Latest news about Bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies. Your daily crypto news habit.
An overview of what’s to come on the podcast plus:
- Ripple mania
- How to become a Sumokoin ($SUMO) baron
- Altcoin buying and sports gambling.
COIN TALK is produced in partnership with Medium and hosted by Aaron Lammer and Jay Caspian Kang.
Click here to download the mp3 and scroll below the Show Notes to read the full transcript.
Show Notes
- 9:30 This Cryptocurrency Inventor Has Suddenly Become One of the World’s Richest Men (Time)
- 9:48 Meet The Crypto Billionaires Getting Rich From Ripple’s XRP (Laura Shin, Forbes)
- 9:55 This thread between Nathaniel Popper (New York Times) and Brad Garlinghouse (C.E.O. of Ripple)
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Over the last day I've asked several people close to banks if banks are indeed planning to begin using Ripple's token, XRP, in a serious way, which is what investors seem to assume when they buy in at the current XRP prices.
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@nathanielpopper Over the last few months I've spoken with ACTUAL banks and payment providers. They are indeed planning to use xRapid (our XRP liquidity product) in a serious way. This is a sampling of what I heard:
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@bgarlinghouse I'm still interested in speaking with these folks if you will provide their names. I asked around and couldn't find any, but I will continue reaching out to financial institutions that you and others point me to.
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@nathanielpopper then why did you tweet this without doing the 2 interviews we arranged for you!!? You have those names. I don't think you want to hear validation for XRP. The @NYTimes should be above spreading anonymous FUD. Do those calls and update your story.
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@bgarlinghouse I wasn't able to reach the two names you sent me yesterday until now. Just to close the loop, here's what I heard from them:
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@bgarlinghouse I have also reached out to the names that @arrington pointed me to -- as well as other names that have been floating around -- but haven't heard back from any of them. I will report back if I do.
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Was a pleasure speaking with @paulvigna about $XRP and @Ripple - this is a fair and balanced piece I can get behind. https://t.co/bhSHfAJt68
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- 12:00 The Ripple Effect (Izabella Kaminska, FT Alphaville)
- 21:41 Sumokoin ($SUMO)
- 23:00 HQ Trivia
- 33:00 I See You, $XRP (TwoBitIdiot, Medium)
Transcript
Aaron Lammer: Welcome to CoinTalk, a new podcast. This is inaugural episode … This is episode zero, right?
Jay Kang: Yeah, it is generation zero of our crypto kitties podcast experience.
Aaron Lammer: You’re inside the genesis block here. I’m Aaron Lammer. Across the crypto cave from me, Mr Jay Caspian Kang.
Jay Kang: Hello.
Aaron Lammer: Just to give a little background here. I do podcasts, I have a podcast called Longform. I have another podcast about weed, called Stoner. Jay, what do you do?
Jay Kang: I’m a journalist. I write for the New York Times Magazine. I’m a correspondent for VICE News Tonight on HBO.
Aaron Lammer: This show has almost nothing to do with what we do with our actual lives. It has to do with what we do with our shadow lives.
Jay Kang: Yeah.
Aaron Lammer: Our pseudo lives.
Jay Kang: We should probably say that it has absolutely nothing to do with any of the companies that we work for.
Aaron Lammer: Couldn’t have less to do with anything else we do. In fact, I think the origins of this show, at least from my perspective, are the, we got into cryptocurrencies around the same time. We started talking about them obsessively. As usual, I just try to feed my addictions into a podcast format.
Jay Kang: Yeah, same. You introduced me into crypto. I had known about it before. But I had never thought about-
Aaron Lammer: If you could go back to that moment, would you just have me not tell you about cryptocurrency?
Jay Kang: Well you’ve tried a few times. You’ve tried a few times. The first time I was like, “No.” And then the second time, I believe I also told your wife, “Aarom keeps talking to me about cryptocurrency.”
Aaron Lammer: “Please ask him to stop.”
Jay Kang: Yeah. But then at a barbecue at your house, you showed me some of this stuff in a very Roger Ver sort of way.
Aaron Lammer: Oh, I’m the Roger Ver in your life.
