Shownotes
This week's news has Twitter all riled up. And it wasn't just about Elon's taking over. It seems that the FTX Exchange of Sam Bankman-Fried may be a little too cozy with Alameda Research. And Binance will be selling all their FTT tokens.. Is this all related? Will it crash the market? Does it matter?
News and Notes
Bank of England raises interest rates by 75 BPS
Bank of England on Recession Fears
Bitcoin Magazine Opinion on Alameda
Mining for Groceries in Lebanon
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I can be reached by email at mcintosh@genwealthcrypto.com and on twitter at @McIntoshFinTech. My mastodon handle is @mcintosh@podcastindex.social. Looking forward to hearing from you!
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Music Credits
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Transcripts
Hey, Sat Stackers. It's November the 7th. This is Episode 80 of Generational Wealth of Cryptocurrency.
Speaker:I'm your host, McIntosh. Today, we're questioning if Alameda is Celsius 2.0.
Speaker:Of course, no one on this podcast is a financial advisor. All information
Speaker:presented on this podcast is for informational purposes only.
Speaker:Now that we have the legal stuff out of the way, let's jump on in.
Speaker:All right, everybody. We'll start with our market update. This week, in fact, has been very boring,
Speaker:as have been many weeks here. Right now, we just closed out the week, of course.
Speaker:We were down for the week. Our levels, 20,926.49 for Bitcoin, 1572.23 for Ethereum, and then
Speaker:just a little bit over 40 cents for ADA. All three of those are down.
Speaker:Actually, Bitcoin was up $300. I didn't realize that until just now. Bitcoin's actually up $300
Speaker:from last week. The other two are very slightly down. So, overall, basically another week of
Speaker:sideways, which if you look at the charts, that's what we're seeing on a daily level.
Speaker:We got a little bit of down, and then we got a bump up towards the end of the week, and then
Speaker:we actually ended up Sunday a little bit lower. So, I know y'all are tired of hearing me say this,
Speaker:but we haven't reached whatever point it is that we're going to reach in order to either go up or
Speaker:go down. I'm still of the opinion we're going down. I'm still continuing to buy with a DCA
Speaker:strategy, just as I always talk to y'all about, and that's all that I'm going to say. There's
Speaker:nothing really left to say. So, we will move on. The weekly topic this week is actually something
Speaker:that has frankly been all over crypto Twitter, if you want to call it that, and the various
Speaker:crypto news sources, and it involves something that we discussed a little bit just recently
Speaker:on episode 78. I think we also did discuss it somewhat on episode 79 as kind of a follow-up.
Speaker:Sam Bankman-Fried, who is CEO of the FXT, FTX, whatever crypto exchange, which as I always do,
Speaker:I continue to get wrong because I don't use it, and I can't, I don't know, whatever. It doesn't
Speaker:matter. You can look it up. It's not too hard to find. I think it's FTX. He also has a trading
Speaker:company, from what I can tell, called Alameda Research. I think the idea there is they use
Speaker:their own capital. They probably have other people that put in capital, and they're trading
Speaker:with that. From his backstory, apparently, Sam made his money crypto trading a few years ago.
Speaker:It's been a few years since he's been involved in the space. I think he's been involved in the
Speaker:space. I'm not going to go too much into his personal details. You can look that up. It's
Speaker:open information out there. It's just not really relevant to this discussion. He did make his money
Speaker:in crypto, from what I can tell. He set up, of course, the FTX exchange. He's also set up this
Speaker:trading branch of his business, which in theory, they're two separate businesses.
Speaker:It turns out that a lot of the capital of Alameda Research, which I'm going to start calling Alameda
Speaker:just to shorten this up, is actually the FTX token, which I don't know what they call that
Speaker:off hand. I think it's FTT. That is correct. The FTT token was this token that was created
Speaker:literally by FTX, and they own a lot of it. I've talked in the past a lot about centralized
Speaker:exchanges, centralized tokens, centralized crypto. It turns out that that is really what's going on
Speaker:here. Now, some of this stuff is just rumor. Some of it is there are certain facts in this matter,
Speaker:which I will be talking about, but I would emphasize, of course, all this comes off of
Speaker:Twitter, but the reality is it doesn't even matter if what I'm going to lay out actually takes place.
