Episode #42: 🇧🇶 Excerptoshi Truthers Unite!!!
By: Coin Talk
Tags: Blockchain, Crypto, Cryptocurrency, Ethereum

Transcript

Aaron Lammer: Hey. Welcome to Coin Talk. I’m Aaron Lammer. Rare introduction with my cohost Jay Kang on the line. Hello, Jay.

Jay Kang: Hello.

Aaron Lammer: Sounds like there is some great ice cream truck action where you are.

Jay Kang: You know, I’m in my office, which is basically in an industrial part of Brooklyn. So, I’m looking down on this alleyway between two industrial buildings. There’s an ice cream truck that’s sitting there. I have no idea what it’s hoping for. The only people around here are annoying artists.

Aaron Lammer: It’s for you. If you have to ask, “Who is the ice cream truck for?” It’s for you.

Jay Kang: Oh my God. It’s so loud.

Aaron Lammer: Very sorry to everyone listening at home for this ice cream truck, but we’re just gonna ride on. This is Coin Talk. It’s the show of bitcoin sadness, occasional joy, sometimes somewhere in between.

We’re brought to you in partnership with Medium. Medium has tons of great writing about crypto. It’s all at me.dm/crypto. Hey, you should become a member if you’re reading a lot of stuff on Medium. You hit their wall. It’s five bucks a month. You get all kinds of great stuff like the transcripts to this show. Speaking of which, here is the show. Okay, Jay, I’m gonna do the throw here myself.

Jay Kang: Okay.

Aaron Lammer: I’m gonna play the music, all right? You ready?

Jay Kang: Yeah.

Aaron Lammer: This episode of Coin Talk was taped Wednesday August 22nd at 1:33 PM. The bitcoin price index … I’m stalling until I can open my block folio … is $6,433.

Jay Kang: Wow. That robot sounds a lot like you, if you were doing a robot voice. I thought for a second that the ice-

Aaron Lammer: We paid a lot of money for that robot, right Jay? It’s probably the biggest line item. That robot’s basically the third host by cost. The expenses we’ve incurred with that robot.

Speaking of robots, man, I’ve been feeling pretty crappy about crypto this week, and I feel like the robots have gotten all the gains. The dominant news story this cycle, there was that New York Times story about retail investors losing money. It’s just a bummer. No one wants to hear about this kind of stuff.

Jay Kang: Yeah. Who is actually making the money, then, if retail investors are the ones that’s losing it?

Aaron Lammer: Robots. I mean, I think the exchanges are making money on every … it’s just like gambling. The people who make the money in the gambling are the people who skim off every transaction.

Jay Kang: So, we’re the suckers who are buying and selling junk stocks while the exchanges and the bankers behind all of this are the ones that are just making money off fees?

Aaron Lammer: To me, the most interesting story of the last year, really, is Bitmain, which is not worth as much as, I think, every coin except Bitcoin. They’ve taken a lot of the money that’s been earned in crypto. I think when a historian unpacks all this financial history, it may be like, “Oh, minors and exchanges got 98 percent of the profits of the whole crypto.”

Jay Kang: Yeah, everyone here paid into it, we’re just suckers.

Aaron Lammer: Yeah. And then, like the Winklevoss’s and the early whales. But basically, the early whales and the people with an institutional position in the eco system. And I would say at this point, I look at something like Chinese mining as almost something like an institution. It’s not going anywhere.

Jay Kang: Yeah, as long as crypto is around, I can’t imagine what would cause them to lose their stranglehold. I mean, weirder things do happen in crypto from time to time, but, it’s just such a dominant right now and everything else is in such disarray that I think it would have to be a revolutionary technology change that would, or even like the unveiling at Satoshi, or something like that.

Honestly, I thought that’s what we were gonna talk about this week. I felt like this was gonna be our first non doom and gloom episode in a while.

Aaron Lammer: Jay faked me out and he sent me an Amazon link this week that was, it’s true, to the book that our favorite for who Satoshi is, Excerptoshi, the man who published an expert from a potential book out from the Satoshi Nakomo … I think the Nakamoto Family Foundation.

Jay Kang: Yeah. Well, it’s the reason why I knew that this was happening was because after Excerptoshi first came out I wrote an email to the email that was attached to it and I said that, “I’ve been trying to find Satoshi for years. I cohost Coin Talk a Bitcoin related podcast, is there any way I could speak to someone on the record or off who is at the Nakamoto Family Foundation?”

And, they wrote me back yesterday and said, “That will not be necessary. The embargo has been lifted. Everything he wishes to be expressed has been posted on the site as of today.” Which, I take to mean that the book was out, you know? That’s why I was emailing you all this stuff, but apparently it’s not. It’s just like the galley for the books. This is like the most interminable launch party ever.