Jay Kang: Roger Ver being known as Bitcoin Jesus. He would walk around and show people how to store Bitcoin on a phone, which is essentially what you did.
Aaron Lammer: As a bald man, I will take any comparison to Jesus.
Jay Kang: Yeah. You came to me and said, “Look, this is how you do it. This is how it works.” Some degenerate gambling past stuff kicked up in my brain. The endorphins started running and here we are.
Aaron Lammer: You have a little bit of a background in gambling. You’ve covered high-stakes online poker players. I have a little bit of a background in technology. I have failed to raise money for a startup previously. So we’re coming to this from slightly different points of view. But I think it’s important for listeners to the show to realize, we don’t really know very much about cryptocurrency. Everything we’ve learned, we learned in the last six months. Through a pretty haphazard education.
Jay Kang: That was always the idea that we had about the podcast. Which was that, when people download Coinbase and they say, “I’m going to buy cryptocurrency.” And then they’re like, “Well, I would like to make an informed decision.” This is all stuff that we did. Wading through Reddit posts and shitposts on Twitter and people who are angry, and people if you don’t know they’re trying to scam you or not. That’s all very intimidating. We wished that we had a sort of inviting, easy, and somewhat dumbed down version of everything to listen to. That’s what we decided.
Aaron Lammer: We’re your guide, your Sherpa.
Jay Kang: Yes. But a Sherpa that was not scaling the mountain at incredible paces, but was like, “Hey, I’ve done this once before and I think we’re going to be okay.”
Aaron Lammer: And as part of the lucky and privileged position we have living in New York here and being involved in the media and journalism and stuff like that, we do have access to people who do know what they’re talking about. Those people are journalists, they are developers, they’re gamblers, speculators, Wall Streeters, we’re going to have them all on this show to tell us all the things that we are getting wrong as we talk through the week’s news.
Jay Kang: Exactly. So when we have a question, when Aaron and I looked at some crypto news or something like that, and we ask each other, “Hey, what is this?” We generally do-
Aaron Lammer: “I don’t get it.”
Jay Kang: Yeah. Or we pretend to get it and then 10 minutes in we’re like, “I don’t get it.” We generally default to asking some people that we know, how to disentangle this and what it actually means. We would like for you, the listener, to go through that process with us as we have these discussions.
Aaron Lammer: Yeah, and let us know how we’re doing, what your questions are, what’s confusing you. Jay helped start Grantland, which is a sports site that ESPN did with Bill Simmons. I think that the way that we regard the Bitcoin, crypto space is from a sports-like background. It reminds me a little of fantasy sports or something like that.
Aaron Lammer: We see this as an entertaining field full of weirdos and interesting personalities. We want to cover it from every angle. You’re probably not going to hear breaking news on this show. But if you don’t want to sit there on every Reddit forum and every Discord chat channel following every project along-
Jay Kang: Reading every single white paper.
Aaron Lammer: If you don’t want to get yelled at. If you want to get involved in crypto without getting yelled at, we’re willing to not yell at you.
Jay Kang: Yeah, because we will get yelled at for you. We’ll try and disseminate the parts that are not yelling.
Aaron Lammer: One more thing before we get going, I want to send a shout out to Medium. This show is produced in partnership with Medium. They’re helping us do things like put up transcripts of every episode, live show notes, which is a reading list. There’s a ton of amazing crypto stuff happening on Medium.
Jay Kang: Yeah. There is really … I mean I’m sure that if you have waded into this space and you have read a good article or somebody coherently laying out their thoughts, chances are that it was on a Medium page.
Aaron Lammer: You can actually find all of the best crypto writing on Medium at me.dm/crypto again, me.dm/crypto that’s a landing page with all sorts of crypto related content. Our page is medium.com/cointalk, we’ll have all the new shows there. You can either subscribe there or you can subscribe there in the pod catcher of your choice. It’s all the same.
Jay Kang: What is a pod catcher?
Aaron Lammer: It’s a podcast app.
Jay Kang: A podcast app?
Aaron Lammer: Pod catcher.
Jay Kang: It feels vaguely-
Aaron Lammer: It catches the podcast.
Jay Kang: Vaguely gross.
Aaron Lammer: As a special bonus, would be down to do a little mini-show today, Jay?