Speaker:The market can get spooked about a product and cause an issue. I don't know if I've never
Speaker:recommended this FTT token. I've never even talked really about FTX before this. You may or may not
Speaker:have money on FTX. You may or may not have FTT token, but to cut to the chase before I lay all
Speaker:this out, my recommendation would at least be if you own FTT tokens that you probably would wish to
Speaker:think about maybe moving them at this point, selling them into something that's a little more
Speaker:stable, should I say? So FTT, of course, like a lot of the tokens is down, but it is even down
Speaker:it is even down more in the last few days. Now, we know
Speaker:it's going to get complicated here, so bear with me. Binance
Speaker:put money into FTX apparently, and in return, they got a bunch of FTT tokens. Now,
Speaker:I'm seeing half a billion dollars, something $529 billion. I think I've even seen some higher
Speaker:numbers than that. It doesn't really matter, but the CEO of Binance, who is,
Speaker:who is, he goes by CZ. He's Chinese, or at least of Chinese ancestry, and he came on Twitter
Speaker:earlier today and said that they were selling all their tokens, all their FTT tokens. Now,
Speaker:I'm going to read the tweets. These are tweets that were up on Twitter,
Speaker:and so this is public record, if you want to call it that.
Speaker:All right. So here, here's the first tweet, and this is the important one. All right.
Speaker:Now, this is directly from CZ's Twitter account. As part of Binance's exit from FTX equity last year,
Speaker:Binance received roughly $2 billion in US dollar equivalent in cash,
Speaker:BUSD, which I believe is a stablecoin, and FTT. Due to recent revelations that have come to light,
Speaker:we have decided to liquidate any remaining FTT on our books, which apparently that number is around
Speaker:$5.5 million, or $512 million, or whatever. We will try to do so in a way that minimizes
Speaker:market impact due to market conditions and limited liquidity, and I would emphasize limited
Speaker:liquidity. We expect this will take a few months to complete.
Speaker:Binance always encourages, that was 13 hours ago, all of these are. Binance always encourages
Speaker:collaboration between industry players. At 13 hours ago when I recorded this, so that
Speaker:would put it early Sunday morning East Coast US time. Binance always encourages collaboration
Speaker:between industry players. Regarding any speculation as to whether this is a move against a competitor,
Speaker:it is not. I believe he's saying this for legal reasons. Our industry is in its
Speaker:nasancy, which means beginnings, and every time a project publicly fails, it hurts every user and
Speaker:platform. That is true. And then he said, we typically hold tokens for a long term. We have
Speaker:held onto this token for this long. And that's exactly what he said. I don't know what that
Speaker:means. We stay transparent with our actions. And that was the end of that Twitter thread.
Speaker:So at this point, the CEO, it's like a soap opera. I kid you not. This stuff is just jacked up.
Speaker:So the CEO of Alameda, who's a woman by the name of Caroline, I believe, she on Twitter says,
Speaker:essentially she said, and I did see the tweet. I don't have it right here in front of me,
Speaker:but she said, we'll buy it for $22, all that you have right now so that you don't have to
Speaker:take all these months to do it. The current price of FTT is $22. It's been falling, but it's $22.
Speaker:Actually, here's the tweet, and that's what she said. She said, if you're looking
Speaker:to minimize the market impact on FTT sales, Alameda will happily buy it all from you today
Speaker:all from you today at $22. I don't know what I saw in one point during my research. I should
Speaker:have written it down, but I saw the percentage of the FTT tokens that Alameda held. I saw the
Speaker:percentage that Binance held. They were two of the top. I believe Alameda is the top holder.
