That never blows my that never it never ceases to blow my mind that you you can get on a train at your local train station.
And yeah, in a like five hours or so you can you can get off in Paris and obviously that's like pretty cool.
So like the most amazing thing in the UK is leaving it is leaving.
Welcome to Game of Nodes, a weekly podcast from independent valeduct teams.
Hello and welcome to Singletrack Mind, the rail enthusiast podcast. We're talking long
distance European train journeys this week. Obviously, we had a whole season on the one
fucking train line in Australia. So we know we are testing our listeners patience a little bit.
So we're going to talk about a continent that has good rail links for a change.
But first of all, I want to find out how my co-host are doing. Fellas, you've just been
at a big train conference, the biggest train conference in the world in Austin.
Is that? No, I don't know if it was this year. Maybe not this year, maybe other years.
But consensus is the biggest train conference, right? Bigger than
Nethemba, surely? Oh, definitely. This year. Really? No, you're right. Actually, that's a fair
point. Like, it's tough to tell because it started it early and spicily. Okay. It's tough to tell
because Denver is so spread out. I guess they both have a shitload of side events. It always
seems like consensus has more side events. And so maybe there's just people spread out more.
The show floor is bigger. Actually, I don't even know, right? Nethemba's show floor might have
been bigger this year. I think it is. And God, there are a couple of events we went to and there
were like six people there and the teams were just like 12 team people, six, nine team people.
And so everyone was standing around awkwardly like, hey. It's a real bad market energy. I
thought we're in a bull again. It was weird. I think the show floor had a decent amount of people,
but it wasn't packed. And then Schultz is right. Like, we went to a few events. We went to one
event that we thought we were in the wrong event, right? And then some dude waved his over. He's
like, you guys look like you're looking for me. We're like, I guess so. Yeah. And then that actually
was a great event. I won't say what it was. It wasn't embarrassing because it was like a last
minute thing. It was no big deal. But it was like a last minute thing. And then we knew about it.
And then we went to this. It was a Laos event. No, it was a Laos. So we went to a Laos thing.
And literally it was just, I forget it was Brendan, right? It was a
Devrel elite. No, I think he was like having media or something. That's right. He's on the
marketing side. And he's like, yeah, we're just, we're just, we grabbed some appetizers and some
beers. And we actually, it was really nice because Alex CEO was there and like, we had a really nice
conversation. It was actually one of the best conversations we had just because there wasn't
a thousand people, right? And you just had a chance to sit down. And we were able to joke
about like just a Laos things, you know, like the, like the validator vote on whether Mainnet's
ready and all this kind of stuff. And we were able to have like really good conversations about
that where, and then the environment might be awkward. But we just literally sitting around
having beers and like eating nachos and shit, which was, which was really, really nice. It was
also very unconsensus like, I think was different. I mean, that sounds good. Yeah, it was. Yeah. Same
thing at Baruchain. We went to a Baruchain event. One of those nights, I remember it was early in
the week though. So that might have been it too. But, but like they were expecting like 700 people
and there was maybe a couple hundred, maybe like 150 or something like that. Which was also nice
because we had a chance to meet everybody and like, there's a bunch of people there, which was,
which was cool. Like there's nothing wrong with that. Like, I think it's fine. It doesn't really
say anything, but it was a lot more, it was everything was a lot more approachable this year
than I thought it was in 2022. I've been describing as intimate. Like at the ETH Denver, you really
couldn't interact with the teams. Like you'd go there to actually talk to us like a specific team
or person, right? And I think I only achieved that like three times because there's just so many people
that me with being introverted, like I don't want to go butt into conversation and be like,
Hey, this is my name and this is what I do. Because they're going to be like, well, I'm busy,
don't care. So I don't want to deal with it. But a consensus because there was downtime,
I want to say downtime, it's not quite the way to put it. There was less stress to like meet
everyone and talk to everything. People were willing to just kind of like pull you into the
conversation. And you didn't have to have that additional mental overhead of like, how am I
going to actually like make this work? It was just everyone was open to talking with people.
Yeah. Yeah, it was cool. And there's a lot of really good, I mean, there's a lot of good
people there, which you would expect. And there was a lot of surprising like cosmos people there.
Because we knew Berlin was going, was it Berlin? So where it was? Yeah. So yeah, so Berlin was
going at the same time. So there was like everybody's like, oh, there's not too many cosmos events.
But I mean, we saw a ton of Ethan was there and Jack was there and cosmos J from say and like,
Shane was down there. And like, there was like, a lot of folks that we would typically see at a
pretty large cosmos event were all there. Yeah. But I mean, I think a lot of the,
a lot of people in the cosmos space that I will say I do a more, more ambitious, maybe
are not going to cosmos events if there is a substantially bigger event that's non-cosmos
specific. Yeah, I don't know. Or maybe they're, yeah, or maybe just like different, maybe just
different goals, right? Like they know all those, maybe they're trying to make different
relationships. So would you say that the popularity of the conference is on the way?
I wouldn't say that. So it's a deal is becoming more, more, more selective.
Yeah, I would say it's more institutional. Like if Fidelity was there, I saw a vanguard person.
And you're smiling like there was a joke there. And I feel like I didn't pick up on the joke.
I just quite a spilt up at you. It's fine. It's fine. I'm over it. I've already over it.
You did?
Yeah. I asked you whether the popularity of the event was on the way
to which the responses, no, I think, I think their appeal has become more selective.
I see. Okay.
Yeah. That's one of those films I think, I think probably other than Master and Commander
that we've seen the most. So anyway, I mean, I usually know my, I usually know my
spinal tap courts. That one totally won't ever my head.
It's too busy to think about the limo.
But so, I mean, it sounds pretty good though. I think like my weird thing is I've only ever done,
I've done like the chain link specific one Barcelona last year.
Right. And then I've done side events at FinTech conferences that have been blockchain
companies or foundations. And those are always weird because it's just like who's the audience
a little bit. And then before that, it was just the cosmos at the height of when all the chains
were launching, which was just insane. And then just after I did the gateway, the Cosmos gateway one,
just after Tara exploded, that was like a week after.
When you say exploded, do you mean like it fell apart or isn't it got popular?
That's an important thing.
It fell apart. So like Cosmos gateway was like 15th of May or something, 22. So like,
I think Tara had literally, literally fallen apart like 14 days before. Like it, there were like
validators were stood around talking about like, Hey, did you get wrecked? Like people were in the
the after event in a club in Prague being like, how much did you lose? So I don't know, I've never,
I'm kind of like, I really do at some point want to go to an industry conference for this space,
which isn't like either like frothing total mania or like funeral after party.
And we'll ignore the all the FinTech stuff because those have just been like a whatever man.
But yeah, it sounds relatively good. Why do you think it was like more intimate this year?
I think it was just less people. Yeah, there's nothing more than that.
Yeah, but what about I mean, but why are less people?
Yeah, but 22 is 22 was like full on bear at that point.
Like, yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, Bitcoin's at $70,000. I don't know. I don't know. I mean,
there's still a Lambo with like, she knew who fucking dogs bless it over in the front. So like,
there's some of that shit is still there. Right. There's people.
A few cyber trucks with ads on them. There's a lot of cyber trucks with ads on
others. People walk around with the huge plastic gold chains. Like, so there's a few of that
still happening. What was it? It was like crazy. And it's still seems right. There's a lot more
suits, which is bullish. Yeah, there were there were a couple of events that I went to where
I think I stood out as the youngest by like 20 years. And I was like, okay, I need to go to
those. That's my that's my crew. I mean, so okay, so okay, so I have a I have a thesis, right? I've
been thinking about so like, obviously, I've been having a few I've been trying to work out
like some new business stuff. I've been also like doing some stuff where networking, maybe it's
networking. But I'm not, as you guys know, not not super tricks hooked in with what is going on
in TradFy, right? But I now have like the tiniest crack a window into it, as it reflects on what
we do, right? That I have acquired over the last seven or eight months or whatever. And I really
do think there's like this. Like so, I keep you know, I always go on about like, Ethereum boomers
and Bitcoin boomers, like because the tech is just not there. But everybody's just grandfathers,
like, you know, it's got market share. So people are just like building on top of it, it's just
becoming this. It's like, you know, when there's houses in Edinburgh in like the 17th century,
where they just collapsed eventually, because you before steel construction, you just couldn't
build a building that high, eventually they would fall apart. But people kept adding stories until
they did. And that's kind of like Ethereum. But what seems to be happening now, at least from a
complete outsized perspective, is that that's where the TradFy, like for whatever reason,
that's that's feels like that's becoming grandfathered in as oh, it's it's just old and
broken enough now that it can be mainstream. Because because banks, they have to adopt broken old
technology, that's how it works. You know, they got a big Cobol mainframe and then run it for 15
years. And they're like, Ah, Ethereum, this will do. I think a big part of that is just because
that's where all the DeFi is like technically, the DeFi happens elsewhere, right? But Ethereum still
holds something like 50% of all crypto funding, maybe even more than that. And so if there's
anywhere they should try and get in, it's gotta be Ethereum, right? Like it.
