 I have to tell you, there's been a lot of things that have been going on lately in the crypto markets and digital asset space. And one of those big things that's happened is Celsius, as they go through their chapter 11, there was a buyout and an actual piece that was brought forth by Michael Arrington's Fahrenheit group. And there's a lot of things that are going on, a lot of moving parts. So what I want to do is I wanted to bring in my friend, Simon Dixon from Bank of the Future. Simon, welcome back to the show for your 20th appearance, I think. Yeah, well, thanks for having me. It was actually this time, approximately a year ago, say Celsius paused on June the 12th and filed for bankruptcy on July the 13th. So that's just around the corner. And it was when I had figured out that Alex Mijinsky was a scammer, it was broken. What I figured out on your channel approximately one year ago this month. Amazing, amazing. So for those of you who don't know, Simon, I will link his websites in the description below. He's not always talking about this. He's invested in some small startups like Coinbase and Kraken, BitPenix, Ethereum, BitStamp, Shapeshift, Lottery, whatever, Abra, and a host of other things. So it's always good to get your perspective. Also, I'm happy to see that you got my flowers I sent you. Fantastic. I'm just kidding. So there's a couple of questions to talk about. First of all, bring us up to speed because a lot of people, they knew about Celsius, especially if you're new into the CryptoNigel asset space. Welcome. But the question I have is this, Michael Arian's Farron High Company won the bid. So bring it up to speed, how that worked out, what that means moving forward as far as Chapter 11, because this is not the end. This is, I think, is just the beginning. And what does that mean for Bank of the Future and Simon Dixon? And we'll talk about stuff later. So Simon, what do we got here? All right, yeah, let me give you the overview. A lot's happened. But basically, Bank of the Future and myself, we were shareholders in the company. We invested in 2020 when Celsius was a very different company. We were pitched an institutional lending company where people could receive yield because they put together people that were willing to pay that yield. And over time, since we invested, the company became a complete sham scam. And Alex Mijinsky blew the whole thing up into a $3 billion hole by yoloing a client funds without permission into mining operations and basically becoming a diversified hedge fund without having any of the licenses to do it. And then when he lost a bunch of money, became a fractional reserve bank without any of the protections or FDIC or anything like it. And just created this outrageous move to try and use the sell token, pump the price, manipulate it, sell a bunch of his stuff on insiders, use depositors money to pump it up and try and IPO a mining company and go massively long illiquid assets so that he could fill the hole and try and put the money back before anyone noticed. Of course, rates were hiked, the whole thing clapped and the emperor had no clothes on Alex Mijinsky was proven to be an outright scammer and the criminal case will start at some point. But in the meantime, we had to figure out what the hell to do with this mess. And so before I knew Mijinsky was a scammer, I immediately tried to do a reorganization plan presented a plan to him. But obviously that required disclosure of the whole. He didn't want to disclose the whole and tried to cover it up and we later figured out why. So once we figured that out, we came on this channel and started to work with creditors and Twitter Spaces was just taking off at this time and really just been at it for a one year journey of trying to figure out how to turn this mess into something that may recover. Because the tragedy of Celsius was that Mijinsky managed to get many people to put their lifetime savings. We're talking about retirees pension funds. We reached a stage where we were actually preventing suicides. We had some suicides. It's just been the most emotional traumatic experience for so many people and really over the last year in trying to fix this and do what we did, you know, with the hack victims of Bitfinex in 2016. Take some of that experience and so it went through a quite a few iterations. Thanks to the future entered the bidding process because we wanted to set up a process whereby everyone can out compete each other. We could give everyone their funds. We wanted to avoid predators that were going to buy the assets for cheap. The pennies on the borders. So we put together a whole framework of how to give everyone that whatever crypto is back left and turn everything else into equity in a company. Now FTX collapsed everything. The whole market went down. You know, we had this absolute craziness and the auction absolutely failed where we were pretty much the only one left with another bidder called Nova Wolf. Binance and everyone put in predatory bids to get the assets for cheap and Galaxy put together a predatory bid to take all the ETH and Bitcoin and get them for like an 5% discount. And Binance essentially was going to distribute the funds for free, but they did. They weren't a registered securities business so they couldn't do the securities and so a company called Nova Wolf came along. They took the framework that we set up and they outbid and banged to the future, which is fine. They spent about six months working on a plan, putting together all the regulations and we started to support them in that process as well so that we could make this company as valuable as possible for creditors to try and recover them. And in the final part, some of the people that we were bidding with right in the beginning, our mining partner like US Bitcoin Group, decided to work with Michael Arrington and put together what eventually became the winning bid. And so we put it in this auction called a stalking horse and every day people were like, they were like, well, we'll offer 100 million more and we'll offer more