Speaker:I'm not certain about Binance. So what you're saying is now we're even going to put more of
Speaker:it in Alameda's hands, even more centralization, which then means, frankly, they can do whatever
Speaker:they want. They can rug pull it. They can, I don't know, they can have shenanigans with it, so to
Speaker:speak. This kicked off a lot of stuff, and a lot of people speculating, a lot of people thinking
Speaker:that this is going to turn into Celsius with the Luna token going down to zero because,
Speaker:effectively, because they were over leveraged and all this. Now, I've seen stuff that I'm
Speaker:not going to directly report on because it is rumor. This, of course, is absolutely the truth.
Speaker:It's right there on Twitter. I mean, it's what they said. I will say this. It appears that Alameda
Speaker:has a large percentage of their liquidity, their capital in FTT, which, in my opinion,
Speaker:makes them very vulnerable. Now, I believe that Sam is a very smart person. I also believe that
Speaker:it is possible, and I've seen this before in the crypto space, that people can be really smart and
Speaker:think that they understand everything that's going on and miss things that are very obvious
Speaker:because of a blind spot. That's a possibility in this case. I also believe that people who are
Speaker:really smart sometimes in this space, they think they've pulled the wool over everyone's eyes,
Speaker:and they've tricked everyone, and it's okay to take advantage of people. That's a possibility
Speaker:in this case. He could be doing the exact right thing. That is a possibility in this case.
Speaker:My stance on all this is I don't know, but what I do know is that things don't look good,
Speaker:and because of that, I would encourage you, if you have any FTT tokens, that you sell them,
Speaker:even if it is at a loss, as risk management. Now, if the token pops up to whatever its all-time
Speaker:high is tomorrow, then I will be wrong, and I could have cost you some money,
Speaker:but you will be as safe as possible. Let me ask you this. If all this between Binance and FTX and
Speaker:these two guys who are both wealthy and extremely intelligent, and the general public out there on
Speaker:the crypto Twitter, what if a lot of these people are correct, and Alameda is over leveraged,
Speaker:Alameda is fudging the numbers, so to speak, because really they're getting those tokens from FTX,
Speaker:and so some people think this is like a big shell game. Okay?
Speaker:I don't want to call it a Ponzi because it's not a Ponzi, but a big shell game would probably be
Speaker:more accurate. Now, I do not know that, and I am not insinuating that that is the case. I'm just
Speaker:saying that's what some people seem to think. Maybe that's true. So I've got three or four
Speaker:different options, actually more than that, four or five different options, possibilities, things
Speaker:that might happen, and only one of those is Sam actually knows what he's doing, and everything's
Speaker:good, and they've got the capital, they've got the liquidity they need, and they're out there trading.
Speaker:So from a risk management perspective, if I had any money involved in any of this, which I do not,
Speaker:I would be taking it out. I would be converting it. It would not be an FTX. It would be a
Speaker:I would be converting it. It would not be an FTT. It would not be sitting in Alameda,
Speaker:if that's even possible, which I don't know if it is or not, if they take on institutional investors.
Speaker:If I had anything on FTX, I would remove it as a point of risk at this point, and I'm going to
Speaker:read through some of the tweets that I came across. If you missed the warnings over the last three
Speaker:years, I'll say it again, not your keys, not your crypto. I've said that myself before. Don't learn
Speaker:this lesson the hard way like others who came before you. That came from N2 Cryptoverse,
Speaker:who is somebody that I've mentioned a couple of times on this show. He used to be like a
Speaker:nuclear physicist or something, really smart, and now he has a YouTube channel, and he's
Speaker:doing crypto, if you want to call it that, and completely unassuming, he's probably still
Speaker:recording on a cardboard box. Six months or so ago, he was talking about maybe upgrading to a,
Speaker:I don't know, a desk or whatever, which don't, please don't. I mean, the dude knows what he's
Speaker:talking about. So anyways, I'll just leave that there. That's what he said, and he was referring
Speaker:to this indirectly. Another person said, I think most people are missing the whole point of the
Speaker:FTT FUD, so the token, and FUD is fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It's not the amount of tokens
Speaker:Binance can sell. It's the point that they are selling. Why? What do they know are the
Speaker:rumors of insolvency? True. And I would agree. Now, CZ may be just be doing this because,
Speaker:as risk management. Now, why he would say, I'm going to do it over a number of months,
Speaker:he implies it's because of the liquidity of the market. And if you're having to worry about the
Speaker:liquidity of the market to sell 500 million tokens or dollars worth of tokens, then you're
Speaker:tokens. That's not a very big market, which FTT is not, frankly. Another thing I saw,
Speaker:I don't know where they got these figures on. So I can't quote this as being true.