It genuinely is. But I've had some conversations like in the last while, where they've been like
very casual, just like finding out what people are working on, trying to get a feel for like if
research stuff that I'm working on dovetails with that and also just like practically from a company
perspective, there's anything we do like consultancy or whatever that might tie in with that. Like I'm
all fucking is. I can't remember the second half of that joke, somebody with big ears. Anyway,
and I feel like the situations, you know, when you have that voice, like when you're just having
like casual conversations, somebody says something and you're like, Ah, I can give you an idea here
and I don't know how much that idea is worth. And I know you won't pay me for this idea because you
don't understand why it's a good idea. Like for me to explain to you why this would be a good idea
and potentially very profitable to you, I can't execute on it because of the situation that I'm
in, you could execute on it, it wouldn't even cost you that much. It could be worth a lot of money
to your company. But in order for like, I can't just give you the idea, like it's not that simple,
like you'd also need to understand it, appreciate the opportunity and then execute on it. But like,
you're like, there is no, there is no world in which I'm going to get paid for this idea.
So should I just say it anyway? And I have one of those conversations a little while ago, where
I just punted the idea out there into open space. And somebody else in the room was like, oh,
like literally did the maths of like what they actually did get it. And then they were like,
huh. And then the next time I met up with those people, they just casually were talking about
that project, which is now like two months further along. And they're like, Oh, and of course, this
part. And I was like, fuck, that's a bit I gave them. And I was like, Oh, out of interest, why are
you guys, what's the, what's the use case there? Because you're not doing it was basically something
to do with Dallas, essentially. And they were like, it doesn't seem like you're using that in
the way that like, I think a lot of people would and they were like, Oh, no, because you know,
you launch a token, right? If that ends up being worth a billion dollars, then we just made a billion
dollars for free, right? And I was like, damn, they got both the completely DJN case that I would
have made and the sensible case I would have made. And they threw away the sensible case,
kept the DJN case. And if they make a billion dollars, I gave away a billion dollar idea for
free. I can't believe this shit. But yeah, it was the reason the only reason I kind of referenced
that is because it was interesting to me how if you're in a position where you can execute on a
risky idea, and you're kind of covered from a regulation perspective, or you have a presence
in the market where you know, you know the regulator, you have the lawyers, you have the
advice, you can just execute an end thing that you think is within your risk tolerance. There's
so much crazy shit you can do. And it's easiest to do on Ethereum, probably, like back to your point,
short C. But the second half of that, though, which was that this idea, like somebody had to
understand it or whatever. And like, I look at situations like that, where it's like, you can
build it on Ethereum or YOLO, it's a bit harder, but you could just fucking launch your own chain.
Like that entire example, like the DJN bit of it was like, we get away in which we can launch a
token. And if it becomes worth something, then happy days, right? And you're like, when all of
these banks realize that they can just start a blockchain, like they're going to jump on Cosmos
or the SDK about five years too late. So it'll be like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
I can just start this blockchain in like five minutes. And I can just throw Cosmos on top of
it. Or I could throw an EVM on top of it even better because the validity is objectively better.
We've lost that argument. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. There was a point in there somewhere.
It's something like, it's so easy to, if you can execute on a really quite DJN idea and feel safe
from a regulatory perspective, there's no reason why you can't execute on something
slightly more DJN if it's just like launching a chain rather than launching an ERC-20, right?
And when people work that out, we have a proliferation of blockchains now,
shit is going to get completely out of hand. That's my feeling. When you talk to people in suits,
they haven't even realized the power and potential of their own degeneracy yet. That's, I think, my point.
Well, I think that that's going to get a leg up here soon with Eigenlayer and AVSs because those
are spinning up just like the Cosmos summer of 2021. I think there's 70 AVSs so far on Eigenlayer.
And not to be too negative on stream, but I'm pretty bearish on Eigenlayer right now just because
I don't expect that its returns are going to be able to pay back the amount of stake going into it.
And it's just going to get worse. There's just going to be more and more AVSs, just like an
ICS. And whenever institutions realize how easy it is to spin up an AVS and how many
validators are just going to grab onto it because it's the next name, oh man. It's ICS, but easier.
So, okay, dumb question. Eigenlayer, what is technically that different from all the other
DVT type solutions? Because that's what it is. It's decentralized liquid staking on top of
heterogeneous blockchains, right? Something like that.
I mean, it's using liquid staked Ethereum or Ethereum, native Ethereum, as its security protocol.
So, if you have like LidoStakedEath, you can stake it to Eigenlayer and then validate for it. So,
it doesn't have like a one-to-one of all Ethereum validators can secure a chain. It has to be actively
restaked, but there's still a huge sum. It's still like day one, there was like $10 billion on Eigenlayer.
And so, basically, it's creating like selective validator sets. I can't remember the AVS, something
is something validator set. I can't remember the A word. And so, if you spin up an AVS, you just
see it. Actively validated services, apparently. Okay, well, there you go. Yeah. So, I don't know
how that's related to DVT. I think probably I was, I thought that the bit that is, I guess,
covered by the Lido piece was actually part of the mechanism for Eigenlayer. But it's
sounds like actually, their part is just the semantics of the validator sets.
Yeah. Now, Eigenlayer makes a little bit of a distinction from ICS in that, in Eigenlayer,
all validators can choose whether they want to support one or not. But from what we've seen so far,
validators are just joining all of them. Because...
This is going to be a shit show. Yeah.
That's going to be a shit show. That's going to make a really shit show.
Validators are joining all of them? What do you mean joining all of them?
Being one of these many AVSs they can't. Exactly.
Because like, how can I also join all of them?
Yeah.
Palkutu runs every single one and does a snapshot for every single one already.
That's right. Dance trade.
The hardest working is in turning not only the Cosmos now, but the entire of the Eigenverse.
I'm not sure if that's a word. Anyway, so we're bullish on Eigenlayer.
We are... Oh, apparently breaking news from Rama. The hub has halted.
Yeah, well, we have that breaking news.
And I'm feeling fine. Okay, cool. Right. If somebody wants to let us know how that pans out,
so the show continues, that would be great. So other takeaways from consensus?
Tons of ZK. Everybody's talking about ZK.
Good. Love it. Love to see it. As long as it's not shitty rollouts, I'd love to see it.
That was a big topic. Staking, huge topic. I think overall, there's a lot of talks about
methods for Ethereum staking. It was a huge thing. What else? What else were big things?
Should see. Regulation.
Regulation. Yeah.
Well, I think with, obviously with the Bitcoin and Ethereum piece, that was all new since
last consensus. So there's a lot of discussion around what that means. And I think that's why we
had a lot of talks with crypto experts at large institutions, which, okay, it's cool. It's good.
Yeah. What else? I'm trying to go to what else were major themes? A lot of services chains.
I thought a lot of Oracle's conversations and a lot of deep end. Oh, and AI. How the
fuck did we forget about AI? Yeah.
Jeez. That was like every goddamn. Yeah. So AI, there are a lot of, but actually a lot of, to
be fair, a lot of different aspects of how a blockchain and AI work together.
And there are some really cool implementations of the use of using blockchain as a payment method
and a reward method for the use of models. And that's actually a really good use case, honestly.
Versus like, hey, I buy an unlimited subscription to chat, GBT. But can all of us create models for
specific things and have different ways to be able to identify which is the best model and have
scoring structure and then have payment structure based on the use and value coming from that?
That's a lore that's doing that, right?
There's a, yes, a lore is one of those that are doing that. But a lore has the model structure
related to the actual creation of those, a lot of ability to be able to create those models
and then be able to have methods for determining based on history what models best predicted
based on time of day or other types of things or geography or like a ton of different things.
And there's raw financial based on the ones that we saw. But that's a pretty cool way.
Fecitiously, I mean, sounds good. The problem they're solving there is a marketplace, right?
They're trying to create a marketplace for AI models. Why can they not do that with a market
like a marketplace that they've just built in a technology and run?
They can't. Yeah.
They can't. I mean, you can make that case for like any almost everything though, right?
