From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of My Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is known. They called me Ben. We are joined as always with our super producer, all mission control decond Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. You know, I was thinking in our previous episode, are two part episode on Davos in the World Economic Forum. The whole time I was listening back, because we listen back to every episode to make sure that we that we uh said what we meant to say. I was thinking we missed that opportunity to talk about something that we usually mentioned, which is that money as a concept is pretty tricky. When you talk about inequality, you talked about the value of something, you get into some murky, surprisingly philosophical territory really quickly, like there's no real way to differentiate between economic ideology or religious ideology. We have had for how many years now, for a while now, we've had like a standing call for someone to tell us what makes those two things different? Do you guys remember that. Has anybody written into us to give us a good difference yet? No, We've always said they're so We're Yeah, it's just they're so similar. So when we talk about currency, I think one thing that's interesting. In our earlier episode on cash less societies and what that might mean, we all noted that we had been using cash less forms of payment more and more often, and I was interested in Yule's experience. Did you find that increasingly the case during the pandemic? Oh? Sure, I mean it makes me think back to an episode Ben, you and I recorded recently on our other show, Ridiculous History about leper colonies and uh leprosy currency, the idea that that cash could be transmitting disease. And I think there are a lot of businesses that weren't even accepting cash at all during the pandemic, let alone people being stoked about, you know, uh, interchanging bills with others who they don't know if they are carriers of of the virus or not. So absolutely, and it seems like that is certainly um to blame or to credit for the massive spike and say Amazon sales and stock price and Jeff Bezoz you know pocket money and other you know companies like that delivery services, food delivery. I mean it was all cashless. Yeah, And as we talked about in that episode and the other episodes of stuff, they'll want you to know, physical money, especially the bills, the holding money, as they called it back in the day, is filthy. It's got traces of cocaine on it, and like US bills have traces of feces on them. It's just not it's not cleanton stuff. But it does represent this idea of value. And in a way, that's what today's episode is really about. It's about something you may have heard of recently in the news, where you may have heard of as early asen hauled an in f T. What is an n f T? Well, to tell you, we have to do a quick recap of what cryptocurrency is first, So here are the facts. And if you're like me, your head is going to be banging against the wall for much of this episode. But is it is it a physical wall that there's like a blockchain of your head hitting a blockchain? Idea of a wall is a wall coin? No matter what it is, my neck and head are thrusting forward vigorously and multiple times until until I either understand or cease to be awake for a while. Sorry, let's get into cryptocurrency. Tough to understand a little bit, but it's also i've been You've done a great job breaking it down in this episode, so let's just talk about it. A cryptocurrency is a digital currency that could be used to buy anything, any kind of service, any kind of good. Uh, it's just a little different. It uses this thing, an online ledger. It uses cryptography to protect that ledger and to protect transactions and to keep a chain essentially of all of the interactions that that particular piece of currency has gone through, just for the record. In its In its form, cryptocurrency can be used to buy anything. It has to be converted back to US d um. There's some vendors that will accept cryptocurrency, like I think Tesla is talking about accepting cryptocurrency for transactions and things like that, and they're even starting to be crypto a t M machines at like gas stations and stuff. It's starting to be mainstreamed in an interesting way, and it's starting to be mainstreamed in a conversational way. In terms of like you know, people from the FED are talking about it, and they're not crazy about it. No. No, that's a good point. They're not because you know, you'll also see reports of some businesses who have maybe tried to accept stuff in cryptocurrency, but then do primarily to concerns about taxation, they had to like roll that back. Uh. These are unregulated currencies. So for a lot of people, this is a an opportunity amid financial chaos. You'll you'll hear about a lot of people who purchased some bitcoin or some doge coin or whatever you want. Let's the general name would be like alt coin, alt coin. They've purchased something like this, and they're not going to Tesla, they're not planning to go to Pizza Future or whatever pizza company we're gonna make up for this episode. Uh. Instead they're buying it, they're holding it, they're going diamond hand. Uh. They're hoping that because there's a lack of regulation here and because the value is is um vulnerable to speculation, that the stuff they paid like, you know, ten dollars for will be worth a hundred dollars at some point and then they'll sell it. Then Uh, it's investing, you know what I mean. It's it's an old game and it's made uh, several people quite wealthy, particularly people who invested in bitcoin earlier, which I'm still kicking myself about totally. I mean, super producer Casey Pegram of ridiculous History always laments about how he had a couple of full bitcoins. When we say a bitcoin, we're today talking about a fraction of a bitcoin, because the value of a bitcoin, I believe now is almost sixty dollars for one. So when you're you know, people like you or I are investing in bitcoin, we're buying point o O two bitcoins or whatever. Um. But then you have some of these alt coins where the value of one it might just be a handful of dollars or a couple of hundred dollars. And that's the thing. They're literally hundreds of these different alt coins, like you said, Ben, and they all have cookie names and are tied to different things like things like Polka dot is one or like cashmere. They're they're almost like a joke, how many of them there are? Um? But you're you're right, then it is a speculative, highly wildly speculative. World where people are making and and uh and losing probb fortunes even based on trying to ride the wave or like make bets. But I think the smart move uh, and hopefully what many folks are doing is just trying to hold onto what you have and and see what happens, especially with the main ones like ethereum and Bitcoin. Yeah, casino rules holds for any kind of gambling. Don't walk in there with more than you can afford to lose, considering goodbye money. Right. Uh. We've