Jay Kang: Yeah, let’s do it. There’s a lot of news.
Aaron Lammer: What should we talk about?
Jay Kang: Let’s talk about the only thing that people in crypto seem to be talking about over the past week, which is Ripple.
Aaron Lammer: Cue the theme music.
Aaron Lammer: This episode was taped Sunday, January 7th at 6pm. The Bitcoin price index was $14,780.
Aaron Lammer: Welcome back to Crip Talk-
Jay Kang: Welcome to Crap-topia. What is your pin number? I don’t know anymore. That’s why I can’t buy this shit coin.
Aaron Lammer: Okay, we clearly had our brains scrambled by crypto. But we want to give you a little preview of the show. Let’s do a few topics. What do you want to talk about today?
Jay Kang: I think we have to talk about Ripple.
Aaron Lammer: Can’t not talk about Ripple (XRP).
Jay Kang: Yeah, which is a little disappointing. But we should.
Aaron Lammer: Let’s also talk about, I just saw that people are trading accounts. I don’t know if this is real. But it appears that some of these exchanges, the smaller exchanges have shut down new accounts and people are trading in accounts on those exchanges.
Jay Kang: Yeah, they’re trying to pimp them out, they’re saying, “I’ll sign this account over to you for five Bitcoin.”
Aaron Lammer: And then I think we’re going to tie things up talking a little bit about our own relative, emotional weaknesses as crypto traders.
Jay Kang: That previews of a year of content, I think.
Aaron Lammer: Without getting too deep into what Ripple is, what’s going on with Ripple right now?
Jay Kang: Well, the reason why it’s in the news is because for a very short period of time, when Ripple was around $3.84 here, Chris Larsen, who is the former CEO of Ripple, not even the current CEO, was supposedly worth 59 billion dollars. Which made him the fifth richest man in America.
Aaron Lammer: It’s kind of incredible this murderers row of people behind Ripple. You’ve got him, he’s briefly richer than Larry Ellison. This is the guy who doesn’t even work at the company Ripple anymore. He’s the former CEO. One of the other guys was the original guy who started Mt. Gox before he sold it to Mark Karpeles. That guy is filthy fucking rich. There’s a new CEO who is beefing with Nathaniel Popper on Twitter, ’cause Nathaniel Popper called a bunch of banks and they were like, “Yeah, we might work with Ripple some day, I guess.”
Jay Kang: I think that people in crypto almost never agree on anything. Like it it seems like there’s never really any agreement about anything in crypto.
Aaron Lammer: Yeah.
Jay Kang: But it does seem like all sides, any type of coin that you’re into, everyone has banded together to hate Ripple. You hate Ripple. Why do you hate Ripple?
Aaron Lammer: I don’t. Look, I’ve owned Ripple before. So I can’t have hated it that much. Generally the rap it gets is, well for starters, it’s not really decentralized. There’s the company Ripple. There’s the token Ripple. The company Ripple has locked up something like 60% of the Ripple tokens. But look, I’m not some decentralization ideologue. So that doesn’t really explain why I would dislike it.
Aaron Lammer: I think what gets under my skin about Ripple is it seems like this Ripple run is playing on people’s worst instincts, which is, people want to buy a coin that’s really cheap. Ripple is pre-mined. So all the coins are out there, available, except for the ones that have been locked up by the founders and for their future bank partners. There’s 100 billion of them.
Aaron Lammer: They seem really cheap. People have bought it up from cents up to over $3. The idea that Ripple is worth that much, where you multiply its price by the number of tokens, seems misleading at best. It feels almost like it was designed to take advantage of pyschology. Sort of in the way of Zinga games used to feel that way to me.
Jay Kang: Yeah, or junk bonds. Where there’s value that’s almost made out of thin air. I’ll say that the association with banks, there’s this great detail in this Financial Times story, where the author, Izabella Kaminska meets the people at Ripple at Davos.
Jay Kang: I think that when you read about Ripple, it’s been in the news all week. The one thing that keeps coming up is that for Ripple to work this network that they want to do between banks, they need banks to buy in.
Aaron Lammer: Yeah, and they’ve held a bunch of tokens up to lure the banks in.