Aaron Lammer: But wait, how can we get a galley of the book? That’s all we need so we can review it on the show?

Jay Kang: Well, I mean, I don’t know. Okay, do you want me to write the Nakamoto Family Foundation back and be like-

Aaron Lammer: I’m gonna say this. Me and you don’t know the most about crypto. I’m not even sure we know an above average amount about crypto. But I will say, I think we’ve taken Excerptoshi about as seriously as anybody. We have given-

Jay Kang: We’ve actually-

Aaron Lammer: His literature, a deeper read than almost anyone, and I believe that we did it on the good faith that Excerptoshi might actually be Satoshi.

Jay Kang: And, we never said that this was not Satoshi.

Aaron Lammer: Okay, I have a few options here. One is, we could try and back door it and book Excerptoshi on the long form podcast, as if it’s like a literary thing, but then it’ll just be me and you waiting for there for your ass.

I can not tell what is going on with this other than like Occam’s Razor is that it’s just some person said, “I am Satoshi Nakamoto. I am the Nakamoto Family Foundation,” and there’s nothing out there that really stops you from doing that.

Jay Kang: Yeah. It just seems very … the book itself. The new messages on the Nakamoto Family Foundation website, which include a couple more of those puzzles that he put in the first one, remember in the first message there was like a cryptogram.

Aaron Lammer: Oh yeah.

Jay Kang: So there’s a new cryptogram. I did not bother trying to solve it because I know that it would probably be really easy, but also beyond my capacities, which is a very frustrating duality of circumstances. But yeah, I think that we should just ask for … Okay, I’ll ask for the excerpt, or I’ll ask for a galley of it. I don’t know if a self published ebook really has galleys, but maybe they can give us like a self exploding PDF or like galleys on the blockchain or something like that so they can track if we send it to somebody else.

Aaron Lammer: What is your take on why this roll out is coming so slow? Like, if you’re gonna do a hoax, generally you just drop the internet with the hoax. Are we supposed to believe this is more real because it’s coming out in successive waves, so that when the actual book comes out, you and me will have already spent six hours of air time talking about Excerptoshi?

Jay Kang: If the con is to try to get media people to puzzle over it and talk about it at every stage, they have found their marks.

Aaron Lammer: I mean, my true hope is that we can eventually have whoever is behind Excerptoshi on the show, and they will explain themselves and explain to us why they did this and why these details like, “My mother was like in publishing.” Why these bizarre set of details have been mapped onto the person Satoshi. I hope we get to come back to that.

Jay Kang: Well, there’s new details. Did you hear about this?

Aaron Lammer: Oh, no. I didn’t. No, no. Tell me.

Jay Kang: This is on the Nakamoto Family Foundation website, and we are now approaching five minutes talking about this.

Aaron Lammer: We got, hey, podcasting is for.

Jay Kang: Okay. “No one knows I come from the Caribbean and have family still there, where my life as a former professional poker player or the decency to consider the possibility” … his grammar is a little off … “or the decency to consider the possibility that my focus is strictly placed on my family, which is what inspired the title of the book. Surely some of you remember meeting me at FCO9. That you didn’t know it was me that you were talking to is no fault of your own. It pains me to know that these” …

So, he also says-

Aaron Lammer: This is … I’d like to say that the speech is kind of in the tone of like a Bond villain who’s like, “It was me behind it all. When you met that strange woman at the hotel, she was my spy. I was watching you all along Bond.” And it’s like, “Yeah, we didn’t know that it was you ’cause we still don’t know who you are.”

Jay Kang: Exactly. The other, and this is sad, but, the other detail that he put in there is that his grandmother has been diagnosed with leukemia and that it has reminded him of the ill effects of being an immigrant child coming to a new country with nothing and being face to face with the realities of immigrant life.

So, Satoshi has now sort of revealed that he’s an immigrant from the Caribbean.

Aaron Lammer: I mean, that is, that, I agree, is a rational read with that. I still don’t know … He didn’t literally say that. He said, “I’m from the Caribbean and I’m an immigrant.” You could read that a few ways. That could be like a Dutch guy who like grew up in, what’s the Dutch island in the Caribbean?

Jay Kang: Antilles.

Aaron Lammer: Aruba?

Jay Kang: Right. Aruba, yeah.

Aaron Lammer: Yeah. Like, was in Antilles, and then their parent moved to work at like Wall Street. I’m just saying.

Jay Kang: That’s true.

Aaron Lammer: We can make no assumptions about Excerptoshi ’cause he’s withholding information from us and playing with our hearts.

