The Collapse of Crypto: The Ugly, The Bad, The Good

A deeper look at why the crypto markets are collapsing right now, how it's similar/dissimilar to previous cycles, and what projects are likely to survive after the dust settles.

Also a look at: Japan's crypto adoption right now is one of the lowest in the world, despite having been the first places to go through regulatory frameworks and mainstream adoption. Is there a long-term strategy in play with the technology?

teia.cafe | Decentralized Radio
teia.art | Arts Collective on Tezos

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

Hello everyone, this is Ryan from Tea Cafe. Today we'll be talking about the collapse of crypto. The ugly, the bad, the good. I'm not trying to scare anyone, but uh today's date is December 17th, 2025. And if you've been paying attention to the charts lately, it's not doing so well, right, in in the crypto space. So I wanted to kind of talk about that a bit. And uh because I've been through several crypto winners already, uh, might help to like get a little bit of perspective. Crypto, despite all of the poor market uh conditions in the last few years, is still the most popular it's ever been in history. Just because prior to a few years ago, nobody really knew about it at all. And uh but the patterns that you see, the hype cycle and sort of the market corrections, right, they remain fairly similar to each other. So um I might, I don't want to make predictions, but I might be able to maybe help some people understand what's going on. Because when I go on social media these days, especially Twitter, I see a lot of panicked posts, a lot of projects kind of talking about themselves in desperation. Some of them doesn't even make any sense, you know? It's just like kind of grasping at straws, right? You could kind of argue that we've been in a bear market since 2022, like for real, right? If you look at uh the prices, like we're nowhere near we were in 2021, and that downward slope has just been continuing on. Uh so one silver lining. I'll guess I'll start with one of the good points, uh, even though it comes at the end, is that uh we're kind of uh reaching a point, it's been long enough since the last uh crypto peak, right? About four years relatively speaking. Uh four years was about the same amount of time it took from one peak to another in the last few cycles as well. Uh so when I joined crypto, that was like 2013, 2014. Uh I mined a little bit of Bitcoin. I was an Ethereum ICO. And then um, yeah, and then I got my wallet from the ICO, and it just kind of sit there, sat there doing nothing for about four years. And then the there was a big hype cycle that came. Well, not really big, relatively speaking, it was big for us. Uh yeah, so around 2016-2017, the prices start going up. Ethereum was about$100 and it shot up to$1,400. And NFTs, Crypto Punks, CryptoKitties, those sorts of things, those were in the media. People were talking about it. It wasn't really like headline news like it is today, you know, but um it'd be just be kind of like it'll be in the tech uh portion of TV, of a of a news show, for example. So it was just this thing, kind of interesting thing. People didn't really have strong opinions about it, other than the people inside of the community itself, but it just kind of came and went and then dropped right back to$100. So$100 to$1,400, right back to$100. So yeah, so I saw a lot of what happened, the highs that happened when prices are going up, rapidly shooting up. I got lucky. Um at the time I was like kind of in a little bit of a financial trouble, but crypto really saved me, and that made me a believer in the whole thing. Because like, wow, this weird internet money thing like actually helped me out on a personal level. So so yeah, so I've stuck with it since then and have been a believer ever since. But I also saw what happened when it dropped all the way down right back to a hundred bucks, and it it can get very ugly. And we're kind of seeing that right now. A lot of the things people posting right now uh kind of reminds me of that. I've seen like Solana quote brag about their protection against DDoS attacks, even though that's really not a crypto thing. Like crypto doesn't have to worry about those sorts of like flood attacks, because in order to use it, you have to do a transaction, right? And in order to do a transaction, you have to pay for it. DDoS only works because it's free, is using free computing power, right? Basically, from so anyway, uh it's just like ridiculous. And then uh one other thing people are talking about Bitcoin, quantum computing. Like Bitcoin is ready for quantum computing, and and it's just bizarre because uh that's not anything new. People have been talking about it since 2000, since I got involved almost 10 years ago. And it it's uh one, it's not really a problem because uh crypto quantum computing cracking the code is still many, many years away. I have plenty of time to prepare, but at the same time, it's like uh why are you like I don't know, like the the reason the reason why it all of a sudden everyone's