done episodes touch on numerous aspects of this in the past. Please do check those out. Will probably name drop a few on the way. We also want to recommend some work by our complaint department Jonathan Strickland over on his show Tech Stuff. He has some great primers on the basics of cryptocurrency, the origin of bitcoin, and so on. But for real quick refresher for this before we get into the very strange story, maybe we can talk about pros and cons of of cryptocurrency in general. Right, Bitcoin is a kind of cryptocurrency. It's the one that most people would recognize today. First, it's transparent. Wait, how can it be transparent? You're saying I thought people could be anonymous. They can, but the transactions of every bitcoin itself or every piece of cryptocurrency, they're all stored on this open ledger called a blockchain, and that means that information about those transactions is pretty much available to anyone at any time. And if you have problems with the purposeful vagueness of aspects of the banking system, then that's like, that's a really good thing. It's like you can play now you're playing that um oh, what's the street side scam where you got the three cups and you got the ball or some game shell game, shell game, that's the way. Now you're playing a shell game with transparent cups kind of. So there's there's a big advantage. That's a huge pro and it's interesting because you essentially serve as your own bank, like you're not working with a bank. I mean, you have to have use some service as a thing called nexo that's essentially stores your crypto for you and takes it off of the exchange, so it's less like vulnerable. I'm not quite sure what that means, but that's what I was I was explained to me. But they're essentially you are your own bank using this service, and it extends you like credit lines of credit based on how much crypto you're holding. Yeah, exactly, and there will be exit points where you are required to interact with the world's extant financial system. But another advantage that this stuff has over banks is that d s instant. It's possible to buy or spend stuff wherever you are, and you don't have to necessarily have a computer to use it. You can do these kinds of transactions entirely on your phone if you wish. So that does hold real value for people who might be technologically challenged in one way or another. But of course, the big one, the big, big one is anonymity M anonymity. It's sweet. It's the reason everybody is addicted to the Internet, and it's also one of the reasons everybody hates the internet. Uh. Anonymity means that you can have this unregulated currency that's not bound by adjustments or fluctuating political chain j is uh. It's also great for people who value their privacy online, people who are thinking, why I don't want to hand over all my information of one sort or another just so I can get some cheddar, some digital cheddar. Excuse me, and this security the anonymity provides is a benefit, but of course, like other forms of technology like fire, it can be used by anybody. So someone sees it and they say, hey, this is a great way not to freeze in the in the Wild's Yellowstone, and then somebody else says, this is a great way to get rid of that house. I hate fire, and cryptocurrency has the same potential, Like, it's no surprise that people on the dark Web or various black markets would want to use cryptocurrency because you know who really values their anonymity criminals. I feel weird to say it that way, but this is something law enforcement and financial regulators worry about because now you can move vast sums of money in ways that we'll talk about. So that kind of gets us to the cons, and there are cons in addition to anonymity. Well, yeah, the first thing is I already said it in this episode. This stuff can be dang confusing for people like me, um, But you know, it's just do the fact that it seems un unders ununderstandable, incomprehensible, just I don't get it sometimes. But I think that's one of the reasons why I personally haven't taken up, you know, going into crypto at all right now, just because I don't fully understand it. And you know, if you you meet the right person that can kind of bring you into the world, maybe you know, you have a sense that will crypto sense, maybe that'll that'll do the trick. Um, But that really does seem to be the last hurdle. Like if there was some some amazing advocate that was going around and well, I don't know, a good example of this um was the Neil deGrasse Tyson for cryptocurrency, making it understandable for every lay person out there, then maybe there would be wider use of this thing. They're definitely folks like that like on YouTube, but you're right, they're not like they're not like you know, of that degree. And I you know, I'll be completely candid. I've I've begun to dip my toe in it, and it was only because I had a friend who borderline insisted that I do it, like like made me feel almost as though if I didn't do it a little bit, then I'd be like missing out on something really cool. So I did it. Nothing insane, but like he's given me information because even just navigating how to get in and out in the different currencies is all very specific stuff because you have to, like his store it in a specific type of wallet just for that currency, and you know, and just the way it works where you copy and paste these like really long keys to get your money from one place to another. It is a little daunting. And if you don't have someone kind of shepherding you through it, I could see how it would be, uh, not appealing at all. But um, you know, I've been enjoying my very limited experience in it, and so far it's you know, it's going. Okay. We need a jaw rule, we sit down on international news platforms and explain the basis of cryptocurrency. Uh, you know, I don't. I think it's a great bit. I don't care if we're overusing it's it's a great bit. I'll respected. Dave Chappelle another another con of cryptocurrency market fluctuation. In addition to being confusing, right, Matt and I would argue that a lot of people are your your faithful podcaster is included, are also often confused by the existing financial system, which is designed to be confusing so that you can rip people off like that's that's the purpose of it. Uh. In a lot of ways. All I know is I have some dollars and I have some mattresses, and if I put them together, that's the way it should be. I got into crypto mattresses. But the thing is, in addition to being confusing when something is new, it can also be incredibly unpredictable, and systems don't like general unpredictability. What systems like is an inequality of information such that some people can predict things that other people cannot. As a primary force of a lot of these markets, So a lot of people, as we said, bought into one coin or cryptocurrency or another as an investment. And yeah, people are using these the way you use actual money. Somebody famously bought a pizza in the early days of bit coined and now way overpaid for