Michael Saylor’s a fan, but Frisby says bull run needs a new guru: X Hall of Flame
Dominic Frisby recalls meeting MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor for the first time at a crypto event. What started off as an awe-struck moment became confusing after things took an unexpected turn.
“I saw Michael Saylor there. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s him!’” he tells Magazine. But it was Saylor who quickly came over and introduced himself before Frisby had a chance:
“He just came up to me and said, ‘I’ve seen some of your videos, and I really like your work and what you’re doing. Would you like to come over to dinner?’”
Frisby explains he was thrilled to be hanging with the OG Bitcoin maxi in Saylor’s house, which is “much nicer” than his own.
“Every time I watch a Michael Saylor video, I get orange pilled. The guy is so clever,” he declares.
It’s something of a mutual admiration society, with Saylor frequently sharing Frisby’s television appearances discussing Bitcoin.
Frisby is not just a Bitcoiner and has his fingers in a bunch of different pies, including cracking jokes on stage as a respected comedian, writing books and hosting TV shows.
With a modest 32,300 followers on Twitter — some way behind Saylor’s massive 3.1 million — he’s still making a name for himself and can often be heard talking about Bitcoin on radio stations like BBC 5.
Oh, and ever heard of hit U.K. show Money Pit? Well, Frisby was the face of it. He admits he has a knack for juggling multiple balls at once.
“I’m a bit of a jack of all trades, and I just tend to go and do whatever interests me in any given moment.”
Frisby can also boast of having penned one of the very first credible books on Bitcoin, Bitcoin: The Future of Money, published by Unbound back in 2014.
“I think it was the first book on Bitcoin from a recognized publisher,” he declares.
Despite his admiration for Saylor, he thinks the next generation needs its own Bitcoin champion.
“I think Roger Ver was a brilliant evangelist for Bitcoin. Saylor was a brilliant evangelist for Bitcoin. But when the next bull market happens, we need a new evangelist. We need to find some new narratives to propel the story.”
And even though he’s a self-proclaimed Bitcoin maximalist, he admits he’s got a small bag of Ether tucked away, even if that’s more an investment in Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin than the actual network itself.
“My portfolio is probably over 90% Bitcoin, and I’ve got some Ethereum. That guy [Vitalik] Buterin, he’s obviously really clever. And I sort of think by investing in Ethereum, you’re effectively investing in Vitalik.”
What led to Twitter fame?
Frisby admits that his Twitter is a bit all over the place, a bit of a “hopscotch.”
He acknowledges that things might be better for him if he just focused on ranting about one topic.
“If I just tweeted about crypto all day long, I would probably have a much bigger following than I do.”
His followers spiked in 2021 when Frisby and a group of others went to well-known landmarks in the United Kingdom and beamed messages onto them.
“I was involved in this thing where we got a projector. And we went round projecting slogans on public buildings,” he explains.
Frisby decided to project the message “Bitcoin fixes this” on the Bank of England.
What type of content can people expect?
Frisby’s tweets are all over the place – one day it’s Bitcoin, the next it’s CBDCs, and then he throws in some comedy or drops a new music video.
His latest project is a parody song and music video on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).
Titled “Programmable money,” Frisby plays the chairman of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab. He starts off chanting “CBDC” and then goes “these monitor every purchase you make, every transaction or decision you make.”
“It cost me a few thousand quid, and I had to call in a lot of favors. Yeah, I mean you can see it’s an expensive video.”
It looks like it’s paying off, getting shoutouts from well-known economist Lyn Alden and the famous Bitcoin podcaster Peter McCormack.
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What content do you enjoy?
Frisby is a Bitcoin maxi for all the “wrong reasons.”
“I just don’t have the time to study all these other coins, and I’m in various WhatsApp groups and stuff and Telegram chats, and I just can’t keep up with this new coin and that new coin. I just don’t have the time or the energy.”
He rattles off a few of his favorite commentators, like Lyn Alden, Peter McCormack, GiGi, Bitcoin entrepreneur Robert Breedlove and Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream.
Predictions?
By the sound of it, Frisby’s been thrown the prediction ball before:
“Do you want me to give you a headline stupid prediction that will get loads of clicks because I’ve said Bitcoin’s going to half a million dollars, or do you want me to give you a realistic one that in three years’ time people go, ‘You got that prediction right!’”
Obviously, we want the prediction that gets lots of clicks, but we’ll take what we can get.
Frisby’s prediction seems pretty reasonable for the upcoming cycle, suggesting we might hit an average price between $70,000 and $100,000.
But it could shoot up to a whopping $250,000 during this cycle. Maybe we should put that in the headline?