talk about talking about it is kind of bizarre. Like there doesn't seem to be a logical explanation why they're bringing this up. But I do think it's like kind of a distraction from the fact that the prices are sinking and and they're basically finding already looking for excuses why they're gonna fail, you know, to be kind of blunt about it. There's a lot of uh the the Bitcoin itself will be fine long term because you cannot really erase a blockchain, right? That's kind of how it's designed. If one person still believes in Bitcoin, then it's by definition, it's still alive. All you need is one machine, one node. It'll be nice if there was more than one, but uh you know, because they need each other to keep things updated. But worse comes to worse, it never really dies. No, no crypto coin really dies unless you right you shut it off for good. But so that's not really the issue. The issue really is there's all these like hedge funds and um really fiat money uh trying to get in on the whole crypto thing, and they're not really using the tech as it was originally intended, right? It's like kind of uh almost like a grift because there's a lot of projects out there that are that call themselves crypto, but is actually not. Some of them are running on servers, uh Sulana. Uh some of them are uh a lot of the Bitcoin funds that have been coming out of uh uh Wall Street lately has nothing to do with crypto. They uh some of them are just like futures markets where it's just a bet to see whether it's gonna go up or down. Like that they don't even touch the thing. A lot of exchanges, right? They uh hold your wallet on behalf of you, right? That's what you're using when you use their services for for better or worse, right? There's some advantages to that, but but they're not really holding crypto in a private key wallet like uh it was originally intended, right? The weird thing that happened in the last few years really is that people probably either because they didn't know how or just was too lazy, but put decide to quote invest in in crypto by put parking their money on like Coinbase or one of those exchanges rather than doing self-custody, right? So what we're seeing right now is I do think a lot of the organizations are kind of seeing their writing on the wall and it and they decide it's time to get out. At the same time, they're telling people now's the best time to get in, you know, Midcoin to$1 trillion, and uh blah blah blah. But they're just really trying to suck retail investors in just to get a little bit of uh returns before they finally liquidate. Most of these places have lost money and firms like MicroStrategy, who uh yeah, it is really bizarre, just has this weird convoluted system to try to get people from Wall Street or Fiat money into Bitcoin rather than actually sell it in the Bitcoin itself. Like you don't need to invest in these funds. You can just buy Bitcoin directly if you really believe in it. That's all you have to do, and there's lots of ways of doing it, right? That's called self-custody, just buy it yourself. But uh yeah, that's not what got popular during these last two years, and they're the first ones to go because it's not only about holding crypto in your wallet, it's not about the hotto thing. It's it's like they have obligations, right? They have to go through Wall Street regulations, they have salaries to pay, uh, they have uh founders to make rich, right? Like the guy. And uh these people, uh, they'll tell you anything they want if you think it'll get them rich, you know. And and it's just been yeah, I honestly have been pretty disappointed by how the industry, what the industry turned into the last few years. And I'm not gonna be too sorry when I see that stuff go. Even though right now it's also hurting my wallet because, right, it's just kind of like bad actors hurt everyone, bad apples. This is uh so anyway, um, that's basically what's going on right now. It gets more complicated, um which I'll go into, but uh I just wanted to kind of give before I go more into detail about what's happening now, uh just a quick sort of like mini summary of like what happened before. So when I got in, I don't have any reference to um what happened in crypto prior to 2013. I wasn't in that early, but I have an idea. What really got me into crypto was Ethereum, and I was in the RC ICO, and I was sold on the idea of smart contracts because I thought that the transparency of having like automated payments that is both uh decentralized and transparent, right? That could be have a lot of uses, uh especially in like cleaning up a lot of the uh I come from a music background, so cleaning up the music industry, writing doing deals, keeping track of copyright, royalties rate, and have all that stuff like funnel into everybody's bank accounts automatically. That seemed like a really good idea. And so I sold and I got in. Uh, but getting in was not easy at all. And I think it's important for people to know this, because it if it's too easy to get in on something, that might be a sign that it's not gonna last. Every time uh I made money in