Well, sure. So I guess the underlying assumption and question behind my
physiatics question is what is the special source that the smart contracts are bringing to the table
in terms of the incentive mechanisms behind it? Like, is there something that's
that's fundamentally like low that works in a low trust environment or involves
micropayments or does something well that blockchain to do well versus cold hard cash?
I think it's the micropayments thing. So one of the reasons why I really like Akash
for theoretically is how it doesn't really need to be theoretically like
how I might theoretically like Akash. Yeah.
I really like how it doesn't need to be Web 3, but instead it's really my vision of it is like
it's an open source project that uses blockchain as its funding mechanism, right?
Because open source historically has a really difficult time finding funding.
There's a couple of methods like you can go through Patreon to get funding.
GitHub now has subscriptions similar to Patreon and we subscribe to a couple of open source projects
that we use like catty. We go through catty for that. But the fact that Akash can use its own
token to get micropayments, as you said, and kind of bypass like visa fees and stuff, I think that's
really cool. I think it's a really cool way to support open source. And I see that as a big
benefit to Elora where let's say you ask one question, you have to pay, I don't know, 0.1 Elora
or whatever. I'd go for that, kind of similar like Kagi where Kagi has like you buy credits
for searching, for private searching. I like that idea. I think it's really cool.
But so the point here, I guess, is that the fundamental problem that's being solved is
micropayments, right? And in order to solve it, a foundation is selling you a token. I mean,
you might buy it over an exchange, a dex or a sex, doesn't really matter. But essentially,
there's an intermediary who has minted that, which is the foundation or the developers or whatever.
They have created intermediation in order to sell you the payment to then do the thing.
That is really, really interesting because one of the main things we're supposed to be doing here
with blockchain is disintermediation, right? Which is splitting, taking away B2B and being like B2C
or C2C type interactions. Everything is marketplace, everything is incentives,
smart contracts will do the rest, right? That's business to consumer and consumer to consumer.
Yes, sorry. Yeah. So basically removing middleman, if you like, disintermediation, removing middleman.
But what we're actually doing is going, well, we're adding a different middleman with potentially
a lower or different cost basis or cost structure, right? The cash system is, the cost structure is
different from AWS. It isn't necessarily cheaper. And you also need to have AKT, which conveniently
will also make money for the ecosystem of people that depend on that, the validator developers,
the whatever, who are all middleman actually. And as validators, we are part of the intermediation
of these services. So I guess it's just like a continuing thing that I guess I find pretty
interesting is like one of the founding use cases and things that both academics and people who are
kind of theoretically, my or theoretically ideologically minded in the blockchain space,
do talk a lot about disintermediation. And actually, what we're doing is like,
we're just shifting around the agents a lot of the time. The thing that disintermediates is cash,
right? Private money doesn't because if you spend with a Visa card, right, Visa making bank on that.
And usually the people you're buying from, the cool coffee shop you go to,
Shulze, I'm guessing, it's probably quite a cool coffee shop. The vendor might be sucking up the
payment charge, right? Because people expect to pay on the card, right? But by paying cash, I mean,
obviously, the government is an intermediary there because they are back in the cash, but
these are in the leap there, are they? I mean, that's an interesting point. So it's like,
the question is, is it more beneficial as a team to have indirect intermediaries, which would be the
validation stuff or direct? You can see you pay Visa 40 cents plus 3% for every transaction versus
how much our validator selling tokens drawing down the price. Right. At which point, you then
eventually get to the point where you're like, well, hang on, you don't need a token at all.
You just need something to drive a way of building an incentive system so that you as
developers get paid, right? You don't need a VALSET necessarily. That's also another assumption.
Don't need a token, don't need a chain probably because you don't worry about double spending
if you haven't got a token. Don't need a VALSET. Blockchain undermines itself, I think,
in a lot of these use cases is the shower thought I've been having lately. I think you need smart
contracts. I think smart contracts are sourced. I think that's actually a really nice source. I think
the bit that's actually good, the blockchain is good for is ensuring the smart contracts don't do
weird double spending shit or essentially like, what's the word I'm looking for? The thing that
takes ages when a Cosmos chain starts, what is that? The checks. What are they called?
Invariance. Invariance checks. Right. Exactly. Invariance system integrity checks. The thing
that blockchain is quite good for is that kind of stuff. There's the scaffolding you can put
around like a smart contract VM. But all the token and all that other stuff, I don't know, man. I
think as long as a smart contract can deal with an external representation or value,
which is purely in the hands of the programmer, man. Anyway, that was a huge theme.
Anyway, to bring it away. I was liking this path. I thought that was a pretty hard take. That was
pretty interesting. I believe in disintermediation, I think is a cool idea. And I think like,
it's a cool idea. One of the things that I've, as I've been working with people who are working
on cash systems and who are very privacy conscious, I've started using cash more because I've been
brainwashed. And in 2024, try and live a week using cash. That is my advice to you.
It's brutal. Yeah. Seriously, this is a good experiment with how much financial intermediation
is actually present in your life. Try and use cash for a few days. I've tried to do this recently.
You hit a brick wall very, very quickly. You start having to go and shop at different places,
to buy your coffee at different places, to buy your lunch at different places.
I think the analogy kind of holds true for blockchains and all that sort of stuff,
except that you literally hit the brick wall as soon as you try and move from one blockchain
to another. And like, IBC is good for that, right? You can have, but it makes you realize
like how insanely complex this can get if like, essentially every blockchain is a walk garden,
right? And I guess that's why the attraction of all these Eigenleider type things is that
they just go, just use ETH. ETH is the US dollar of blockchains. It's like, no, no, no. ETH is a
shit version of the US dollar that you should use a stable coin before you use ETH, although you
maybe shouldn't use a stable coin for other reasons. But I don't know. Whatever. Shout out to us.
It's sad because I've been trying to get away from cash for so long and now that we're,
we're now, now that I love, I love not carrying cash. Like that was like one of my favorite things,
I'm trying to get away from that. And then now I, for that, you know, for all that desire
of creating the world that, God damn it, you're right. They're like, we're, there's so many
intermediaries between those types of things. There's a, there's a really interesting article
actually in the Financial Times, I think it was this week about how, so we talked to hear
him before a few times about challenger banks and stuff like that. There's something that,
I mean, that has happened in the States, obviously, but like there was a big, a big springboard of a
lot of it happening in the UK a few years ago. And a lot of it was driven by people who were
kind of inspired by Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to improve traditional banking and user experiences
and get things on mobile. And what's happened now is all the big banks have caught up.
And there's this really interesting conversation. And there's a great article in the FT about this
this week. I'm sorry, I can't remember the exact title, but if you, if you look for it,
you'll find it, it's about challenger banks, Monzo, Starling, Revolute, stuff like that.
And they, they basically take some user usage numbers and they, they, they hypothesize that
a lot of people use these challenger banks have a really good user experience, essentially as like
cash clearing, but they actually keep their money and their, their like salary or whatever will go
into a traditional, like what you call a high street bank, like a big bank. One of the ones
that's come over to the UK recently, there's apparently massively growing is Chase, right,
which is a high street bank for you guys. And what they, they kind of theorize that maybe,
you know, these, these, these new challenges have actually done very, very well with getting people's
hearts and minds, but not so well in them actually fully trusting them, you know, with their money.
And what they say is that then, you know, the difficulty here is that in order to actually
get the, the marginal amount of money that makes these banks make their money, they need to be more
like the traditional banks and they don't have that traction and don't have those revenue sources
for, for lending, essentially, that those bigger, bigger traditional banks do. So what they've started
doing is increasingly thinking about other more, I don't know, tech world focused ways of, of, of
monetizing. And of course, that eventually means selling your data, right? It means analyzing
and selling your data. And it's kind of interesting to see like the incentives have played out that
way, right? That they, they came into it being like, ah, we'll do better user experience. That
means that we'll take market share from the traditional banks, and then we can monetize
like a traditional bank, right? We just, we lend, we make a load of money, everybody's happy.
You know, that's it. We just, we saw a gap in the market, we took it, we killed an old dinosaur.