Jay Kang: I know that the little league world series is on, but maybe 10 years go there was a little league world series team from Saudi Arabia, and it was all American. It was all American kids who were like six foot two or something like that.

You’re like, “Wow. Saudi Arabia’s little league team.” And it’s all people who are working there in the oil industry. So, it could be something like that. I think you’re right. Or, he could be like a Dutch Aruban, like Sidney Ponson, former pitcher for the Baltimore Oriels and now immigrated to the United States back from … who knows.

Aaron Lammer: I mean, there’s a lot of possibilities. I will say, just reading this as a pure work of literature, which is how we always encounter Excerptoshi, I do think that these details of saying like, “My story has an element of the immigrant story in it,” very quickly led my mind towards some of the stuff that’s happened in Venezuela and these transitioning economies.

Did Excerptoshi have some sort of formative experience with a collapsing market that led to the creation of Bitcoin? Cause we already know that Satoshi was very interested in the economic crash. But Satoshi would’ve already been a working adult by then.

Jay Kang: Or like, did he-

Aaron Lammer: Is there some previous economic trauma in the situation?

Jay Kang: Or did he grow up in Saint Kits amongst like a cul de sac of money launderers and thought to himself, what is the most efficient way of laundering money out there.

Aaron Lammer: I’m just gonna say that taking Excerptoshi literally at his word, Excerptoshi could be an American kid, like a Dan Bilzerian type whose father was a white collar criminal who fled to the Caribbean, and he could describe being an immigrant like in Saint Kits or Trinidad or something like that. And, that would really, in a novelistic sense make a lot of sense that this was someone who was avenging the regulatory persecution of his father figure.

Jay Kang: Oh yeah. Well, look, I think that it is interesting that he’s like saying … The one part that stuck out to me, honestly, is that he was like, “When you met me at FCO9,” I don’t know what that is, but I imagine it’s like something conference ‘09.

Aaron Lammer: I feel like that’s some like rap shit talk. It’s like, “When I grab your chain at the 2001 VMAs, you knew who I was. You didn’t know that I was Satoshi, but you knew that you were talking to someone who grabbed the chain.”

Jay Kang: It is. It’s kind of like there is this, “Oh, you didn’t expect the immigrant kid from the Caribbean to be the one that was like leading you along the whole way.” You know? “I’m just a humble man from humble beginnings.” It’s like a … It almost feels like it’s a verbal quint, like coming out as a Keyser Soze. Like, “You never suspected me. You thought I was dumb, you thought you were smart. But guess what bitches.”

Aaron Lammer: He’s taunting the audience a little bit and he’s suggesting that the reason people haven’t figured him out is that they’ve somehow doubted him or that they couldn’t imagine a person like him being Satoshi, which presents a very weird picture, ’cause I don’t really even know what the mainstream idea of who Satoshi is.

I guess he would be saying, “I’m not a Nick Szabo cryptographer, libertarian type.” But he is that, I think. And he’s saying he was at this conference that, I’m just gonna guess that that conference was like a conference of a bunch of the people who were suspected of being Satoshi era Bitcoin people had been.

Jay Kang: Yeah, so like, compiling what we know then, right? We know that his grandmother who has leukemia now ran a printing press, a sort of publishing house. We know that he says that he is from the Caribbean, and that he is an immigrant. That he was at FCO9. Right? Like doy?

Aaron Lammer: That’s right before Bitcoin, right?

Jay Kang: I guess my question’d be like, don’t you feel like at this point maybe we could triangulate who this might be? How many people were at FCO9? You know? How many of them like-

Aaron Lammer: I agree.

Jay Kang: … of Caribbean descent and so, FCO9 was Financial Cryptography ’09. Data security, the International Conference, which was in Acura Beach Hotel and Resort in Barbados.

Aaron Lammer: Maybe he’s just fucking with … He was like, “I was like on the wait staff at FCO9 when I was working as like a hotel worker in Barbados, but I was the true originator of Bitcoin.” Is he gonna give away what his real identity is as part of this? Or is this book gonna be published anonymously and it’s just a clue, again, that people are gonna try to figure it out.

Cause, I would agree with you. If this was the real person, you have enough data points to figure out who it is. However, those data points may not point to anyone because there’s no real evidence at all here that’s unique that this is Satoshi.

Jay Kang: The interesting thing is that I’m looking over the speaker list at FCO9, and it’s a lot of academics. It’s not people … It’s people from Harvard, it’s people from the University of Cambridge, Indiana, UC Berkeley, that’s just one panel, you know?

Aaron Lammer: But that’s, anyone who is involved in what would become the field of crypto then would’ve been an academic, what other thought would we really have?