Jay Kang: Yeah. They’re like, “You know my 59 billion. We’ve got some for you too. But not for them.”
Aaron Lammer: Yeah.
Jay Kang: That bothers me a little bit. And I will say that I also am not some Austrian school Libertarian who believes that everything should be decentralized. But I do agree that there’s this sort of shell game here. If I printed a million Kang Coin (KCO) and I held 999,000 of them and I sold them to you for 50 cents, I’m not worth the one billion Kang Coins plus whatever, wait that doesn’t make sense. Let me try again. If I print a billion Kang Coins.
Aaron Lammer: Yeah. Jay, where can I buy those Kang Coins?
Jay Kang: I sell you one for $1.
Aaron Lammer: Yeah.
Jay Kang: That one Kang coin is worth a dollar. I’m not worth a billion dollars at that point.
Aaron Lammer: Exactly. And I further think that even if you accept these hijinx, potentially as clever, at one point I think they had passed Toyota in market cap size. When you’re bigger than Toyota and all you’ve really done is introduce the idea of, “We’re going to disrupt the SWIFT money transfer system.” What is the incentive to actually do it? How much would you have to actually achieve to justify that value? And how much would you just be like, “Hey, things are going great. Tokens trading for $3. What else do we need to do here?”
Jay Kang: Yeah.
Aaron Lammer: Why build an actual company? The guy who’s the richest isn’t even the CEO anymore. I almost feel like these pre-mined coins ought to be categorized differently than the minable coins. ’Cause I think that their supply represents something different. It represents something different if there’s a mining community that feels like it’s worthwhile. I will not be buying Ripple. Will you be buying Ripple?
Jay Kang: Well, I mean, like you, I already bought Ripple. And then I sold it for about a penny more than it was after I … As you’ll learn from us, we do a lot of that.
Aaron Lammer: Yeah, I think that’s something worth addressing as we get going here on the show, which is, Jay and I, not only should you not take our investment advice. You should consider going the opposite of the way we’re going.
Jay Kang: Oh yeah. I’m sure you guys have listened to Sports Gambling Podcast, where you just say, “I’m going to bet the opposite of that guy, because that guy never wins.” That’s a good idea to us.
Aaron Lammer: We really don’t know what we’re doing. I will say, just to tie this up. That both of our original assumptions, — we’ve been taping fake episodes of this fake podcast previousl — both of us thought that Ripple would never have a meteoric rise because it’s usefulness as this middle man in money transfers, which is basically what it’s designed for, is somewhat ebbed away if you have it making 50% or 80% swings on a single day.
Jay Kang: Yeah, I recall this was an impassioned case I made during one of our Basement Tapes. With you being like, “You can’t have a transfer between banks if the thing is plunging 20% in a day. Therefore it’s never going to go up.” And I think that I cost you a lot of money that way.
Aaron Lammer: Jay, how many different accounts do you have for exchanges?
Jay Kang: Right now?
Aaron Lammer: Yeah. What are you? I assume we’re both-
Jay Kang: I’m ashamed to say.
Aaron Lammer: We’re both on Coinbase/GDAX
Jay Kang: I’m ashamed to say it. I think I’m at six.
Aaron Lammer: Okay, wow. Did you ever think it would come to this?
Jay Kang: I had hoped not. Because like most people who are getting into crypto at some point, you want to be almost like a knight of crypto and stand for what’s good in crypto.
Aaron Lammer: That has never been my ambition.
Jay Kang: That certainly does not mean signing into six different exchanges so that you can chase shitcoins all over the world.
Aaron Lammer: We both started on the Coinbase/GDAX axis, which is, I think where most people start, at least Americans. I know that both of us made the jump to Bittrex, which seems like the logical first place to go. A lot of these bigger name alt coins are available at Bittrex. It’s a place where you can pick up Zcash (ZEC) and Monero (XMR). Actually I think I did some ShapeShifting before I did that.
Jay Kang: Yeah, that was before I entered your crypto world.
Aaron Lammer: I lost two Monero in a ShapeShift calamity that’s still unexplained. Come on the show and talk about it ShapeShift makers. I got to Bittrex and we both stopped for a while.
