Digital Asset News host argues the Bitcoin $80K rally is unsustainable and covers a range of crypto industry developments
A solo Digital Asset News episode covering Bitcoin's rise above $80K, regulatory headwinds, legal disputes, and AI investment trends.
Summary
Historical midterm-year patterns — in which Bitcoin fell 77–86% in 2014, 2018, and 2022 — form the backbone of the host's argument that the current move above $80K is unsustainable and that profit-taking is a reasonable consideration. He covers several significant developments: a US court case in the Southern District of New York in which lawyers representing victims of North Korea-linked hacks filed an emergency motion to unblock approximately $70 million frozen by the Arbitrum Security Council after the Kelp DAO hack, with North Korea and Iran named as defendants — and noting the irony that a binding legal order is now preventing those funds from being distributed to victims; a wave of US states banning Bitcoin ATMs, driven largely by AARP lobbying over elder fraud; and a lawsuit between Justin Sun and World Liberty Financial — Trump's family's crypto project — which has escalated into mutual litigation. He also spends significant time rebutting the anti-crypto narrative associated with actor Ben McKenzie and the 'Four Horsemen of FUD,' citing statistics showing cash is used far more heavily for illicit activity than crypto, and warning that these talking points will be weaponised during midterm elections. He argues that the blanket dismissal of all altcoins is misleading, highlights the dramatic outperformance of AI-adjacent stocks like SanDisk (up roughly 3,555% over one year), and closes with detailed commentary on how he is personally integrating AI agents — using OpenAI and Claude Code — across his four businesses, including short-term rentals, an animal shelter grant-writing operation, and a spam-filtering app he developed called Gold Key.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Bitcoin Above $80K — But Is the Rally Real?
Host: Well, everybody, it's a great day to be in crypto and digital assets because right now we're seeing Bitcoin above $80K. But will it last? It might, because no one really knows the future. But there are some pretty negative forces coming up, so let's just jump right into it.
Today we're going over a lot of things that I uncovered that pretty much surprised me about what's going on.
Arbitrum/Kelp DAO Hack — US Court Case Names North Korea and Iran
Host: First things first. This just came out regarding a legal situation. A LLC has filed an emergency motion to vacate a restraining notice served on the Arbitrum DAO on May 1st. As you may recall, roughly around April 20th or so, there was a hack on Kelp DAO. Hundreds of millions of dollars were lost in Ethereum, and because of that, the Arbitrum DAO came together and said, "Hey, let's freeze everything."
Now, people say that goes against decentralisation, and you're right, actually — because in all honesty there was a council of 12 people and nine of them went forward with this. So someone can say, "See, it's not decentralised," and nine people ain't decentralised. But what happened in the aftermath was Kelp and Arbitrum kind of trying to figure out where exactly they should go.
So on May 1st, there are attempts to seize approximately $70 million belonging to victims of the April 18th exploit. They're saying that a thief has not gained lawful ownership of stolen property simply by taking it. The lawsuit itself is in the Southern District of New York, and the defendant is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea — aka North Korea. Wonder if they're going to show up. Also named is the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Interesting. And then Ruth Calder and Cardona are plaintiffs versus the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, also defendants, and Arbitrum DAO.
What this really comes down to is this: the Arbitrum Security Council did a tech freeze — they froze all those funds, which people say is not very decentralised. Well, when you're losing your entire life savings, I wonder how much you'll pipe up and say, "Yeah, don't freeze it, let me lose everything." And also, these are US court lawyers for DPRK victims — those are the victims of the hack. They are saying, "Look, we want all of our funds back plus restitution because we have damages." And they're saying that lawyers for DPRK imposed a binding legal order that's now blocking distribution. So they're saying, "Hey, we have this, we'd like to distribute it, but you guys are blocking it." And it is interesting that a court of law is stopping a decentralised protocol from distributing the funds to the people it's supposed to go to. Anyhow, that is just one piece of what's going on.
Brazil Bans Stablecoin Cross-Border Payments
Host: Now let's talk about some other bad news. Brazil's central bank has banned stablecoin and crypto settlement and cross-border payments. I'm not too concerned about this, but I just want to bring it to everybody's attention that as far as decentralisation and stablecoins go, they're not really that decentralised. The ban applies to fintechs and payment firms, closing the back-end payment rail for cross-border flows, which is bad.