it. People have used it for gambling. That's pretty cool too. There was even a case where somebody bought a house with cryptocurrency. Bought house with bitcoin, but a lot of house. Yes, yes, there is kind of I would say it's kind we'll get to it. But but this is the thing. Most people are a great many people are buying this stuff to hold onto it right. Then the next the next cod would be the scams. As with every emergent technology, there are people that are going to use the inexperienced, naivete basic human trust of other people to cheat them out of stuff. And then that's compounded by the fact that you can accidentally cheat yourself out of stuff here because you can lose millions of US dollars worth of value currency if you lose the stuff you need to access this. This happened to a guy named James Howell's probably the most famous example right now. He literally accidentally throw away a physical hard drive with seven thousand, five hundred bitcoins back in when he was cleaning his home. He like wrote to the local government the authorities of the landfill where he thought it would end up, and they wouldn't let him dig it out. And he is just s o l which on a family show means sorely out of luck. There there are some other pros and cons and we're getting to them, but those are the basics. And when we think about unpredictability, we see the biggest example that just happened, something people hadn't predicted, has already occurred, and it is this the rise of the n f T. What does n f T stand for? Does it Standford? No fun Time? What does it standford? New fun Time? Uh? Does it stand for? What are some other ones's let's just make some things up? Nason, frog tremble, Uh, Mason, that's great. Uh? You know, neo fascist trocolodytes, neo fascist trocolodytes, yes, Nazi cave cave people, yes. Uh? Does it's uh? Does it stand for nearly fanny time? That's filthy? In the UK, it doesn't stand for any of those things. But we'll we'll tell you what it does stand for and why it's got so many people fascinated. After a word from our sponsor, we're back in FT. Despite all the awesome acronyms we just made up, n FT is a real thing. It stands for non fungible token, and fungible in this case has nothing to do with fungi. It's a weird Why I thought that was a made up word. I was not aware of this and uh and uh economic parlance, but it apparently means like one to one right. Um, So a bitcoin is fun fungible. You can trade one for another there and you'll have the same thing. Uh. In the crypto universe, a token is a representation of a thing, um, you know, some building block in this ecosystem. Right. Non fungible means exactly what it sounds like. It means it is one thing and one thing alone. It cannot be traded for another thing because another thing like that doesn't exist. Right. It can't be replaced with something else. There's no um parody there, there's no equivalent. Uh So. One of the first uses was a game called Crypto Kitties. Ben, you gotta tell us about Crypto Kitties. I was not aware of this. Yeah, Crypto Kitties. So Crypto Kitties interesting. It is a block chain game, and what it allows you to do when you play it is to purchase, collect, breed and sell cats, cats that are entirely virtual. This got so popular in that it jammed up the theory of network, slowing it down significantly as it reached its all time high number of transactions. Back in the game was also still really popular. Someone bought a non fungible token a digital cat from the game, or get this one hundred and seventy two thousand dollars US real money, and this what they got for that was really I mean, yes, in technical terms, I got this long blockchain, right, but what they what the goat was an image of I'll say, a quite cool cartoon cat, right, But is it a hundred and seventy two thousand dollars cool? How much would you pay for an image? Yeah? This is my problem, and I feel like I'm just not understanding something. No. I think you probably likely are. You're buying this image, so you own the image, but you're not. You can't make money on owning that image all the rights to the image. You own this particular assembly of these pixels in this form in the in that way, even though it can still be screenshotted and it can still exist as an image on an Instagram for people to look at and enjoy. But you own what the higher resolution? That's That's okay. I'm with you, Matt, I'm what is it? What are you getting? Like? Are you getting like some mega high four K version that you couldn't achieve with a screen shot? Because I know people are taking these and like you know, you can get a digital frame and you can throw one of these into these digital frames and then they have it in your house. There's an art show at a local gallery called a b V gallery. Onto this local mural artist Greg Mike owns they're doing an n f T show UM, and in the gallery is just a bunch of TVs, like a bunch of like vertically positioned TVs. UM with these images, many of them are are animated. Most of them are I think all of them. Maybe you're animated UM now I don't know about that, but that's definitely the popular version of these. And they loop there like a looping animated image like a gift or something, but higher resolution. Yes, so there are there are a couple of things that qualifies what I would call ownership here. I don't know that it is fair to say they meet the requirements of what constitutes ownership in the pre n FT world. There's there's a great way to explain this, uh shout out to Mitchell Clark over at the Verge. Let's say you are deep in the trading card game and you have a very rare or somehow unique trading card like Pokemon. You have the Pikachu illustrator. That's a that's a rare Pokemon card from what I understand, and you trade it for a super rare, very old baseball card him like the turn of the Night of the century, and you've completed your trade, but now you have something totally different from what you started with. Also important note, Matt, people can sell in f t s after they purchase them, and there's a weird system set up for it. So maybe that makes a little more sense. I like, I'm like, uh, Mitchell Clark's example, but there's another one. I thought that I want to see what you guys think. It made a little more sense to me. Let's say, let's think about borrowing a hundred dollars versus borrowing a car. So let's say you go to Paul Mission Control and you're like, hey, man, can I borrow a hundred bucks? And Paul, being a mention, says, yeah, of course you can borrow it, just pay me back next week or whatever. So he'll expect you to pay him a hundred bucks next Wednesday or Thursday or whatever. But he'll just want some form of a hundred dollars back. He's not reasonably gonna expect you to come back with the exact same hundred dollar bill. And yes, peek behind the curtain, folks, Paul only uses one bills it's very weird to be with him at restaurants can confirm where he eats for free. But yeah, so we could confirm that that's real. But let's say instead, well, let's say the same day you borrow