Bitboy | Two Different Worlds

Bitboy -- aka Ben Armstrong -- is the notorious crypto influencer with one of the largest audiences in the space. After some jabs back and forth on twitter, we're bringing him on Bankless to clear the air. What's up with Ryan's glasses? Is Bitboy changing his approach? ------ Earnifi | Check For Your Unclaimed Airdrops, POAPs, & NFTs https://bankless.cc/earnifi ------ SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ ️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave NEXO | CRYPTO FINANCIAL HUB https://bankless.cc/Nexo LEDGER | NANO HARDWARE WALLETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger ️FUEL | THE MODULAR EXECUTION LAYER https://bankless.cc/Fuelpod ----- Topics Covered 0:00 Intro 6:00 Bitboy's Glasses 8:00 The Rant 14:50 RSA's Perspective 19:30 Bitboy's Bill 24:20 Ethical Platforms 28:05 Beef with SBF 34:24 Changing in Crypto 41:00 Two Different Worlds 44:55 Shortcuts 50:45 Disclosures 52:20 Heavy is the Head 59:41 Man of the People 1:03:03 Best Practices 1:05:50 Closing Thoughts ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, we are hosting BitBoy on Bankless today. The thing they said would never happen is happening. David, you're looking snazzy as always. I'm glad you brought your customary suit and tie to this Bankless conversation. As you know, this is a podcast by the elites. Bankless Nation. For the elites. We are hosting BitBoy. And we are going to talk to someone who is a man of the people today with BitBoy. What are we going to get into?

• 0:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we just want to cross these worlds of the elites and the people and see what kind of intersection we can come to. So there's a lot of things that he has to say, especially about glasses. So I really want to hear about Ben's opinions on glasses and just get his perspective as to what's going on in the crypto industry.

• 0:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, before we get in, I got to tell you about a fantastic tool for the elites, for the bankers out there. There's a tool called Earnify where you can connect your ETH address and get connected to all of these fantastic airdrop opportunities. David, I've made some money using this in the last year or so. It's like over 10K in money. It alerts you to opportunities automatically. And as a banker, as an elite, of course, I like making money. I don't know about you. What else would you say about this tool? And how can folks get plugged in?

• 1:28David Hoffman?

  It's a pretty elite tool for all the elite boys out there. Yeah, I mean, it does all the work. I like margins. And so when I can hire a bot to go farm airdrops for me, I'm just a big fan as an elite guy myself. Yeah.

• 1:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, if you guys want to find out more about it and plug in your wallets and see what opportunities you can harvest from this thing, go to bankless.cc/earnify. That's E-A-R-N-I-F-I. And you can find out more about that. David, maybe we should set some context before we bring BitBoy on. You know, some people have said that this is a peak bear market content. A comment I read going into this conversation was, "Folks..." We may have bottomed. Bankless is having BitBoy on the podcast. I guess I'm not nearly as pessimistic. I'm hopeful we can have a useful conversation. The context for why we're having this conversation is, BitBoy, this is Ben Armstrong, the guest who's about to appear on the podcast, went on a rant about my glasses.

• 2:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think this rant was mostly unprovoked. You might have a different perspective. We got in some DMs, some back and forths. He doesn't know who the FI was, or maybe he does now. I guess we'll see. It took a while to schedule Ben on the episode, but he replied. We got something scheduled. We did a quick gut check with the Bankless community and said, should we bring BitBoy on the podcast? You know, something for entertainment purposes, for advancing the conversation forward. I was prepared to not do it if the community didn't want it to happen. But close to 60% of the Bankless community said, yes, bring Ben on the podcast, bring BitBoy on the podcast. Have a conversation. That's what we're about to do. What do you have to add?

• 3:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, I don't have anything else to add, right? Well, I think we should cut to the sponsors who made this possible. Once again, these are fantastic tool for elites like you listening to this episode. If you want to become more banked and then we'll be right back with BitBoy. Before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 3:33David Hoffman?

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• 4:17David Hoffman?

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• 5:01David Hoffman?

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• 5:43David Hoffman?

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• 6:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, want to introduce you to BitBoy, aka Ben Armstrong, aka BitBoy, the crypto influencer who doesn't know who the F I am, or at least didn't two weeks ago. He's a ceaseless fighter for the people. BitBoy, welcome to Bankless.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, thank you for having me on. I'm glad we could make this happen. I think really the problem was is when I read your tweet, I didn't have my glasses on. And so I didn't exactly read what it said correctly.

• 6:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, so you are a glasses wearer yourself, and yet you're criticizing glasses. Is this, where is this criticism coming from? What do you have against glasses, BitBoy?

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Well, I've been ashamed, obviously. Well, you know, this goes back to when I was in the third grade. And people are gonna be shocked to hear this, but I did things for attention back then. I purposely failed. I know, I know.

• 6:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Never saw it coming.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Youtuber was not a career choice back then. It was only circus clown that people thought I was gonna be. But basically, what happened is I failed my eye exam on purpose, so I could get glasses and go into the third grade for shock value for my class. And then my parents thought I actually needed the glasses for years. And in the fifth grade, I lost the glasses multiple times, which actually spurred on the fight that I believe ended with a divorce between my dad and my first stepmom.

• 7:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you serious?

• 7:20Speaker 02

  That's actually a true story. That's actually a true story.

• 7:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think because I saw you post in one of our, I think it was during the SBF Voorhees. And David was like, BitBoy is posting in our chat right now. And one of your, one of your posts was tragically that you hate glasses so much because it caused your parents divorce?

• 7:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that's not really why I made the comment about your glasses. But yeah, that is actually a true story. That actually did happen. So maybe in my heart, I do have some, you know, natural, instinctual resentment towards glasses.

• 7:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's kind of Freudian thing, then?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, it must have been. It's my fault, though. I shouldn't have failed the exam in the first place.

• 7:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, can we talk about, so I want to start here, actually with the glasses rant, by the way. Sorry, rant. I don't know if that's what you'd call it.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Rant's fine. That's what they call it in the chat, the rant.

• 8:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was a rant. Okay, so it was a rant. And this is, this is what it was. I think most people listening to this probably saw this video, including me. I was really surprised to see it the next day. And then you tweeted out, "It has to be said, the suits have taken over crypto." No denying that, Ben. And I won't stand for it. F Bankless, F Ryan S. Adams, F the horse they rode in on. We stand for the people, not the elite, not the Lawyers, not the billionaires. One thing is for sure. I definitely don't represent douches. It was really, so this, this rant about like, um, bankless, about, uh, me, uh,

• 8:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  was this like spur of the moment? Cause it kind of looked like in this rant, you just like scrolled up on my new profile.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  A dude in a sports jacket with glasses on and you were just like, yeah, F this dude in particular. Was this like, where did this come from? Was this spur of the moment? Like, why did you say this? I'm, I was, I was left very confused about the whole.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 9:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Encounter.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Well, first and foremost, um, you know, people know I, I get hot, you know, I, I get heated over stuff. Um, I, you know, that's, that's just how I'm built and why is that? Because I'm super extremely passionate about things. And so what got me really riled up was, you know, when me, that's the first night me and SPF got into a little argument over, you know, basically them trying to steal, uh, some of our political backers out from under us. And, you know, all of a sudden you have this tweet where you say, you know, Bit Boy does not represent crypto.

• 9:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm gonna show the tweet.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 9:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I'll show the tweet. This is what I said.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Please, dear Lord, and any lawmakers or adult three in this tweet, just no bit way doesn't represent us either. Talk to Jay Trivinsky of the Blockchain Association, DCG ties. Talk to Miller, CWL. Don't know anything about them. Talk to Coin Center. They're, they're fine people. Which, you know, that's no shade at Jay Trivinsky. I don't know him personally. Blockchain Association doing some good stuff.

• 10:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're great, by the way. Jake is fantastic.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  I'm sure.