I have a thesis that payments are going to be the big thing, and of course USDC and Tether — which account for 93%, maybe 94% now, of all stablecoin transactions going on in the digital asset world — are essentially built on four or five rails: Binance, Ethereum, Solana, and Base, with Polygon kind of in the fifth and sixth position. Because of that, I'm still dollar-cost averaging — even though on Mondays I buy the big bulk of Bitcoin. But because of this, you start to see that maybe remittances won't be a big thing as these central banks start to crack down and say, "No, we're not going to allow this."
And then also, I know everybody talks about the Clarity Act and how it's so close and just right around the corner, which is great — it might be, I have no idea. But it seems like that's been going on for quite some time, and if we don't get that launched, marked up, and passed pretty soon, it's not happening in a midterm year. And I think that is going to be a bigger issue.
Bitcoin ATM Bans Spreading Across the US — AARP Leading the Charge
Host: Another thing I found which I thought was quite concerning: there is a major organisation giving pushback to Bitcoin in the United States. But first, there's a big pushback in Canada. It seems like there is a conjoined effort to put down Bitcoin, specifically Bitcoin ATMs. Now, I'm not a big fan of Bitcoin ATMs — I don't use them, I think the markup is ridiculous — but some people like to use them, and I think that's a whole point of financial freedom.
This is coming out of Alberta. It looks like either parts of Canada or the entirety of Canada is looking to ban crypto ATMs.
A news report described the situation: crypto ATMs may soon be a thing of the past in Canada thanks to the federal government. In its spring economic update, the federal government proposed cracking down on non-compliant money service businesses and recommended banning crypto ATMs, making it a criminal offence to operate one. The RCMP says they also have issues with the machines. Cryptocurrency by its nature is very difficult to trace and locate and is easily moved around the world, so scammers often use it as a method of payment. The ATMs allow users to convert physical money into cryptocurrency which can be transferred all over the world. The RCMP says cryptocurrency ATMs are often used in romance scams, grandparent scams, and online fraud. When a person puts cash in a Bitcoin ATM, it goes straight to a crypto wallet where it is immediately accessed by a scammer. One person noted that no one blames Apple when iTunes gift cards are used in scams. Adam Ryan founded a cryptocurrency ATM company, Bitcoin Well, in 2014, and the company has grown to operate across Canada.
So with the crypto ATMs — sorry about the echo in that clip — there was also a video about Nevada here in the United States. And I did a search: it looks like there's a bill to ban crypto ATMs that passed in Minnesota, as of around April 28th. Also, as of April 29th, Tennessee became the second state to ban crypto ATMs.
Where is all this coming from? It's coming from the American Association of Retired Persons — AARP. It looks like they are the ones leading the charge to ban all Bitcoin ATMs across the United States. And I have to tell you, it sounds a lot like what Ben McKenzie has been talking about. But you can see here all the states where a bill was introduced and the law was enacted. This is as of April 28th, 2026. So look out for Bitcoin ATMs being banned. Again, I'm not a big fan of them or anything like that, but it is going against a little bit of sovereignty as far as economic freedom.
The reason why AARP is so up in arms about this is because of this: adults 60 and older accounted for 86% of reported losses in cases where the victim's age was known, and it's all about crypto kiosks.
So I need everybody to do me a favour. If you orange-pilled one of your family members, friends, or acquaintances who are a little bit older, you should make sure that you don't just orange-pill them and tell them to buy and do nothing else. You have to step up and tell them how to protect it, because if you don't, they keep losing things, they keep getting scammed, and then we get blamed for everything.
I'd like you guys to put in a little bit of effort and tell these family members, friends, and loved ones that if you're going to buy into Bitcoin or any crypto, you either have to do one of three things. You're either going to have to put it on a cold storage device and remove it off an exchange — because the exchange can collapse, as Voyager, FTX, and Celsius showed us. The second thing is you can say, "You know what, I don't want to deal with this — let's just do an ETF for you, grandma or grandpa, you're just not going to get it." Or the third thing, which I think is one of the easiest, is just have custody through a reputable custodial service — the same custody service used by BlackRock and MicroStrategy, which use Coinbase Prime.
Ben McKenzie and the Midterm Election Anti-Crypto Narrative
Host: As far as Ben McKenzie goes — we've actually talked about him on the show before. He's been making the rounds on the Daily Show, on various podcasts, on ABC and NBC, pushing the narrative of just how awful Bitcoin and digital assets are. He's actually made a documentary, and people just kind of laugh it off like it's no big deal. Here's the thing: they're going to rally around what he's saying. And when I say "they," I mean people during midterm election time. Who is more pro-crypto and who is more anti-crypto in Congress? You know who it is. So what's going to happen is they're going to latch on to this and use these as talking points about all the different people who have been scammed. Elizabeth Warren is going to go out there trotting her nonsense and talking about how awful it is.