Jay Kang: Oh, no no. I agree. I agree. It is actually kind of a specific reference. You know? That actually is interesting to me. He is … FCO9, I’m sure is not something that one can just Google and come up with without knowing at least a little bit about this world.

Aaron Lammer: Well, it’s possible that if he’s familiar with the world of Satoshi hunters, which we have to assume that he is, and this is true whether he is Satoshi or Excerptoshi. He would know … I don’t know this for a fact, but I would guess that there are astheros and serial killer lore, certain hot spots where it’s like …

I just read Michelle Mcnamara’s book about the Golden State Killer.

Jay Kang: Sure.

Aaron Lammer: And when they look at the strongest evidence, she correctly predicted that he went to Sacramento State, which is a pretty limited pool of people.

Jay Kang: Yeah.

Aaron Lammer: She knew his approximate age. And they were right about that stuff. If Excerptoshi says, “Oh, I was at FCO9,” I’m guessing that somewhere on forums, if we track this long enough, we’d find that this is like the core Nick Szabo, a bunch of these high probability people were there. It’s like locating himself as within a certain milieu without literally calling out his own identity.

But I agree with you, just with the, “I grew up in the Caribbean,” I feel like you could get to a list of a few at most.

Jay Kang: I mean, look. I think that what I would do if I was a journalist, is I would look through this …

Aaron Lammer: What are you, on sabbatical?

Jay Kang: I’m divesting from journalism.

Aaron Lammer: Oh yeah? You’re short journalism [crosstalk 00:18:08]?

Jay Kang: I’m short in journalism. I went on Bitmax and put a huge short on … yeah.

Aaron Lammer: You’ve been taking out twits on Civil?

Jay Kang: Hey, hey. Those are our friends. I would …

Aaron Lammer: Hey, I’m not short on journalism. You’re the one that’s short on journalism.

Jay Kang: I think what I would do is I would just call, or I would email all the people on this list. You know? And, just ask them, “Do you have any idea? Did you talk to somebody who talked about their grandmother who ran a printing press?” You know?

There’s like, I’d say like 100 people on this list. It seems like their schedule is they had maybe eight days together or five days together. And, you would think that if maybe one of these people did talk to somebody of Caribbean descent perhaps who’s grandmother did run a printing press, or a publishing house. Then you have who Excerptoshi is, right?

Aaron Lammer: Right. But we’re not closer to knowing whether Excerptoshi is Satoshi. All we know now is that the person who’s clearly being fingered by this document is a real person, which doesn’t even prove that that’s Excerptoshi, it proves that Excerptoshi has written a work of speculative fiction using the identifying details of this person.

I just can’t believe that this honey pot leads back somewhere rational. Cause if it does, then the most bombastic thing to do would be like, on the last page of the book, you’re like flipping, flipping, flipping, it’s like, “Oh, I forgot. Here are the private keys.”

Jay Kang: Yeah.

Aaron Lammer: And it’s be like, “Whoa.” You know?

Jay Kang: Yeah.

Aaron Lammer: Short of that, there’s really nothing to tell-

Jay Kang: Here’s the other problem that I have, is that the release date for this book says it’s in January. That’s so far away.

Aaron Lammer: But that’s kind of public though.

Jay Kang: No, but it’s self published. It’s not like he’s waiting for like Random House to do a publicity round and waiting for the right timing to tie it into the election or something.

Aaron Lammer: What percentage chance … Okay. It’s January 4th. You and me are betting on the Augur market. We’ve both just purchased the book and stayed up all night, read the whole thing. What is the percentage chance that you wake up that morning thinking, “The person who wrote this book is a real person, and it is the real creator of Bitcoin?”

Jay Kang: I mean, look. If we’re talking seriously, I would say very low, like under one percent. But, I don’t know. I actually think of all the Satoshi hoaxes and all the Satoshi stories, whether Dorian Nakamoto … Although, that one was pretty funny, honestly, accept for that sort of anguish it caused Dorian himself.

I would say this is at least the most fun, don’t you think? It’s like a … It has a lot of elements to it and it’s so weird. Guys, we’ve been talking about it for 22 minutes now.

Aaron Lammer: It’s weird that it’s a little believable. It’s a little like the P tape in that it’s a little too far to be believable, but then there’s like a weird double take where you’re like, “But doesn’t that make it a little bit believable?”

I was gonna say closer to 20 to one, 30 to one. I think it’s more like a five, two percent, three percent chance that this is the real person and that … and this isn’t just the reel, this is the book presents some incontrovertible journalistic proof that they’re Satoshi. Which they could have. It’s not just the private keys. There is multiple routes to proof, and we don’t really know what all of them are ’cause we don’t know what cards Satoshi is currently holding, or even if Satoshi is currently alive, or if Satoshi is a man or a woman.