• 10:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Miller works at the D5 Fund, doing fantastic work in DC. And I'm kind of surprised you actually don't know about these people. I know you're doing a lot of work.

• 10:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  We call them personal heroes. Yeah.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Well, I, I know Jay Trivinsky and I know Coin Center. I just didn't know, uh, Miller, CWL.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  So you saw this tweet, and then what happened? Well, I was offended. I mean, because the fact is, I do represent crypto. I represent the average person in crypto. If you look at the statistics, I actually did a poll, which is not scientific, but I did a poll on Twitter, which you would think would skew harder to Twitter. And 70% of the people that answered that poll said the first place they went to learn about crypto was YouTube. My channel is the mainstream YouTube channel. It is the gateway through which the majority of people, at least in the last bull run, came into crypto. Now, certainly, I don't end up being everybody's cup of tea, and some people ended up wanting to get more into trading. They want to get more into mining. They want to get more into, you know, maybe they just like someone that has a different disposition, someone that doesn't do hour and a half live streams every day.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Maybe they want their stuff more concise. Look, there's plenty of great YouTubers out there for people to watch. So, but I'm the doorway. And so, so many people come in, and I'm great with that. If people come in through my channel, but then they end up somewhere else, the point for me is, I love the fact that I bring people into crypto. I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago. And, you know, the guy who organized, the guy who organized the entire conference, Expoverse, he came up to me and said, you know, if it wasn't for you, I wouldn't even be into crypto. And now there's a giant conference going on. I met with a woman from IOG who works, you know, under Charles. Well, yeah, I guess he is the head of IOG technically, but she came up to me at RareBloom and said, hey, you know, like, I got into crypto through your channel, and now look at this. I'm

• 11:48Speaker 02

  working at IOG. It's so cool. So I know that we are the doorway through a lot of people that people come into the space. And to say that I don't represent people, like, yes, I don't represent the suits. I don't represent, you know, people that have, you know, 74 degrees, whether it's in financial management, or whether it's in law, or whatever it might be. But I do represent the average person, and no person on planet Earth has educated more people about crypto than I have. That's just a fact. If you look at our number of views, we dwarf everyone, at least in the United States for sure. Obviously, Coin Bureau in the UK, I think he just moved to Dubai. He does a good job. His channel's outgrown ours. They have a different, you know, kind of a different kind of thing. They do, they do longer videos, but less videos per week.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Things like that. But you know, for us, we really believe that we are, you know, that's the catalyst for bringing people in and educating people. And certainly, you know, people can point back at things from years ago that weren't done perfectly. You know, some things that happened, whether it was projects we promoted that didn't do well, or did well for a short period and then dropped, or God forbid, there was a couple that rug pulled, whatever. You know, people hold that against us from years and years ago. But if you look at the maturation of my channel, if you look at where we're at today, I take that very seriously that we are the educator in crypto. I'm coming out with a book, catching up to crypto, you can find it on Amazon, comes out in January. This is going to fill the gap between people that come into the space to understand the space.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Because you've probably experienced this before, when people watch your podcast, there's a gap between when people come in and what we consider to be a beginner. It would take 60 videos to make that content. And in the book, I'm going to try to do that job of filling the gap. So we take it very seriously. And people don't understand all the things we do behind the scenes to try to push crypto adoption and regulation, and trying to make things that are very friendly for the crypto world, and we want to keep decentralization. So to say that I don't represent crypto, like, yes, it triggered me. It definitely triggered me. Because I see this kind of comment all the time, and it drives me insane. And then, of course, when I look at the list of people that you have there that you can talk to,

• 13:57Speaker 02

  like, these are your traditional, you know, your traditional kind of, you know, lawyer and Jake Trevinsky, obviously. Like I said, I didn't know Miller C W L, but Coin Center, I know what they are, and I know what they represent. They're buttoned up. Like, for me, it's about representing the person, like, the average person that comes into crypto with a dream to change their life. And so, yeah, it made me mad. And when I get angry, I do have a way of verbally assaulting people in a way that it's, it's both a strength and a weakness. You know, it's one of these things where I can defend myself pretty well, and I don't, I don't take things lying down. But obviously, you know, should I have made fun of your glasses? Probably not. You do have a suit on in the picture, to be fair.

• 14:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  By the way, there's a T-shirt under that suit. It's just not, I mean, it's just I don't like to have the suits on today. Not today with the skinny tie. There you go. Not today. No, today is my full banker apparel. So, okay, so you're saying that, so, by the way, I think we'll come back to this, but you're saying, hey, look, BitBoy is a gateway to many people into crypto. I'm, you know, helping to lead people in. And by the way, like Bankless and others, you shouldn't be so dismissive of me, right? And you felt like this tweet was dismissive. Let me tell you my perspective and where I was coming from with this, with this tweet. But, and I do want to come back to like, with that entry to crypto and the 1.0x million number of, you know, followers you have on YouTube, subscribers you have on YouTube,

• 15:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  what a tremendous amount of responsibility rests in your hands, BitBoy. Like, what a tremendous amount of responsibility to make sure people aren't falling for scams. Right. Are going in the direction of like the Do Quans and the 20% anchor yields. Like, you have a tremendous amount of responsibility. We'll get, we'll get to that a little bit later in this conversation. But I guess here's where I was coming from with, with this tweet, right? I don't know very much about you, to be honest, BitBoy. Like, I did know who you were. I know you didn't know who the FI was, but I knew who you were, just like, but I hadn't subscribed. I'm not listening to the BitBoy Crypto channel on a regular basis. Like, I'm not down the BitBoy rabbit hole. I just don't know very much about you.

• 16:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  My reputation, like, you're kind of a crypto influencer, sort of attention-seeking individual, and you might have reasons for that, and maybe the reason is to kind of onboard. Also, you know, Zach XBT, which uncovers a lot of scams and, you know, frauds in crypto, had sort of a thread. I was familiar with that. I was, I was familiar with your, your riff, your back and forth with Kofi, Kobe, where there was like some sort of lawsuit involved. So, I hadn't done a deep dive on this. And what I was saying here is, if you see my tweet here, at, you know, was SBF put up his, "My Current Thoughts on Crypto Regulation." All right, first tweet here. This is what I said before you even replied. "Sam, with respect, this absolutely sucks.

• 16:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're saying DeFi should be OFAT. You're saying on-chain freezes should be normal. You're saying DeFi front-ends registers as a broker-dealer. No, this is not reasonable. This would eliminate the US from the crypto race." All right? So the things that you were saying, at least The points I could glean from the rant that kind of resonate with me is like, you are anti Sam's ideas on so-called crypto regulation that would stifle DeFi. Guess what? So am I. Like, so am I. And here I am in the thread saying that. And you lumped me in with the devil's SBF and You're right, I did. Which we can come back to, which was completely factually incorrect. Yeah.