crypto, it's paying my bills right now. I'm not I'm not super duper rich, so don't don't ask me for money, but uh I made enough on my returns to pay the bills currently. Yet to be seen if that can continue, but we'll see. Uh there's the but anyway, um, for me to get into the Ethereum ICO, it wasn't just like going to a website signing up and putting in your cash. The only way to get in on to get Ethereum coins at the time was to directly pay them Bitcoin. And the only way you could get Bitcoin back in those days is uh either mine it yourself or you find some guy on the internet and then you trade it for a piece of pizza or something. And uh people make fun of that transaction, you know, the Bitcoin for one pizza, one Bitcoin for one pizza, blah blah blah. But like if you're looking at it objectively, it's like, well, what else were they supposed to do? Right? That was the only way. I'm probably not even the only one, right? There's plenty of people that traded, uh, you know, bartered for Bitcoin uh with something that they had. So it's a very, very different environment than it is now. Now there's exchanges, you know, it's really, really easy to buy crypto, even with a credit card or bank account. But uh that wasn't really the case. So after I got into the Ethereum ICO, basically I set them maybe a hundred or two hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin that I mined, which took like several months, by the way. This is why people didn't get in early, okay? It's it was a lot of work for something like you had to be kind of like obsessed about it to even think of doing it, you know. So yeah, I think it's really important to keep that in mind because the opportunities are not never obvious, and and if it's uh very popular, it's probably you gotta be a little bit wary. You can't have it both ways at the same time, right? Something popular but also special, right? You can't be special and normal at the same time, right? Like well anyway, that's a different topic. But um, so anyway, uh after that uh nothing really happened for like a few years. Uh I until like 2016-17-ish, the price of Ethereum kind of wobbled around for a few years, but eventually it's kind of settled around$100 or so. But during the hype, uh which was actually triggered by CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties NFTs, uh, it went up from$100 to$1,400. And uh people were like, wow, whoa. And uh some people made a lot of money, and it kind of got into the news. People were talking about NFTs for a little while, not like they do today. It was more like a niche thing. So they it was on the news several times. Some places wrote articles about it, but it was more like a hey, science and technology news. It wasn't like the huge like blow up we saw in uh 2021. So that came and went, and it was cool. Um, the other thing that was going on was uh ICOs became a big thing. So that includes Tezos as well. Uh around that time, that's when Tezos launched. But the first ICO really was Ethereum in 2013-14. Uh, in case you don't know what an ICO is, initial coin offering, just think of it as IPO, like again when a company goes public. This is ICO when a coin goes public and it includes the public um to basically directly invest in the project. At the time, that was uh actually very novel because like some random person like me could like actually do it. If I was willing to do the mining thing and all go through all the hoops, um it it melt it made people, regular people like me, feel like an investor, like a real investor, right? That that didn't have to go through accreditation and all those sorts of things. And it was relatively affordable at the time. Um getting into Ethereum's ICO at the time was probably just a few hundred dollars at most, and that got you about 2000 ETH, and we can do the calculations, uh yeah, it's pretty good return, right? But uh but the uh yeah, so the hype during 2016 didn't really last. Uh there was issues with NFTs that really people took a look at it, even Bjork was like fooling around with it for a while, her being uh way ahead of her time. Um yeah, you know, and people checked it out, but it didn't really solve the problems that they need, so it just kind of collapsed. So it went up from hundred to fourteen hundred and back to a hundred. And again, it stayed that way for about four years. And uh interestingly enough, uh they in the crypto cycle of twenty twenty one they Actually, spent a lot of time that this is the Ethereum folks, like kind of refining, um basically trying to make the NFT thing that failed in the last uh the last cycle up to par. They didn't make a huge changes, but they made it like made the process of owning one smooth enough to the point where they felt like it was time to market it again. So I have a lot of respect for the people that were doing that work during that time because for about three or four years they were just kind of building away in the shadows and just going at it every day. And then when it was time for it to take off, it happened. And the rest is history, right? Sort of. I mean, we're still living