But what's happened is that they, the, the incumbents have moved just quickly enough that
they didn't fully die. And they've just taken their place back in the market, which has left the,
the kind of innovators being too big to be bought out because they're worth a lot of money, too,
too big to fail because they're regulated and their, their deposits are backed, but too small to
really grow much bigger other than expanding to other markets. And that's very expensive. And
there's different regulation in different markets. And it's like really, again, back to the
intermediate, intermediation point, it's kind of again, a fascinating thing with you. Like,
ah, yeah, just financial data and stuff. Anyway, but yeah, I live in hope that we're only a couple
of years away or a few years away from it being possible to do actual digital cash systems,
where you can, you know, pay with something like cash and not hand over all that data. That'd be
nice. I've been kind of watching this, the same thing you're talking about, flow in different
paths for, for two banks that I use, Brex and Mercury. Mercury, I guess kind of going through
the same path and their choice for like how to monetize further is originally they're only for
businesses and now they've added in personal personal is like $200 a year, right? So really not that
much, but they know that their clientele is like tech employees, right? And so they're like,
God $200 a year, like we'll definitely get our stuff paid off for that. And Brex has gotten the
opposite in that it's offboarding people. Like we have money in Brex, but they're like, you're not
using it enough. So we're just going to start kicking people out. Yeah, right? Yeah, they're
not making enough. Yeah, exactly. So why are they offboarding you because you don't have a big enough
deposit in there or? And I'm not using it enough. Yeah. So I have deposit in there to kind of like
split up my funds, my emergency funds. But it's not like it's not actual utilization is high enough.
Not that there's not enough deposit, the utilization isn't high enough. So
it's not because they charge you every time you do a transfer or something.
They don't. So like in theory, it should just be totally fine. But maybe it is the data thing.
They're not getting any data for me. So get out of here. So I'm pulling all my assets from Brex.
Yeah. Well, Brex also, I don't like the, I mean, the banking themselves don't make any money out,
but like we use Brex card for a bunch of things, right? So they take a percentage off of that,
like, because it's a master card, but it's really, it's, but it's cleared out daily. So they make
they make something off of that. They have like, now there's started to do obviously invoice payments
where they take a piece out of the invoice. So there's no money in banking, like there's no money
in banking. So now it's all these auxiliary services, either transactions or not this even
I've been wires, right? It's got to be the transaction based things. So like we actually
moved because I used to do all like own credit card and do like expense reports on that kind of
stuff in, but I don't do it anymore. Like we just do all corporate now. It's helped because
we're pushing so much through like those types of cards that, that even they get cleared out
daily, they're still like a good amount of transactions associated that right? And that's
where they make their money, not just cash sitting in there. So we do what you do in Brex,
it's somewhere else in a different bank. So I know I'm on a list, right? Cause it's just sitting
there. It's like, there's a, it's an, oh, shit bank. In case the other one shuts down, right?
That, that there's an, oh, shit bank associated to it. And then like, we'll see if I get the same
thing because they're like, Hey, you're not using all these different services that we use. And
that's where we make our money type of thing. It's crazy. We have our oh, shit fun in a bank. We have
to pay, pay a business. A monthly fee for? Yeah. Yeah. Which isn't bad either. Like I actually
wouldn't mind that. I know it's like, it's very low. It's like $20 a month, something like that.
Like it's like tiny, it's a tiny amount. And I'm just like, well, then they're never going to kick
us out if we just, we just hand that over. It's the, you know, we also have safe deposit boxes
and things with them as well as a business, you know, for, for ledgers and all sorts of other
stuff. So we're just like, okay, we're throwing them reliably, maybe $1,000 a year total,
probably less safe deposit boxes on that much money. But it's just like,
but like chasing stuff like that. Like, I mean, if you're paying, you know, even if you have a
checking account that's 20 bucks a month, you're off that list, right? They don't care. They're
making their 20 bucks. You know what I mean? Yeah. I guess that that's the scale they're working at,
like $20. That's enough. Yeah, more than enough. That's enough. Yeah. Like I don't even know what
I don't even know what Brex makes office and fees. I think it's the idea that, that, that they know
that we're using the platform. So therefore, as we grow, they grow. I think it's probably it, right?
And they don't want squatters. Like they don't want accounts. Cause I assume they probably look at the,
maybe the draw per account. So if it's accounts are just sitting there not doing anything, they
probably look at it and say, Hey, you know, it's not worth it. So what's, what's interesting is that
one of the, one of the challenger banks, which I think has expanded to the US now, which is called
Monzo. We have a, we have a business account with them. Manzo. Manzo. But the, for the personal
accounts, which they do offer, they're, to, to kind of what we were talking about earlier about,
like other ways of monetizing, they have a thing you can opt into now. It's like,
it's like cashback, you know, cashback rewards with a lot of banks or credit cards.
But they sell your data. They explicitly go like, here's the deal, you'll get cashback in
much situations. We'll sell your data. And you know, you look at it.
I thought that that was illegal in the EU.
You, you have to opt into it. You have to specifically opt in and you can specifically
opt out at any time and you can request deletions. It's all covered within GDPR. But I looked at,
I looked at it, did like some kind of back of the packet maths on like, yeah, the kind of
shit we expense on the company card, which ain't, ain't lots. And the kind of stuff that I would
expense if I did it for a personal account. And I was just like, I don't see how this,
let's see how this ends up. But, you know, maybe, I don't know, maybe, I guess I've never really
used a credit card with cashback. So I don't know, I don't have a frame of reference for,
well, I don't, I've never had a credit card either. So, Jesus, fucking, I don't believe it.
I don't believe in it. I don't believe in debt. I like, I believe in certain types of debt,
but I don't believe in, I don't believe in debt to a financial institution where possible. So,
you know, so the reason why I use credit cards is mostly because if I use a credit card and like,
it gets skimmed, which happens way more than it should, then with a credit card, I just say,
no, and the bank goes, okay, well, I guess I'll just reverse that and then I'll send you a new
card. But you have chip and pin, right? We have chip, pin, no. Not pin. For debit,
yes. Chip and pin for debit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if you get card skim, they still have
your, they don't have your pin number. So, for debit, right? For credit, for credit, just basically,
I mean, even chip, even chip, they're not going to skim it, right? Unless, well, that's not entirely
true. If you, I mean, now it's tap, right? So tap, you're not going to really get a good skim,
you're not going to get a, you're really not going to get a skim, you're not going to get skimmed
off of that, right? But if you're sliding the card into a reader, then yes, it'll, it will pull
it off. There's still a metal, there's still a, there's still a magnet strip on the back, right?
It's not just, it's not just a chip. So it'll just pull it right off the strip.
So here, what, what gradually happened was when, so chip and pin, I want to say chip and pin came
in in 2008, 2008. It's been a while. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. And they, basically, after about
2011, they generally just, I think, didn't activate the strip anymore. Like it's physically there on
a lot. I have to look actually, is it even there? I'm not even sure. Like I know that if you,
if you get a strip on a card from a challenger bank, like Monzo or whatever, the strip is deactivated.
That would be great. It's cost-matched. Here it's still, yeah, it really should be chip only.
Like maybe, you know, the transition times here are like fucking decades, right?
Well, yeah, I've had the strip on mine in the last week. Yeah.
Chip doesn't work. Like I have to go parking something that I have to. So
that's why I use credit card for that protection. And that's the main reason.
Yeah. And I mean, I'm sure you do too. Like we paid off, we use cash back cards, we
paid off every month. So it's just kind of like free money. If quote unquote, if you don't count
your data and your sales information and where you buy and where you shop and how often you shop and
if you don't count that, then you have to count. If you're getting that information anyway.
If you're getting that information anyway. About your life.
If you're using a debit card, there's no way they're not getting that anyway.
Oh yeah, sure they are.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they're there. Yeah.
So they'd be doing the debit card. It depends on the terms of service if you're a bank. Like a
traditional high street bank. I think it would be less certain actually because of
data protection rules because they'd have to get you to sign stuff.
In the EU. In the US.
Well, we're not in the EU anymore, but we do have the rules grandfather.
Okay. Okay. Fair.
We have freedom now. We have freedom and it has, as it turns out, no economic value.
That's not true. I think there's some negative value there.
Yeah. Okay. That's not positive.
Yeah. What else from consensus? It was good to see everybody away from the show.
It was good. We saw a lot of folks actually. That was really nice.
Yeah. It sucked to not be there. That was kind of.
Yeah. It was hot as shit.
On most days, we had two units. One one didn't have any working air conditioning,
which was fucking awesome.
Did you have as many mosquito bites as I do?
I've got mosquito bites just absolutely everywhere. They're fucking everywhere.
You just have to know that you are feeling unwell. Have you got malaria?
It could be. I have a spider bite on my fucking palm and shit. Yeah. I came back like bitten up.
Oh. Go ahead. No. One night, the three of us were hanging out late.
We had this fire on, which is like a stupid gas fire. We're burning these useless citronella
candles. And then we're out there and useless citronella candles. Trying to keep the mosquitoes
away. And they were everywhere. They were all over the place. It was dark in there. We couldn't
see anything. And then Schultz was like, I think I'm getting bit up. I'm like, I think I am too.