• 17:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  And honestly, BitBoy, I think you owe me an apology for that. And I'm happy to say, I could have phrased this tweet, the other tweet that you're talking about differently. Uh, the tweet where like, what did I say here? Uh, the tweet where I said, don't listen to BitBoy, but let me give you some context for what I'm saying. I don't want lawmakers to listen to SBF. All right? Right. And I don't want them to go to the nearest attention-seeking crypto influencer YouTube and get their information from that person either. I want them to get the facts from the people who are on the ground, working on the DCCPA in DC, like Jake Trivinsky, who cares about our values, Bankless values,

• 18:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  who cares about the values you say you care about. Miller, uh, as well, from DeFi Fund, Coin Center. These people are the people who are standing up for our rights in DC and actually have the funding and have the ears of lawmakers. I want lawmakers to go to them. No disrespect. I don't want lawmakers to see that the rant you put out because they think we're crazy when we do that. All right? It sets our cause back. I don't want them to listen to SBF. But to be honest, BitBoy, I don't want them to listen to you either. I don't even necessarily want them to listen to Bankless. Okay? So that's where the tweet is coming from. I'm trying to redirect. Look, your game is attention. I get it. That's like, that's why you said, you know, back in grade school,

• 19:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  you put on the glasses for attention. You have a YouTube channel for attention. Okay? And you're good at it because you're good at getting attention. By the way, this rant got a lot of attention. I think like you were trending on Twitter. Like three days. Yeah. My point is, this is not where serious lawmakers should actually go and you're saying in your rant that you're working behind the scenes.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  And you've got legislation coming up.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 19:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  I talked to these people. They don't know anything about what you're talking about. Like, who are you working with in DC? Like, there are some things that are factually like.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just not resonating.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  I sent you guys an email last night and you didn't get it and it has all the information. I wanted you guys to come with that information. So that you guys will see exactly what I'm doing and it's not smoke. Like, it really is. We are working. We have high level politicians on both sides of the aisle. Um, and what we were working on is a bill. And the goal for this bill is now to become an amendment on to the boot, on to the, uh, the Boozman bill. So because of that, like, yes, if they're working on the specific language of the bill, we're not to that stage yet because this has to run through a process where it gets tweaked down to an amendment. And now I look, here's, here's, okay, no, number one, sure. I'm, I'm sorry that I said that. I apologize. I can certainly be a bigger man to apologize. Obviously.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  You know, I make fun of Sam Bankman-Fried's hair. I make fun of your glasses. Like, I, I tend to, I tend to focus on things that really don't matter. But really what that is, is that is just me trying to, to manifest the way I'm feeling about you and it, and that's the way that it comes off. And to me, it was a very elitist thing to say that I don't know what I'm talking about when, number one, you, you don't watch my channel and you don't, haven't listened to the things that I've said. We actually already have a bill drafted in California, uh, that's, you know, sitting there in front of the assembly, which is, uh, the, uh, financial, uh, stability. And the Financial Education Stability Act of, uh, 2022, SJR 16 on the California docket. I've got Senator Mitch Hirsberg, who is the head, the head of the assembly in California. He's coming on my channel soon.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Met with his chief of staff, gave input on the blockchain bill in, uh, the blockchain bill that they did for Vital Records in California. Guess what? It got approved. I'm not the reason it got approved, obviously, but we had input on that bill. We looked over it in early stages. So I think people really dismiss the level of involvement that I have in crypto. Now, here's what I want to say. I really wish, basically, I know you guys didn't intentionally not read that email. You didn't realize it was sitting there. We talked before we went on air. But that email tells you a lot of the players we're working with. It tells you, you know, exactly what we're doing. And I think when you understand what we're doing, it makes sense because I don't want to be in charge of crypto regulation.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  I don't want to try to determine what is a good transaction and what's not. What we're working on is a mechanism that a lot of people have called for for years in crypto. To be able to make those decisions on crypto regulation. I would not be the person making those decisions. Some of those people that you mentioned in that tweet, they could be involved potentially in the future in making some of those decisions. And I wish I could be a little more clear about exactly what all that means. But unfortunately, until we have the funding for the bill and it's registered, then we technically can't give the details away of the specifics.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  But it's taking away the ability from one man to be able to come in and influence crypto in terms of what SBF has done. And it puts it in the hands where people in crypto actually have a seat at the table. And I think once you look over what we put together, I think you'll be like, oh yeah, that makes complete sense. And I doubt that anybody in crypto, Eric Voorhees, who was on your show a couple of weeks ago, or you know, last week. I doubt any of these people will be against what we're doing. What we're doing circumvents all the language, actually, in the DCA P. Is it DCCAP or DCA? DCCAP, yeah. DCCAP, right? It goes around all that language. DCPA, I think, yeah.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. DPC, you know, YMCA. So the whole thing is, is it's a mechanism and it's common sense. Like, we like doing things that are common sense for people. And people would say like, why in the world, these people came to me, by the way. Why would these people come to me? Because I have the biggest voice in crypto. Like, I have the biggest platform in crypto by far. In the middle of a bear market between TikTok and YouTube and we had almost 10,000 people watching our stream today. We have almost 10,000 people around the internet watching our streams every single day. Your Eric Voorhees versus SBF debate, which was The most, the thing in crypto I enjoyed watching more than I've ever watched another thing, it got like a thousand viewers. Like, I wish they got more. It should have gotten

• 23:48Speaker 02

  more, is what I'm saying. But the point is, I've got a big voice and we're able to circumvent marketing costs on bills because I'm able to go out and speak on behalf of crypto. So, that's, that's why I got triggered. And that's what we're doing in a nutshell. You guys can read more about it later. But I don't, I don't want to make decisions. It's creating a mechanism that also, by the way, I think everybody will be on board with this, who right now is in charge of crypto. Everybody knows. It's SEC. That changes under my amendment.

• 24:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, this is the thing, right? And this is the thing that we're kind of like, we have to respond to is sort of like the crypto ethos of, of not trust, but verify. And so, I don't know anything about the bill that you're, you're saying there's an email waiting for me. And I'm happy to like, look at that and investigate, right? But your approach was not that. Your approach was not like, hey, here's the BitBoy bill, you know, let me reveal it. Let me go over it kind of like a rationed, reasoned sort of reply, an Eric Voorhees style of reply to SBF. It was just, it was just like kind of this big, like rant, kind

• 25:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  of accusing. I think that you'd probably say, based on this tweet, anyway, BitBoy, that like, from what you say, we're probably on the same side. I think we are. Okay, so we both think that Sam's proposals sucks. And like, you've got one approach, one way of doing things. Bankless has another. We were able to bring both Voorhees and SBF on the show to have a productive conversation. It wouldn't have worked if we started the conversation rather than rationally replying with something like this, by making fun of Sam's hair. Or I saw on your Twitter stream, like, Sam with like devil horns and like a goatee patched.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  I just retweeted it, you know?

• 25:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, okay, so you're doing a different approach here. And yet, like, you're saying we're on kind of the same side from a values perspective. You have to respect the approach that Bankless Is taking this.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  I

• 25:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's different.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  I do.

• 25:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  And my ask to you, BitBoy, is like, I'm not just gonna trust you. Okay, so like, one thing that we can't do in crypto is, to the best of our ability, if we have any kind of platform, and your platform is bigger than ours on YouTube, you know, for certain. But if we have any kind of platform, we have to help people. We have to, there are predators in this space, tons of them. And so, we have to do a better job sniffing out the predators and the scammers, and those that would take retail's money, and giving them access to get information. And if you just play these games of kind of like, you know, attention for the algorithm, and you don't open source what you're talking about, you don't like, come back with reasoned arguments,

• 26:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  it's just not gonna be as effective. But like, let me, let me ask you a question. So, what were your thoughts on the SBF and Voorhees conversation? So you say, you watched that stream. Yeah, what'd you think of it? Like, who won the debate? Where were the good, like, where were the good points made?

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  And overall, what were your, what were your takeaways?

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Well, before I get into that, I do have to, because I definitely want to give my thoughts on that. I do want to just, like, the thing about that tweet, like, the same thing you're saying to me, like, you could have left out that first part about BitBoy. You could have just said, hey, these are the people we want to have in. You didn't have to call me out specifically. I guess that's

• 27:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  But I'm not sure, like, so, I'm actually not sure you're one of the good guys. Like, I don't know you enough.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  I am.

• 27:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, I don't.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  I understand why people don't think so.