in it, but so uh yeah, so that's the gist of how it got there, right? Interesting thing enough, the two both cycles were triggered, not by DeFi or any of the other things they were working, they were both NFTs, and I do believe that even in the next cycle, it's gonna be NFTs. Because NFTs uh has to do with art, right? And then um it's really how to say it, it's it's really the ideal market to test the functionalities of crypto um projects because uh crypto is a very, very new technology, relatively speaking, right? It's been around for like over 10 years, but at the same time, no one really has been able to like figure out like what to really do with it to make it uh useful. But it has a lot of applications in the arts, and the arts is a good place to test things out because before you start using these things for like medical devices or hey, your uh escrow on your home, uh those things you can't have failures, right? Like it's not acceptable. But with art, things break here and there is not that big a deal, right? It's the it's a lower stake asset that is ideal for experimentation. And that that's the reason why I think that um even today, like it still continues to be one of the, if not the biggest quote, product in the space. Uh, this is also the reason why I doubled down on Tezos. Uh, I'm completely out of Bitcoin, I'm completely out of ETH. I sold sold a long time ago, um, just because for reasons I'll get into. But uh yeah, I still think we're not out of the NFT thing yet, because in order for crypto to be come to have utility, to work, to be useful, it it really needs to nail the um model in the creative spaces first. Then after it proves itself, they can probably move on to other things that uh require more precision, and the failure rate has to be zero, right? For for some things. So, yeah, so that's what we're kind of moving towards, and I do think Tesla's is really like the best candidate. They've been doing the most in that area, at least for now. So uh we'll see what happens after this cycle, though. So it's gonna be very, very bumpy. So, yeah, so the ugly, right? The ugly and the bad, they're kind of related. Uh, if you're being for real, there's a ton of scams in crypto. That's the reputation we have. There's a ton of phish, people just trying to steal each other's money. There's the security. There's a lot of half-assed projects where this the security is really not up to where it should be. And so you hear about these big places getting hacked and drained and at a level that's probably not acceptable, right? Uh and then uh there's of course the beam coins, which is not as ugly, but uh still, right? It's just basically a casino, right? And you ask them what what does a coin do? Nothing. Like some places don't even hide hide it anymore. Well, so you have these coins that exist for no other reason than to be a casino where you hope in you get early enough before you get wiped, right? And so all of that stuff is gonna, it's not gonna go away, but it's gonna be less emphasized as the markets kind of uh uh correct itself. This happened before too. I remember uh in the ICO era, there was all these coins just popping up everywhere. Everyone on their moms wanted to create a uh ICO because they heard a few people got rich from it. And just like today, they're making dog coins and and ape coins and whatever that was what uh Bitcoin silver, Bitcoin Gold, Ethereum Classic, Ethereum, this well, yeah. So uh, but I mean being real, uh there was a market correction right after that cycle happened, and there's a lot of projects that were like big names at the time that are just disappeared. They're not completely dead, they're still around, but if you look at the charts, like they haven't done anything in like over five years. So you can probably say, okay, it's probably dead, right? And uh I just wanted to emphasize how easy it is to be on the top ten and never heard of ever again, right? Because the saying uh the higher you are, the harder you fall, right? And a lot of the projects that kind of overmarketed in themselves over the last few years but didn't deliver on their promises, it would be a different story if if they marketed something and they were in parallel providing actual value to the people that bought in. But people call it a bubble because that didn't happen. It was just pure marketing. So a lot of those uh projects are collapsing now because they're running out. Because if you don't have a real product, it even if it's not intentional, your project turns into a Ponzi. It's uh basically the same thing happens at startups where they have a ton of uh like where they raise a lot of money, the founders have their share. You know, for what it's worth, they could be trying their best to make it work, but when the project starts to fail and you kind of know it, um the thing most people do is uh they try to sell off their shares, in this case, the uh coins, before people realize and then just jump shit. And they're gonna lie, they're gonna tell you whatever you want to hear uh while they're packing their bags. But I think that's been