hunterdbucks from Paul, you go to code Enam Doc holiday and you asked to borrow her car, and because she's awesome, she lets you borrow her car and you say, okay, I'll bring it back to you, you know, next Wednesday or Thursday or whenever. But what is So you come back to Paul and Alexis and you give Paul, you know, uh, two fifties and he's like, what are these because he's only ever seen a hundred dollar bill, but he believes you because it adds up to a hundred. But then, you know, Doc is like, where's my car? And you're like, well, I brought you a car back. They're like, that's a car. Then she would say no, no, no, no, no, bro, my car is my car. I gave you my car, and I would like my car back. That's that's where a car would be a non fungible token, and this bill is d dollar bill would be more like a bitcoin and n f t s or the crypto version of this, Like, they can literally be anything. That's the other thing. They can be anything that you can digitally depict totally. Like, for example, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey recently sold his first tweet, the first tweet as an n f T for two point nine million dollars. So that tweet is then encrypted in this very specific encryption and now it's an n f T. It's yeah, So it's like it's you attach an n f T to the asset and that's what. So it's not like that's not the n f T itself, it's the thing that you attached to it that then verifies a chain of custody. It's essentially like a digital authenticity report. But what the hell does that mean? Though? How do you own a tweet? I could screenshot that tweet and put it in a digital frame. To me, it's a fetishization of ownership, is what a lot of this is. That's not an unfair way to say it, because you know, my it reminds me of the story that keeps coming up when we explore these kinds of things about the Emperor's new clothes, which will wax poetic on later. But but you're right, so drawing, music, animation, video clip, digital art. You buy the n F T, yet you still own it quote unquote whatever. That a new idea of ownership is. But other people can just right click and save it when they see it. Other people can you know what, Other people can right click save it and then if they have a printer, they could print it out and they could frame it themselves, and they own an iteration of that. Well, it's like when Martin Screlly bought that Wou Tang Clan album. He he had it, he could do whatever he wanted with it. He could a lord it over everyone like I really pretty much did. Or he could distribute it to the world. Uh, that's different. That's like a one of a kind thing that he only, and he and only he has access to and has the rights to do with what he will. This is not that. So I'm very confused as well, Matt about the the draw in terms of like why why spend you know, two three million dollars on the first tweet when like you can just you know, look at it. It's this idea to me of like I own the first tweet and that's cute, and it also means that the only people that are doing this that level of of cash are people that can afford to do cute things with that kind of money. The tweet example is funny to me because in the Verge article that I just cited, the journalists had to update their article because they originally said selling a tweet as an n f T as a joke, and then Dorsey did it, and they had to go back in the article and say, hey, we were joking, but this guy did it. We don't know if we read the article. But people paid much more than what they paid for that tweet. Uh. One n f T was auctioned at Christie. So congratulations to Mike Winkleman, a k a people, a digital artist who sold an n f T there for Paul. Can we get a drum roll please? Yes? Sixty nine million, very real dollars and yeah, it's a lot. These are by design meant to give the purchaser again that quote unquote ownership, and it is ownership as a as a concept. You know, it's you could also even on the artists side, Let's say I sell um an n f T of something that I have painted, then I would still have that physical painting very well could and then I could just create more n f T s of the same thing, just the same image with different blockchains attached. And now it's like I've made Prince. Now you have a number three of one hundred of ben Bull and Casey ds study number seven. I love your work band, I love that series. Um, but I have to ask them, is there an inherent agreement or an implicit agree or like implusit wouldn't be enough. Is there an agreement contractual or otherwise? Uh? For the artist to never make another thing like that? Again in some cases? In some cases because again this is this has a doesn't have any kind of sweeping regulation uh, and the ideas that necessarily doesn't because right download this thing? Are you printed out and you own it? Even though you never bought the n f T you don't own it in f T wise, But isn't possession nine tenths of the law. I mean this caught on pretty quickly. Now we're talking about multimillion dollar market. So I think the three of us have raised some really great questions at the jump here. Uh, most directly, why mess with this? Why have them? Well, it can be it's great if you're an artist. If your people, of course, you can absolutely understand why people are calling this an evolution and fine art collecting. You can sell new stuff in a new way, that's dope. You can also make a lot more money off a digital thing that maybe you otherwise would have sold as like a sticker or something, you know, because if you look at these, a lot of these are really cute little pieces of pixel art or some of them, right, and that wouldn't have been like if you saw that on an app store as a you know, an emoji or something, would you paid for it? Would you have just like waited until there was a old pack of emoji to downloads or something, or wait for the next OS update where then it's just folded into it. That's that's what's happening. And to make no no, no, no. But let's start making original stuff they don't want you to know videos again, but exclusively as n f T s. Let's make let's make millions of dollars for people who just have a theory um sitting around and they don't know what to do with it all. Let's do it. That's a really good point. That's what I hadn't thought about Oh okay, wait, we gotta get back to that one. That's a very good point. Um, that's a crazy point. Well, here's another benefit for the artist though. You can enable a feature on an n f T, the bulk of which on ethereum that allows that like pays you a kind of residual So every time your work is sold or change his hands, you get a little cut of the deal. And that didn't happen with a lot of like, uh, classic oil paintings or whatever. You know, that didn't happen for Leonardo da Vinci or Picasso or you know, any any of the masters of the craft. But it's it's a little different for buyers. I mean it's a flex right, Ultimately, it's it's a it's a kind of a playground of the rich. Look what I can do. I've got an n f T gallery next to my Dirigibal collection and and I don't know, in