• 27:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  But you can't just say that. You have to, like, you have to, you have to show it, right? And by you just engaging in, in the way that you've been engaging, it just doesn't show me that. It just looks like it's a crypto influencer looking for more attention. That's what it looks like to me. If you had been like, here's GitHub, and here's kind of an open source, like, document of all of my propositions, here the senators were working. If it was like, that kind of reply, you would have gotten a different response to me. My only thing was like, let's focus on the people doing the actual work.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sorry, I'm gonna let you finish.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  It's hard in the bear market to get people to fund things. So, that's, that's really where our struggle is. And we've had several people that have committed to funding and then ghosted it. And you got to wonder why that is. But um, so here's what I have to say about SPF. Before we get into the debate, which is you have to understand what happened. I've been whistleblowing on this federal bit license for six weeks now. For six weeks. And the thing that triggered that entire conversation on Twitter. After he posted that was I said, I just responded to him. I said, get ready, bud. And he responded back, oh, you're shilling Binance or whatever. But he didn't say Binance because he was scared to actually have CZ involved. There's a deep civil war going on in crypto between CZ and SPF. People don't know. It's why him.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  CZ had been investing in Twitter such a big deal because SPF was told no. So um, but what happened is. We, I have a person who helps us raise money. He, he reached out to SPF and uh, Tim Harrison. From FTX US and sent them our bill and our proposal. And said, hey, we're looking for funding. We think this might be something you'd like to take a look at. They said, yeah, sure. So they took FTX took the bill. They moved it over to their policy team. Now, in the world of politics, the way a policy team works. Is they move very quickly. They don't work very slowly because it's always a race to try to get things out. So they sat on our bill for like three weeks without telling us if they were going to fund it or not. No, no input. One of our top politicians who's involved in this.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Called uh, the policy head at FTX US or I don't know if it's FTX or FTX US, I think US. And basically called him and this is the type of person, when this person calls, you answer the phone. And so this person talked to uh, the politician. And said that, okay, so here's the deal. We're actually not going to be funding this bill because we're working on our own legislation. We have Chuck Schumer behind it and we are attempting to create a federal bit license. And because of this, we've been having a problem with your side of the aisle. We would like for you to lead BitBoys team and come over and work for us. He literally tried to steal one of our top people out from under us. Meanwhile, they sat on our bill for three weeks to sabotage us, to slow us down.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  And so it's been very personal. So you can go back and look. Nobody else was saying this about SPF because I'm the only person who had that information. For six weeks, I've been telling you, he's going to push federal bit license. About four weeks ago, I finally came out with the term federal bit license. I outed Chuck Schumer, I outed SPF, I'm outed Tim Harrison. So I explained what they're trying to do. The next day, Brett Harrison steps down from FTX US, who was the person that this all ended up going through. The next day Brett Harrison follows me on Twitter. So you know they're watching. And so it's personal between me and SPF. And if you look at SPF's track record, this is what he's done consistently. Consistently, he has crushed competition in pursuit of his own endeavors, trying to rule the space.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  But what happened is when we came out with a video that very, very distinctly articulated what he's trying to do. What happened is he softened the language. So if you go look at his tweets, he very specifically says in those tweets about what they're doing. Which by the way, the manifesto on the website, a little bit harsher language, a little more detail. But on the tweet thread, he said, now just to be clear here, we're, we're not coming after decentralization. We're not coming after DeFi, we're not coming after peer-to-peer transactions. Well, what are the two things that I said he was trying to destroy for four weeks before this came out? DeFi and peer-to-peer transactions. So he literally comes out specifically with those terms to try to make it seem like, you know,

• 31:29Speaker 02

  what we're doing is favorable for these things, like, you know, look at us, we're so great, we care about crypto. And he doesn't at all. He's not, I know people that know him personally, he's not a crypto guy. He's a finance bro. If you look at what Alameda Research did to make all their money with the Kimchi Premium and all kinds of other stuff, they had to rebrand. And he had to leave, even though he owns 90% of the company, because they have such a bad reputation. FTX is, is getting the same reputation. So what I thought was really interesting is. They came, he came out specifically trying to talk about those two things because obviously if you get a license, a decentralized exchange can't get a license peer to peer. The bit license put this in perspective for people. It costs an average of $100,000 to be able to get one. And then in addition to that, you also have to have a certain amount of cash on hand as a broker

• 32:13Speaker 02

  to be able to meet their qualifications. So you're looking at almost a half million dollars. It's not like the normal person is going to be able to go out and get one of these, especially a decentralized exchange isn't going to be able to. So what I thought was so interesting in the debate between Eric and SPF on your channel was that actually he's finally started sprinkling out the idea of licensure, of licensing. And if you go back and you look at actually what happened with tornado cash, I, I think he's behind that too. Uh, the, the, the arrest of the developer, I think he's behind that too. That's speculation. But if you look at the playbook for what got the bit license, you had 2014, February, Mt. Gox gets hacked. July 2014, the bit license gets voted in.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  The next year it got, uh, it came into action, right? So all of a sudden tornado cash thing happens kind of out of nowhere a few months ago. And then all of a sudden, what does SPF start doing? Sprinkling out these ideas of white listing and block listing and, you know, if you, if Bob sends money to Alice and Alice's, uh, address has been block listed, now because Bob sent money to her, his is as well. What, what if somebody, what if his scammer's address gets blacklisted or blocklisted is the new terminology? And then someone gets scammed and sends money to that person? And now they can't reach the rest of their crypto that's left in because it's been blocklisted. You can't off, off rampant. So he started throwing all these ideas out about tornado cash.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  It seemed very insincere with the timeline for him pushing this federal bit license. So Eric Voorhees did a, I've never seen such a one-sided debate. I've never seen a debate that was so lopsided in anything in my entire life. All SBF did was ramble, not say anything, try to talk above people's heads and, you know, try to rephrase what Eric said 48 times. And then Eric would come in with one or two sentences and would totally wreck SBF. He'd have to go right back into retreat. I'm shocked. I don't know if this guy has handlers. I'm shocked they let him do this against Eric Worhees. I mean, my gosh.

• 34:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Actually, I give him credit for doing it because he did have this conversation out in the open. But, but yeah, you know what's, you know what's interesting, BitBoys, like, I did not expect this, this kind of a conversation coming into this, because I was familiar with kind of your rant and, you know, some other things. And like, you are presenting some rational arguments, a lot of things that like, Bankless would completely agree with you on. We have always been very wary of, like, the greatest threat to this entire crypto movement is that the crypto bankers come in and start to make this the same system that we just left. It's like, same old, you know, same old boss, new boss, same as the old boss.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Dog market 2.0.

• 34:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly. A new set of bankers. And we've always thought that a play could be for the crypto bankers of the world to come in and like, completely sterilize DeFi, make it a AML KYC type thing. So what you find is like, if you are familiar with Bankless content, you will find that like, we have, it's, there's a common allyship there around all of this. Now, your, your approach is very different. Approach is insanely different, yeah. Like, incredibly, insanely different. And like, but as far as kind of what you're saying, what you're articulating, some of your end goals of like, protecting DeFi and making sure that this is a sovereign financial system, that more people are able to go bankless,

• 35:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  like, I think we're completely united in these goals, which was, which is also why, it's like, if you were for these goals, why are you attacking Bankless and the Bankless movement? That was another thing that I didn't really understand about this. But maybe what you're saying is it was just in response to my original tweet that kind of like, yeah, tweaked you out. They didn't do too much more due diligence on that.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. But I think, I think also, you know, the thing is, is like, Like I said, it was number one, you know, BitBoy doesn't, you know, it shouldn't have the platform to be able to do this. And number two, that I don't represent people in crypto. And like those, if you were to ask me like what my channel is and why it's so strong and why it's continued to maintain high numbers in terms of viewers and watch time, it's because the average person out there relates to me. I was living paycheck to paycheck a few years ago. You know, I bought Bitcoin in 2012, I sold it all. It took me nine years to become a millionaire in crypto. It didn't happen overnight. And so because of all those things, like people really relate to me. And so when you push this idea that I don't, I shouldn't be the person to do this, like, in my opinion, it was kind of slap in the face of my audience. And so

