Meet the “Psychic” Cryptovoyants Selling Bitcoin Information for Thousands

Information in this article should not be treated as financial advice.

Over the past few years of crypto volatility, many casual traders have been searching for clues to the roller coaster market’s direction.

This thirst for information has given birth to an entire cottage industry of crypto advisory platforms, ranging from specialist crypto news sites and startups that sell accredited courses for more than £300 at a time high profile Tiktok astrologers lends his heavenly wisdom.

Now a somewhat controversial method of “psychic foresight” – made famous by the CIA – is being used to assess cryptocurrencies. Thousands of people pay for the information.

Founded in 2018, CryptoViewing is an international startup that provides its subscribers with remote viewing of “data,” or forecasts, about what might happen to various cryptocurrencies in the future.

More than 2000 subscribers contribute between €9 and €85.50 per month to the startup’s distributed global team of more than 20 part-time and full-time employees, five of whom are viewers.

Now, like any fortune teller worth their salt, CryptoViewing does not claim to be 100% accurate, and tells its audience not to take its word as gospel.

“We are only giving you information, it is not financial advice. You need to have multiple sources of information to make informed decisions, says CryptoViewing co-founder Daz Smith, who is based in Bath, UK.

What is remote viewing?

This feels like a good time to remind our readers that Sifted does not recommend anything like financial advice either – and to mention that remote viewing is not new.

The term was coined in the 1970s by researchers at the Stanford Research Institute (an offshoot of Stanford University which is known for spinning out startups).

The technique sought to bring a level of scientific rigor to the parapsychic idea of “clairvoyance”a supposed ability to use “extra sensory perception” to “see” things in the future, or at a distance.

And while this may all sound like spiritualist quackery, remote viewing was something that was taken seriously by the US government for more than two decades, and included testing whether “psychic” abilities could be used to aid Cold War espionage efforts. This wild chapter in US government history was chronicled in Jon Ronson’s book and film – The men staring at goats.

Lessons from the dot-com boom

Smith has been training as a remote viewer for more than 25 years, but was approached in 2018 by friend and fellow remote viewer Dick Allgire about applying his skills to crypto markets.

“He came to me and said, ‘Have you ever heard of crypto? I’m thinking of setting up a remote cryptocurrency viewing organization, just to see where we can go,'” he recalls.

While Smith didn’t know much about crypto, he did know a little about startups. In the late 90s, he launched a digital marketing company that ironically sold something quite similar to today’s NFTs.

“It was collectible advertising in the form of interactive digital baseball card things that you could store in an album, kind of like NFTs these days,” he says.

Smith attracted more than €1 million in seed investment for the idea, but was unable to find more funding for the project after the dot-com bubble burst. He says he sees many parallels from that time when he looks at today’s crypto market.

“It’s going to happen just like when the great internet bubble burst. When we first started looking at this there were fewer than 3,000 cryptocurrencies globally, now we are approaching 20k, he says.

“Without using any psychic information, just with plain common sense and research, you can clearly see that the vast majority – 95% to 98% – of these are just going to go away.”

Smith believes remote viewing provides a way for him to identify whether a crypto project is a scam that’s going nowhere or something legitimate backed by good intentions. This is how it works:

The technique

Remote viewing is a technique that must be performed under fairly prescriptive protocols, involving at least two people—a “sender” and a “viewer”—who must be in different locations (there can be more than one viewer at each remote viewing).

The sender is responsible for identifying a “target” (in CryptoViewing’s case, a cryptocurrency), and attempting to telepathically transmit details about that target to the viewer (things like the CEO of the crypto project and the logo).

The observer, usually with a notepad, will then try to “perceive” details of this target, and write them down or draw them. When the session is finished, the objective is revealed to the viewer and the accuracy of the notes is assessed.

In CryptoViewing’s case, Smith will first try to note the details such as the CEO and logo, and then will try to perceive whether he feels positive or negative about the project, often accompanied by a downward or upward line.

“I actually go inside myself to get the information. There are very subtle, almost imperceptible feelings inside myself. So it’s not visual 90% of the time—I just get these feelings that really come from the core of your being,” Smith describes.

What do users say?

This might sound like a pretty shaky system to (even partially) base your financial decisions on, but Smith says he’s able to accurately reproduce CEO and logo details about 70% of the time.

As for the accuracy of positive or negative sentiment around a currency, Smith reiterates that the information he gets from remote viewing is only ever part of his decision-making process, and that he always does his own research.

That said, he tells Sifted that he’s currently up about 350% on his crypto investments, which was more like 700% before the recent crash.

Some of CryptoViewing’s subscribers also seem happy with the advice.

Scott Dekanich lives in Vancouver and had been working in insurance for five years after leaving college before accidentally stumbling across a YouTube video about remote viewing. He had never shown any interest in psychic phenomena before, but his curiosity eventually led him to CryptoViewing.

Since subscribing in 2019, Dekanich has quit his job in insurance and now works full-time on crypto and other Web3 projects.

He tells Sifted that he follows a similar investment philosophy to Smith, not relying as much on remote viewing information.

“It’s a quarter to a third of my decision-making process on whether I think a cryptocurrency is a good investment,” he says. “It’s just like an extra data point for me to pull from. It’s not like I go to CryptoViewing and say, “Oh, they’re doing a remote view on Ethereum and they say buy it, so I’ll buy it.”

Is remote viewing total nonsense?

Dekanich says he has yet to invest in a cryptocurrency or token that had positive sentiment on CryptoViewing that turned out to be a scam.

He admits that the organization did not predict this year’s major crypto crash and says that remote viewing information appears to be less about the price of a coin and more reflective of the intentions or motivations of the people behind it.

Smith and Dekanich will both tell you that they have absolutely no certainty about how it works, even though they are convinced that it does. This view was shared by people involved in the CIA’s Stargate project, who believed that remote viewing helped save the US government more than $200 million by locating lost scud missiles in the Persian Gulf.

In terms of peer-reviewed literature, one of the major studies on remote viewing was commissioned by the CIA and reviewed by two credible researchers from the American Institutes for Research, Jessica Utts and Ray Hyman.

Utts concluded that remote viewing had a “Statistically significant” effect that produced positive results inexplicable by chance. Hyman, meanwhile, said Utt’s conclusion was “too soon, to say the least” in part because the results had not been independently replicated.

Later studies have not definitively proven the validity of remote viewing, but some institutions still have faith in the technique, such as police forces who have used it to try to solve missing persons.

And while it may all sound incredibly “out there” and new age, Smith says remote viewing is really no different than the concept of intuition which is common in business: “I just use what any good CEO would use, and that’s their gut. I’ve just been able to hone my gut over a period of two and a half decades, so I understand it in much more detail.”

If he had to guess, Smith says the explanation for television could be rooted in the mysteries of fundamental physics, and questions about the nature of our reality.

“I believe the latest theories about holographic universe and quantum mechanics “I think that’s probably what’s happening here,” he says. “I think there are quantum entanglements that we just don’t have the physics for yet. But we’re getting there.”

So, would we advise Sifted readers to buy into external viewing and its potential to predict cryptocurrencies? We leave it up to you.

Tim Smith is Sifted’s Iberia correspondent. He tweets from @timmpsmith.