happening. I see like all kinds of ridiculous things, people saying it has no bearing in reality, but what they're doing is they're trying to distract you while they head up the exit. And unfortunately, uh yeah, if this is your first cycle, you probably didn't see it coming. It's it can be kind of difficult to see. I was it was the case for me too. I I didn't know, right? Luckily luckily, I stuck to projects that were actually working on real things, and that included Ethereum as well. My portfolio during like 2017 to 2019 was uh Ethereum, a little bit of Bitcoin, a tiny bit, and then uh Dogecoin. I had others, but they were just for fun. Yeah, those those really are the three things, pretty much. Yeah. So at the time they were working on things and it made me feel okay. But in the last couple years, I lost that feeling from those projects because the bankers came in, they kind of kicked out, or the speculators basically took over, and the builders were either um subdued or they left. And there was a big shift in culture at Ethereum that I was not comfortable with, and that's why I I uh got out. I I was serious about it. I was uh a validator for a little while, and that wasn't cheap to do that, but the return sucked, the customer service was horrible, and um yeah, it just like didn't make any sense anymore. So the reason why Tezos for for me, Tezos was the place where all those things went, but but again, um nobody believes it because everybody used to make fun of Ethereum back in the day in the same way that people making fun of Tezos. Even though objectively it's the probably the highest quality project in the space right now. It's not perfect, but they're at least trying to solve problems, real problems. And there's a few others, like I like Gridcoin, uh Decentralized is still pretty um interesting because also because it's decentralized decentralized. I do think like a lot of the um projects that are gonna survive in the future is is gonna be good governance because uh when when people start to sell and that entity is centralized, if that one party leaves, that's it. It's just game over. And we're gonna see who's been doing this decentralization thing for real or those who have been faking it. And that idea of confronting that truth is like freaking a lot of people out, I think, right now. But um that's just how it goes needs to happen because the way the industry was going up until this point, like it crypto has a terrible, terrible uh reputation right now among the general public. A lot of it comes from FTX. And even though that's technically not crypto's fault, the technology did not allow that. That was really Wall Street, right? But the kind of people that end up representing the space, they're not doing the industry any favor because uh without people's trust, crypto is nothing. It's all about trust, and and they haven't used the technology in the right way. Uh I am I don't know. Most places they don't even check ledger records, even though that's the whole point, right? So all that stuff needs to go, and it's happening now, and it's gonna be a little bit scary, but I I a lot of us have been waiting for this moment for it to finally okay, finally, we can move on. So we're gonna see how it turns out. So here are uh so I'm gonna go into the good part finally, right? There's but before I do, uh as mentioned earlier, I wanted to kind of talk about maybe a few other perspectives that seldom gets talked about. And a lot of it has to do with Japan. Uh and Japanese American, by the way. Uh it's kind of uh uh I don't live in Japan, but I pay attention to what's going on there here and there just to like kind of get uh informed. But but Japan, uh, if you think about it, now is Satoshi Nakamoto Japanese. Uh nobody really knows, and I don't know if we ever will. But my hunch is that there is a good chance that he was just because of like the things that happened around the crypto industry uh when it first got started. So a couple things. Um the Bitcoin was like invented around, I don't want to say the wrong thing. Let me check. I think it's 2010, 2011, around there. Oh, 2008. Actually, actually, I guess that's when it was first conceived. Now, you think about it, right? Uh that happened at the exact time the uh financial bailouts were happening, right? And the whole like uh uh you watch the big short, right? The collapse in the economic market, banks going out of business, things like people couldn't have imagined could happen happen. And I do think that um the development of Bitcoin was really a reaction to observing that because if you're paying attention, and obviously Nakamoto's a smart guy, right? Um and he knew what was going on and like how that bailout was a really, really um big problem in in the economy. And honestly, we're that's we're we're kind of hitting that point of like inflection point. Because back in 2008, they bailed out the banks, they punished no one, they kind of got away with it. Did they fix the problems underneath? That's what they say. They say they did, but did they really, right? And uh there's good reason to think