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Let's not, like, okay, so we're past that, right? Okay. Both the politics, but why don't you talk like this more often? I do on my show, actually. Here's what's so funny. What's so funny is 99% of the people that attack me on social media, they've never been in my community and they don't come watch my videos. If you actually watch my videos from start to finish, yes, there might be a time or two during a show that somebody comes in the chat and says something stupid that I jump on. But outside of that, like, it's a really rational show. It's a very mature show. I've got a lot of perspective. I've been in crypto since 2012. This is not new to me. Every major event that's happened in crypto, I've been a part of in one form or another. I've got Mt. Gox claims, I use BitInstant, you know, like, I, you know, knew about when Roger

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Verne was accepting Bitcoin on his, you know, picture frame website, the first one to accept it. Like, I've been through the wringer. I've seen it all. I wasn't always actively investing during that time. But because I was having to buy a software for my business for many years, I kept up with it a pretty good bit. There weren't the educational resources out there. But this is what we do. The majority of people on crypto Twitter, they know me from memes and they know me from a rant here or there, or they know me from that Zach XBT thread, which I talked to Zach about that thread. I messaged him privately. We talked about it a little bit. And the thing is, is like, even he recognizes my channel is different now than it was. There was a time where I got some really good advice from a, I got some really good advice from, you know, another large YouTuber in the space. And they said,

• 38:12Speaker 02

  you know what you gotta do? You gotta start giving your audience what they want. And I think the problem that occurred in 2021 or 2020, really, a lot of this stuff is 2020. It's not even in the last year and a half or two years.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  What it was is I got too dependent on giving my audience what they wanted and I stopped giving them what they needed because it was more advantageous for me to grow, to give them what they wanted. And it was such, I did this channel for two and a half years and nobody watched. So when I started doing these videos, um, and giving them what they wanted, all of a sudden now I start growing. And so I had to go through a maturation process to get to a point to realize that at some point, I have to turn the dial and I have to take control of the channel and give them what they need. And that's what we really want to do, uh, for the next bull run. Is we're not going to be doing 100x altcoin videos every day or every week. It got to the point where my audience demanded that from me. Like every Friday, they wanted our moonshot of the, you know, pick of the week.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  And what happens is we get oversaturated with altcoin picks and most of them did well in the short term. Almost all of them did terrible in the long term. We have some like C V R that did 7,000% increase. So certainly some that that did very well, but the, the overall idea is that we've just had to come to a place where I've matured as a content creator and I'm, I'm very confident in, in what I do is edutainment. We're edu- uh, educating in an entertaining fashion. And, uh, you know, I, I think there's something that a lot of people, they keep going back to this thread that was a year ago, most, which we've not done a, a speck of sponsored content since January, uh, even in a bear market where we've needed it as a business.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  Um, and you know, people don't give me credit for that, you know, everybody just wants to attack all the stuff. Um, like the, the N F T stuff you pull up there, like that was so, basically I had a graphic designer making N F Ts for me and they just came up with that. At that time, everybody was using stuff from Google. And once people made a big deal about this, we actually, if you, if you look at the definition of, uh, fair use, a lot of what they were saying was plagiarism was fair use. We added enough to it to make it different. But see, when it comes to me for some reason, it doesn't matter. People don't care. They only want to go to the most negative case because I represent, I think, what a lot of people in crypto don't like. There's certainly a lot of jealousy out there. I mean, that's obvious. Um, just when you're at the top.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  Of what you do, there are going to be people that are jealous and are haters. But I think that there's, there's a rejection of the average person coming into crypto. There's this idea that you have to be so embedded into the tech or you have to be, you, you have to been in the space for 10 years or you're not, uh, you know, creditable. And, and so for, or credible, excuse me. And so because of that, like, um, you know, people don't give me a fair shake a lot of times. There's no question in my mind, I am the most misunderstood person in crypto, bar none.

• 41:03David Hoffman?

  In all of my years in crypto, I've never been hacked, scammed, or lost money to a thief. And a lot of that credit goes to my Ledger hardware wallet. The Ledger Nano X and the Ledger Nano S plus hardware wallets allow users like you and me to secure and manage all of our crypto assets and our NFTs, all with the security of storing users' private keys offline and out of reach from hackers. The Ledger Nano X is the perfect hardware wallet for managing your crypto and NFTs on the go, because it connects to your phone with Bluetooth and has a nice big screen for easy transaction readings. Ledger has also upgraded the iconic Ledger Nano S and made the new Ledger Nano S device more DeFi and NFT friendly, making it the perfect hardware wallet for beginners. Ledger has truly maximized for both ease of use and security.

• 41:44David Hoffman?

  So discover which Ledger device is best suited for your journey by going and visiting shop.ledger.com. If you've been listening to Bankless, you know that we're fans of the modular blockchain thesis. The idea that blockchains will separate execution from data availability and consensus, allowing all three to become the best versions of themselves. And Fuel has built the fastest modular execution layer in the industry. By supporting parallel transaction execution, Fuel unlocks significantly faster throughput for the Web3 world. Fuel also goes beyond the limitations of the EVM with its own Fuel VM, which is more efficient and optimized, opening up the design space for developers. And lastly, Fuel brings a powerful developer experience with its own domain-specific language, Sway, and a supportive tool chain called Fork.

• 42:27David Hoffman?

  With Fuel, you can have the benefits of smart contract languages like Solidity, while adopting the improvements made by the rest tooling ecosystem, letting the Fuel development environment go beyond the limitations of the EVM. If you want to learn more, there's a link in the show notes to see how you can get involved with a Fuel network. upon us. Ethereum's layer two ecosystem is growing every day and we need layer two bridges to be fast and efficient in order to live a layer two life. Across is the fastest, cheapest and most secure cross-chain bridge. With Across, you don't have to worry about high fees or long wait times. Assets are bridged and available for use almost instantaneously. Across's bridges are powered by Uma's Optimistic Oracle to securely transfer tokens between layer twos and Ethereum. Across is critical ecosystem infrastructure and Across V2 has just launched.

• 43:10David Hoffman?

  Their new version focuses on higher capital efficiency, layer two to layer two transfers, and a brand new chain with Polygon, all while prioritizing high security and low fees. You can be a part of Across's story by joining their Discord and using Across for all of your layer two transferring needs. So go to across.to to quickly and securely bridge your assets between Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon, Arbitrum, or Bova Networks. I actually would like to lean into that a little bit. Because BitBoy, at the start of the show, you talked about how, you know, BitBoy, the channel is the gateway into crypto. It's like the first exposure that so many people have in order to understand what this crypto industry is. And YouTube is that place, right? YouTube is so critical for that. And so the, you know, the account that leans into like the YouTube algorithm and YouTube

• 43:53David Hoffman?

  optimization, the hardest, the fastest, the quickest, is definitely going to capture that audience sooner than the accounts that don't. Now, so like you said, you've like talked to people and they say, oh yeah, I learned through crypto through BitBoy. When I go to crypto conferences, and I went through a ton of crypto conferences over the last 18 months, something like 18, 20, 15 to 20 of them. I don't hear anyone talking about how they got into crypto through BitBoy. And like what I've, what I've come to kind of realize through this conversation with you so far, is that there's like two different worlds out there. Absolutely. Two different crypto worlds. And there's like the BitBoy YouTube optimized crypto world, and then there's kind of the boots on the ground, I meet these people at crypto conferences world. Maybe there's, maybe there's a better name for that.

• 44:38David Hoffman?

  But those, these two worlds, like the Venn diagrams almost don't overlap at all. And there are certain properties that I think people from, from our side, the people that I'm familiar with, the people that I talked to at conferences, that are, when they see Your channel and say they see that side of crypto world, they just get like super triggered. Uh, and when you go to your YouTube channel, uh, BitBoy, it, to me, it seems obvious. Like there's a video that says XRP to $589, which is something like a quadrillion dollar market cap or something like that.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Well, once you, don't make the same mistake the pump made and assume that a title on a thumbnail is what I believe. It's the, we covered that story because a lot of people have been asking, what is this 589 in, in Ripple? Why do people talk about this all the time? That video was me actually explained, there was one section of that video where I explained what that number is, where it came from, how it's so asinine, it will never happen. It, but the thumbnail sell, like that's, we're in the attention game here.