If you'd like to hear some rebuttals, we already did a show last week called "The Four Horsemen of FUD," and Ben McKenzie is one of them. He talks about how Bitcoin and crypto are only used for illicit activity. Well, in honesty, as you may remember, there are $4.4 trillion used in total annual illicit activity with cash — that's drug trafficking, human trafficking, corruption and bribery, environmental crime, bank and shell companies. That's 2 to 5% of global GDP used in illicit activity. For cryptocurrency, it's $158 billion, which is less than 1.2% of on-chain volume. So if we take a look at the two, we should really be phasing out cash, because that's what's being used for illicit activity.
And as the CIA director said, Bitcoin is a boon for surveillance because it's actually on-chain, it's immutable, and you can see it — everybody can see it on an on-chain ledger.
And then, like one of the guys said, no one complains when Apple gift cards or some kind of gift cards are used for illicit activity. I get the point, but it's not a great one, because these types of gift card scams are where a scammer will say, "Hey, I want you to send me these gift cards," and they spend it or send it to somebody and hawk it for something. It's only $200 million in the United States. I just want to bring that to everybody's attention because you're going to hear this a lot in midterm elections moving forward.
Justin Sun vs. World Liberty Financial — Mutual Lawsuits
Host: So we have that piece, which is not good. And if I'm going to talk about parts of Democrats, let me talk about the Republicans. I'm not a geopolitical expert, but I can tell you that both of them have issues.
Justin Sun of Tron fame just announced on X that he filed a lawsuit against the president's company, World Liberty Financial. He claims the project froze his World Liberty tokens without justification, stripped him of governance voting rights, and has threatened to permanently burn his holdings. Sun says he attempted to resolve the dispute privately before filing, but the World Liberty Financial team refused to unfreeze his tokens.
And just three hours ago, this was revealed: Trump's family's World Liberty Financial is suing crypto billionaire Justin Sun for defamation. They're seeking unspecified damages and a public retraction of statements Sun made.
So if you think, "Ah, the Democrats are awful because they hate crypto" — Republicans are just as bad. They essentially rug-pulled us with Melania coin and Trump coin. Correct me in the comment section, but it's been a real bad ride.
Bitcoin's Historical Midterm Year Pattern — Why the $80K Pump May Be Fake
Host: However, there are some positives, and the positives are this: we're still going around the same path — all-time highs, all-time lows — and right now we're at $80,000. So just like the thumbnail and title suggest, I think this $80K pump that we're on right now is great, and don't get me wrong. But if you're in profits, I would urge you to take some profits off the table to de-risk, because if things line up like they have for the last 13 or 14 years, midterm years are usually the worst as far as traditional finance and digital assets go — although I believe the NASDAQ just hit an all-time high and the S&P 500 hit an all-time high last week. So if we're having those outrageous rocket numbers, I just don't think it's sustainable, especially with everything going on.
If we take a look from all-time high to all-time low, these things usually happen in midterm years. 2013 was an all-time high for Bitcoin at $1,200. Then on January 14th it dropped 86%. The midterm year was 2014 — specifically November 6th, 2014 — so it gave you a couple of months to figure things out, but it was still going lower. Then 2017 to 2018: it took 365 days and went down 85%. What was the low? December 15th. What was the midterm day? November 6th. It took one year. Then November 8th, 2021 to 2022: how long did it take? One year and one day. We dropped 77%. And when was that? November 9th — that was the week of the midterm year.
So we had January, December, November — and maybe this year, since we had an all-time high in October, maybe we hit an all-time low in October as well. Who knows what it could drop to. It's already been at $59K. But again, nobody knows where things are going — this is what has been happening, and this is what's going on in the markets. The markets don't like ambiguity, and that is essentially what happens when you get midterm elections.
So what do you do? Well, your goals are not my goals. My goals are a little bit different, but I still buy Bitcoin every Monday because the US government will still debase the currency by printing money and they're going to have to print their way out of it. I think some of these altcoins — Binance, Ethereum, Solana, maybe Polygon — will still do well for payments.