I will say, this book, it is surprising to me how far you can take a hoax like this without really doing more than put up a website that has no CSS.

Jay Kang: Yeah, I mean, I don’t … I basically am of the mind right now that whoever is doing this is convinced that he is Satoshi. I don’t think it’s a joke.

Aaron Lammer: Oh, interesting. So you’re going for more like a mad genius, like the joker kind person.

Jay Kang: I think this is something I’ve mentioned the show before. When I would write a … When I wrote about Satoshi in the past, I got some phone calls from people who, it was honestly a little scary, but it was people who had called and told me they were Satoshi. I would say, “Okay.” And within five minutes, they would tell me that they had also invented like email and the internet and self driving cars where … It was people who were obviously crazy, but there’s clearly no incentive for that person to call me and say this sort of stuff unless they really believed it.

I feel like there’s a version of this where the person who is saying they’re Excerptoshi is actually convinced that he is actually Satoshi. Otherwise, I don’t know. It’s an incredibly good rouse if it is.

Aaron Lammer: I like this. I like this route. I’m seeing like a follow up in our Bitcoin Maximalist movie, future movies, same area where, in the present day a young economist in the Nouriel Roubini mode is like trying to sound the alarms against Bitcoin Maximalism and he’s just shouting from the hilltops, “It’s going to zero, it’s going to zero.” And as the Bitcoin world comes, he gets driven completely insane and then at the end, he’s in an asylum and everyone’s like, “I am Satoshi Nakamoto.”

“No, I am Satoshi Nakamoto.” Cause it’s a litmus test of like who-

Jay Kang: It’s like the end of Amadeus when Salieri is being worked through the insane asylum, but instead everybody’s screaming about how they’re Satoshi.

Aaron Lammer: I mean, it’s a litmus test of like, what the greatest grandiose thought of yourself and your era is that people in an insane asylum think that’s who they are. They think they are Michael Jackson, or that they are Jesus Christ. I think probably historically, the leader in people in insane asylums thinking they’re that person is Jesus Christ.

Jay Kang: Yeah, yeah. No, no, no, no, no. That’s … I agree with that. I think it’s an interesting …

Aaron Lammer: In a Bitcoin Maximalist universe, Satoshi Nakamoto is Jesus, will be Jesus Christ, right?

Jay Kang: But I also think that part of the sort of evidence of how pervasive and interesting the Satoshi myth is, is that there are people who probably have no idea what Bitcoin is who are pretending to be Satoshi Nakamoto. It’s not just for Bitcoin people, the myth, it’s something that has pervaded other people to get sort of in the psyche of people who are unwell to be like, “Oh yeah, and I also invented Bitcoin in addition to like these other mysteries that I account for.”

So, I don’t know. That’s interesting.

Aaron Lammer: There’s probably hundreds of Satoshi’s all over the world like, dudes who are hanging around Swiss wine bars picking up women and being like, “I’m secretly Satoshi Nakamoto.” You know?

Jay Kang: That’s a terrible, that’s a terrible, terrible drift.

Aaron Lammer: I mean, people, there was a guy impersonating Stanley Cooper. So, if there’s like that, think how many people would say they’re Satoshi Nakamoto. And like, since basically I think people’s born in assumption is that Satoshi Nakamoto is some kind of a nerdy white guy, like, 20 percent of the people out there could claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

Jay Kang: Yeah.

Aaron Lammer: Maybe not worldwide, Europe or America.

Jay Kang: But not Excerptoshi. Excerptoshi is a Caribbean-

Aaron Lammer: Excerptoshi is of Caribbean descent and has repeatedly, the main thing we know about Excerptoshi is Excerptoshi is recklessly narrowing the circle around his own family.

Jay Kang: Oh yeah. I mean, I really do think I could probably email all these people today and get some answer back. Now, it might be that none of them remember any conversation and actually, more likely that would be true. That would at least be a start. How many people were at this conference? It couldn’t have been more than a couple hundred.

Aaron Lammer: Can we just commission Adrian Chan to do this for us?

Jay Kang: Adrian, I’ve divested from … I’ve divested from journalism and I need your help.

Aaron Lammer: I double dare you to email every single person on the FCO9. Investigate them personally and come on the show and report to us about it.

Jay Kang: Actually, you know, I am going to send this to Adrian. I’ll see what he says. I sent him the Excerptoshi thing and he didn’t even read it. And I was like, “Why did you not read it?” And he said, “Because it was so obviously bull shit, can you stop wasting my time?”