• 45:41David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  And obviously to do that, and of course I had the big thing with pump, a lot of people know about. And pump does the same thing, or he was when he was covering Bitcoin on his channel. And, you know, he did the same thing where he would say Bitcoin to, I can't remember, $20 million.

• 45:54David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  So do you really believe Bitcoin's going to $20 million? No, and, and I don't judge him for that. I think that's fine for him to do. It's an idea that's in the video that people can watch. He uses other example of a Dogecoin video where I said Dogecoin to $5. I didn't say Dogecoin to $5, the thumbnail said it. Matt Wallace said it was going to $5 and I spent the entire video explaining why it wouldn't happen. So I think, once again, it's like the misrepresentation and misunderstanding by people seeing a thumbnail. And number one, assuming that people make investment decisions off of thumbnails. And number two, judging the content before you've even seen it.

• 46:23David Hoffman?

  Uh, I'll, I'll, I'll take that point. However, you also in your Twitter profile have like hashtag XRP. And the reason why I really want to lean into this is that like XRP to me is the banker's coin.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:34David Hoffman?

  And it's, it's also like got this, like, it, it used to be stronger, but it's got this like super big Twitter army. Uh, and so we, we have to be careful about when we make content about, like, yes, a thumbnail doesn't really represent my beliefs. It's not investment advice, but BitBoy, you know, it is for a lot of people. A lot of people are going to see that and be like, yeah, okay, I'm going to go and buy it right now while I'm watching this video. Because the thumbnail goes straight to the reptilian brain. And like, there's also this like meme of like BitBoy is like the Alex Jones of crypto. And like, if you compare your rant to like an Alex Jones rant, it's like, it's like seeing almost the same thing. And so.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  It was one of the best rants I ever had for sure. I mean, that's not typical. And so like, and so like, yeah, like Alex Jones has call it educated a lot of people out there about things, but I wouldn't necessarily call it education for the education that we're trying to go after.

• 47:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that's the thing, BitBoys, like hearing you talk, I'm like, oh, this dude's smarter than that. Like, you, you, you actually like know better, like you know better. I feel what you're doing, though, is you're using these shortcuts that aren't actually good for the community. As, as you just mentioned that you were using these shortcuts in, in 2000 to grow your channel and doing all of these

• 47:45Speaker 02

  Well, that's not a shortcut.

• 47:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Super shady altcoins, right? And so order the

• 47:49Speaker 02

  But what I'm saying is like Is that a shortcut asking your audience what they want and then giving them what they want? That's actually what YouTube

• 47:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  But it is. It's bad for them. If, if what, if what you're giving them is not good for them, it's bad for them.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  There's a balance. There's a balance. There has to be a better balance.

• 48:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  I know, and you're going

• 48:01Speaker 02

  And I was out of balance at one time, and today we're in balance.

• 48:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are we, though? Are we in balance?

• 48:06Speaker 02

  Hundred percent, hundred percent. Like, if you go look at everything Zach attacked me for, if you go look at everything that I've been attacked for, it's years ago. And people can't in their brain unwrap those things and realize we're not doing the same kind of content. Because that responsibility, you, I thought it was so big, David, when you talked about that responsibility. I feel the weight of that responsibility on my shoulders at all times. Not only do I have the arrows constantly in my back that, that come from mostly false places. The, the, the weight of carrying around the idea that people count on me to get educated in crypto, it's very heavy. And then the weight of thinking about my audience that like, I've told them how I made money in crypto and I, and I've talked about

• 48:47Speaker 02

  all the different ways that it's changed my lives and that I want that for them and I don't want them to make bad decisions, whether it's, no. Even when we were covering altcoins that were way down on coin market cap, whether they were promoted or not, like we never told people to put more than 5% of your portfolio in a super speculative, uh, coin, right? We, we always done portfolio videos and we've shown like you want the vast, vast, vast majority in the top 10, the top 20, the top 50. Maybe a little in the top 100. Once you get outside that range, it's 5%, but people don't listen to that. People, people don't understand that that's the message we're giving. They just go and they pull up the thumbnail of the video and say, see, you know? And, and I've always, from the very beginning of my channel, one thing that You know, really, really irritates me. It really chaps me is that, you know,

• 49:31Speaker 02

  we've never done an undisclosed promotion in the history of my channel, in the history of Twitter. We've never done a single one. We've never done a pump it up, not a single one. And yet, people attack us for those things over and over and over and over again.

• 49:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this isn't like a crypto lark type of situation?

• 49:48Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no. Well, first of all, I don't know enough about the crypto lark situation to really say exactly where that falls. I think some of it was probably misrepresented, but I think some of it was probably accurate. The truth is probably in the middle somewhere like it is on most things. But I've understood since the first day I started this channel, that not disclosing promotions is a criminal, like that's what Ian is in trouble for. Now Ian, you know, rebukes a lot of that stuff and says they're making stuff up. But I knew that from very early on. That's actually why I've been so vilified. It's because we did disclose every single time.

• 50:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Where do you post disclosures, bit boy?

• 50:24Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 50:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Where do you post them? Like where can people find disclosures?

• 50:28Speaker 02

  In the video, audibly?

• 50:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you think that that's something that the crypto YouTube world could get better at? Well, it's just like standards for disclosures and like where they're posted. And like, so it's not just in some show notes that no one looks at. But it's like, there's a disclosures page where like you're posting all of this information. I know it's an exercise that we've tried to get better at over time. And I think we've landed at a pretty good place, but I mean. Didn't, were some videos deleted? Cause that's what the Zach XBC thread claimed.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, the Zach XBT thread, I had a 160 long tweet reply to that whole thing. I finally did, because I just get asked about it so much. And we wanted to put out every single thing about all of it. So people could read it and understand and we can all move on. Some of the stuff that he referenced was not even true at all. Like he referenced one project that, you know, he said rug pulled. No, they rebranded and moved to a different coin. The coin still exists. Now it's not doing well, nothing is, but it still exists. It's not rug pulled. So there was some of that information that was factually incorrect. Some of it was correct. The one that everybody points to is PAMP. Now PAMP was a project I covered and I'll come back to this token promotion business. I think it's really important to.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  Be sat here in a moment, but we covered Pamp. It was an anonymous team. After that, we never took sponsors from an anonymous team again. Um, because we learned that was a red flag. We learned red flags over time. And what happened is, is the project that we looked at and my research team vetted. It was not the same project. When I released the video, when I released the video, they changed the smart contract out. Once again, showing the predatory nature of the token promotion business and the people behind it. Um, it's a serial team of people that goes around and does a lot of this stuff. And, you know, I didn't think about that, that, oh, they could change the smart contract. And so, yes, we deleted the video and the reason we deleted the video is because i- i- and to me, it makes total common sense.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  These coins are still on decentralized exchanges out there. If someone were to somehow stumble across this video and think that it's new. And they, and, and see the video, they could very well go to you to swap and try to buy this coin, be like, oh my God, look how cheap it is. Why would you want to keep up something that was a scam? And so, you know, there was another project that we covered, Distex. We paid our community back the entire amount we got paid for that promotion. We put together an Excel spreadsheet of the ETH holders and out of my own money that I took in from that and more. We paid them back and nobody wants to talk about that. They only want to make me a villain and they only want to pound me for, uh, you know, like I said. Should I have known that they could have changed out the smart contract? I'm not a tech guy, but we learned it going forward.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  And every time we made a mistake, we learned a lesson and we move forward. And I think here's, I, I really like that you brought up the idea of disclosures. Um, because you know, there was an article going on today about how in the European Union, they're about to make, uh, you know, regulation where you have to disclose, which good. I, I've cheered for that. I love that. I want that. Here, we're putting out a video this Saturday where I'm going to be talking about the token promotion business and I'm, I'm going to be calling on. All influencers across crypto, no more token promotion, period. No more, no more private sale deals where you get in an investment round in, in lieu of a promise for you to promote that project, right?

