Kurt Wuckert Jr. and Eli Afram Recap 2024: A Sobering Year with Plenty of Highs and Lows

On New Year's Eve 2024, Kurt Wuckert Jr. hosted a special episode of the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream to recap the past year. Joining him was entrepreneur and big block OG Eli Afram, creator of AnonSurvey.com, the first scalable blockchain voting platform.

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Kurt Wuckert Jr. hosted the final CoinGeek Weekly Livestream of 2024 on New Year’s Eve, and he was joined by entrepreneur and big block OG Eli Afram, the creator of AnonSurvey.com, the first scalable blockchain voting platform.

The livestream kicked off with Wuckert thanking RockWallet and Champions TCG for sponsoring the show throughout the year. Both fast-growing firms advertised on the livestream throughout 2024, which Wuckert described as a “sobering year” with plenty of highs and lows.

On the one hand, 2024 was a halving year, with miner revenue declining substantially. The drama of Dr. Craig Wright’s court cases was another lowlight for BSV, but it wasn’t all negative. On the positive side, Teranode is going from strength to strength, and TAAL recently mined the first Teranode block. Ordinals continued to be popular throughout 2024, and many new people became interested in scaling and the underlying technology because of it.

Wuckert reminded us that Bitcoin has always been about the system and what it can disrupt in the long term. However, the industry’s incentives are currently warped. Every dollar deployed has likely underperformed simply holding BTC, and while lots of people are making money now, it’s worrying for the long term.

He invited us to imagine this trend at scale—MicroStrategy (NASDAQ:MSTR) has shut down its original software business and is now focused solely on stacking BTC—what if other companies did this? It would lead to a widespread economic slowdown with serious consequences.

Yet, as if that isn’t worrying enough, President-elect Donald Trump has appointed Howard Lutnick as Commerce Secretary. The CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald (NASDAQ:ZCIIFX) is “Tether’s bankers’ banker,” meaning the shady characters at the head of the stablecoin company are one step closer to the center of the network. Wuckert is concerned that the fraud and early shenanigans can be papered over and Tether can reach “escape velocity.” Afram wondered if, at this point, there’s some government involvement in Tether, to which Wuckert replied it is almost certain since they’re one of the biggest bondholders.

Wuckert and Afram briefly discussed their Christian backgrounds before the latter made an astute point: there are many similarities between religious ways of thinking and those in the blockchain industry. In this industry, people get riled up when you criticize the technology or coin they believe in; it’s almost as if it has become part of their identity, and they cannot view things rationally. This is only exacerbated by the fact they often have a lot of money on the line, and being wrong has actual costs.

Wuckert believes this is partly because many people don’t have another anchor in life. If they had families and communities, it wouldn’t be so intense. However, for many, their favorite coin is their community, and they will fight to defend it.

Speaking of beliefs, the pair switched to the COPA v Wright trial earlier in 2024. Afram says he honestly thought Wright would win. Wuckert says he was always cautious, given how powerful COPA players are and how many holes are in Wright’s story. He points to the sterility of the evidence as one reason he wasn’t 100% certain as so many others were. Afram says he still thinks Wright is Satoshi but accepts he could be wrong.