equity in the company. And suddenly this bid actually worked into exactly what I originally wanted to put together in the first place. And I think we achieved the best result we could and it has this backup plan, which is really important. If the SEC won't approve it, then it moves into a controlled liquidation with a backup plan so that we can get really the best result for creditors. And that's a lot of happening in between, but that's where we are right now. The Fahrenheit Group, they are called, is a group and a syndicate of people that have won the auction, won the bids and there's a backup plan in case the regulators won't approve this plan. By the end of this year, hopefully everyone will be getting as much crypto that is left, their Bitcoin and ETH back, and then equity in a company that if we can make it succeed, then it has the potential in a high risk, high return basis just like any company to become one of the largest mining operations, a staking business and really take the $2 billion of assets that remain and manage those to try and make a recovery for creditors. So we want to achieve the impossible, try and do the Berkshire Hathaway, float it on NASDAQ, and just really do the best we possibly can to turn this shit show and outright scam into something that might be good for creditors and may give them a recovery. Hey, sometimes you got to polish that turd, right? You got to take you got to take life that gives you lemons and turn it into lemonade. So all those things that just happened, it looks like that this new co people are going to get some equity into this new company, which sounds fantastic, and they might actually get some of their crypto back, depending on how that all works. When will we know, I mean, kind of how when will we know when if we're going to do through a liquidation or this is going to go through? Because again, I think this is the first step to a little bit of retribution. Yeah, well, there's several hurdles to overcome. So firstly, Alex Mishinsky is going to come back. So he's actually trying to prove that this was all FTX is for trying to get as much money out of the estate as he can possibly get. He wants to take the token that he used and try and get 81 cents for it because he's the largest token holder and just extract more value out of the estate. So we've got to overcome that hurdle. Also, the shareholders, there's a real big problem. If if Bitcoin and crypto do really well before we get out, they could simply take all of our crypto, sell it for dollars, pay everybody off in dollar terms, make everyone whole in dollar terms based upon the lower the price and give all the assets. To shareholders, that's a real risk. And the shareholders are actually trying to take and rate creditors for that. I am actually a shareholder. So it creates an interesting situation. But, you know, we're the, as I said, I've always rate rate disclosed that, you know, exactly how this can work. So there's also other you've got to settle between all the people that had all these loans and how that actually works. Then the judge has to approve the plan. Then the regulators, you know, we had in Voyager, the Department of Justice, objected because they were trying to save. The good thing about Celsius now is even the company, the law firm, Kirk and Melis, that were representing Celsius, they've thrown Alex under the bus and said all creditors deserve everything they can get. You know, they're suing Alex as all that type of stuff. So everyone's kind of on the same team. But you have these weird, these weird dynamics where people that bought cell token are trying to side with Alex Mijinsky to try and get the best result, which would lead to them taking a bunch more out of the estate. But then many of the people that own cell token on the app were genuine victims as well. But some of them are just working to kind of you know, it's so there's all these weird dynamics. I would say by the end of this year, if everything goes to plan, you know, we will know whether this is a controlled liquidation, we would have received our crypto back, and we'll have equity in the company. That's my ambition is become an absolute obsession as project. I've been going live on Twitter spaces every week, trying to update people on, you know, to me, it's an obsessive, interesting project because I like doing this thing as a financial geek. But at the same time, you know, it's I've met people that I now consider my friends that were just scammed into this thing. And I just can't stop until the job is done. It's just an outright obsession now. Yeah, I get it. We all get we all get obsessed. And that is for sure. Would you leave me to my next question. But before I get to that, I will say I will say this. I don't understand the Celsius part of the token and people saying, Well, it's worth 81 cents. To me, personally, I take a look at the Celsius token. I see there's no value whatsoever for what it does. When there was a company called Celsius, I can understand that that would give you discount on fees and that would bring you to other enlightenment or other different positivity that it could happen. But right now I just don't see it. That is my opinion. And I will just stick with that. However, with everything that you've been going through this will lead me to this next point, which is this I've heard you on a lot of Twitter spaces. I've seen a lot of YouTube. I've had you on my show, but nobody has taken more crap than I think you have on Twitter. But it's not just about taking that amount of manure that you have, but it's your attitude. And just walk us through this about this because I got to tell you some people on social media flip out, but I've never seen you pissed. I've never seen you super angry. So walk us through like when someone calls you just a bold face liar, tells you to f off tells you that you were the biggest scamming piece of trash that's out there. These are some of these like real people that say these things. How do you deal with that? Because I've never seen anybody take it in stride