Speaker:FTX and FTT tokens reported Alameda assets. So this is the trading portion, 5.82 billion of FTT.
Speaker:Wow. I don't know if this is, if this is true, this is crazy. And the FTT current market cap
Speaker:is only 3.35 billion. I don't know how you get that. I know that some of these tokens are locked
Speaker:up or something. Maybe they're not part of the market cap. I don't know. But that's just,
Speaker:I don't know. That's kind of crazy. The point is, the point is simple. The point is that a lot of
Speaker:the capital of Alameda is these FTT tokens. It's a significant portion of their portfolio.
Speaker:All right. So what's the lesson? Lesson is, shouldn't be putting any kind of money into
Speaker:some type of system like this that you can't afford to lose. If this is your long-term wealth
Speaker:that you're talking about, you should be practicing some things like cold storage
Speaker:in your own house, maybe, or a bank deposit vault, if that makes you feel better, or something,
Speaker:a bank deposit box, whatever. You shouldn't have it on one of these centralized exchanges.
Speaker:If you have money, and again, I don't know if Alameda takes private investors. Maybe they don't,
Speaker:but there are companies that certainly do. If you're putting money in something like that,
Speaker:you do need to be prepared to be able to lose that. Do not put your life savings in some
Speaker:thing like that. I'm not going to tell you that you shouldn't, although I'm going to recommend
Speaker:that you be very careful, because as this market unwinds, especially, we find out more and more
Speaker:that these things are just kind of, well, I think shell game is a pretty good way of putting it.
Speaker:So be very careful. What else?
Speaker:This, if this is true, I'm going to speculate a little bit.
Speaker:I do believe that Alameda is very over put into FTT. I'm not going to say that that's going to
Speaker:crash FTT, or that's going to crash Alameda. And by the way, Alameda owes Voyager, who's one of
Speaker:these bankrupt companies from Celsius involved in all that Luna, Celsius, whatever. I don't
Speaker:remember the connection at this point, but regardless, they owed them something like half
Speaker:a billion dollars. So you see how all this, it's like all of this crazy web of IOUs and
Speaker:and I'm going to take the token from over here and put it over here. And really, these are the same,
Speaker:they're two distinct companies, but they're not, if you know what I mean. So regardless,
Speaker:please be careful. Please be safe. Your best strategy is strictly to DCA. If you want to
Speaker:trade, if you want to do things like that, and I don't talk about trading a whole lot,
Speaker:but if you want to trade, you should be doing that with a separate pool of money. This is money that
Speaker:if it gets nuked, which it should not, but if it gets nuked, I'm okay with that. Don't intermingle
Speaker:it with your long term money, your, your savings, so to speak, and if to put it in current monetary
Speaker:terms, well, that makes a lot of sense, right? I've got a savings account. I don't trade out of my
Speaker:savings account. All right. So that's that. What do we got next? I believe what we have next is our
Speaker:supporters. Apparently, I'm still not getting the quite right thing here. I don't know.
Speaker:No, bring this up. All right. I, I still don't, I don't know. I still don't have all this figured
Speaker:out. I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, if this is just the bear market. I don't know,
Speaker:but we'll figure it out. Hopefully. We certainly have a lot of new people listening to the show.