Jay Kang: Yeah.
Aaron Lammer: And then there’s been a rush in the last week or so, where it seems like everyone got … A lot of people have to have gotten onto some exchange or we couldn’t see all this Ripple (XRP) trading.
Jay Kang: Yeah, there seemed to be a domino effect. Because first, everyone signed up for Coinbase and then Litecoin (LTC) surges. Ethereum (ETH) surges and then Bittrex says, “Whoa, we’ve got a lot of people. We can’t handle all of you.” And then Binance, which is a Chinese exchange, they say, “Whoa, we can’t handle all your people. There’s no new signups.”
Jay Kang: And then on and on and on, it seems like every single day now, a new exchange is saying, “We’re shutting down new registration signups.” I don’t know. It seems like either there’s a massive, massive amount of people who are trying to signup for these things. Or something really bad is about to happen.
Aaron Lammer: Well, the way I’m reading it, as a buyer. Is, if there’s more people trying to get on these exchanges than can fit through the door. I’m buying alts, because those people are going to come after me and they’re going to want to buy alts and eventually they’re going to get accounts. I mean, it’s crazy. I don’t know if this is really going to sell. But there was someone who was selling a account for $25,000 on eBay. All that account does is give you the right to transfer in Bitcoin and trade.
Jay Kang: Yeah, and for how long? ’Cause it’s not like this is a permanent, it’s not like they capped a country club and they’re like, “No more people in this country club. Someone has to die.” I’m sure that Binance will allow new people in the next couple months. Or Bittrex might in the next couple weeks.
Aaron Lammer: I don’t know. Cryptopia got knocked offline by DOT trading, I think, today.
Jay Kang: Yeah, Cryptopia is another one that shut down new registrations as well.
Aaron Lammer: It makes sense, if you’re just chasing the high, Cryptopia is the closest to a video game experience that you’re going to get out there right now.
Jay Kang: I don’t know, KcCoin is close. They’re very similar.
Aaron Lammer: I haven’t been on Kucoin.
Jay Kang: They’re very similar.
Aaron Lammer: Okay. Tell me what are the differences, for people out there that haven’t checked them out, what’s Kucoin like? Is that Korean?
Jay Kang: I don’t know the country of origin. But when you sign in there is a phishing warning and it’s in English, but every word is conjugated wrong. It inspires a lot of customer security in me.
Aaron Lammer: Yeah.
Jay Kang: But no, it’s like a lot of other exchanges in the sense that it lists the coins. They have these flashing banner ads that say, “It’s Kucoin Christmas.” Mind you, this is today.
Aaron Lammer: Yeah.
Jay Kang: They’re like, “If you sign up. If you tweet out Kucoin we’ll give you this.” So the whole thing looks like an online poker site from 2004 or something like that. Where everything is bonus incentive. It does not look like an investment tool at all.
Aaron Lammer: For me, my experience at Cryptopia was I started dragging on the bottom. I started to buy the strange off-brand things.
Jay Kang: Yeah, I remember this.
Aaron Lammer: Things I previously turned my nose up to.
Jay Kang: You texted me and you were like, “I bought this, this, this, and this.” And I was like, “Huh, I have not heard of any of those.” And then I Googled them. That really didn’t help that much either.
Aaron Lammer: The way I originally approached Cryptopia was — so, everyone knows that I have a soft spot in my heart for Monero (XMR),
Jay Kang: This is the first episode. So nobody knows that.
Aaron Lammer: No one knows it yet. But you’re going to learn all about my affection for Monero. I like to put an extra “O” in it, call it Moonero. I started looking at the guys here who are the biggest Monero “Stans.” The guys who are just shilling Monero left and right. Which are a dying breed actually, there used to be more of them. They were showing their bags. They were showing some pretty far down the chart anonymity coin. Monero (XMR) and Zcash (ZEC) were the first anonymity coins that I read about.
Aaron Lammer: I find the use case for anonymity coins pretty compelling. But Zcash and Monero and I also have some Zcoin (XZC). These are pretty stable now. They’re coming up. But you’re not going to double them tomorrow. So I started looking and seeing some of these smaller anonymity coins that were available. Picked up little Sumokoin (SUMO), a little Zoin (ZOI).