that this system that Satoshi created was a result of basically him or her or whatever. Uh maybe maybe it's a bot. But maybe a bot created Bitcoin, I don't know. But um, but the idea is to create an alternative currency system that could not that could not repeat the same mistakes of 2008, right? The most interesting thing about crypto, and a lot not a lot of people uh talk about this, is the fact that you cannot go into debt. I I people talk about the difference between digital and fiat, but there's a lot of overlap between digital currencies and crypto, at least on the surface. But one of the biggest differentiators is the fact that you cannot go into debt, you can't take out loans, at least not directly, right? You have a wallet, and the wallet is always positive, you cannot go negative. So that's one big part of it. And I do think like it's pretty safe to say that Satoshi probably was not a big fan of quantitative easing and those uh stimulus and all those sorts of things, um like shuffling money around in a circle hoping like something good is gonna happen, right? I don't think he was really into that. Uh, he wanted to make Bitcoin a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. That's in the title. So um what the so if you take it from that point of view, right? And they decided to launch this thing into the world that offered a real alternative. In the beginning, no one took it seriously. Well, they even knew about it, right? This very abstract, like, oh, you can own money on the computer out of nowhere, right? Like, like even now, thinking about it, it seems kind of weird. But imagine back then trying to convince someone this money exists on your computer through these quote wallet, digital wallet, right? It's probably a very hard sell. So that's why it took a long time before anyone even considered using it. But uh but they kept on doing it and kept uh working on it, and uh eventually uh became Mt. Gox, right? If you don't know what that is, you should probably look look it up because it was actually started in Japan. And that's that's really the reason why I do think uh Satoshi has like ties with with Japan, just because of its early history, right? Uh Mt. Gox was the first exchange in Japan, uh first crypto exchange in the world, at least the main the most major one. And uh, if you look at the history of like even like Cardano, Ethereum, all the Bitcoin people, they always they talked that was the thing they knew. And uh so some people it was very, very small by back then, but some people made a lot of money in Bitcoin by investing early, very, very early, even before I got in. Like they made a lot of money in Japan, and um yeah, you can look it up, it's all there. So so from that money, Charles Hoshison from uh Cardano got into a fight with Vitalik. They had uh disagreements and he was uh quote let go or I don't know, he quit or he got fired, or but anyway he was mad, he was mad and he decided to create the the ETH killer Cardano coin and it was so smart that it was look at his team they're all PhDs from reputable universities. How dare you question my intelligence there's a lot of ridiculous things that happened back then. So but uh but anyway that's where the money came from um but the reason why I'm talking about Japan is because they've they've um been sort of a cycle ahead of everyone and what I mean by that is that when I visited there in 2016 I went to an electronics store kind of equivalent of Best Buy or one of those uh competing stores in the US the equivalent of that over they already had Bitcoin integrated you gonna go there buy a TV with Bitcoin? Sure go ahead we support it and meanwhile um in the US we're struggling struggling just to even get through the regulatory things like and uh yeah so they were like way ahead of the curve when it came to like crypto adoption and no one talks about it because of reasons I don't know why but this is and everyone I think I do think it's like a large uh uh ego thing they don't didn't want to let people know but but anyway uh so that was there and um they tried it out for a couple years and nobody used it so they're like okay well and they they kind of faded away interesting like a lot of the hype behind crypto kind of sustains itself based on like an antagonism right like oh the the banks are holding us back the government is holding us back screw Elizabeth Warren you know her right like the Bitcoin people do not like her uh so it was kind of but but it's it it's like but like even if you have an enemy it's like a reason to get up in the morning to fight your enemy right in Japan they took it all the way they tried it out and it was a letdown so they just kind of slowly faded away it's still there by the way it's just like no one's talking about it. And Japan has one of the lowest um crypto adoption rates in the world it's kind of bizarre considering I just said Satoshi is probably from there I don't know for sure but probably so they were the first to launch first to adopt and then first to get bored of it. So yeah I went I went there recently last couple months there there