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The former president of FTX US dishes the dirt on his falling out with former Jane Street colleague Sam Bankman-Fried and predicts the spot Bitcoin ETF will far outshine the record-breaking success of the Bitcoin Futures ETF.
Who is this guy anyway?
The ex-president of FTX US, Brett Harrison, tells Magazine that he didn’t say a single word to Sam Bankman-Fried during the two-month notice period after he resigned, which was only months before the whole exchange blew up. Even getting a message to SBF to say he was resigning in the first place was hard work.
“I had to talk to other people in the company to formally resign. I wrote one text to Sam and I got back a single heart emoji. That was the last I heard from him,” Harrison declares.
Harrison and Bankman-Fried had been colleagues years earlier at quantitative trading firm Jane Street, where Harrison saw his potential while teaching SBF in a course on programming for traders. But things went south real quick between them at FTX.
Harrison claims it was due to Bankman-Fried’s inflated ego and his reluctance to accept any feedback or advice.
“Sam hated criticism and, as a result, refused to communicate with me. It drove my decision to quit even further,” he says.
Yet, Harrison says he had no clue of the storm about to engulf the company with FTX declaring bankruptcy only a few months after he bailed from the U.S. arm of exchange.
“The rest of us, especially in the U.S., were blindsighted. We were working with regulators, top lawyers, and to have the whole organization fail because of one person’s greed, will stay with us for the rest of our life.”
However, he feels justice was done in the recent fraud trial against his former boss.
“I do feel the result was absolutely just, and I’m glad that justice was served quickly; I think it was essential that Sam was held accountable for his actions,” he declares.
Meanwhile, Harrison wasted no time diving into a new project.
He co-founded Architect.xyz, a DeFi platform that focuses on bridging all the different opportunities in the digital asset space for both institutional and retail investors.
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Harrison is a bit of a brainiac and has a computer science degree focused on artificial intelligence (AI) from Harvard University. So, who better to ask about the potential for AI to take over the world?
“I do not think AI is a threat to humanity,” he declares, pointing out that AI has been in development for much longer than people think:
“Lots of people are now seeing AI for the first time, they don’t appreciate the decades of progress that has gone into it.”
Harrison is more concerned about humans using AI to pull off scams and swipe identities more effortlessly.
“It truly is just linear algebra,” he says. “The idea that linear algebra is some existential threat to our survival just feels somewhat fanciful to people who have been practitioners in the field for a long time.”
What led to Twitter Fame?
Harrison is a smart guy who drops interesting stuff on social media that people seem to dig.
But let’s not dance around the fact that the FTX connection is what blew up his follower numbers, with his count hitting its highest weekly peak when FTX took a nosedive in November 2022, when he gained 2,140 followers, according to data from Social Blade.
Back in January, his long rant about his departure from X got nearly 3 million eyeballs. He said he wasn’t canned from the FTX gig; it just wasn’t his dream job, and SBF was an “insecure, prideful manager.”
Content people can expect
If you scroll through Harrison’s timeline over the years, you’ll notice his glam lifestyle has toned down considerably since the FTX days.
Back then, he was often seen hanging out with celebs and former prime ministers.
Nowadays, it’s way more low-key. Besides throwing in some market talk, Harrison’s been sharing snippets about his family life lately.
He’s even flexing about saving toys from the FTX US office that somehow dodged the whole bankruptcy drama.
What type of content does he like?
Harrison loves the blend of genius and goofiness on Crypto X — getting a daily fix of humor and high intellect.
“One of the things I love about Crypto Twitter is the perfect mix of highly intellectual cerebral, either Market structure or political commentary, and degenerate memes.”
However, when we asked about the accounts he’s into, he’s not that forthcoming.
After doing some light digging, it turns out he’s following 2,100 accounts, and guess who’s in the mix? None other than Bankman-Fried’s pal Tiffany Fong.
Bitcoin predictions?
Harrison used to avoid making predictions, saying he’d never have predicted the events that happened to him. But that was when things were going too smoothly, and that’s all changed.
Harrison declares there is a very “high probability” that a spot Bitcoin ETF will get approved in the first quarter of 2024.
As for price predictions? Harrison isn’t tossing out any six-figure numbers right away.
“In Q1 assuming there is an ETF that’s approved. I think something in the $50,000 to $55,000 range feels pretty probable,” he states.
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He doesn’t see Bitcoin hitting six figures until “toward the end of 2024 or early 2025 at the earliest.”
He points to the first day of Bitcoin Futures ETF as just a little hint of how optimistic he is about the spot Bitcoin ETF:
“If you remember the day when a Bitcoin Futures ETF was listed the inflows were some of the highest ever seen in the history of ETFs. I think we’re going to see even more records broken for a spot Bitcoin ETF.”
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