a positive way, it is a new way to support artists. You like, that's cool, right, You've got You've got a artists that you think is is a really important voice in the world, and you want to financially support them. And you could say, hey, I will buy your n f T. I feel like it's a creative way of donating in some in some way, and yeah, you get usage rights, but I don't think somebody would. I don't think you would find somebody using an n f T that they didn't buy as or an image from an n f T that they didn't buy on their Instagram profile. I don't think you would see him getting sued, right, they would just take it down. I don't know how you enforce it, you know, or why you would bother um. But it's just it's only unique and that's a token on the blockchain, so it's in this weird I know this phrase gets overused so often. It's in this weird liminal space. I'm so sorry like it. It's true though it's free. It fits so many things. It is a very useful phrase. So in n f T, if we think about it, is kind of designed to be both a Mona Lisa, only one exists. There's only one real Mona Lisa and the rest of forgeries. But it's also kind of has the capability to be a Honda Civic. You can just especially the artists, you could just take the same thing and then say, okay, this is different non fungible token and now there are thousands. Logan Paul from YouTube has made some video clips of his existing videos as n f T S Grimes, you know, the once kind of indie, uh electro weirdo kind of outsider artist who became more and more popular with every record and then kind of really jumped the shark by having a baby with Elon Musk. She sold six million dollars worth of n f T S various kind of a digital dree kind of collages like that were collaborations that she did with another artist. Uh, that's something called the war Nymph Collection. Some of it was like set to music and a lot of this stuff that since it is so new, Um, there are a few portals to getting this stuff where artists have like accounts, you know, like you would on a social media platform. The most popular one, I think it's called nifty Gateway, and that's where she sold her stuff. Uh yeah. And so the question then is what does this mean for the future. What can n f T specifically lead to? Here we enter trickier water. Don't forget this is the same species that went absolutely nuts and bananas for POGs, for beanie babies, for countless other crazes gathering. I was gonna say, man, I thought of you, because magic the gathering. I don't think counts is of fad or crazy anymore. It's been around too long. It's here, and if n f t s are just a crazy how long will they last? Because if there's more to it than that, then what's the stuff they don't want you to know about? In f T S will tell you after award from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy first, obviously, and I feel like we should even have to point this out, but it's due diligence. First, Obviously, there's a very valid criticism that these massive amounts of money could be used for something better, something that helps the world. However, that as a criticism we look at every time when they can fine art the toys of the wealthy, the Mazzarati fleets everything that we like. The problem with that is, once somebody has their own money, you cannot really tell them, and I would argue you should not really tell them what to do with it. Of course, Also I would argue that a lot of philanthropy is just pr shell game again to uh to well, to screw the rest of the world. But it's true. It's true. That's a nonstarter. You can't People surprised don't react well when you say, hey, why did you spend sixty nine million dollars on this digital thing when that could feed and house x amount of people for why amount of years? Whatever? People don't like to hear that. Uh, same same reason Jeff Bezos doesn't like it. Probably doesn't like it when people are saying, here's the fraction of the money you made during the pandemic that can make a life changing difference in the lives of you know, the day to day lives of your employees. I do want to point something out here. Many of these transactions we're talking about we're done in. I think it was ethereum that was mostly the coin that was used for these Ethereum is where it started, so I am and I'm just putting us out there, and I don't even know this fully computes, but they were rather low numbers of ethereum that were exchanged. We're talking hundreds. I think that was the most, or at least the one sale that was for several role hundred thousand was like, uh, two hundred and something ethereum. I think we said something like that. Okay, imagine that you you got into ethereum very very early on, and you know, let's say you put even as much as ten thou dollars down when ethereum is at the lowest possible levels, when it's just beginning, that could translate to many, many, many many ethereum, which would essentially be a fortune that was created out of very little money very early on, and you would have so much of it the equivalent of what it actually is in dollars maybe doesn't matter to someone as much once that that, like, it's almost like winning the lottery really quickly, um I, and imagine the value of it seeming very different than if it was a hard earned million dollars that someone worked their whole life to achieve or something. Absolutely glad you brought that up. Absolutely glad, because there's something that I think a lot of people can understand through comparison here. Right If someone just has this etheroryum and it's kind of grown native to that financial ecosystem, never touched it because you're like a lot of other investors, You just wanted it to a crew and then hit a windfall, and then maybe you would think about taking it out into another currency. There's something that happens when you travel to a part of the world that uses a different currency, and it's really weird. I don't know if there's a technical or respected name for it, but when I'm just freestyling here, I call it it's the monopoly money effect, you know what I mean. Like, you go to a place where like you go to uh Japan that will be a familiar example to a lot of people, and you take your US dollar the amounts that you have, and you exchange it for yen, right, and you get these you get these different amounts of dollars. So like if you put in two hundred and fifty dollars, then all of a sudden you have over twenty seven thousand yen. And even though you know that the value systems are different, psychologically you're walking around and you're like, this is what it feels like at the top, you know what I mean. And it can take you some time. It can take you a few transactions to realize, like to get a sense in your head that yes, in terms of cost of things, that two fifty dollars and that twenty seven thousand seven yen or something are still like they have parody, but I know exactly what you're thinking about it. It's like it's one of the reasons that a lot of people when they're traveling to unfamiliar places might spend a lot more than