AI Stocks vs. Altcoins — SanDisk Up 4,000%
Host: With everything going on with AI, this was an interesting piece. SanDisk is up over 4,000%. First of all, what's SanDisk? You know those little memory flash cards you get for your camera or a compatible device? SanDisk is up over 4,000%. And I like how this post was put: "So many altcoiners in disbelief." And then this one says, "If you invested $24,000 in SanDisk one year ago, you would have over $1 million today." SanDisk is now up 4,100% in the last year, while altcoins are down negative 90%.
I wish we would get away from labelling every single altcoin the same way, like there's no difference between Ethereum and Fartcoin. There's no difference between Solana and some random memecoin. That's ridiculous. Can we get away from that and just realise that there are some altcoins that actually have real utility and function and can actually work? Just asking — because when you say stuff like "so many altcoins in disbelief," I will remind you that over the last year, SanDisk is up over 4,100%. And Bitcoin over the last year is down 15.8%. Now, over 30 days and 14 days it's looking pretty good, but don't forget it's still down 16% from its all-time high. That's a lot in traditional finance.
But an altcoin like Justin Sun's Tron has been up every single timeframe — 1 hour, 24 hours, 7 days, 14 days, 30 days, and one year it's up 37.5%. So can we please stop with the narrative that all altcoins suck? Some actually do stuff. Tron is really good for Tether and cross-border payments and international payments. I've used it before. Works fantastic. Anyhow, let me know what you think about that in the comments section.
Just to finish up on SanDisk — I wanted to show you this. This is why I think that back in 2021, crypto was everything and was the hot new item, and now we're maturing into more of a buy-and-hold approach, especially with a spot ETF and regulation coming in with the GENIUS Act that's been passed, and hopefully the Clarity Act also on the docket. But SanDisk — and ChatGPT, and if whatever Claude Corporation goes public, AI is going to be the big thing, as it already has been.
Look at this: SanDisk over one day is up 6% — that's adorable. Five days, 23% — that's pretty good. One month, 75% — wow, that's really good. Six months, 550% — who would have thought that a little tiny manufacturer would do this well? One year: 3,555%. And five years is roughly the same. You can go across the board and take a look at Nvidia and see how well that's doing. So again, I think as time goes on, maybe it's a little bit of time to diversify into AI stuff.
Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI Infrastructure Investment Thesis
Host: This is what makes me want to share this with everybody. From a post about Leopold Aschenbrenner — he got fired from OpenAI in April 2024, spent the next few months writing a 165-page thesis predicting AGI, launched a fund, and bought zero Nvidia, didn't buy Microsoft, didn't buy Google, didn't buy Amazon. He bought what it runs on: Bloom Energy, Lumentum, SanDisk — like we just talked about — CoreWeave, and Iris Energy. And now he manages $6 billion worth of that.
Now, I know this is a sensationalist post, but I'm sure there's some truth to it as far as these types of sectors go. Energy, storage, manufacturing — all related to AI — doing pretty well. We'll see how it all plays out.
Q&A
Host: Let's get into the Q&A and go from there.
Intel by Intel asks: "What was the catalyst for the SanDisk pump?" Probably storage. Maybe they're going to do something with manufacturing, but it seems like a lot of things that have to do with computers are doing pretty well as the AI play.
On the SanDisk 6% daily gain being "adorable" — yeah, it's cute, it's nothing really too great.
"Litigation — the American way." Yeah, some people sue the presidents, right?
On the 4,000% gain — that's why I buy a little Nvidia here and there, because I think that'll be the future, and Tesla too. But there's always things to go around. However, don't make it too complex. Like we talked about a couple of days ago, only the dumb survive — just get in where you feel comfortable and move in that direction.
That's why I'm trying to learn as much as I possibly can about AI. Like, we talked about this three or four days ago — Riot Platforms pivoting. Everybody here in the channel knows Riot for their Bitcoin mining, but if you look back to when they started, they were around in 2003. Riot started out as a biotech company called Bioptics. They developed diagnostic machinery for animal health and it bombed beautifully, but they went public with it somehow. Then when things became hot in 2017, they pivoted to Bitcoin. And then when Bitcoin cooled off last year and AI became the hot thing, guess what they did? They pivoted to AI. So there's nothing wrong with pivoting as long as you can determine which one's the next hot thing. This could all blow up in their face — AI could be a huge disaster and go to zero like some people say — but I don't think so. I think it's going to be here for quite a long time.