like you have even myself. Yeah, well, you know, naturally when I came and told the community because I was the first to break that this is an unlicensed bank. It's registered as a hedge fund. And everyone went through the stages of disbelief. You know, immediately there was, you know, they built a relationship with this guy that did an AMA every week. And then I come along and suddenly tell them, Hey, by the way, we've all been scammed, including myself. I'm actually, interestingly, an aside point and answer your question is one of the people that's clearly aligned with trying to repair Alex Moshinsky's reputation along this whole process. He tried to actually prove that I took out $8 million from the platform. So he went through and he realized that I had applied for a loan. And when I audited my account, I realized that they actually swiped 289 Bitcoin from my account that I didn't notice. And because of that, he actually saved me millions and millions of dollars by trying to scam bust me. And it turned out that I was entitled to 289 more Bitcoin than I understood. And literally, they deleted it from my account. I was the only one that that happened to you. That's how bad you were in this company was. And me, the idiot that I was working so long on other plans, I didn't even audit my own account and realize this. But that's, I think, you know, that's an interesting story in the types of things. And I think really, to me, it's calmer. And so really, it went from a lot of people to there's only about 10 or 10 or 20 people left that haven't figured out the whole game that's being played here. And so, you know, I think we do this really strange thing as humans, where there'll be, you know, you probably do this when you're going through your YouTube comments, you'll have like 100 or 200 comments of people that say that was the best content ever. And probably the only one you reply to is the person that really wound you up and said something stupid. You know, you're a scammer or something like that. And then you put all your energy into this one person forgetting about the 200 people that you should have been responding to. That actually want this content or liking what you do. So it's like a human psyche thing that we tend to do. And it's really, you know, destructive. So for me, it's been a real experience. But every time I've kind of gone off the rail saying I don't need this, you know, screw it, let the process go. I get on a Twitter space and I hear a story of, you know, the world we're living in right now with all this AI and all this things of people losing their jobs and all the disruption coming up. You know, imagine if you were 75 years old, you put all of your money into Celsius, you managed to get all your retirement funds, he managed to get them. You've got no chance in the job market today with all of these trends. You can't help at all. And it's just that perspective of those are the people that we've got to do this for because it means so much. And that really just takes me to a conversation with myself around, well, what have I got to do in order to make sure that people understand this stuff. And that's really what's got me through. Obviously, I want to recover my own funds as well. But the people coming, it's literally a tiny community of, you know, like 10 people that obviously Mijinsky is either got on the payroll or he set up the incentives so that they're his reputation repair department. You know, I mean, you know, so you just ignore them. And I just started using blocking for the first time. So if you want to listen to the spaces, they'll benefit from all my work if they are a genuine creditor. But half of them are like changing accounts and they're just trolls. It's probably Alex and his friends anyway. I mean, his wife has been an absolute troll saying that I stole all the money and all sorts of craziness. But everyone recognizes it over time and it just becomes obvious. So, you know, that's really what gets me through and it's just a mission and desire to see this through to the end. And I won't let those trolls get in the way of what's way, way, way more important for some people that genuinely can see what's happening here. Stockholm syndrome is a real thing. So I was actually thinking about that when I was writing this question, but neither here nor there. So I will just say this, you are right. There are, you know, I'll have in my comment section, tons of positive comments, and then there's one negative and we'll focus on that. And it is an issue, even myself, I'm pretty low key. I don't get amped up too quickly. But even me, I have those flaws and I always will see those things and sometimes I'll respond to them, but I always try to remember some of the stoic teachings. I cannot change what happened. I can only change my reaction to the event, meaning whatever happens that's out there, it's going to happen. We're going to see the market. It's going to collapse. It's going to come back, but I can't change the event that happened. Only my reaction to set events to bring me forward. All right. The truth just came out. So people were accusing me of bidding assets on the cheap and then my bid was actually leaked. We gave all the coins to creditors and a hundred percent of the equity and we're not charging hundreds, you know, tens of millions like everybody is now charging. So the truth just came out and eventually, you know, when I said these things that everyone just thought wasn't true, I said, you won't hear from Mishinsky again. He's going to prison eventually. This is going to chapter 11. They're not, they're not illiquid. It's insolvent. You know, there's no way this gets through the regulators aren't going to allow Celsius 2.0. There's going to be a bid and you need a regulated bidder and his, you know, this is a security. That's an illegal token offering. And, you know, pretty much most of what I said came to fruition. And where I got it wrong, we were just working with genuine people, you know, and I'll admit when I'm wrong about something and whether it's