And we go inside and we're like, I'm just covered.
Yeah. And they're the little mosquitoes. You couldn't even see them. And they're working at
least they have the decency to be like this big so you can go.
Right. Right. Yeah. Like, I might yeah, my elbows and everything else. So we saw, we saw,
yeah, we saw like a lot of teams. We saw the seida team was there. Peter's in chat right now.
It's good to see Peter. And we saw like, like I said before from from like traditional cosmos
teams like Jack was down there and Shane and Ethan and like there's a lot of good like the
Allora team we met. Seida team we met. Sorry. Buckman.
Yeah. I really appreciate talking to Jay from say, I think that was from say, because yeah,
I haven't actually met the seida team in person. And not Jay specifically, I haven't really talked
to them. Phil, I talked with fairly regularly. Yeah, maybe every few days. But Jay, I've never
really interacted with too much. Neither. Yeah. That was really cool. Yeah. Yeah, it was great.
And like, it was nice to be able to see different teams and like put them together. Like, had you
guys know each other like that type of thing? That was really fun. But yeah, that was that was
really cool. Then obviously soon we saw Bosco from Silk Nodes was there. Obviously, Shultz and
Null flew in, which is reason he's not here tonight because I left him Saturday morning.
He was there for a couple more days, right? He flew Monday, I think. Monday US time. I think he
landed like what this morning, Thursday morning Australian time. And so like he was dragging ass.
Like just for those. This is a long day. He did it for such a short time as well. He must have been
jet lagged the entire time. No, actually did pretty well. I think coming coming this way,
it's a little bit better because you just like he just stayed up. You know what I mean? So yeah,
yeah, really, really, really long day coming back home from the US is always easier than going out
for sure. Right. Right. So he's going. So basically he's yeah. So it's a little bit rougher
going the other way. Whenever I go to the West Coast, I'm always just so fucked. I can't do
anything. And then it's like, oh, it's time to come home. And I'm like, what the fuck? I've only
just got over the jet lag. And then he just like, I once came back from the West Coast and I went
into work that morning. Like I did a red eye back from the West Coast to the US. Go off the plane,
got on a train, just literally went straight in like I just had to carry on just went,
walked straight into the office. Yeah. It's like, get me fucking coffee. Let's go. They're like,
wait, haven't you just got back from holiday? It's like, yeah, like two hours ago, let's go.
You just gotta fight through it. Yeah. They're like, yeah, we're not really sure we want any
touch production service today, actually. I'm like, let's go. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine.
I was partying with John Lee Hooker last night. It's totally cool.
Was that last time? I think actually that might have been the time where it was, yeah, there was
like, there was a thing in that chapel that's in Oakland. And John Lee Hooker's grave is there.
And I was stoned as fuck. And I was just leaning against this thing. And then I just like looked
behind me and it said John Lee Hooker. And I was like, holy shit. I was like, holy shit. Is that
John Lee Hooker? And this guy literally just walks past me. It was just like, how many John Lee
Hookers are that kind of thing? He just keeps walking. I was like, yes, it's John Lee Hooker.
Huh? That's funny. Because it wasn't like a small, because there were some like,
because it was like a big public mausoleum, I think. They're a lot like these really small,
little cubby holes. I don't know what you're doing. Yeah. It's like a little, just a small building,
right? Yeah. For really, really small little cubby holes for the little dogs. And then there were
like big plaques for the big dogs. And this was like a big dog plaque. So I was like, whoever
John Lee Hooker was, he was a big dog. And there's only one, there was only one John Lee Hooker who
is the biggest dog of the John Lee Hookers. And also a big dog among the general population.
So anyway, yeah, I guess that must be the John Lee Hooker. All that random person lied to me.
But yeah. Yeah, that's him. Yeah, that's him. It does. It was toilet paper magnet.
Inventor of the perforated ripstrip. You know what I'm talking about? That was John Lee.
That was what made him his buddy. I heard one of those the other day where it was like,
you know, like improbably insanely wealthy people. It was something like, you know,
how some fruit comes in a bag where the hole is just big enough, you can kind of get the tip of a
finger in and then it just rips. But the actual, the way the material is weaved is like in a double
interlocked hexagon. So the bag, the fruit is actually really strong and light until you
put your finger through and just bam, and you just get your oranges out. Yeah.
What the fuck does that do a John Lee Hooker? My point is like,
so I made the joke about the toilet paper perforation being a zillionaire.
And I'm like, I was picking up what you're putting down. The other John Lee Hooker.
Yeah. The other John Lee Hooker. Jonathan Lee Hooker, who created the ripable orange bag.
The ripable toilet seat, the ripable toilet paper strip, the ripable orange bag. He made a
lot of ripable items. And all right. So any other, any other follow up items from consensus?
Any other final thoughts before we move off this fucking topic?
I'll add one bug thought. I got woken up by a cockroach landing on my face in the middle of the day.
We did not have the most amazing Airbnb. I won't say that.
So the thing is right in the run up to consensus, there was like this, oh, we've got this sick Airbnb.
It's going to be totally awesome. Was it just like, was it just like that expectation reality
picture where it's like a horse and the, the, the back half is really detailed. The front half is
just like kid's sketch. We went after, I went after a place that was like really walkable to
everything, which was, which that place was like, we could walk up the sixth street. There was coffee
and liquor store nearby. Those are, that's only two of the eggs you looked up outside of the two
things I looked up. There was coffee and liquor store nearby. On top of that, there was also,
there was also nice restaurants. There was, yeah.
There was liquor store at the basement fray. That's all I looked for.
All right. This is the widest place I've been chosen. Oh yeah. And the venues are on the corner.
Oh, okay. Right. Yeah.
And the venues on the court. We like, we walked from the venue back to the house many times.
But that was really nice because I feel at East Denver, like half the time I'm in a freaking Uber,
like it, like everything is 20 minutes away and you got to like plan out because these two events
are all shit. We're going to sit in a car for 25 minutes, right? And it's just like, it's just,
it's just exhausting. And so to be able to walk back and forth, that was really nice.
Like if you walk from the venue to the house in like 15 minutes, like if you hauled ass,
that was cool. So the only issue with that is everyone in those houses in that area are either,
like, they're lifers. Like they've been there forever and the houses are really run down and like,
and like, they're just beat up in the, the house is worth nothing, but the lot's worth like a million
dollars. Or they convert them into like VRBO, Airbnb's, and they're run by organizations,
not people, right? They're run by companies through buying one, $2 million places and turning them
into place and they put no money into them. And so this place, this place was for sale,
which I didn't look at Zillow. Sometimes I do look at see, like, if, see if the rental is also for
sale, that's usually a red flag. That means they're not putting any money into it. And this place,
they haven't put any money into it. Like they probably did it like maybe five years ago.
Their conditioners were kind of shitty. The outside was kind of beat up. Like it wasn't awful,
right? But there wasn't really like, it wasn't amazing. And then the, the AC units and one of
the units was totally broken. I've been arguing with them, trying to get a refund and stuff,
which was really disappointing because like John and like a couple other guys from
Artifact couldn't stick around because it was miserable. It just didn't work. So,
so yeah, anyway, so that was, it's kind of, it's like a trade off between those two things.
So next time we'll, I think, I wasn't really, we looked at, I looked at it for like a day.
Like I threw some options out and this, the place looked fine. And that was next time,
next time you should throw, you need to throw a bull market for the $80 around.
It was still fucking expensive. Don't get me wrong. Like,
Oh yeah, it was still expensive. Yeah, it was still expensive. Like it's,
I think we, I don't know what it was like grand and night or something like that,
but across six of us isn't awful, but, but it was still, it was still like, I don't know.
I think you're right. I think it didn't, should have looked harder and we should have like found a
place that, that, that was, maybe we could have given up on the location and, and try to find
something else. Cause the location was, we were kind of what I was driving off of. So next time
we'll find something else. Yeah. Welcome to Game of Nodes, the short term, let's,
that's right. Podcast. That's right. I just realized that I did the stick at the top of the
show and at no point did they then actually correct and say, welcome to Game of Nodes.
This is how you could tell I've not done the podcast in two weeks. Oh wait, maybe you didn't.
No, I didn't. Let's say. All right. Want to do some news?
Let's do some news to do. Everybody's going to crack their knuckles, adjust, you know,
get the necks all loose. Yeah, we would say this, this sloth thing, we all missed that,
unless you, did you guys get on the ground floor of the sloth? No. I'm not a sloth holder.