they think they're spending because they're just like, hey, what what these are all plus other countries use coins a lot more often than the US, so they're like, I'm just putting pocket change in these things. You know, I don't know that this is really worth five dollars or whatever. Um, it's tough. And that's even without exchange rates. So you are absolutely right, and I can see that. So we're not saying all these people are, you know, billionaires or whatever. And I think that's my point to with about like, you know, internet spending, crypto culture gone a run a muck kind of is how I look at this in some ways, because so many people made a lot of money on crypto. Maybe not instantly, but it's like a lot of people that I know that made a lot of money on crypto used it to buy like, you know, synthesizers and like toys and stuff. It's not like, you know, they were never banking on it as being there, like life's blood or their life's work. It was always kind of funny money, you know, because they knew the bottom could drop out any day. I was talking to a guy who, um, is giving me some advice on this stuff, and he says he lost ninety thousand dollars and one fell swoop uh in when there was a big crypto kind of bottom fallout situation back in or something like that. Um, and you know, to the point where he got out of it entirely for a while and then got back in. But I'm just saying, like, you know, I've known people in the past. I've played in a band with the dude and years ago who had all this crazy stuff, and it's because he lived with a dude who got in early with the crypto, with the with the bitcoin stuff, and he got him into it and he just had like funny money to just blow on whatever. Like it's it reminds me of like the kid in Big you know what I mean, Like when you like, all of a sudden, he got all this money, you got more than you know what to do with. You just like buy yourself like a pleasure palace, you know. Um. It's just interesting because you're right I think that you're totally correct. It doesn't feel like earned. It just feels like frivolously created um therefore can be frivolously spent. I don't know, a lot of people already had this sort of separate existence, you know what I mean. A lot of people already had a day job where they were doing so they had income, you know what I mean. And this stuff just kind of kept a crewing in the in the background. So that makes sense. But there's something else we have to talk about. The tease this a little bit. Crime. Non fungible tokens get especially interesting when you talk about money laundering. So it's no secret criminal elements use crypto money laundering to hide the dirty origin of various funds. The easiest way to do it this is not financial advice. No one is telling you to do this. We cannot legally say this is roughly how you do it and get away. The most easy way to do it, uh is kind of a three stage process which we can describe vaguely. You can purchase cryptocurrency with like let's say you have the your dirty cash, call it your fiat cash. Right, If you want to get a little edgy about it. Uh. You buy your cryptocurrency with your FIA cash you get from running guns or mass or stamp fraud or something. I don't know, it's just stamp fraud still my favorite crime. Uh. And now that you have this and you have it in cryptocurrency, you have to be careful because crypto based transactions again overwhelmingly can be followed via the blockchain. However, once you've got this dirty these dirty coins in play, then you can do a couple of things. You can use sort you can use a service to make it a little more anonymous, breaking links between those bitcoin transactions. That's possible. Uh. And then you have a legit excuse for that. You can say, well, I'm using that service because it provides even better personal privacy and security. The easiest way to wash it, which is interesting, is this. So like, let's say I've been running guns for a while, right, I had a crazy year during the pandemic. I got into a side gig, and now I have a lot of money that I can't move because Uncle Sam will get after me. Then the next the easiest way, so I put it in bitcoin or whatever. I put it in douge coin or whatever, and the easiest way for me to get around the trace ability there is to take not the money I had in cash, but the money already, put one crypto coin and then wait for an I c O and initial coin offering, because like we said earlier, there are tons and tons of different cryptocurrencies, different coins, and when that initial coin offering comes out, these are one of the businesses that does accept payment in cryptocurrency, aren't they. So now I just have to say, well, I'm gonna get I'm gonna buy in big with bend coins or whatever, and I'm gonna pay for it all with bitcoins, and then boom, I have shell gamed the points and I've done so well enough that now people are not going to be able to say, hey, the origin of ben coin is actually a crazy, crazy international trade in a R fifteens and Kalishnikov's and crap like that. Boom boom boom. And the last thing you have to do is just integrate that money back into the legitimate financial system and then you can just say, hey, like the thing is, this is where the unpredictability, volatility, fluctuation of cryptocurrency comes in, because you just wait till it gets to a really high point and be like, oh, yeah, yeah, I got it a while ago, and then this happened, and so now I've got I guess I just got lucky, you know. And then I would say, not the lecture people, but I would say, if you made it that far unscathed, uh, maybe you can retire from the illegal gun trade. It's not a very smart business be in. Uh, it's not a very good business to be in. And this can get you around stuff like income from drugs, from trafficking for weapons sales. It can help you dodge taxes. Possibly to me, the most interesting thing I don't I think maybe we talked about this a little bit, is how useful is this for state actors who don't want to get caught pain for someone for an illegal activity. How useful is it if you want to get around sanctions right to buy stuff? Uh, and to improve funds and all that stuff is important, right because we are talking about crime, we're talking about human lives. But there's another much bigger problem which people are only really now starting to understand in mainstream conversation, and that's this the crime, the legit stuff. None of this can happen if we can't maintain life on Earth in some way. One of the biggest problems with cryptocurrency and with n f t S is in fact the environment, and in a very not cool way. That's right. Uh, it's absolutely a detriment to the environment. The technology, the amount of electricity, the amount of resources and infrastructure requires to process just one transaction bitcoin. In general, leaves could potentially leave a carbon footprint the size of the entire region of London. Um. It all goes back to how these things are created. Uh. New bitcoins are created by this idea of mining coins, which is the extra CPU