On Bitcoin ATMs — I never felt like a kiosk or an ATM was a safe option. I never understood it. And when I saw the fees on one of them, I thought, who the hell would use this? And it's not like you didn't have to share your ID — up to a certain point, like $750, you didn't have to, but anything over that you had to scan your ID. So it was KYC and AML anyway. Never used one, never would trust one.
On AI tokens — I don't DCA into AI tokens. I had a couple but got rid of those. What I'm doing is investing time and energy into learning about AI and AI agents.
How the Host Is Using AI Agents Across His Businesses
Host: Let me show you something. I've got four businesses essentially. There's Digital Asset News. Then we have our short-term and medium-term rentals. I do some volunteer work for grant writing for an animal shelter. And there's a product I developed called Gold Key, which wipes out all the spam in your email — and I have to tell you, it's great to go to my Gmail account now and see no spam.
What I'm doing now is going through OpenAI, Claude, and Claude Code and figuring out how they can do all this stuff automatically for me. We already made the website for the animal shelter and it's pretty good — it's got a nice little AI agent, you can find stuff, you can donate, and it goes to them. And what's great about this is when you create it with AI, you can host it on Google and get a website for free with free hosting, which is pretty nice.
For our short-term and long-term rentals, we use agents to answer questions, do SEO stuff for the websites. For the animal shelter, the AI crawls through all the different spaces and finds different places for grants and where funds can be available, writes it automatically, and then posts for us on social media. And for Digital Asset News, this one doesn't really do too much right now — I'm doing all of it except for me and the researchers.
So yeah, that's what I'm doing — just learning how to do it. And if I can crack the code of how to do this perfectly, and how to do this grant writing perfectly, I can teach others how to do it. If you're looking for how to figure this part out, there are two people I watch. There's a guy named Andrew — I linked him in the description — he's good if you want to learn about how businesses actually use AI and how to save yourself from spending thousands of dollars every month. And there's a lady named Sabrina Ramonov — really good information on how to use Claude Code and the difference between Claude and OpenAI.
On the comment that "you'd be better off in the long run not using AI" — I think there's a problem with people spending too much time in front of a computer screen, that's for sure. But as far as AI goes, it's saved a lot of time. These AI agents do forget what you say and then all of a sudden you want to do one thing and they do something totally different. It's like having kids — like teaching your five-year-old how to clean up after themselves. That's pretty much it. And then of course they'll lie to you sometimes and think it's cute, but it's not.
On the question "What's the easiest online job to start as an AI job?" — go check out those two people I just mentioned. I would say: find an issue or a problem and solve it for that person or that business. There's something all business owners want — they want to make more money and they don't want to increase their time to make more money. If you can save them time and make them money, they'll hire you all day long.
For me, I just looked at this every day — I go through my emails in the morning with my coffee and I delete about 50 or so across all the accounts, sometimes 70 or more. And I just thought to myself, how much time am I wasting? This is like five to ten minutes every day. If you extrapolate that over weeks, months, and years, I'm wasting a lot of time just deleting junk. So I made this app to do it for me.
On the Bitcoin kiosk elder scam issue — I've seen a couple of reports about how scammers would say, "Hey, I need this money today, and if you just get it to me, I'll show you how to do it — take your cell phone with you." Even elderly people have cell phones. There was a news segment where a police officer went up to a lady who was about 70 years old at a Bitcoin kiosk and asked what she was doing. She said, "Oh, this is my grandson, he needs some money." He said, "Oh yeah, let me talk to your grandson." It was just a big scam. Yeah, that's how it goes.
On houses in Puerto Rico — depends on where you're at. If you're in the touristy area, high six figures. If you're in the mountains, low six figures. That's the best I can say.
On Bitcoin dropping — "I thought it would go up forever." Well, damn it, there goes my whole thesis.
My Monday buy wasn't because I was ecstatic — it was just because the cash order buy goes off at six o'clock and I usually have my phone on at that time, so it just buys every Monday like that.
On using AI — look for the closest teenager around you and they can show you how to do it. Well, not really — what 99% of people do is use ChatGPT or Claude or whatever as a glorified Google. I had my grandson down here about a month ago and I set him up with OpenAI, went through the whole process, got him to the ability to speak with his agent on Telegram, and he had no idea. I asked what he uses it for and he said, "I use it to ask questions for school and then I ask other questions about how to do things." I said, "So you treat it like Google?" He said, "Yeah, pretty much."
"Nobody should be looking to YouTube content for their investment thesis." That's very true.