Aaron Lammer: I feel like Adrian Chan’s refusal to discuss Excerptoshi with us is more evidence that Excerptoshi could be real.

Jay Kang: Or it’s more evidence that Adrian is Excerptoshi.

Aaron Lammer: Because like, what if Adrian is like hot on the trail of Excerptoshi and he’s like, “Aaron and Jay gotta stop taking this so seriously. They’re gonna blow like my scoop that it was Excerptoshi.”

Jay Kang: But, let’s go to the bad story right now, which is the Eth market.

Aaron Lammer: Okay.

Jay Kang: Or the Eth market, I don’t know how to pronounce it. But like, the Ethereum market is doing terribly right now.

Aaron Lammer: Yeah. Did you notice that just because I became an Ethereum Maximalist during the crash or have you actually been watching it for reasons other than to hold it against me?

Jay Kang: Yeah, it’s mostly like a … I don’t even really think it’s a shot at Froyda, I think it’s probably just like being a dick where you started telling me that you were buying Ethereum and I started checking to see if it had gone down.

Aaron Lammer: You definitely have never been a huge Ethereum fan. And to be honest, other than my very first fore’s, I wasn’t either. I think I was kind of playing, you know when people play poker and you kind of just assume every hand’s gonna go like more or less an average poker hand?

Jay Kang: Yeah.

Aaron Lammer: I was kind of like, “Okay, well, you know, it’s kind of rexed to Bitcoin, they’re probably just gonna both go back up and at that point it’ll gain. I don’t have a very deep investment thesis, which brings me to like, I finally asked our friend Ledger Status, I was like, “Hey man, we gotta start chilling some F here. We gotta get this market going here. What’s going on?”

He was like, “Well, no one really gives a shit about ICOs anymore. And, what’s the demand for Ethereum when no one cares about ICOs?”

And I was like, “Yeah. Fuck.” I didn’t think of that.

Jay Kang: We love Ledger, and I will say that one of the downsides to having someone that is reasonable and smart in your life that you can talk to is that when they say something deflating and right, you can’t really argue about it.

Aaron Lammer: I had like no argument against it. I was like an old person asking someone how the printer worked, and they were like, “You have to turn the printer on.” And I was like, “Oh, thank you young man.” In a sports context, I would always be like, “Yeah but.” And this one I was like, “Oh yeah. Fuck. You’re totally right.” How long has it been on this show since we’ve talked about ICO?

Jay Kang: Okay, so to risk a little bit of silly correlative thought though-

Aaron Lammer: You think we killed the ICO market by mocking it on the show.

Jay Kang: Well no, the peak of Ethereum, which was around $1500, $1400, when was that? Was that during the peak of ICO insanity? I feel like it was a little bit afterwards. I don’t know if we can say that Ethereum only pumps when ICO market is pumping, but I think what we can say probably is that if there’s no ICO interest, then it is harder for Ethereum to pump. Does that make sense?

Aaron Lammer: Okay. Yes. Except there’s one more ingredient that I didn’t really think about either, which is that a ton of that Ethereum went to all these shitty ICOs and those ICOs own token, is now fucking deeply in the toilet that people are gonna be selling their Ethereum hoards and people are panicking ’cause Ethereum’s worth nothing now. It’s kind of like a vicious cycle, a perfect storm of shitty conditions stemming from the ICO boom, as I recall.

Jay Kang: Yeah, yeah. It might just be like the bottom fell out. Right? We talked about last time, and I did get a little bit heated, but I was just like, “What is … Cause I was thinking about it, and I was like, you know, I was trying to think about a year ago when I would talk to you and some of our other friends, and there was all this Ethereum stuff coming up.

Remember? They were like, upgrades that were coming.

Aaron Lammer: It was a Metropolis.

Jay Kang: Yeah, Metropolis and there were upgrades coming and Fatalic was gonna talk at Tech Crunch Connect or something. Do you remember that? There’s all that sort of … There were these sign points that people were pointing to saying like, “This is why this is a good investment.” It has progress, it has a future, it has a face. And I just felt like there was none of that excitement anymore.

It might be that I no longer read the Ethereum Reddit every day like I used to. But I don’t think that that, I don’t think that that sort of hype around specific future events exists anymore. There is a question right now of what are we really looking forward to in terms of Ethereum.

Aaron Lammer: Well, so like Joe Lubin from Consensus, the Ethereum co founder was like, “Look, price crashes are gonna happen. It’s still in development. It’s gonna take a bit. Maybe these price crashes,” I think he said maybe they could be good. I feel like the price is only a negative seen in the context of at one point was significantly above $1000 and it’s now below $300.

If had slowly crawled here, it would be fine. It’s the experience of the roller coaster that has made this seem pretty dead in the water now.