speculation and just stay on, just stay on track to that really. So the truth, the truth just comes out. You can't get away with shit right now. If I'm ever, you know, exaggerating the truth or something, I'll get my punishment, karma comes back to bite you. That's exactly right. I mean, I'm wrong all the time. Just ask my wife. All right. So that'll kind of close us out on that piece. And it's, you know what, we're wrong. We figured that out and hopefully we can move forward. So speaking of things that were wrong, there was actually, there was a video that we did back in February. And I was under the assumption as far as everything that has to do with, with Gary Gensler and the SEC, Gary Gensler bad, everybody in crypto good. And I asked you this, this simple question I said, and I'll, I'll leave it in the description so people can watch it. It starts around the 11 minute mark or 12 minute mark. I just ask you, I go, I go, who's lying? Because it seems like nobody can really go forward with the SEC and Coinbase comes in and then they get a Wells notice. What is the deal? And you told me very simply, you said, Rob, you understand. He goes, I've done this before. Bank of the future has gone through and we've tried to get a broker dealer license because we're an ATS, an alternative trading system. And we actually did that, but it slows everything down when you have to go through those rules and regulations, which is what Coinbase and Kraken may not be used to do onboard new clients. And I was like, oh, that makes sense. And then he talked about how, but even, even so, SEC is being a little bit shady about how they do things. You see this, and you were right. There was a piece that we talked about where a couple of different firms have come in and they've actually been accepted through an SEC path to be a broker dealer. Those two people are Promethium, Ember, Capital and OTC market group. And they were approved for broker dealer or providing trade for crypto securities. And this is actually through the regulatory arm of FINRA, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. My question is this, is what are your thoughts on this piece and did it kind of pan out the way that you thought it would? And actually looking for other exchanges moving forward. Yeah, well, both are true. So I think the SEC has made some really bad decisions. They let Celsius and FTX get the size that they are and people lost a lot of money. And at the same time, you can see the flip-flopping between make sure you apply and we went through some of those processes. So the broker dealer and ATS, which is how you do trading with securities without being a national exchange, we sold that to Coinbase and Coinbase acquired that and they've been trying to do security tokens through that. But we've spent, I mean, at Bank to the Future, we're actually now the longest standing company in Bitcoin and with the world's first regulated securities business. We spent a decade trying to comply with all this shit. And we had to rebuild it again and again like three times as all these new rules and regulations come through. So, you know, we just launched e-staking as a security. And, you know, it takes like a couple of years just to get all of those different parts together. So nobody is used to the user experience that you have to go through in order to do this compliantly. And it's very disruptive to the business model that they may be used to if they were doing things as crypto. And so really, you know, both are correct. But I do think that the SEC has had to, they've had a lot of criticism for good reasons. And they have to start letting these people get regulated. And I do all think they pick winners and losers. And, you know, there's some politics going on with whatever happened with FTX. There was some politics going on with what happened with Coinbase and Ripple and all these things. And the US is certainly losing, you know, a chunk of this market in order to protect the incumbents because they are, you know, because they don't want the rules to affect everyone going off their normal exchanges and then coming over here. And that is really what this is about. Imagine if you implement a little thing and then Google suddenly says, right, I'm delisting off NASDAQ. I'm creating a security token and we're going over here. You know, it can be incredibly disruptive when you are the largest capital market in the world. And so you've got to get inside that. And plus this industry, we just fucked up to be frank. Sorry to swear. We embarrassed our industry. We do all sorts of scammy things. We made our own worst enemies. We did some things which are just unforgivable. They're going to lead to a lot of people saying you should have regulated, please regulate this stuff harder. I lost my life savings. That only comes back to more shit. But it's the natural evolution of innovation. And I think we come out at the end a better place. And thankfully there's competition amongst countries. You've got El Salvador that's coming out doing digital securities. You've got Europe doing virtual asset service provider regimes with all insider trading, all insider information, all of those things. And the U.S. just needs to catch up with what the global regulators are saying everyone else needs to do. Yeah. And I mean, yeah, we're trying to catch up, but America is going to be, they're going to be a little bit stalled out because of the leadership that we have with the Biden administration and with Gary Gensler and moving on. I will say this, there is one positive thing. And you said, you know, we have to, we have to up a lot, a lot of things. It is good for people like us to maintain and stay in this industry because of all the lessons that we've learned along the way. I mean, you were investing in Bitcoin in 2010, 2011. You went through the Bitfinex hack and got them out of that. And then now we've gone through all the stuff with the Voyagers, the Celsius, the FTX. So moving forward, I think it's on us to remind the people that come after us and say, look, these