intensive process. Um. It requires like thousands and thousands of these complex calculations. The more bitcoins there are, the longer it takes to mine new coins, and the more actual electricity it takes. That blew my mind when I first understood that. But when you really start digging in, you realize, no, this is this is very very much a real thing. Yeah, there's there's some fascinating and not super uh not not super happy research into this. There's a Dutch economist named Alex Dave Rees Davray who found that the energy use here is growing at this breakneck pace because it takes longer to mine, you know, one bitcoin to complete the math there. Now, the energy use, he asked me. By seventeen, the energy use was already thirty terawatt hours a year. So that's the and that's where he gets that London number from, because he said back in two thousand seventeen, thirty taro watts year was the same amount of energy used for the entirety of Ireland. You'll see another report you can see that Cambridge University studies found bitcoin uses more electricity than the entirety of Argentina as far as uh February one. So it's accelerating. Is the issue where we're eating more and more into the machine and that is creating more and more pollution because most of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels, right, So it's something we don't really think about, but it's it's absolutely true and something UM knowl you and you and I I think I talked a little bit about this off air when you were kind of getting into bitcoin, right. Yeah, Well, it's not something I even fully realized right when I started. And again I'm not like deep into it by any stretch of the imagination, but it's true. I mean, there's Look, there's definitely like bitcoin apologists, for lack of a better way of describing them, that will say, okay, there's a conflation going on. People are saying, you know, one bitcoin transaction consumes as much energy as your house uses in a week. And then this blog three myths about bitcoin's energy energy consumption from Satoshi Labs. Um they point out that you know, it's electricity that it consumes, not energy at large. So it's like I use as a cons sumer electricity, gas and gasoline. Um, bitcoin transactions only use electricity. But that's it's honestly like, I don't. I only bring that up just to show both sides. But yeah, it's true. I mean it is fair to say that a one single crypto or bitcoin transaction and was seven kill a lot hours, which was more compared to the cumulative one hundred thousand visa transaction with only one energy consumption of a hundred and forty nine kill a lot hours. Yeah, so there is there is a real issue here. And the thing about this is it's it's an issue that's tough to mitigate in many ways because the way the system is built demands that increased consumption Ethereum, who, as we mentioned earlier, was the kind of the big daddy of an f T uses a process called proof of work to valid ate their transactions to say like, yes, this is the actual thing happening and it is legitimate. But in response to the growing criticism about energy consumption and environmental damage, they've been moving to a less intensive process called proof of steak. And this proof of steak process is going to, according to them, take up less than one percent of the energy that's currently being consumed. So that's I mean, that's good news, I guess. But it's something a lot of people haven't thought about. I I didn't really think about it. You know, you have to get it. It gives you a sense of just how Gargantua and the infrastructure is now to create these coins. But there is one other philosophical quandary here, and it's one that does not have an easy answer, and it's this we talked about at the very beginning. What what is value? What what is currency? Economy? Religion? There's this fantastic Fairi's tale that I guess it qualifies as a fairy. It doesn't really have fairies in it, but there's this story it's very popular in the West. Was back in the day called the Emperor's New Clothes. We all remember it. Back in the the story goes, once upon a time there was an emperor who had everything, and he was a super fancy dude, and he had all the super fancy, exclusive stuff, and he was very jaded because he had bought everything you could buy. He had the finest clothes, the finest caviare and cheese wheels and n f t's hanging up at his boudoir. And he wanted something that no one else could have. And so a tailor from far away, an unknown and unknown man, came to him and said, I will create for you the finest suit of clothes. Right the look at this, this this silk is so fine that only the most find I could see it. Can you surely, Emperor, you can be the type of dude to appreciate this type of stuff. And then the emperor was just what the emperor do? Oh my god, Yes, it's gorgeous. And feel this finery. It's so soft, it's like it's like velvet, but like you know, magical angel velvet. Give me all the bolts. That's what fabric and invisible fabric comes in, uh, and then you know, he gets he makes some of these outfits that he then wears in a parade, and he's just got his junk all hanging out. He's just that he's out there. And that's it's the perfect It's a parable. It's called it a parable perhaps because it's meant to teach a lesson, right, and the lesson is be grateful for the things you have, uh, and don't focus all of your energy on things because that's not gonna make you happy. And at the end of the day, you know, it's like more money, more problems. If you get to a point where you just keep one in the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, you're never gonna actually be happy because you're just building your image of success, full life and of happiness on stuff. And and see the oldest cliche in the book. But you can't take it with you. Um. And I feel like this is a product of that. I think you're spot on, Ben, This this phenomenon is a product of that malaise that I think overly wealthy people have where they want to have a thing that no one else can have or get in on. Early on the cool thing or but you know, the twist of that story is, I mean I said he was he had jounk hanging out and all that. But I mean that's because what well, my son, it's because there aren't no clothes. That's that's me talking to my son reading the Emperor is new clothes to him. Um. There you go, bingo um. And so the the big thing here also is that the value is based on really nothing besides the fact that it's difficult to make these things. They are trackable and you can make more of them, and they're clean, and they're somewhat anonymous. So like the value is in what they are somewhat even though they're not really there. They're digital things. But I think something that's really important here is that because it is based on based on belief, people who have been heavily invested in something like bitcoin or ethereum them getting others to believe in the same way as our salesman to the Emperor, getting them to believe that the bitcoin is real and very, very