Speaker:By the way, if you're listening to this and you're a new listener, this is what they call
Speaker:a value for value show. If you're using a podcasting 2.0 app, you can stream stats to the show
Speaker:to support the show. You can boost, which means basically you send a set amount of money
Speaker:at one time and you can send a text message that way or what amounts to a text message that way
Speaker:as well. So that you can make a comment or tell me, you know, tell me what I'm doing wrong or
Speaker:whatever. One of the things I did want to say is that I was able to, I believe I've got things set
Speaker:up to do chapters tonight. I hope we will see. And we'll find out shortly when I pull this into
Speaker:the editor and start trying to work on it. So hopefully this will be our first episode
Speaker:with chapters. I have of course been doing transcripts lately and so post the transcript
Speaker:along with the show. I try and get that into the show notes as well. All right. Where am I at?
Speaker:Still not there yet. Ideally, I would have a place that, you know, new listeners could go to.
Speaker:If you Google value for value, there's information out there, value, the number four value podcasting.
Speaker:I do recommend that you get a podcasting 2.0 app, which is brand new apps that have been coming out
Speaker:over the last, I guess, over a year now. And they support all these, a lot of new features,
Speaker:transcripts, chapters, streaming, boosting, a number of other things, and they are continuing
Speaker:to innovate. It's cutting edge. Frankly, podcasting has been very stale for a long time. And this group
Speaker:of people, which includes one of the co-founders of podcasting, Adam Curry, they are trying to push
Speaker:things forward and they are succeeding. All right. Let's see here. So that's cool. Hey, Jenny,
Speaker:there you are. Haven't seen you in a bit. I'm glad you're out there listening. Hope you heard
Speaker:your name last week on our top boosters. I think you were number two and she returns with three
Speaker:boosts in a row. 490. Oh no, that's correct. Now let me figure out what I'm doing. Actually five,
Speaker:I apologize. Or am I reading this right? Again, with the fonts. Let's see. One, two, three, four.
Speaker:No, it is four. Okay. I can, I can, I can count. The booster different. One of them is different.
Speaker:So anyways, this is awesome. Thank you, Jenny. The first one, is this the deep breath before the
Speaker:storm? She boosted 495. Are reversible transactions a good thing? Boosted 495. News notes and more
Speaker:regulation talk, which I think was last week's episode 990. Awesome. Thank you. And is this
Speaker:deep breath before the storm? She boosted 495. So she actually boosted that one twice. That is
Speaker:awesome. I saw at one point when the summary came through for the day that somebody had boosted,
Speaker:it didn't show me who normally when I get a boost with the Satoshi stream, it sends you a message.
Speaker:So it was a pleasant surprise at the end of the day when I got that lump sum notification,
Speaker:but I did not know who did that until just now. So that's awesome. Thank you, Jenny. I appreciate
Speaker:that. Jenny probably is one of our oldest supporters at this point. So that's cool.
Speaker:At least I'm doing that right. I know she loves our music at the end. So I'll leave that in there
Speaker:for you. Right. Cool. And that's it. So we will, and no message, feel free to send one, Jenny.
Speaker:Thank you. Let's jump into the news. A lot of this news I've already covered, of course,
Speaker:with our discussion earlier. So I won't be covering those. There will be links in the show notes
Speaker:about those. The Bank of England raised interest rates early last week by 0.75%.
Speaker:As bad as England is doing and as high as their interest or their inflation rate is, which
Speaker:it's around 10%. This was the biggest hike in 33 years, by the way. But they've only moved up to
Speaker:3% for their rates. I'm going to go out a little bit on a limb here. I'm not an expert on this,
Speaker:but I do believe around the world, frankly, all of these countries who are raising rates to try and
Speaker:lower inflation, which is the only thing that they can do, I do believe they all started too late.
Speaker:They're at 10% inflation and they're only at a 3% central bank rate. So also late early this week,
Speaker:the Bank of England came out and they said basically that the US or the UK, excuse me,
Speaker:I apologize, their English friends, they warned that the UK is headed towards the longest recession
Speaker:in modern history. Now, I don't exactly know what they mean by that. I guess they're saying
Speaker:it's going to be longer than the Great Depression, which I am really strongly starting to see that
Speaker:myself. There'll be a link to that show note as well. But they are all doom and gloom at this
Speaker:point. I'm like, where were you guys six months a year ago or more really? I did see an interesting
Speaker:note. I don't have a source for this. I do believe this is coming though. I'll just quote this.