No, no, no. They're on, they're on MTIA, TIA, Celestia, which is. Celestia.
Yeah. And they are selling pretty well on Stargate. So it's actually just looking,
it actually is bouncing back because before, it was higher than this before. It was like,
I think right now the floor price is 4,000 bucks. It's 5,000. Just like, yeah, like basically
4,900, 4,900, 5,000. Do you ever see the film Blood Diamond? Yes. I am going somewhere with this.
So you know, like he keeps saying, like Leonardo DiCaprio's character keeps saying,
this is Africa. He keeps saying, TIA. Whenever something happens, like he keeps saying to,
I can't even remember the journalist, she's a journalist, isn't she? Whenever he's
trying to explain something really fucked up, he's just like, oh, TIA. And every time I see
TIAs in the Celestia ticket, in my head, it pauses in Leonardo DiCaprio's South African accent
from the film Blood Diamond. I just hit TIA. And I can't take that token seriously. And I'm just
like, people keep making money off it. And I'm just like, blood.
That's a sick reference. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's, this is, this is how broken
I am as a person. I look at a thing and I'm like, because it faintly reminds me of a one
liner from a 15 year old movie, I cannot get involved in this project and I will not get
involved in this project. There's been some pretty big sales recently, a couple outliers at
$8,000 and $9,000. But there isn't pretty good. Yeah, there's a lot of fixed price offers. People
are buying last sold was around five grand. There's been one around 5500 things like that.
So floor price is high. Yeah, there's been some pretty high rarity ones sold to.
What's the floor price on a bad kid these days? I think it is about, let me take a look at it
real quick. Because if the floor on a sloth is higher than the floor on a bad kid, then...
Oh, it definitely is. Yeah, floor price on bad kids right now is $1,800. So it's about 40%
Why? Why is it so popular? I mean, yeah. There's also, there's also 2500 of them versus 10,000
bad kids. I think if we did an NFT collection of tulips, do you reckon it would take off?
As long as we spell it weird or yeah, I don't know.
Like, okay, so they have sunglasses. So what right, my perspective here is that like,
I've been working on some stuff recently and I've been reflecting on the fact that in all,
in my whatever we're on now, four years in crypto, something like that,
every time I've had a clever idea, I've worked on it for a long period of time and made no money
off it. Every time I had a dumb idea, the dumbest things I've done have been the most profitable.
The things that I've done have taken literally the least effort have tended to be the most profitable.
Except for gaming nodes. Except, no, gaming nodes. That's low dumb. That's high dumb, low revenue.
No, because we've got business off of gaming nodes. Gaming nodes is what gaming nodes when
few activities that has definitively paid for itself actually.
That's true. That's true. Actually, on a variety of axes, game of notes,
that's right, paid for itself because, but anyway, I digress. The point is that I'm not
thinking dumb enough. And so I'm just like, okay, what if NFT collection of tulips, there we are,
bam, little meta joke. And then we move on, right? Just makes my rug pull collection.
And Mad Scientist was the other one that was on Lesmosis, I think. I've been watching that too.
It's kind of flattening out, but I thought so. There's some, this is, I don't know,
Robert's going to correct me. I thought this was the first cross chain NFT mint of some sort.
I don't know. I feel dumb. Something like that. I feel dumb all the time.
Yeah. Ooh, here's a news item. I've heard that Mars is going to spin down its validator set and
become a smart contract on Neutron. I did hear about that. Yeah. How about that?
The question is, will it do that before we deactivate our Mars validator, which we have
we've had on the pending piles since March. You don't care very much when you won't even
deactivate it. It involves not going to let you out of a bank vault. So not an ICF chain,
a smart contract on an ICF chain. Yeah. I mean, I think, so I mean, this totally
not facetiously. I think that's courage. That's capital C courage. That's like,
we should do the same for Chihuahua, except that should just go to Dow Dow.
And it does another chains. I'm a huge fan. I mean, yeah, I mean, why not Osmosis though?
I think that's the more interesting reason because Mars originally, from memory correctly,
was supposed to only be deployed on Osmosis, right? That's right. That was their main satellite.
The fact that they're not choosing Osmosis for that, I think it's utterly fascinating.
Yeah. I mean, what the fuck is Mars at this point? Like, that's a great question.
Well, I mean, the funny part too is that Mars was intended to just be like a dead
chain with a smart contract that Mars was put into, right? So why did they do a chain originally in
the first place aside from hopefully trying to make some money because they got rugged by the
terror crash? Yeah. And the end result of that is that it's been a wildly unprofitable project to be
a part of. So I remember this coming up a while ago, actually, I had to go look. So this was back
in November, right? Did they approve it? Is it happening? I don't do what was what approved?
Mars being one down? Did they put it like a governance structure that they're going to
make a decision associated with this or what were they doing? So I've only read a tweet so far.
I was like, the plan for how to unravel from the team. I don't know that there's been a governance
thing yet. Okay. Yeah, I did see that in the, it was like back last year, I remember, but this is
proposed migrating mission control to Neutron, which I thought kind of meant moving at all, but
maybe it doesn't. I'll put a note, I'll put a link to the show notes in that. Yeah. I mean, it's
actually, I guess, I mean, we always joke about half these chains should be smart contracts. And so
this one is showing that that's accurate. Yeah. I mean, we could go further and say that half of
these chains could be smart contracts and half of these smart contracts could be not existing.
And they actually wouldn't have any less value because all of it is completely imaginary along
with their use case. And once again, I would say there'd be more value in having never existed,
because so much money has gotten into like server costs and stuff. Yeah. I mean, I think the real
IQ 9000 plays, it's about to war games 1985. What a curious game. The only way to win is not to play.
Ramos says Delphi Digital invested in Neutron, Astroport and Mars, which makes sense. That's
why they obviously move that towards Neutron. Yes, follow the original statement to follow the
money. Well, that was well, Mars was far before Neutron, right? So now, I guess that original
goal of that launch and now where that should be, I guess that totally makes sense now.
So we have a couple of the news items. There's that that Texas Stock Exchange thing is kind of
funny. Is it meaningful at all? So this news item BlackRock and Citadel team up, raise $120 million
doesn't seem like a lot of money, just in my opinion. To create a new Texas Stock Exchange
of plans to take on the new on the two big New York Stock Exchanges, the plans to be Pro Crypto
and this the current BTC and ETFs among others they're looking to get approval for. This reminds
me a little bit. So recently, you know, there's the you know, in golf, the Saudis
started an alternate golf league and basically bought the whole thing. Recently, they tried to
do the same to pro cycling and they were like, we have got $240 million and we are going to start a
new cycling league. And then anybody who knows anything about cycling goes, okay, in your
screnadiers granted the biggest budget in cycling 50 million euro per year. There are like whatever
18 World Tour teams granted not with the same budgets, but $240 million. That's like 180 million
euros. Well, you can have four teams, what they're going to race around in the desert.
And bear in mind that if you compete in an alternative league that's not approved by the UCI,
you don't ride the Tour de France, which is like the third most viewed sporting event in the world
and the only one that matters to every single World Tour team. In fact, they have to ride it,
otherwise they lose their license. So what are you going to do? Like,
fuck you. It's the third most watched sporting event in the world.
Something like that. Yeah. It's like,
the viewership of the Tour de France globally is really big, like bigger than you would expect.
You mean within 500 miles of France? No. Globally, I don't think Asia gives a shit,
South America doesn't get shit. I know the US is going to give a shit.
I think what like this? You're wrong. You're wrong. You're wrong.
After land, after land, number two. And it's decisively number two.
Yeah. Really? 2023 World Cup of soccer was number one. Number two was Tour de France with
$3.5 billion. Third will be the number three. Now this is the surprising one, cricket.
Yeah. No, I wouldn't. That's not surprising. India. Yeah, that's not surprising. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I mean, the World Cup was easy.
And the IPL was above the Tour de France. I would have guessed that.
No, Tour de France is massive. I think you don't. Yeah, it's huge. It's a massive,
massive sporting event. I know. I believe that. I didn't think it was number two in that list.
I would think it was like top 10. But yeah, that seems insane.