are the pitfalls of crypto digital assets. It's going to change the world, but you have to understand the problems that we're going to have. Never forget. So I can see that. I guess that would leave me to my last question when we get out of here is we're in a sideways slump right now, but we've gone through a couple of bear markets. You've been through more than me. But how does everything look in 2024 post halving? How does the market look and how does the landscape as far as like, I mean, just macro in general? Yes. So it's this whole thing, Rob, I've been working on three main projects, obviously the Celsius thing. But I was also, for the last two years, I've been writing my book. That book there was the first published book in the world to include Bitcoin. It was published in 2011. And it also talked about how banking is going to transition to central bank digital currencies before that was a word. And it actually played out in the 2023 bank run crisis in the US. So I talked about these different cycles that cycle in the new book that I've got coming out. And the reason it's not published is because every month something new happened that was unbelievable content. And I just couldn't do it. And now I need to get the closure of Celsius in there and then the US banking crisis happened. But all of this, I think, perfectly lining up to give everyone the best lessons of how to navigate the market ahead. And I talked about each of the Bitcoin cycles and all my experience through all of them. The first one was about tackling centralization because it was just a centralized product in the beginning with Bitcoin. The second was regulatory and law enforcement crackdown. The third cycle, they're all these four-year cycles, was surviving token printing. And this one was about surviving quantitative tightening. And it turned out that I think we're going to get the pivot and quantitative tightening because of all the inflation and everything that came and the bank crisis that resulted. Next, we've got surviving central bank digital currencies and then finally AI. So I've gone through all of these trends. But the four-year cycle, I still believe prevails because I think you can see where this is heading, not financial advice. But I think you can see we got our crackdown. We got the leverage out of the system. We had quantitative tightening. It turns out that the big three trends that I've always been saying is you've got Bitcoin as digital hard sound money. Ethereum is kind of a higher risk, less reliable, proof of stake. You don't know what the future is going to be, but you can do a lot of interesting shit on it. And then you've got this reemergence of people trying to create different stuff on top of Bitcoin, scaling debates, all the same things. And everything else is probably going to be securities. So you've got proof of work, you've got proof of stake, and you've got securities is where our industry ends up and a whole bunch of stuff in between. I think it's still lining up for the four-year cycle to prevail into halving. It took out the inefficient miners, many of the ones, the public companies were over-leveraged, went bust. We've got institutional money where BlackRock has to invest in all the public companies. Hopefully we can turn Celsius into the largest Bitcoin mining operation and take the scam and put it into proof of work, have a bit of a proof of stake play as well, and even have a securities play. So I think the Bitcoin cycle prevails personally, and I've just been buying every single month. I bought some Bitcoin at $69,000. I just bought some at $28,000. I bought my first Bitcoin at $3. And I'm buying every single month because I don't want to take my fear that I earn and hold it in something that I know has to be held in short bank when your deposit gets too big or you have to just lend it to the US government that will eventually go through a change of empire. Or I don't want to put the whole thing in gold because it doesn't increase your value, it just preserves its value. And so to me, Bitcoin is still that natural choice of digital hard sound money, money you can own, money you can spend, money that has a fixed supply, and everything that's happened over this cycle just pushes me to want to put more into money I can own, more into money I can spend without censorship, and more into money where I can trust that that money supply and that inflation model and that monetary policy ain't going to change, no matter what any company says, no matter what any government says, no matter whatever tax is played, no matter whether you ban it in China, no matter whether you say it's illegal, no matter whether you launch a central bank digital currency in Nigeria, no matter what you do, that mask and code is anti-fragile and it just seems that this is the next test which is cannot survive inflation and quantitative tightening since the reason it was created in the first place in 2008 was a response to a different version of what happened in 2023. Yeah, well said Simon, as usual, I cannot say it any better, literally I can't say any better. So listen, my friend, thank you again for stopping by the show, we appreciate it. Everybody watching the video right now, there's a couple of places that you can go to get a little more insight into Simon. Of course, first of all, his book, Bank of the Future, I'll link that in the description. Also, you've got Simon Dixon, follow him on Twitter. If you're going to know what's going on, that's the place to keep up to date, especially with everything we just talked about. Simon, you've said it all today, I appreciate it. Awesome, thanks for having me again Rob, I'll see you in the next one. Alright, maybe we'll see you in London at that guys event. Alright everybody, thanks so much for stopping by, I appreciate you like today's video, thumbs up, subscribe, all that good stuff. If you're not going to subscribe to me, just pick somebody, this is not a set it and forget it, but that's it for today. So thanks so much, I appreciate it, and I'll see you on the next one.