Jay Kang: And yet you somehow missed the biggest one of all, ZClassic (ZCL).
Aaron Lammer: Well Zclassic was already pumping when I got there.
Jay Kang: Not where it is now.
Aaron Lammer: Not where it is now, but I was looked at it and I said, “Okay, how … I think now, Zclassic (ZCL) is worth a third as much as Zcash (ZEC), which is insane.
Jay Kang: It’s like $200.
Aaron Lammer: But at the time, Sumokoin (SUMO) was trading for a buck 80 and Monero (XMR) was trading for $300 something. It seemed like a good idea to check out Sumokoin, which is a Monero clone, low price, “K” in the title. Sumokoin, with a K. (laughter)
Jay Kang: What actually made you go down this route? Because I think that what “smart” or shark investors would tell you is, “Don’t bother with that stuff. Eventually Monero (XMR) will win out. You might be able to catch a small burst in these things. But eventually you’re going to lose enough on those where it’s not even worth it.”
Aaron Lammer: I don’t find that compelling.
Jay Kang: You don’t find that compelling?
Aaron Lammer: I don’t know. I think that we’re in the throws of a mania and people are looking to bid up these tiny, low-market cap, low price coins. Look, I don’t expect to be trading these coins for the rest of my life. But I do feel like there’s some short term gains to be had.
Jay Kang: Yeah, look, the market has proven that.
Aaron Lammer: Wait a minute.
Jay Kang: No, no, no, I’m not saying-
Aaron Lammer: Oh, you’re playing devil’s advocate over here.
Jay Kang: I’m playing devil’s advocate here. I’m on your side.
Aaron Lammer: Yeah. We need an actually conservative person on this show, because I feel like we’re both just egging each other to a lower and lower common denominator.
Jay Kang: Yeah, look I think that anything to fill out your Monero (XMR) “Stan”-dom is good. If any of you play HQ trivia and you look in the chat and you see the words Monero, Monero, Monero over again-
Aaron Lammer: That’s me.
Jay Kang: That’s definitely Aaron.
Aaron Lammer: That one’s me.
Jay Kang: That’s almost always Aaron.
Aaron Lammer: I think I have driven about 10% of the volume of Monero, just with my own fandom.
Jay Kang: Based on HQ Trivia, yeah. I actually do shill my own coins on HQ trivia chat too.
Aaron Lammer: Here’s the funny thing that happened with Sumo. You’ve gotten to witness this all. Which Sumokoin, right after I buy, and I wasn’t thinking I was going to hold this for years. I was thinking, “Well maybe Sumokoin will double in the next week or two, sell a tidy profit back to Bitcoin.”
Aaron Lammer: Instead, it went up five X, four or five X, pretty quickly, right after I bought it. I was like, “Holy shit. I got a winner. I got a winning lottery ticket.” And then, I started talking about how I was a Sumokoin baron. And how I-
Jay Kang: I think you Tweeted it several times.
Aaron Lammer: All about Sumokoin. And then I got kind of, it became part of my identity, that I was a Sumokoin dude. And then I was like, “I don’t want to run into people and they’ll be like, ‘Hey, how’s your Sumokoin doing?’ And I’d be like, ‘I don’t have that Sumokoin anymore.’”
Jay Kang: Yeah. I think what you’re talking … I mean, look this happens to me too. I’m sure that there’s some behavioral economics terms for it. But I think that when we luck into a decision in crypto and it works out for us and we feel like we’ve been on that ship a long time.
Aaron Lammer: Yeah.
Jay Kang: We won’t cut bait because the only thing that convinces us that we’re not complete idiot gamblers is the fact that we bought this coin at 14 cents and now it’s like 10 times that value. And then we have to ride it out. Because if it’s not in our portfolio then we just looking at a river of shit.
Aaron Lammer: The way I feel also now with SUMO. Sumo’s back to almost its high again.
Jay Kang: I know about it.
Aaron Lammer: So now I know. I told myself, “Next time it’s up there, you gotta sell it. You gotta get out of this.”
Jay Kang: You’re not selling it. You’re not going to sell it.