was like a crypto theme cafe and I won and I'm like oh cool I don't know just I'm in the area this is in Tokyo might as well check it out right and I went with my brother because we had nothing else better to do but but then it was gone. So sad it's so sad. A couple years ago I went to they had even had a cafe called Mona Coin themed bar. They had a mona coin it lit up but it was a crypto coin made in Japan at the time and uh they had a bar and all that went in uh no one was there but you know hey but cool at least it exists right so okay so anyway that's what's going on now you can skip ahead to to today there is a interesting development happening so in the last couple weeks and part of it is just people grasping at straws like I said but uh they've been blaming the drop in pit bitcoin cris price on Japan increasing their interest rates uh to borrow money let's see I can't see it but Bank of Japan to take interest rates to 30 year high and why is this uh significant well uh to just to to just say uh to make it clear 30 year high means 0.5 percent to 0.75 percent okay i'm not talking about like 10 or 30 it's so small and uh when people go to Japan the interesting thing they they notice is that uh if they've been to there multiple times their inflation rate is really really slow like even my dad oh he's been going there for decades he said oh yeah the prices are pretty much the same from the 80s it's kind of bizarre so um all this time for the last couple of decades they their borrowing rate has been very very very low and Americans and US companies have been taking advantage of that so when they need to borrow money you can go to the bank you can go ask your friends if we're rich enough you could go right different places but they do notice that the borrowing rate in Japan is really really low and some of that has been flowing into crypto and it's not unthinkable just because that's where it is like that's where it started that's where Bonk's was and the people that did that stuff back in the day they they're still there so uh yeah so I do think there's some truth to that claim because if uh cheap loans and cheap money is harder to get it's gonna slow down the markets a bit right now I think it's a bit exaggerated because it's not o Japan's not the only place you can get that but uh there's a lot of people just kind of fixated on it for some reason which I think is kind of interesting so uh something to keep in mind so but what they're doing now they're kind of tightening it up and if you didn't know uh Warren Buffett has been accumulating yen as well because I think right now if you look at the yen price to dollar right it hasn't it's really not doing that well right it it's um one right it's like 150 160 back in its prime the yen used to be under a hundred in in fact so that was a long time ago though but I think Warren Buffett is a smart guy he probably sees an opportunity of the yen surging back because uh he sees it as a good deal well here's this undervalued thing and they're raising their interest rates and um so they're preparing um for the yen to become more valuable relative to the dollar so what the the thing okay so this is kind of going into opinion territory but the thing I am speculating knowing nothing about who Satoshi is or who they might be but I do think like Satoshi did not like quantitative easing especially from the US because um what America has done basically in the last decade or two uh leading up to 2008 but but even from before right it's like how does uh how do Americans like maintain their standard of living right um what happens is when a currency is the world reserve currency right everyone uses the dollar that gives the hosting country kind of the ability to quote export inflation because if you push basically when you um print more money right and then use that money to like kind of so so when you print money technically it should be worth less right and because it should inflate the uh currency because there's more of it right but what they they can they can kind of get away with it because if they if people are using the dollars right they can use that to kind of reprice things in their favor when it goes overseas and then back at home nobody notices we are kind of like pushing that burden on on overseas uh countries and that they would do it because they have to but you could probably imagine they're probably not too happy with that right but it's like well but it's the dollar right like oh what are we gonna what else are we gonna do but uh that kind of sentiment is starting to fade away China's you more people are using the yuan for business and the hyper well I don't want to call it hyperinflation but the increased inflation you see now as a result of that it's very abstract very invisible but it is there and the rising it just means that all the money printing we've been doing in the last decade or so is catching up to us and uh and yeah so with even with this um uh yen what the yen is doing they're trying to get away from it because this everyone's kind of looking at America and they're like oh it's