• 53:48Speaker 02

  This has to stop. If we're going to mature the space, and this is not something where I look back and I say, what I did was legal or illegal. Obviously, there's no regulation in place. We tried to do the best that we could. We implemented the same kind of rules they use on the stock market. Like, we wouldn't touch our, you know, we did a video on something that we wouldn't touch it for at least 72 hours. Usually, we never touched it, because that's kind of what's in the stock world. But the token promotion business is totally broken. If you look back at every single project that we ever did as a promotion, very few of them are still viable.

• 54:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  BitBoy, why is, I, I'm glad you're saying this. Like, why does this even need to be, like, obviously, I mean, there are tons of creators, like Bankless has never, would never include in its business model whatsoever, a token promotion. Like, the Daily Guay, Anthony Sisano, smaller channel, but like, would never do that. Like, this is just common sense.

• 54:37David Hoffman?

  He'd throw himself on his sword first.

• 54:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, why, I'm glad that you're saying it, and like, you're saying mistakes were made, but like, this was obvious two years ago, too.

• 54:45David Hoffman?

  The thing I really want to emphasize here is that, like, BitBoy, you're talking like, oh yeah, we learned these lessons, like, the Zach XBT thread misrepresented me. I'm the most misrepresented person in crypto. Like, people don't talk about, like, with how we gave the money back. People don't talk about that we did this. Like, I don't hear anyone else in the crypto industry who's like a media person, content producer, having to make these, like, defensive statements. And so, like, there's that, there's that dot, there's the Zach XBT thread. It's that, like, when I go into in-real-life events, like, no one really seems to, to listen to you. And it's just like, all of these different dots that are out there.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  I have a picture in line sometimes for four hours at conferences. So, sometimes when I go to conferences, like, last year I was at Decentralcon, I literally didn't move for four hours and took pictures with people. So, the people you're talking to are not the, they're at the crypto conference, the people that watch me. It may not come up in conversation, but it's, it's hard for me to walk around. If I go to a, to a demo hall, where they've got, you know, booths and stuff, I can't make it five feet without every single person grabbing me. And I understand what you're saying, like, A long time ago, somebody told me something, another large YouTuber. When I was growing very quickly, they said, look, you are going to want to slow down. You do not want to be the top dog in this space. If you are, this industry is not kind to the person at the top and you're going to be assassinated time after time after time. And I said, that's fine, I'm built for it, I can handle it.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  And so, yes, I get more of this than anybody else, but look at all the people Zach XPT has done stuff, it's not just me. And you also have to consider the fact that when I came into YouTube. You don't want to be in the same list of people that Zach XPTC has gone after. Well, I'm the one that has the most famous thread. So, you know, yeah, of course not, of course I wouldn't, you know, even Zach would admit, like, things have changed on my channel, I know he would. But the fact is, is that when I came into YouTube, the model for making money on YouTube in crypto was to do, number one, in 2017, it was tons of undisclosed promotions. And so, when I came in the space, I said, okay, well, the token promotion is, that's the model, like, that's fine, as long as you're disclosing.

• 56:51Speaker 02

  And so, I really committed to disclose. And, you know, is it, we don't know what the legality is, if it's not a security. If it's not a security, then we don't know what the legality of it is. Of course, we don't know anything that is a security or is not a security. But what I'm trying to say is, I just regret it because I don't like the fact that I did it, because I understand now that it's a flawed mechanism. And yes, there's not a model for going to 10,000 to a million. And if you look at most of these videos, they were when I was in the 20,000 to 30,000 subscriber range. They were not when I had a million. They were not when I had 1.5 million almost. And so, we did, you know, learn that on, you know, learn that earlier on.

• 57:33Speaker 02

  We thought what we could do is, we would learn from the mistakes and we would try to hone it into something that was advantageous for our audience at all times. And, you know, unfortunately, I just see now, that it's not a profit, it's not a model that works for the audience. And to be honest with you, it's not a model that works for the influencer either. And I think this is the big thing that people have to understand, the model only works for the people that are behind the token. They're the ones, and why, look, I know almost every major YouTuber, personally, okay?

• 58:04Speaker 02

  There may be one or two that I would consider to be pumping numbers. Okay, one, one or two, that's it. The rest of these guys know what's on the line. What happens is, is you go pull a chart and you look at a video and you say, see? Right when he did this video, look at the dump. It's the team, it's the people behind it. They're the ones that knew when the video is out. They're the ones that, you know, helped, you know, tell you what should or should not be in the video. We, we actually would take no advice on what should or should not be on the video. We would do it totally unbiased. There was money involved, but we would never let them look at the video before we published it and things like that. But the, the whole thing is the teams are the ones that are wanting the shortcut. And then what they do is it makes it look like it's the face. I'm the face. The team, nobody knows who they are. And so they get off scot-free, they get to dump the token.

• 58:48Speaker 02

  And now they're in founder's dilemma where they made all of this money off a token, off of something that's not built yet. What's the point to build it now? Let's just take the money and run. And that's what you see happen over and over and over again. And I think really exposing the way that this business works. And then once again, when the next hype cycle comes in, these business, look, I, I had somebody try to pay me a million dollars to do a video. I said, no way, like, and it turned into a big, big ordeal. We had said we would do a video and then we said we weren't going to do it. And then they tried to give us a million dollars. This is how desperate these people are and these founders are to be able to push these, these tokens out there on unsuspecting people. And so, um, you know, I, I think personally, um, you know, going forward, obviously we haven't done one since January,

• 59:30Speaker 02

  but I do think like you guys do sponsors, like there is things you can do in crypto that I think are appropriate for sponsorships. This is what, one thing we're going to be talking about this weekend. And there's other things that, that shouldn't be. When the hype cycle comes in, the audience is looking for a shortcut. So when you do a video that's a very low cap coin, they're looking at that and they're like, oh my gosh, like this is the way for me to shortcut and get rich. And so they lose and then you lose credibility and the founders make off with all the money. That's why I like really going forward and I've talked to one of the top promotion companies in crypto as well. And they've told me that if I come out with this video, said, calling on all my friends, everybody to stop doing token promotion, that they as a promotion business will also stop doing promotion business.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  And they will focus on what needs to be focused. Look, wallets, fine, exchanges, fine, affiliates for exchanges, fine. Tokens, now look, here, here's a little dicey water. An NFT, well, NFTs are a whole other thing, but an NFT or a game that has a token, I think it's okay to do promotion for that as long as you don't mention the token at all. They have to understand, we're not even saying you have a token. We will talk about the merits of your game and that's it. I think that can be appropriate, but the idea of talking about a speculative asset that could go up or could go down, you know, based upon awareness, which obviously eyeballs bring awareness. I think it's just got to stop it. It's bad for the space and people will pull up my media sheet and they'll say, oh, you know, you had 30,000 hundred video. First of all, that was going rate, like that's not outlandish in crypto. Okay.

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

  Second of all, what people have to understand about that is it wasn't leaked. We just gave, we gave it out to anybody because we didn't think it was a big deal. We thought people understood that's kind of how prices were in crypto. But we stopped doing promotions in January and that's hurt us this year. You know, like financially, that's like, we've lost out, you know, $2 million or whatever it is by completely stopping all, we stopped all sponsorships. And I think that, you know, it's something that now after being this far away from it in January, looking back, I can say, you know what? I regret doing the token promotion. Yes, I made some money doing the token promotion for sure, but look, when is my penance up? Like, when is my, does it ever end? Is it ever end or in 2029, when I'm running for vice president and I'm pro crypto?