Aaron Lammer: But now I’m like, “What if SUMO goes to $100 and I’m known as the SUMO guy?” And I don’t have it anymore and then I have to go buy it again on the expensive. And then I’m like, “I only have five Sumokoin guys. Sorry. I used to have a lot.”
Jay Kang: Yeah, you’ll never be able to show your face in the sumo baron lounge anymore and they’ll just be like, “Yeah, he used to have it. But he doesn’t have it anymore.” I would actually say that again, none of this is investment advice, to you either.
Aaron Lammer: Yeah. My investment advice to people is to just turn off the show now, unsubscribe to the podcast and never listen to anything Jay and I say.
Jay Kang: Why would you sell it?
Aaron Lammer: I’d sell it ’cause I made a big profit on it. As you said, “Aren’t you going to lose in the long run, with these shitty coins?”
Jay Kang: I don’t know. I feel like at some point, you just gotta ride it out. Obviously, every single thing is saying that you probably should have sold it the second that you hit 3X, you know?
Aaron Lammer: Yeah.
Jay Kang: But look, part of crypto is just having fun with it. I don’t know. What would you text me if it wasn’t the price of SUMO every four hour updates?
Aaron Lammer: And I feel like, of all the things to become the baron of, am I going to find something as good as Sumokoin, with a “K”?
Jay Kang: No, no, no. Names do matter.
Aaron Lammer: And the logo’s not bad either.
Jay Kang: No, the logo is terrible.
Aaron Lammer: I would say that the logo for Sumokoin looks like something that the designer of Insane Clown Posse graphics designed in the late 90s.
Jay Kang: It’s a terrible logo. I think the name is good though.
Aaron Lammer: So we’ve established that my weakness is buying things based on their name, narrative, icon, logo.
Jay Kang: Logo.
Aaron Lammer: What’s your weakness?
Jay Kang: Oh man.
Aaron Lammer: Gambling?
Jay Kang: Yeah. Well sports. Sports betting. Bitcoin is a whole different thing. I have no idea if it’s legal or not. I’m pretty sure it is.
Aaron Lammer: I’m pretty sure it’s not.
Jay Kang: Well, can I report it on my taxes?
Aaron Lammer: We’ve been planning this show for a couple months.
Jay Kang: Yeah.
Aaron Lammer: Taping demos. And my biggest fear was that you were going to get completely rekt sports gambling, to the point where you no longer had any Bitcoin, nor were you interested in it. And that would be the end of this flagship partnership. That has not happened.
Jay Kang: I will say in my defense, actually, this is not in my defense, but almost it’s non sequitur that I will wrestle into my own defense. The gambling space in crypto is actually pretty interesting with smart contracts through Ethereum and with just the idea of a decentralized sports book is also interesting.
Aaron Lammer: If you ask me right now, of all the ICOs, what are the highest percentage chance of these to actually succeed? I’d be like, “All of the casino and gambling ones.”
Jay Kang: Yeah, ’cause there’s a use case. And people will use it.
Aaron Lammer: Yes. People love to gamble.
Jay Kang: I will say that I’ve now been probably putting occasional sports bets down in Bitcoin for three to four months. The experience is a lot different than using an offsite book or going to Las Vegas and putting down a bet. And certainly a lot different than using a bookie. It’s something about the fact that you are putting, when you want to put down, let’s say you’re putting down $150 bet, right now that’s .001 btc.
Aaron Lammer: Do you worry that every gambling loss you have for the rest of your life that was made in Bitcoin, you will be calculating it based on the price of Bitcoin, which could be over $100,000 at that point?
Jay Kang: No. I am thinking that every bet that I make is adding to my Bitcoin stash when it goes to $100,000.
Aaron Lammer: So you’re basically doing the same thing gambling on sports that I’m doing gambling on Sumokoin?
Jay Kang: Yeah. And I think that’s where the corollary is, right?
Aaron Lammer: But why? Do you feel like you’re better at sports gambling than alt coin trading?
Jay Kang: No, because I think at this point you could actually make a reasonable bet. You would say that I will probably win this bet, much more so than I will beat the coin spread here. That if you bought 10 random coins on Cryptopia this week, or on Kucoin or on HitBTC, that some of them would go down quite a bit. But one of them would go way up and that you would probably end up doubling the money. I’m only talking about this week.