Speaker:If there's maybe an interest in this, I'll dig into this maybe as an entire episode. I don't know.
Speaker:This is kind of outside the purview of crypto, but this is kind of stuff we unfortunately have
Speaker:to keep track of. Interest payments on our, and this means US, $31 trillion in US debt is about
Speaker:to exceed what we spend on the Defense Department. Now, if I remember correctly, the Defense Department,
Speaker:which is basically all the military spending, is our biggest piece of the budgetary pie.
Speaker:I know you all are sitting out there going, God, McIntosh, why on earth would you even know that?
Speaker:I don't know. I'm crazy. Yes, our Defense Department, our military spending is the
Speaker:largest part of our budget, and it's quite sad. But our interest payments will exceed that.
Speaker:The problem is our interest payments have been quote, relatively low. It's still a very large
Speaker:amount, but they've been relatively low because the interest rates have been so low. But as these
Speaker:interest rates ratchet up, as they must, when the treasury bonds mature and they roll over,
Speaker:they roll over at the higher interest rate. And that drives up the interest
Speaker:that we have to pay, is what I understand. This person said, we are entering a debt death spiral.
Speaker:Interest on the debt will double if they leave the rates above 4% for about three years. And I do
Speaker:believe that is possible. All the debt maturing rolls over at a higher rate. And that's what I
Speaker:just described. That actually very well summarizes my fear. And this is how I believe the United
Speaker:States in particular could enter hyperinflation, which would be a terribly nasty thing. Our
Speaker:unemployment, and this again is the U.S. reached 3.7%, which is actually quite low. And I only
Speaker:bring this up because this to me means that they are going to continue to raise interest rates.
Speaker:The reason why they're trying to raise interest to, how can I put this? There's not a tactful way
Speaker:to put this. They're trying to raise interest rates to stall business growth, which will
Speaker:raise unemployment. So they're monitoring the unemployment numbers very closely, but we're
Speaker:nowhere near what they would need in their little fantasy world, frankly, to pivot, to turn around
Speaker:and start quantitative easing, which I call money printing, right? So the unemployment
Speaker:has to go up, but one of the problems is they've also changed how they monitor unemployment.
Speaker:And really the unemployment is people who are not actively out on the job market seeking a job,
Speaker:3.7%. The reality is there's a lot more people out there who've somehow they're getting by with
Speaker:family or whatever, or they're taking part-time work instead of full-time work. So this really
Speaker:doesn't cover what, in my opinion, is going on out in the actual world. All right, we've done
Speaker:all the FTX stuff. There will be links to that, including this balance sheet information, which
Speaker:is quite good. I'm also including some opinion pieces about Alameda. I did not really include
Speaker:those. I did read through them and it's very interesting material. They're not primary source
Speaker:material, I would say, and I'm not going to report on them other than to say I will be including
Speaker:them. So if you're pondering this or wondering what's going on, you may not care. You should care
Speaker:because if this goes belly up, this will be the next Celsius. And that's why I titled the show
Speaker:this way. And when Celsius went down, it drugged the entire market down to where we're at today,
Speaker:to where we're at today, basically. And I've been saying for a long time, I have highly
Speaker:suspicious that we will go down to a level of 17,000 or maybe even lower, not 17,000,
Speaker:somewhere in the range of 14 to 16,000. Excuse me. 17 was where we got back to back in June or
Speaker:July. I think it was late June, regardless to these extraordinarily low levels for the current
Speaker:climate, so to speak. All right. And what else do we have? Oh yeah, this is crazy.
Speaker:Oh my goodness, people. My fellow Americans, seriously,
Speaker:I wonder about you sometimes. Actually, I don't wonder. This doesn't surprise me one bit.