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  Like, are we still bringing up videos for 2020 and not recognize the growth process and the maturation that we've been through? Like, I hope that's not the case, but I look back on that time and, you know, I do regret it. But I also see that, you know, you didn't have to cut it off completely. Now I'm starting to understand like what could be appropriate, what, what isn't appropriate.

• 1:02:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  And trying to do, you know, what's, what's best for the space overall.

• 1:02:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And Ben, here's, here's what I think is happening here. Like you, the going, leaning into the whole YouTuber thing. You're the man of the people, right? I am the man of the people. There's like a bunch of funny like chat comments I'm reading right now. Uh, backless needs to watch a show about Bit Boy. Guys, Bit's knowledge is bankless, working with regulators? And so like you created this meme that you are the man of the people, right? And that is why people watch your show, like you're fighting for them and that for some reason has worked. Uh, it just, the populist tactics. Like we, Do- Do Kwan did it, like, uh,

• 1:02:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Danny Sesta.

• 1:02:40David Hoffman?

  Alex Jones did it. It's very intoxicating for like a lot of people out there. And so they, they get along for the ride. And so I think your show started off as did the leaning into the token promotion business, perhaps maliciously. As you grew, you realized that you actually can't optimize for wealth while also leaning into the malicious token promotion business. So you started to pare back and you've probably been paring back your malicious token reporting, uh, token promotion business. As you've gotten bigger, because you're doing this optimization function where you're trying to promote the best of your ability while growing your channel the most, while also still maintaining this brand of I am for the people. But what I'm seeing here, what I think here today is you are brand managing and PR managing as you've gotten bigger and bigger and bigger.

• 1:03:24David Hoffman?

  So that you can keep on being the man of the people and leveraging your audience for monetary gain. And whatever meta is now in 2022, late stage bear market, that's what I see going on here.

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think anybody that meets me in person will tell you that's not true. I, I think all my, I have 50 employees here. They'll tell you that that's not true. And, and what you actually are looking at is you're looking at a pruning away of things as I've grown and gone through this maturation process of things that were not good, the things I wanted to change. Every channel goes through a maturation in, in some form or fashion. And so what happened is, look, it's certainly like, how dumb would I be to promote a scam? Like, how stupid would that be if I were to, oh yeah, you know, this one definitely is going to rug pull. Let me go ahead and promote this in a malicious type way. No. What it started out in the beginning is, is hey, like this is a project. I like it. It, it seems like it's got a lot of things I like. And that's one of these predatory things that these places do is they learn what the YouTuber likes.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  And so then they're, you know, like if you're a DeFi guy, they're like, check out this DeFi project.

• 1:04:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  But, but, but like, here's the thing. I hear what you're saying, but I still feel like you're playing the victim card here because like, I mean, we were, Bankless was around back in, you know, 2019, 2020. And it was self evident to us that number one, you can't do sponsored content, never do sponsored content for fiat, for tokens, for anything. Number two, never take like tokens in compensation and pump the price of those tokens.

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

  Of course, we didn't, we didn't do that.

• 1:04:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  But like, okay, but like, but you're just saying like, there are some things that you're saying now you regret in, you know, 2020, you did, and you've reformed your business practices. Like what I'm seeing is like, there's some unethical things that you did that were self evident and obvious back in 2020 that you're now kind of regretting.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  Well, what is, what is the unethical thing specifically?

• 1:05:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't take, don't take tokens for compensation to create a pump video about the token.

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  Okay, well, I didn't, I didn't do that. To protect from that, we receive Bitcoin and Ethereum or USDT.

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  So, so.

• 1:05:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Even if you're, don't take, cut, cut, cut the, the token compensation. Don't, don't get paid for content.

• 1:05:35Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, you gotta do sponsors, right?

• 1:05:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sponsors, disclosures, commercials.

• 1:05:39David Hoffman?

  We make content and add sponsors. We don't do sponsored content.

• 1:05:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  What I'm asking, what I'm asking bit boys, cause like, I think that, I think that, um, first of all, um, this is a much more like, this is a different conversation that I thought we were gonna have. I thought it would be like, not intelligent. I thought it would be some back and forth.

• 1:05:55Speaker 02

  But actually, it's the meme culture.

• 1:05:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's a lot of benefit from this because I got like, I think David and I got to peer inside of like, a very experienced crypto influencer who's kind of matured his business. And as at the top of their game and like, now you're looking at your business, you're like, how can I reform it? What I would say is like, just, you know, it sounds like you're going in this direction, but disclosures, very important. Let me show you the Bankless disclosures page right here. We show everything that we have. Okay, the entire team. Like what we have tokens in across NFTs, public NFT wallets and stuff like that. Okay. So you could do that. Number two, don't get compensated for content. Don't do the pay per content play. Do sponsors, do some sort of subscription model, disclose all of these things to the public.

• 1:06:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Number three, I don't think, I think you're better than playing kind of the attention game all the time. Right. It's just like, um, these are all of the reasons, by the way, not to get back to that tweet, BitBoy, but like all of the reasons I want people to talk to Jake Trivinsky, if they're talking about regulation and not going down the BitBoy, uh, you know, train of like, looking at some like some of the shady past that you have. Anyway, all of these things, I feel like you are reforming. I feel like you can play a role in making the whole crypto YouTube influencer space better. It is interesting to me that this world out there exists. And I totally acknowledge this, that like Bankless isn't tuned into, which is like this Venn diagram of people who, um, aren't like deep, deep into crypto

• 1:07:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  with the builders at the conferences and are here for kind of like the wealth and life changing money. But I feel like you have such a tremendous responsibility and that you're in a position to kind of do better, uh, in the years to come in introducing the crypto, like veering them away from scams, reforming your business model. I'm very hopeful you could do that. And I'm also happy that actually we had this conversation. I feel like I understand you a lot more. And I do think that there's some common ground with respect to you, making sure that we get DeFi regulations right in the U.S. And, uh, you know, I'm happy to, to look at all of your initiatives and evaluate those. And, um, hopefully there's something good there. So, uh, I appreciate you coming on. David, is there anything else we, uh, we need to conclude with?

• 1:08:06David Hoffman?

  Uh, I think this YouTube chat is one of the most interesting, like clash of communities I've ever seen. That'll be the, uh, the thing I sign off with for sure.

• 1:08:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, BitBoy, what do you have to say? Closing thoughts from you?

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having me on. I think it's been a productive talk. I think that most people, you know, they understand why the average person relates to me. And I think that, you know, going forward, that bond's only going to be stronger. And, you know, we're going to try to do whatever we can that's best for our audience at all times. And, you know, for everybody out there that hates me, that hasn't watched a minute of my content, like, you know, I really urge you guys to get off of Twitter threads and come over to YouTube and see what we actually do. You know, we have the most informative new show in an hour and 15 minutes live stream every morning. We also have, you know, around the blockchain in the evening, which is perspectives of other YouTubers that wait for us to help grow the space, bring on YouTubers and give them a shot. And, you know, I think Bankless, like I said, I've seen you guys on TikTok, and I've seen some

• 1:08:59Speaker 02

  content there that I like. And I think our ideals are very aligned. And over time, you know, if people give me a chance, I think what they'll find is that we really are pushing the space forward. And we are, you know, trying to do what's best overall. So, you know, thank you for having me on. And, you know, if you want some crypto education, you know, check out my book, Catching Up Crypto on Amazon, coming out January 17.

• 1:09:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  There we go. This has been less of an elite podcast than I thought, David. Good discussion with BitBoy today. Got to end with this. Rest and disclaimers. As always, Bankless Nation, crypto is risky, ETH is risky, so is YouTube and the influencers on YouTube. You could definitely lose what you put in. Trust no one. Verify everything. We are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.