Aaron Lammer: Not that many went down though. That’s the crazy part.
Jay Kang: Yeah, that’s what I mean though. That’s just this week, right? I will just say that, ask somebody who has a compulsive need to gamble that I found that this is probably both the dumbest but also the easiest and most painless way to do it so far, that I’ve found.
Aaron Lammer: See, for me, I’m not really a gambler. This is as close as I’ve come to gambling, is buying crap coins.
Jay Kang: And the question that I think is, if I had hit a Sumokoin, like you did, if I hit something that in one day went up five times what I bought it for, would I be more interested in just gambling on shit coins? Yeah, probably. But it hasn’t happened to me yet. Don’t know what it feels like to be a SUMO Baron,.
Aaron Lammer: Jay, I want you to become Baron. I want your feudal estate to be right next to mine and both of us to ride it to victory. Here’s what we’re going to do on this show. We’re not going to tell you how much money we have in coins. Both of us have been involved with journalism. So you can guess, it’s not that much.
Jay Kang: Neither of us are really-
Aaron Lammer: We’re taping this in the basement and Jay said, “Would it be possible for us to get heat at some point?” earlier.
Jay Kang: We are both basically wearing scarves right now.
Aaron Lammer: But we want to keep you up as to what we’re trading. Our failures and quasi successes as we go. We’ll be telling you what’s in our bag. You can write and tell us what’s in your bags. Hopefully, I feel like the show might get us some good tips, right?
Jay Kang: Yeah, please, if at all possible. Let us know anything. Things that you hate about the show. If there were things that you wish that we did more. Especially if there are people who you think that we should talk to, to have on as guests.
Aaron Lammer: If you want to get in touch it’s hi@cointalk.show — this show is kind of typical of what an episode will be like, except usually we’ll have a guest on and they will weigh in on those topics and we will interview them a bit about what their experiences around crypto have been. Which is a fascinating topic to me. ’Cause people come to this with totally different life experiences. I want to have on cryptographers and I want to have on people who’ve been day-traders. I want to have on people who are tech journalists. All those perspectives I feel like are colliding in this world.
Jay Kang: What if we bring on the competing SUMO baron. What if he has more sumo than you and he’s like, “You’re a fake SUMO baron.”?
Aaron Lammer: A friend of SUMO is a friend of mine.
Jay Kang: I don’t know if he’s going to feel that way, or she.
Aaron Lammer: We’ll have a new episode for you every week and maybe even more than that. You down to do more than that sometimes?
Jay Kang: Whenever news breaks, which is a lot in crypto, let’s say the market crashes or Satoshi comes forward or the market crashes, we’ll be here.
Aaron Lammer: We’ll be here with you. You can subscribe in any podcast app, you can also follow us on Medium at medium.com/cointalk. Medium is going to have a transcript of every show, in case you want to read our stupid ideas, so you can go through them faster.
Jay Kang: Yes, if you want a written down version of every coin that we’ve talked about and said that we liked, just so that you can go against them, it will be on the site.
Aaron Lammer: And we’ll also publish along with it a little reading list. We didn’t cite it when we were talking about Ripple (XPR), but both of us really enjoyed Ryan Selkis’ piece, I think he’s at @twobitidiot on Medium. His piece on Ripple really was the background reading that at least got me to understand what Ripple was so I wasn’t blindly hating it.
Jay Kang: Yeah, and Izabella Kaminska’s piece in the Financial Times, which I thought was a very good case as to why Ripple might have a long road ahead for bank integration, that also was great. We’ll put that in the show notes as well.
Aaron Lammer: Yeah, okay. Subscribe, say hi at hi@cointalk.show and we will see you very shortly.
Jay Kang: CoinTalk.
Aaron Lammer: CoinTalk. Alright.
Narrator: This episode was taped Sunday, January 7th at 6pm. The Bitcoin index was $14,780.
“The Sumokoin logo looks like it was designed by whoever does those Insane Clown Posse graphics”Click here to subscribe in Apple Podcasts.Direct DownloadContact: hi@cointalk.show
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