Yeah. But so, but anyways, the point is that like, it is a big, not only is it a big deal if you
are in cycling, you've got to do it, but also to be a World Tour team, which is a relegation system
like any league, you have to ride the races in the World Tour, one of them being blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, so when somebody turns up and they go, we've got $240 million, we're going to buy this sport,
you have to race in my browser. This reminds me of that. We've got $120 million and we're going
to rival the New York Stock Exchange. It's like, yeah, you've got $240 million, you want to rival
the Tour de France. Good luck with that. We'll see you never. And this is like, yeah, okay,
you want to rival the New York Stock Exchange by listing a Bitcoin ETF with $120 million. That's
your war chest? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's the Chicago Stock Exchange, I think. But the whole
I think is kind of the point, right? I think longer than the New York Stock Exchange, but
nobody uses it. So good luck. You said it was like, hey, we're riders. Right,
it's the Chicago Stock Exchange. It's pretty popular. Yeah. This feels like one of those,
like if we announce a thing and put an imaginary number on it, we can get a headline and then
we might not even ever actually have to do the thing because people will have forgotten about
it pretty quickly. That's why I was watching the Tour de France. All right. I got to
retract this. I was decisively wrong. The New York Stock Exchange is 100 years younger, older,
than the Chicago Stock Exchange. Okay. So that's actually quite a big gap. It's a big gap.
But the Chicago Stock Exchange has been around since the late 1800s.
Respectable. Respectable.
First 100 years is only trading like parochies and fucking hot dogs and shit. So we got those
other stocks in there. Welcome out of these. I was about to say.
Kaluski and yeah.
What do you reckon is the oldest stock exchange in the world? There's probably one in the Netherlands,
right? That's why I was going to go for it. There's some lovely filth over here.
That's a good reference. It's a deep cut. This is a deep cut.
Some water we've been distributing swords. There's no basis for a system of government.
Which actually, this is the current state of what is happening in the UK. Election fever.
Yeah. It all fell apart pretty quickly for the... It's just... Yeah. It's been funny.
Women's World Cup is number four. This list doesn't make any sense to me.
I think we're looking at the same ones.
Football is very popular. Women's World Cup on American Summer Games.
Football is very popular. People will watch any football.
Well, I think the question is from the women's part of it because in the US,
so like the Timbers Army in Portland, their soccer league is really popular. Timbers Army
always sells out. The Thorns, which is the women's side, is frequently empty.
Very few viewers.
So I think what started to happen, I don't know if this is in every country.
I imagine it's very, very different in different places. But I think what's happened is advertisers
have worked out that if you can sell women's soccer or football, as we call it in the rest of the
world, football, and then it gets popular, you can then advertising reach half the population.
Who knew? And it turns out women weren't watching, not watching football because they don't understand
it. It's because they just don't give a shit about their partners complaining about
templates running around a pitch and they're just like, I just don't want to get into it.
Whereas if they can just watch something without their partner talking over them all the time,
they're kind of into it. So I don't know. It kind of feels like the money is going into
women's soccer and that's why it's growing. It seems women's cycling. That's been
exponentially growing in the last few years and it's a pretty similar story where it's
professionalizing pretty fast. I guess my surprise comes from there was this big news thing,
our event recently, Samar recently, where a woman that was in pro basketball, I want to say,
in the off season, she would go play sports in Russia because Russia paid more than US did.
This is significant because she then was imprisoned and was part of an exchange of prisoners.
Because she got paid so little, she would then go work in Russia as a professional sports player.
That's pretty wild. In the chat, Rama says,
Australian women's team got 80K watching a friendly versus China two nights ago. That's in
Australia. So that's how big women's soccer is becoming. I'm guessing that is football.
I think it's great.
That must be football, not Aussie rules football, right, Rama? Because I'm guessing they don't
play Aussie rules football in China. Have you ever seen Aussie rules football? It's wild.
Yeah. I've been to a couple of footy games, actually.
Really? Yeah. In Alberta.
Oh, yeah, a bit of Melbourne as well. It's fucking fun.
I had literally no idea what to expect to the sport. And then I was like, I got to the thing.
Bear in mind, I'd gone in completely caught. I'm not a sports guy, really, other than cycling,
a couple of other things. Watching a bit of climbing. Olympic bouldering is the coolest
sport at hands down. It is like watching Spider-Man.
They basically do flips up the wall and you're like, what is happening?
Oh my God. Have you ever watched lead climbing, competitive lead climbing?
So they're doing it really fast, like boom, boom. Or professional ice climbing. It's
genuinely like watching a scene from an action film.
That I haven't seen, but it sounds awesome.
Do you see the one where, yeah, so the one where they do it with lead climbing, but they also do
ice. So they have crampons and they sometimes will suspend on chains like a block of ice
or a block of simulated ice in between two of the, what do they call them?
They call, what do they call a climbing challenge? They call it, they have a word.
I have no idea. Yeah, I have no idea either.
It's not problem, but they have a word for a thing that needs solving.
And they'll have like two walls and then like a chunk just suspended in the air. And then they
would be like, well, there's nothing for it. They're just like leaping. It's like, whoa,
what the fuck is this? This is insane. It's like an action film.
But yeah, climbing is sick, isn't it? But yeah, and I just walked into the arena and was like,
why is the pitch oval shaped? This isn't cricket. And then they get the ball and then they start
running with it in their hands and you're like, wait, this isn't rugby. This is all wrong. This
is all the sports back to front. I don't understand. I guess you guys know what rugby is, right?
It's basically like American football, but not. I played collegiate rugby. Yeah.
Okay. Do you know how it got invented? I don't. It got invented in rugby, obviously.
And I think I want to say he was a private schoolboy. Let's say that. Why not? Some guy called
Alice. I say Alice Webb might have that a bit wrong. Just picked up the ball in a game
where you weren't allowed to pick up the ball and he ran with it. And they were like,
boys will be boys. And a new sport was born out of male privilege. There you go, rugby.
That's literally. And now you have hookers. Like that's an important distinction to rugby.
Yeah, I was the hooker in my team. I didn't have to build for a hooker. I was a winger.
You can tell I'm a lank. I was a winger. I have no strength. So a friend of mine was
front row like a prop. And he was so good. I once saw him tackle somebody and then just
in midair to tackle somebody else using the body weight of the person he had just knocked
to the ground. That person popped past and he just adjusted off of them. Took out the other guy.
We had someone that played on our team who like all of us were like 210 pounds or so. So I was
like 40 pounds more than I am now. This guy was 300 pounds of muscle. I swear to God. And he was
like six, eight. So he would come running past and he would just throw people out of the way
because with a hundred pound difference and he was like pure muscle. So like when you went to
like went down and guard the ball, when he wanted you to move, he would just pick you up, throw you,
and then go running. Like you just there's nothing you could do about it. It was outrageous.
And he was like the nicest guy. His name was Brian. Oh man. He's the nicest guy.
I imagine it's kind of like a lot more fun doing rugby when you're sort of
voluntarily doing it in that kind of situation. When you have to do it at school,
it's literally like the equivalent of that is the fat kid in the year who's also the bully.
Or he's like, or he's maybe not even the bully. He's just a piece of shit. And he's just like,
ah, this is just a chance to rake everybody and just like run into you, knock you over because
he's so heavy compared to you and then rake you with his boots and you're like,
okay, yeah, no, this was a rugby club. And so like we were all volunteering for it. And because he
was so nice, like the way he would hit you, you would go down, but you wouldn't go sprawling. I
got he had so much skill and he was such a great team captain. I did it at university and I was
in the smallest wall of residence at my university. So it's two, we had 200 people, right? So
university of I think 40,000 undergraduates, our whole, our whole was 200 people, right? Obviously,
mixed gender as well. So in the to field of men's team, we had plausibly, I think probably about
80 blokes to make up 11, 11 every Sunday, plus a couple of injuries, right? So realistically,
you need 15 to 20 people to even practice. So it was a case of there were two lads who played
under 18s under 21s and were really good. And two people who were moderately good who had done
under 18s like for these guys were county level, right? So they were really good.
And then everybody else was just like drafted in all shapes and sizes. And then to cover injuries
and people being away and whatnot, there were a couple of people who were just in as the subs.
And one of them was he was about five foot two, he played a bit in school, private school in Hong
Kong. He was five foot two, probably about 60 kilos. I don't know what that is in pounds, about
100 pounds. No, about 130 pounds, something like that. Yeah, something 130. Yeah, I'd go, I'd go,
I think 130. Yeah, so yeah, quite, quite small guy, right? And so the biggest hall of residence
at the university is over 8000, right? And they just fully fielded a team of people who'd only
played at town or county level before they came to university, they were all just tanked,
actual rugby players taking it seriously, they all played for the athletic union,
like the varsity team, whatever the university teams. And it's just like us all hung over on
a Sunday morning, like, just like, okay, we are going to get completely wrecked. And like,
the other teams were dead sound about it. They were just like, that we'll try, you know, all
right, boys, good, good job for turning up. Like, you know, we'll keep it a clean game,
we'll keep it a clean game. And then you just get pounded into the ground every like second
you got the ball, wow. We scored three points in the entire season. And it was in the first
minute of the first game. And it was because one of the two lads who was really good got past it
immediately kicked for a kick for the four teams. And they were just like, oh, that was good.