a has been country and then um China doesn't go around starting wars like we do we're just currently bombing Venezuela as we speak uh there's a lot of people who are not happy with the way things are going with America and how they're conducting themselves that if um they can't maintain their uh reserve status uh they're gonna leave and then yeah so so I've been saying uh okay where's the good part right so so there there's gonna be a big shift in the world currency right I I don't see it happening in it any other way I don't even even with like we switch out our president in a few years even with with a new administration the the the problem is just like way too big and unless we get like a FDR style really crazy strategy I don't know never never say never but um it's it's uh probably gonna happen so the silver lining of all of this especially if you're in crypto is that crypto will be part of the global financial system in one worry another one way or another and you gotta think about it even the idea of a global world is a relatively new thing like the UN didn't exist until fairly recently right we had to have like several world wars just to get to this point of like major countries not going to war with each other but um and and and really the way that kind of um countries major countries interact with each other these days is through economy right and they're preferable to like have an economic war over a a real one right if possible so a lot of these things are happening the US dollar will still be around uh but just like kind of like the British pound was around right it'll be around but it won't be the only thing and I do think like in the future currencies are going to be kind of split between the yuan dollar and uh the euro right euro is actually another major contender and but crypto as well so somewhere in there it's gonna be in there but in order for it to be any use at all it has to work right and and at the current like standards of the industry that is not happening. There's lots of places that have or tested out ethereum Bitcoin for financial systems Bitcoin's too expensive it's too slow ethereum has issues with its governance um there also gas fees don't help right the L2s were supposed to fix the speed problem but it just turned into this like chaos that no one can make sense of and and it's just not no one's using it you know you've got to be real so um so what's what's happening really is that we're still developing this stuff but the story's not over yet and I do think the ones that are going to survive the next cycle are the ones that are serious. The meme coin stuff all that scam like dog poop coin all those they're all gonna go away and what's gonna be left is really the um projects that have been working on it seriously and like I said Ethereum Dogecoin even the Bitcoin people used to be that it's just kind of disappointing to see what it's turned into and unfortunately they're gonna pay the price for it maybe if it crashes hard enough uh all the the all the vultures will leave and then the builders will come back again and make it into something but if you're being real it is like well I don't know this thing is like 10 years old it's like clunky. There are much easier ways to start a new coin and even the value of proof of work is sort of questionable because it's like it's expensive for no reason so that's the sort of issues people are going to seriously start talking about once all the fluff money kind of goes out. And then maybe we might get something interesting. And I'm still fairly optimistic for the crypto space as a whole I only say fairly but I'm actually really optimistic about NFTs because it is still the next iteration of crypto because we haven't figured it out yet let's be real we haven't figured out how to make NFTs work yet like it has to it has to it has to respect copyright it has to respect royalties has to do all that stuff that are used in the industry every day but the tech techies just kind of missed out on so for some reason right for some bizarre reason uh they just sort of missed the whole point because there were other priorities they weren't there to like build something they were there to like make quick cash so once that happens it'll come back around and the good thing I'll leave it on a good note the good thing especially for Tesla's is that we're kind of reaching that point in the cycle um you could say that we've been in a bear market since 2021 2022 when the prices started going down if you look at the chart we haven't gotten back up yet we haven't really recovered so maybe we're approaching the bottom the true bottom and we're ready for thing for the next cycle to happen all right and so yeah I'll just leave it at that and yeah hang in there man oh it's uh this is never pleasant and my my accounts are hurting as well I won't lie it's painful but this is how the industry grows and this is how you mature you know no pain no gain as they say so hopefully the pain will subside soon and then the gains will come. Okay well thanks a lot for listening and see you in the next one take care