valuable is highly profitable to them because their investment goes higher and higher with every new person that says, yes, I see the clothes too. They they're amazing. UM. So what I'm thinking about um specifically calling out some billionaires and multi multi multi millionaires out there who are going on Twitter and other places talking up bitcoin and ethereum and all the other ones out there saying how great they are and how you should get invested. I'm imagining all of us people on our level, like you know, investing your hard earned money in something like this. And then really we're filling the coffers of billionaires who just went in on a whim uh to invest in their their bitcoins. Just happened with Wall Street bets when we saw people drop it into thread to say, you know what's the next game? Stop is going to be invest in that? You're right? Yeah. A case in point are you know our buddy John McAfee of of of the anti virus fame. UM, he was just indicted for alt coin pump and dump scams where essentially he was big upping these alt coins on his Twitter as a person who's supposedly an expert and saying people would ask, well, are you invested in this? And he would say, no, my son, I am not, uh, and of course he was, and then he would pump it based on the exposure it would get from his tweets, and then he had dump it and make the money and then we're rinse and repeat. So he is he's actually facing up to eighty years in prison. He's seventy five years old. I can't believe that that's what it took for this guy to finally have to answer for some of his uh misdeeds that we know about. You know what, I didn't he like practically stage a coup in a third world country or something. Then I can't remember exactly what the deal was, but do easily a mavericky nut job. He's lived a life. He's lived a life. But he is also clearly if he is convicted, which doesn't sound like Kasmen yet, he's clearly doing exactly He's clearly tackling the same conundrum that you were talking about their Matt, which is Bitcoin is barely used as a real world currency. It's it's bought again as an investment, So that means that it's value, whatever it's value, maybe, is solely found in the fact that other people value it. And so when you ask how much something is worth in the world of art, you're really asking because art is subjective you're really asking about other people's opinions in the future. And then when you remove the physical object there, it becomes increasingly intangible. Then this question becomes more and more important and even more difficult to answer. No one, no one does have an answer yet, and I think we're I think we're endeavoring to be very fair about this. You know you want to support your favorite artists, then by all means, do you want to spend your money on what you want to spend it on. Then I mean, by all means, as long as you're not hurting somebody, it's pretty much up to you, right, that's not a crazy take. I completely agree, and if I could, I would just love to return briefly to that sixty nine million dollar and f t auction at Christie's by the artist people who I think it's cool. I like because artif followed him on Instagram for for many years now. But the piece that he auctioned off was called the First five Thousand Days. Every day is the First five thousand Days. And if you look at it like big or like you know, zoomed out, it just looks like a like a mosaic. Well, these tiny little squares all of the tidy little squares are five thousand of his artworks that he has published in digital form on his Instagram over the years, and I recognize many of them. Uh Now to be completely transparent, there are some eagle eyed folks that have searched through some of those images and found some kind of racist and problematic images in there. So I'm having to reassess my feelings about people, but your feelings about his art and his politics aside. He was paid his cut fifty three million dollars of that sixty nine point three million dollars sail in Ethereum, guess what he did. He converted it to US dollars instantly, and and and uh and said he did so because he goes boom, fifty three million dollars in my account, Like what the uh? I'm not remotely a crypto purist. I was making digital art long before any of this, and if this n f T stuff went away tomorrow, I would still be making digital art today. Um. He says, then goes on to say, I absolutely think it's a bubble, to be quite honest, there was a bubble and the bubble burst and it wiped out a lot of crap but it didn't wipe out the Internet. And so the technology itself is strong enough where I think it's going to outlive that. Um says the man with fifty three million dollars in his bank account. If the bubble with the bubble burst, it burst with him, I would say, but clearly not. Well, you know, there's a there's another thing. I'm sure a lot of our full listeners were waiting for us to mention Banksy or people claiming to be Banksy. UH sold a in ft just earlier this month, after the original was physically burned in Brooklyn. This is the first for the art industry. The piece was by the way, you gotta love this, Uh, you know I love this banks He approach. The piece was called morons. It pokes fun at art collectors. UH. It had been burned by a team of crypto enthusiasts at quote a discreet location in Brooklyn. They sold this in ft he of this thing that no longer physically exists for thirty eight thousand dollars. So what were those folks buying exactly? Were they buying something unique that only they could appreciate, or they buying the Emperor's new clothes? I think that's I think it's a fair question. It isn't. It reminds me of another banks He stunt where he had a piece in a frame of like I think a little girl with the balloon or something like that. Um, and he posted a video that was either him or I think Banks he's a group of people. Um. But he posted a video or they posted a video from the audience in the auction Uh. And right as it was auctioned off with the final um, you know, call of the auctioneer. Uh, the frame shredded the piece before everyone's eyes. And guess what that made it more valuable because it stopped halfway and so now it's like so that's like literally because the destruction of the art made the art more valuable because it was now Banks's hands were on it. And it's just like custom shredd or frame. So it's also ephemeral. Uh. And I think it's no um. I think it's no accident that that one of the most popular cryptocurrencies and the one used for these is called ethereum because it's all just kind of in the ether, you know. And uh and of course to the collective known as banksy As, I think it's a group of people to thank you so much for hoisting the world of fine art on the pitard. It deserves so uh so massively appreciated things. As always, everybody tuning into the show, there is some stuff they don't want you to know about cryptocurrency, and there are some questions that have to be asked about n f T s uh. We can't wait to hear from you. 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