Jay Kang: All right, so, our third story, this is positive I think, is that Bitcoin has come to the English Premier League, or cryptocurrency at least. And the news story was that seven Premier League Clubs have agreed to set up a digital wallet with eToro. And this is sort of a sponsorship that eToro, which is a wallet investment program, I think, from Tel Aviv, the teams are Brighten and Hove Albian, Kartiv City, Crystal Palace, Lester City, Newcastle, South Hampton, and Tatnum.

Within that group there are some pretty big clubs. I mean, I think Brighten and Kartiv, Kartiv just got promoted this year to the EPO. Lester obviously won a couple years ago in one of the surprising results in all sports history. Newcastle is a story big club, and Tatnum is one of the most popular clubs in the world.

This is actual real, sort of, engagement I think that-

Aaron Lammer: These people really took their money. I feel like, the basis of this story has basically been, “We’re willing to pay you a bunch of money, in Bitcoin.” And they were like, “Cool. We’ll take it.”

They’re like, “You’ll set it all up and we can exchange it for pounds if we want to? Fine. Whatever you want.”

Jay Kang: The head of eToro’s UK division, his name is Dick Balgandum, had a statement about this and he said, quote, “Today’s announcement is the first small step on a long road to football fully embracing blockchain technology. Education will be key so that industries can understand the potential and so getting global exposure through these premier league clubs represents a great opportunity to raise awareness. Blockchain brings transparency, which means it can improve the experience for everyone who loves the beautiful game.”

That is basically right out of any type of shit coin ICO. There’s absolutely no explanation of why this is true or how it’s going to happen, but hey, I respect the hustle.

Aaron Lammer: Yeah, I mean, I started, you sent me this and I started clicking around and I ended up on some story about how like, “UFA is using blockchain for ticketing to make sure there’s no duplicates of tickets.” And I was just like, “I literally have no idea what this means.” It’s like they’ve tested it at a stadium in Estonia. And I’m like, “Here we are trying to sync the Infera chain, which is still sitting at 86 percent. You’re telling me that this whole stadium was running some sort of a blockchain ticketing?”

I don’t even know how to read these articles anymore. In some ways, this eToro story, I at least understand what they mean, which is, they made a Bitcoin wallet and paid millions of dollars in Bitcoin to put eToro logos on their jerseys.

One thing I don’t understand is, my understanding of the Premier League was like each team had kind of like a unique jersey advertisement scene.

Jay Kang: Yeah.

Aaron Lammer: But there’s gonna be eToro on all of these different jerseys?

Jay Kang: Oh no, no, no. I think it would just be at the stadium or something like that.

Aaron Lammer: Oh, okay. Okay. Cause that’s what I thought. I kind of like the history of the pairings of teams and sponsors and how that works into the [crosstalk 00:36:29].

Jay Kang: Yeah, this is not like the NBA or the MLB where people are crying foul and saying it’s like, once tony and story don, ethical institution is now taking dirty money and giving itself over to corporate sponsors. A lot of the sponsors on EPLT jerseys are Chinese gambling sites and stuff like that.

Aaron Lammer: I feel like the most common money in the EPL is like Russian oligarch who made money on oil markets. Oil markets in kind, buy out jerseys on said Premier League team. Of the companies that I do not recognize on jerseys, they’re almost always Russian gas companies.

Jay Kang: Yeah. And every other jersey has like a middle eastern airline on it.

Aaron Lammer: Or a middle eastern oil conglomerate.

Jay Kang: Chinese gambling, Saudi airlines, or Qatari airlines, and Russian gas companies. That’s about it. Welcome the blockchain to that wonderful triumph for it. It’s good.

In that story, I actually found a much funnier story, which is that there’s a team in Gibraltar, it’s a pro team. I didn’t realize that Gibraltar had a Premier League. Is Gibraltar even a country? I thought I was just, is that where the Strait of Gibraltar is?

Aaron Lammer: I think that’s like a territory, sort of like the Puerto Rican model.

Jay Kang: Gibraltar united, a football team playing in Gibraltar, semi professional Premier Division is the first one to, part two pay its players with cryptocurrency.

Yeah, there’s also a football team, or soccer team out there that pays its team players in cryptocurrency. This seems like a terrible idea, by the way. That’s why I probably don’t know.

Aaron Lammer: Well, that’s what I wanted to ask you. So, I ask you, Jay, you’ve left your employment at Vice, but you’ve got other employment opportunities. Your next job says, “Jay, there’s the salary we’re offering you. These benefits. One more thing. You have to take payment in Bitcoin and/or you have to take payment in the token of the company.”