Speaker:All right. There was a Newsweek poll. So Newsweek is a newsletter magazine here in the United
Speaker:States. They did a poll, 63%. So the majority of Americans support the federal government sending
Speaker:new stimulus checks to fight inflation. Now, that's a slightly misleading headline. Yes,
Speaker:they want to fight their own personal inflation, the higher energy costs that they're paying,
Speaker:their higher gas costs that they're paying, the higher everything, just everything, food, rent,
Speaker:whatever. And they want the government sending them $1,500 per person checks or whatever
Speaker:to fight inflation. But how is the government going to get that money? They're going to create
Speaker:more money and create more debt, which is going to drive the inflation. And it's like...
Speaker:All right. I'm going to close on what sounds like a very depressing story,
Speaker:but I think it's awesome. Now, I will say this. I do feel bad for people who are in situations
Speaker:like this, but these people who are doing this, it's innovative. And that's what I'm celebrating.
Speaker:Does that make sense? So I've mentioned before, Lebanon having severe economic issues,
Speaker:really what amounts to, well, they are experiencing hyperinflation.
Speaker:But I came across this awesome news article in Bankrupt Lebanon, which they've closed the banks,
Speaker:that people were literally holding the banks up to get their own money out because the money
Speaker:was deflating. It's a crazy, crazy situation. Anyways, locals mine Bitcoin and buy groceries
Speaker:with Tether, which is a US dollar stable coin, because their local currency is so
Speaker:dramatically deflated. Now, this headline literally says, as a dollar is now worth 15 cents, which
Speaker:that doesn't make any sense. I believe what they mean is a dollar in the local currency
Speaker:from some period of time ago, say a year ago, it's now worth the equivalent of 15 cents.
Speaker:Regardless, I do know they've had massive hyperinflation of their currency, I guess
Speaker:deflation of their currency itself, but people are looking to use US dollars. And so this guy,
Speaker:and they picked out one guy in particular, they were talking about, I'm sure he's not the only one.
Speaker:I don't know if they bring that out in this article, but regardless, he started mining Bitcoin.
Speaker:I'm going to read this one paragraph. In the spring of 2022, Gabriel, I think maybe that's
Speaker:how that's said, Gabriel says the banks were closed and locals were barred from withdrawing
Speaker:money from their accounts. Receiving cash via international wire transfers wasn't a great option
Speaker:either. Since the services would take US dollars from the sender and give Lebanese pounds to the
Speaker:recipient at a much lower market rate, he's losing half his value doing that. So he found out about
Speaker:Bitcoin, about mining. And so now basically he's doing freelance work, he's mining Bitcoin,
Speaker:and then he's using the mined Bitcoin, and Bitcoin, he gets paid for his freelance work
Speaker:in both US dollars and Bitcoin to buy his groceries, to pay his rent, to do those kind of things.
Speaker:So he basically stays out of the local currency. I thought that was really cool. It's a great
Speaker:article. You should take a read. There's a lot of suffering. I'm going to close with this, I promise.
Speaker:I'm going to wrap this up and yay, we're going to be under an hour tonight. That'll be awesome.
Speaker:I talk about the US, I talk about Western Europe, China, Japan,
Speaker:the so-called developed world a lot, but there's a lot of suffering already going on around the
Speaker:world. Places like Africa, places like this in the Middle East, Lebanon, North Africa, in particular,
Speaker:Egypt. I was just reading high, high inflation. It's funny because one of the people that I
Speaker:have do freelance work for me for some completely other stuff,
Speaker:is they're doing freelance work in Fiverr. She lives in Egypt and I'm paying her in US dollars.
Speaker:So she's getting around that situation very similarly to what this person is.
Speaker:To me, so much of this ties back to fiat money, to these crazy monetary systems that these countries
Speaker:have developed really since the early 1900s, certainly post-World War II. Bitcoin, to me,
Speaker:will have a very large part of the monetary future. It will have to because there's nothing
Speaker:else that can do what it can on a worldwide scale and replace this falling stuff.
