my kid soon.

Aaron Lammer: Okay, there was an op-ed, I think it was today, in the New York Times. It was basically an economics professor in Venezuela talking about how Bitcoin had allowed him to survive more or less during the crisis in Venezuela. It goes into pretty deep detail describing in a step by step practical way basically how he has shifted his financial life into Bitcoin and, as such, been able to survive slightly better than the average person.

Jay Kang: Can I ask you a question? I know that we try not to get into so many meta-journalism discussions on this show because our listenership doesn’t care so much, but were you surprised to see this in the New York Times?

Aaron Lammer: Not really. I think that the Venezuela case for Bitcoin has been brewing for a pretty long time. There’s a pretty concerted effort. It’s probably the most optimistic universally good story happening in crypto right now. It’s not surprising to me that this would land in the Times. Were you surprised?

Jay Kang: No, I wasn’t really surprised, but if we do go and think about things from a … Obviously, every piece that’s printed in New York Times font has a conspiracy theory attached to it. I would say that some people would say that this was only published so that people get a sense of how bad economic conditions were in Venezuela, therefore, opening more public sentiment for some sort of coup there or something like that or intervention in what’s going on. I don’t think that’s try, but then, at the same time, I’m like, “Okay, that’s not true because editors are just people who have to fill space and they’re just trying to find something interesting.”

Jay Kang: There was a way that this thing was written that it did feel a lot more advocate like than your general op-ed. That did make me pause a little bit. I’m not accusing the New York Times op-ed page of any wrongdoing or even any … I really do think that they thought it was interesting. They published it, but I could see an argument in what you would say, the way this is written is a little bit too, hey, this is … It felt like an ad for Bitcoin, honestly.

Aaron Lammer: Well, okay, I disagree with that on a few levels. One, the New York Times publishes a lot of op-eds.

Jay Kang: Defend the New York Times!

Aaron Lammer: The New York Times publishes a lot of op-eds so it’s not like crazy that this-

Jay Kang: Yeah, sure and some of them are much more, let’s say, problematic like when they publish the head of Blackwater writing an op-ed. That’s [crosstalk 00:54:35].

Aaron Lammer: Sure, sure, sure. I actually don’t think this is a particularly controversial op-ed insofar as I do think whether you support a U.S. intervention in Venezuela or not, I would say that Maduro has been more or less verified internationally as the villain in this story. For the New York Times to publish an op-ed that contains anti-Maduro sentiments isn’t hugely surprising to me.

Aaron Lammer: The entire story of Bitcoin in Venezuela wouldn’t be a positive story if you’re pro-Maduro. Bitcoin is being used as a hedge against Maduro and basically as a way to undermine his economic rule. It shows how Bitcoin can spontaneously intervene in a situation like this and operate at a level in which … And, he talks about how people are actually buying Bitcoin there, which is … Have we ever talked about local Bitcoins on this show?

Jay Kang: No. Yeah, I think we have, but not by name. The concept of it, I think, is something we discussed quite a bit.

Aaron Lammer: It’s like a Craigslist X website that pairs buyers with sellers to either make in-person, or if you direct bag transfer, Bitcoin transactions. The author … I’ve heard of a lot of people buying Bitcoin in coffee shops and so forth in Venezuela from just private dealers, but he’s doing it through bank transfers. He says that under a $50 transfer doesn’t get flagged by the administration. He sends it to someone and they send back Bitcoin. He was able to get his brother smuggled out to Columbia and secure some of his savings by buying Bitcoin in that way.

Aaron Lammer: It’s an incredible confluence of modern trust technologies that you can basically have someone in a place that has rapidly inflating money doing anonymous Bitcoin transactions on the fly.

Jay Kang: Yeah, the way that it was framed in the piece I thought was very good, which was just like, “Hey, let me tell you what it’s like to buy a carton of milk in Venezuela right now. You can work all you want, but … “ I think his dad works some job and he gets paid basically $6 a month. Obviously, the problems with trying to buy food in Venezuela have been very well documented. He tells you how he does it and how it’s annoying, but it’s possible and that this is the only safeguard he has against the idea that all of his labor and his family’s wealth, which is not that much, but his family’s small amount of savings won’t be evaporated by political instability or political things that happen with Maduro and the economy in Venezuela.

Jay Kang: I don’t know. The thing that I find interesting and this is that, for me, that this is by far the most compelling case for Bitcoin. It’s interesting to see the generational gap, I think, when I was trying to figure out who was talking about this article. People who are a little bit smarter, I think, and a little bit more worldly who really did think that this article was important and then the more into crypto or inside crypto people who more or less ignored it and continued to scream about whatever their [inaudible 00:58:10].

Aaron Lammer: Well, I don’t think that’s totally fair. I think part of the way this story … If you’re asking how it ended up at the New York Times, I saw Anthony P show last week had on a Venezuelan person. The crypto media has been pretty heavily promoting the voices of Venezuelans who are using Bitcoin to control their financial lives. I think that story gets told a million times then it flows to various news outlets and then eventually it’s in the New York Times. It’s like a conservative route to-

Jay Kang: That’s fair. Yeah.

Aaron Lammer: … push the story. What’s interesting to me going forward with this story is we’ve seen that it basically works. There’s enough volume that you’re able to see on the local Bitcoin volume a huge amount of Bitcoin flowing to Venezuela. After Venezuela happens and there’s going to be more of these kinds of incidents because states fail all the time in the world, will Venezuela ever go back to a Bolivar-style system or will Bitcoin eventually become the defacto currency of Venezuela and will these countries that use Bitcoin for stability end up just using them for their economy in the future?

Jay Kang: I think there’s zero chance that they switch to Bitcoin as their currency. It’s not just Venezuela obviously that’s interested in this. There are a lot of much more powerful countries including our own that have a lot of incentive to not make that happen. I think that they will apply any sort of military or political pressure possible to make sure that that doesn’t happen.

Aaron Lammer: Maybe going Bitcoin economy will be the new going Marxist for our country.

Jay Kang: The new Cold War between companies on the-

Aaron Lammer: Yeah, it will be [crosstalk 01:00:09] maximalism. If we let maximalism spread to Columbia, we’re going to lose all of Central America.

Jay Kang: Yeah, [inaudible 01:00:18] is the new-

Aaron Lammer: Becomes the new Cheng.

Jay Kang: He becomes a freedom fighter.

Aaron Lammer: Again, I would see that movie.

Jay Kang: I would see that movie, but I would not want to live in that country.

Aaron Lammer: All right, well, good talking. I have a feeling we’ll probably be talking about the Venezuela stuff again because it seems like it’s a story that’s only growing.