Jay Kang: Absolutely not. No.

Aaron Lammer: “Do you accept this?” What if it’s not an option? What if it’s like, the job, it’s a great paying job, but it pays in Bitcoin.

Jay Kang: I would say …

Aaron Lammer: I don’t have a problem with that.

Jay Kang: They would have to pay me double in Bitcoin what I would’ve accepted in US dollars. Yeah.

Aaron Lammer: Double?

Jay Kang: They would have to-

Aaron Lammer: To make up for the volatility or just for the inconvenience?

Jay Kang: Both. If they’re going to pay me, let’s just say out of, they were gonna pay me 50 thousand dollars a year, I think I would need 100 thousand dollars a year in Bitcoin.

Aaron Lammer: Well, what if your Bitcoin compensation is paid to the value of the dollar? So it’s pen Bitcoin, but it’s Bitcoin that’s like, “You’re getting the same amount as you would.”

Jay Kang: No, I would need 100 thousand dollars in Bitcoin tagged to the US dollar at that time. Yeah.

Aaron Lammer: Wow. See, I have no problem. I’m like, “Okay, if you’re gonna peg it, it’s gonna be like a stable value, pay me it and I can either keep it in Bitcoin or I can just trade it “

Jay Kang: Yeah, but then you have to pay taxes on it.

Aaron Lammer: You have to pay tax on it as income anyway.

Jay Kang: Yeah, but you have to pay taxes on the income and the sale of Bitcoin. Oh yeah, for sure.

Aaron Lammer: You think so? So, you think all these people who are being paid in Bitcoin are paying double taxes on it?

Jay Kang: Well, if they immediately cash it out to US dollars, yeah. Why wouldn’t they?

Aaron Lammer: It’s one or the other. Either it’s … Because, the cost basis is how much … Let’s say they pay you out at Bitcoin 5000.

Jay Kang: Yeah.

Aaron Lammer: Okay? They pay you one Bitcoin for a weeks of work. $5000, that’s one Bitcoin.

Jay Kang: That’s not so bad.

Aaron Lammer: Okay. Then you immediately cash that in and you have 5000 US dollars. Okay, so either that’s a capital gain that you gain that much in your portfolio, or it’s income, but it’s not both.

Jay Kang: I don’t think so, because I think that basically you are paying … Is the IRS really going to sit there an acknowledge that you got that Bitcoin out of income?

Aaron Lammer: Well, you’d have to document it the same way you document your salary.

Jay Kang: And how is the company going to pay your Bitcoin based W-2 and take that tax out of the payment that they give you?

Aaron Lammer: Each transaction is timestamped with a US dollar amount, then you just basically calculate everything. Look, I don’t know that’s how they do it, but it’s not like that crazy that someone could do it.

Jay Kang: Okay. I’m sticking with my guns. I would need like double.

Aaron Lammer: I agree, it seems like a pain in the associated, and I would say, the further away you get from Bitcoin to like, “I’m getting paid in shit coin X,” you really have to pay people at a premium.

Jay Kang: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think that, we don’t even have to ask the question of whether or not this is good or bad for Bitcoin, right? Obviously it’s neither. It’s just like a funny story. I do hope at some point, much like the people at the World Series of Poker where I like block folio patches, it would be kind of cool to see some EPL team, or even like championship league team, some lower division team wearing like a crypto based patch.

I’m actually kind of surprised that no crypto company has tried to sponsor and MLS team or something like that. It seems like that would be kind of obvious.

Aaron Lammer: I mean, I’m not sure if everyone wants their business. Some of these companies seem shyer. It seems like the EPL already has a rich history of catering to the OTB industry and degeneracy of every kind. It make sense to me they would be an early adopter.

I think if crypto succeeds, we’ll see this everywhere and it seems like the people that are gonna pump advertising dollars in, are these kind of exchangy, financial producty. My understanding of eToro is it’s sort of in the Robin Hood vein.

Jay Kang: So, it’s like a complete consumer product.

Aaron Lammer: I don’t really know though. I have not used it. Yes. And I think it’s got like futures and stuff like that also.

Jay Kang: Oh cool. Can we sign up for it?

Aaron Lammer: We could with a VPN. I think it’s not come to America yet, I don’t think. I think it is coming legally to America I believe. Probably we will see some e … Hey, eToro, sponsor the show.

Jay Kang: Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Lammer: We want to be your US ambassadors.

Jay Kang: We literally said nothing bad about eToro that whole time.

Aaron Lammer: I know. eToro is gonna emerge remarkably unscathed from this segment. And we’d make great US brand ambassadors. We’re available to attend sporting matches, could gamble on air, whatever it is you want us to do, we got it. That’s it.