Speaker:It will be a painful process, but people like Gabriel here in this article will be the people
Speaker:who will lead the innovations for their countries to enable them to move forward and not just fall
Speaker:into complete chaos. We're seeing this in Africa. I love the stuff I'm hearing out of Africa. I
Speaker:mentioned just recently, this organization that is going into places where they have water in Africa,
Speaker:they're installing micro hydro setups or even larger, which provides power that those people
Speaker:desperately need to improve their quality of living. And at the same time, they're mining
Speaker:Bitcoin. And there's a large number of people in places like Nigeria that are learning about
Speaker:Bitcoin and getting proficient even in programming Bitcoin and working in Bitcoin. Bitcoin and some
Speaker:of these other currencies potentially will help these countries make it through what's becoming
Speaker:a very apparent, a really difficult time. We here in the United States, and I would argue even as
Speaker:bad as Western Europe is right now, in Western Europe, we live a semi-sheltered life compared to
Speaker:a lot of the places around the world. And I don't ever want to forget that. And that's why I take
Speaker:the time to talk about places like El Salvador and these African countries. I see a lot of
Speaker:African countries. I spent what? An entire episode, multiple episodes talking about the French
Speaker:colonialism in Africa and how even to this day, they are still manipulating their monetary market
Speaker:and it is wrong. And I will not start going on about that. All right. As I said earlier,
Speaker:the Generational Wealth Cryptocurrency podcast is a 2.0 podcast. What that means is they're
Speaker:building all this innovation on podcasting 2.0. Great new stuff that you're not going to get on
Speaker:your Apple, iPod, what is this called now? Podcast player or Spotify. Two great examples,
Speaker:two very large clients. The innovation is not happening there. It is happening right here on
Speaker:the Fountain app, on the CurioCaster app, on stuff like that. You need to go check it out.
Speaker:The podcasting 2.0 team, if you want to call it that, and they're not getting paid for all
Speaker:this or whatever, but they're working on it. They put together a webpage at newpodcastapps.com.
Speaker:You can go check that out. That list, all of the apps, there's a lot of them and their
Speaker:functionality. Some of them have different things, transcripts, which I mentioned,
Speaker:they all support chapters. I believe the majority of them support streaming sats and boosting
Speaker:to support people like me. Now, I don't ever take advertisers. I don't ever take sponsors.
Speaker:That way I can do things like talk about FTX and this shady stuff, shall I put it that way,
Speaker:going on with Alameda. I don't have to worry about that. You go and listen to some podcasts
Speaker:and they have, and these are, maybe they're not news podcasts and I'm really not a news podcast,
Speaker:but I do talk about the news a lot. They'll be sponsored by Coinbase. I'm like,
Speaker:how do you do that? Well, they pay us a lot of money and there's a lot of money in advertising,
Speaker:by the way. I get that. It depends on what you're doing, but I can't do that with journalistic
Speaker:integrity. I'm not here to rant on other people. It's not my business, but I don't ever have to
Speaker:worry about that. I can talk about what I hear, what I see, what I read, and I share that with
Speaker:y'all. I hope that that provides you with value. If you're getting value from that, then you should
Speaker:please give me value back because I spend a lot of time on this and I'm still building things up.
Speaker:Like I said, I'm working on chapters, so on and so forth. Another thing you can do to help out
Speaker:the show, tell other people about it. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful and I
Speaker:would love to hear from you. I'm on Twitter at McIntosh Fintech. I'm also on... I need to actually
Speaker:fill this in. I'm on Mastodon as well. I know a lot of people are in a Twitter kerfuffle these days,
Speaker:which is... Twitter's not a decentralized service, so I'll just leave it at that,
Speaker:regardless of who's running it. I do post on Twitter. I also post on Mastodon. I'll have that
Speaker:next week. You can reach me by email at mcintosh@genwealthcrypto.com. Of course,
Speaker:the generational wealth website is at genwealthcrypto.com. Stay humble, friends. Go out