And then that didn't sound fun at all. We got so destroyed that first game that after that,
he was like, there's no point kicking. There's no point kicking. We can only score tries. And
then we didn't score any entire season. Oh, the shambles. And anyway, the point was that that
kid from Hong Kong who was really game, like, absolute lad champ, he got run over by a guy
that must have been 120 kilos of muscle. And he had to he finished the match went went back to our
hall had a shower came out for the curry afterwards. And then at the curry about halfway
through, he was just like, I'm sorry, boys, I'm just in a lot of pain. And there are some medics,
there's some his first year. So none of the junior doctors knew new fucking shit. They were just like,
what kind of pain? And he was like described and they were like, you need to go to hospital.
And so he we're lucky we are all the residents was like 800 meters from the A&E of the of the
hospital in the city. So he just like was like, see you boys later, got up from the table, walked
to hospital and did not come home that night. Either yeah, I think fractured collarbone.
He just he just got to the pub afterwards had some pints with the boys and comfort curry or the
legend. Anyway, game of legends. So yeah, yeah, hey, film recommendation. Have you seen Civil War?
Like what Civil War? Like Marvel Civil War? The Alex Garland film? That's new, right?
Yeah, I watched it on your Plex server, you surface.
Don't get around to that too much. Yeah. It's really good. It's really I did watch
something on the recommendation. What did I watch? It was two weeks ago already. I can't
remember what the hell we were watching. I was talking about. Oh, so no, on gaming notes,
we were talking about some Sunday, we're just talking about no, no, no, no. No, brick. Oh,
yeah, brick. Yeah, brick, we were talking about. Yeah, yeah, brick. Yeah, brick. I did. I did
watch brick. I couldn't tell you what it's about because it was two weeks ago. But yeah, I did.
JGL is pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. Like surprisingly good. Surprisingly good, right?
That was a good movie. It was a little bit fucked up. I can see why you like it.
It was a little bit fucked up. That film. I'm like, what kind of fucking high school is this?
I know, right? There's a lot going on. Yeah, like I got that chick got murdered. Anyway,
you want a class? You want a class? Like you got my notes? Yeah, should we just keep on being
kind of vaguely depressed and taking drugs? Yeah, why not? Exactly. Exactly. It's totally what it
was. Yeah. Yeah, that was a good, I would recommend that to everybody. But yeah, I would
recommend that. So Civil War is out on Watch the Next? Yeah, yeah. It's the trailer is like,
this is a war film. It's boom, daka, daka, daka, boom, boom, boom. And then the actual film is
basically about some journalist in a war zone. Oh, okay. And that's it. It looks pretty good.
I'm looking up right now. It's dystopian future America. Yeah, just every film about that right
now. Don't look up all of the fucking just just watch the film. There's lots of talk online.
I just just watched the film. It's very well-paced, very well put together. It's one of the only films
I can think of where I've watched it with my partner and she didn't go that film was half an
hour too long. We finished it and it was like June 2. This way. Yeah, she was about the right length.
But crucially, there's a scene in it, which I think is maybe the modern equivalent of the
saving private Ryan Beach scene maybe. Like is in just like a masterpiece of cinematography
in a kind of war film context. It's just very, very cleanly done. Just really gets
across the idea and the energy. There's a couple of shots in there, which are just too good.
They're almost too good because I noticed them. I was like, that is a great shot. That is the power
of cinema right there. And then I was like, ah, damn, if it was just like, is it better if you
don't notice it? Or if it's so amazing and eye-craping that you're like, that's a fucking great shot.
That is cinema. I don't know. I don't really answer that. I film, so I'm going to tell you.
Yeah. All right. You say so. There's a great sequence anyway.
Yeah. Oh, this last piece. You want to talk about this last piece before we get off?
The Jacob thing? The news headline or Jacob thing? Take it away.
Yeah. So we'll link it in the show notes. But so Jacob Gedakian and pronouncing that based on
Schultz's pronunciation, I think that's correct. Hold on. I pronounce his Gedakian. Oh, I was
close. I actually thought I was getting it right. I'm sorry. So he released a document, which I
guess the fair name for that is an affidavit, which is really just him, which is just a legal way of
being able to put something on record. He's not really putting anything. I guess he's trying to
have some sort of claim, but he doesn't know who he's claiming against. And in the stock, which
we'll link to because he put it out publicly, I wouldn't link to this otherwise. So it was the
only reason we're talking about. But I guess it's of notional at some point over the last
six months, maybe from October to February or so, around he had diminishing of assets up to the
value of $1.513 million USD. And that's he has a list of what those assets were in terms of what
was stolen or at least pilfered, I guess through a couple different sexes that he had items hosted
at. It looks like Kucoin, Exchange CX. I forget who else it was. And maybe in a couple wallets.
I actually haven't reviewed it too much to see what was going on. But everything from
Celestia to Sey tokens to a bunch of bad kids, like 11 bad kids, bunch of stars, Adam,
Osmosis, I think there was a bunch of stuff in here, Injective, I think.
A bunch of things that were kind of pilfered out. So I guess the story here, he doesn't know who
stole them. I think that's correct. And I think he tried to, I'm not sure exactly,
but it looks like he tried to be able to do some deposits in some of these types of things and allow
an investigation to be able to continue to see where those things were pulled in.
But yeah. So anyway, I guess we'll follow this up. I'll put a link into it. Maybe we could talk
about a little bit more next week when we have a little bit more history on it. But this is,
I think this was published just recently. This document is dated back in May, the first of May,
or 7th of May or something like that. And, you know, I mean, honestly, I know we had some
conversation about like team members of Notional Leaving. And I think Robert might have said something
around some wallet mnemonics being in a shared one password account, meaning like a team password
account where you might have multiple team members that might have access to that. I'm not sure if
that's exactly correct. But if that was the case, and depending on how those wallets were stolen,
or how those some of those assets were pilfered, or even if they were stolen out of sex, out of
sexes as well, or if there was just purely hot wallets, I mean, regardless, we don't want to have
anything stolen from anybody. And unauthorized transfers regardless of what the history is,
is not the right way of, if that was not sure where this history came from. But if that was,
obviously, something that was a third actor that kind of worked towards this in some sort of way,
that seems unlikely. The one password thing and like things where somebody had access to mnemonics,
that would be obviously somebody on his former team. And that's clearly criminal. I mean,
it's all criminal, right? And there's clearly better ways to be able to, if somebody feels
jilted, associated to lost revenue, or from a from a backpaid, you know, from maybe salary or
other types of things, it's clearly not the way to resolve it. So anything where you have this much
exiting an individual is not great. I don't take too much issue with using one password to share
hot wallets. Because I mean, to a certain extent, you have to, right? Like, because we run relays
and oracles and stuff, like the team needs access to these wallets. But these are considered like
heavy cash, right? Yeah, probably $3 or $4,000 floating on the relay wallet in a given day.
Because we burn through that every month, right? Right. Where we there's actual value in the
wallets, those are going straight to like, yeah, we, we, like, it's like, if you have a company
bank account, you might issue people who need to make payments like a debit card or something,
or a credit card with a low limit, like, but you don't like, you don't like put make them an
authorized cosigner of checks to max to unlimited value, do you like, basic financial upset, like
in a, you know, a boomer, a trade fire, a boom away, like, you know, literally don't give them
a checkbook or whatever. It's mad to give them the total balance of the entire company. I mean,
yeah, yeah, I mean, this is, this is, I mean, again, nothing against this situation because theft
is theft, but this is not the best key management. No, like, if that's actually what happened, and
like we use, we use hardware keys for a bunch of shit, including like, you know, sex removals and
things like that, where we have backups at something physical to be able to prevent things
like this, like no fun should leave a sex without something physical as well as, as well as a token
and all that kind of shit. And like, that's a week, right? We do all that, especially when it
gets in that situation. And even, even like on ledgers, you know, like that type of idea of,
like to your point, like we also, I do the same thing with like testnet accounts, like,
we were, we rotate keys like fucking crazy. So not rotate, but we use different keys for every
single chain and every single wallet. So, so that having testnet like tough in there, I don't
really care about that, right? Like, I don't really care because it's just convenient. But
you're right. Like we vault all that shit. And like, once that's at a point, those things should
not be, there's no reason for teams, team members to be able to share validator keys or be able to
share other types of things that that.