I recently joined a paid Patreon called "The NFA Research Group," run by a creator posting under the name NotFinancialAdvice.Crypto. I was blocked from the page inside about twenty minutes of subscribing — before I'd done anything except read a handful of posts. I got to keep the material I'd already downloaded, which is what this article is based on.
I'm not writing this because I got blocked. I'm writing it because the block happened to line up almost too neatly with something I'd already been working on for months: the Bearableguy123 Codex, a from-scratch forensic decode of the anonymous "BG123" riddle account that's been the subject of XRP community speculation since 2018. That project set out to actually verify what could be verified — decode the real ciphers, pull the on-chain transaction data, grade the account's predictions against what actually happened — and to label honestly what couldn't be verified. Reading this creator's content next to that project throws the difference between the two approaches into pretty sharp relief.
The Patreon markets itself around three pillars: crypto deep dives, riddle decodes, and what the creator calls "media matrix" content — the idea that mainstream media, advertising, and even entertainment programming contain deliberate, coordinated symbolic messages timed to real-world crypto and financial events.
In practice, the scripts I have access to fall into a few recurring buckets:
To be fair to the creator: he includes standard disclaimers throughout ("not financial advice," "entertainment purposes only") and is explicit in at least one script that he doesn't personally invest based on riddles. This isn't presented as a paid signals service. It's presented as speculative, para-social entertainment — closer to a conspiracy podcast than a research report, whatever the Patreon's tagline says.
The Codex project drew a hard line between three tiers of claim, and labeled every single item in it accordingly:
None of the material in this Patreon subscription operates at that level. There's no cipher work, no on-chain data, no reproducible decode of anything. What's presented as "connecting dots" is, structurally, the same move every time: take a symbol with enough interpretive surface — a star, a crown, a color, a word — and map it onto whatever happened to be in the news that week. That's not a criticism of imagination; it's a description of the method. It is the same design principle behind Nostradamus quatrains and similar "prophecy" genres: broad enough symbolism that almost any future event can be retrofitted onto it after the fact.
One test the Codex ran directly on this question is worth citing here, because it's the actual falsifiable version of a claim this creator raises repeatedly — that BG123's posts (and by extension, bullish XRP news generally) precede coordinated price action. Using eight years of daily XRP price data and a pre-registered permutation test against 10,000 random date samples, the honest result was narrower than the theory claims: no significant short-term "posts precede pumps" effect, and the one significant finding (a 45-day post-decline drift) is fully explained by the mundane fact that hype posts cluster near local price tops, and tops in a volatile asset mean-revert regardless of who's posting. The stronger claim — that these patterns reflect deliberate, coordinated timing — turned out to be unfalsifiable as framed: any missing confirming evidence gets explained away ("the wallets are obfuscated," "it's a long game"), which is the same structural problem the TCrB-as-signal content and the Elon-is-the-bear content both share. A theory that can absorb any outcome, including total absence of evidence, isn't really making a prediction.
I subscribed, read a handful of posts, and was blocked from the account within roughly twenty minutes — before commenting, without any interaction that I can point to as a trigger. I don't know his specific reasoning, and I won't pretend to. What I can say is that it's consistent with an account that appears sensitive to its paid content circulating outside the paywall, and that isn't necessarily distinguishing between hostile scraping and an ordinary new subscriber reading what they paid for.
I'm not reproducing his paid scripts here — that material stays behind the paywall as far as this article's concerned, and copyright is copyright regardless of how someone treats a new subscriber. What I am doing is describing, in my own words, the pattern of claims and the methodology behind them, because I think it's useful for anyone deciding whether a "riddle decode" subscription is actually doing decode work, or doing narrative work dressed up as decode work.
After the block, I reached out to him directly. In the interest of giving a complete and honest account, I'll say plainly that the exchange got heated on both sides — I opened by asking, bluntly and not particularly graciously, why he'd blocked me and called him a name I probably wouldn't repeat in print if I were being careful about it. That's on me, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
Past that opening, though, I laid out exactly what I've laid out here: that I wasn't trying to pirate his paid content or strip it from behind his paywall, that I'd paid for a second subscription specifically so I could see what he'd been posting recently, and that my actual interest was in whether a frontier AI model, working through his claims and decodes, could add anything the existing riddle-decoding community hadn't already found. I told him directly that I'd be sharing an article on my site, and I sent him the link to the Codex project so he could see exactly the kind of standard I was holding this analysis to before any of it went up.
His response was that he finds the riddles genuinely interesting and enjoys speculating on them — which is a fair thing for anyone to say about a hobby, and I don't dispute it. But when I asked directly what he thought I'd done wrong, and pointed out that he'd blocked me within twenty minutes of a paid subscription without any interaction on my part to justify it, he didn't answer either question. What I got instead was a vague accusation that "we both know what you do" — no specifics, no example, nothing I could actually respond to or correct if it were true.
I mention this not to relitigate the argument, but because it's relevant to the piece as a whole: I gave him a direct, advance opportunity to see this coming, explain his side, or point out anything he thought I'd gotten wrong about his content — before publishing a word of it. He had that chance and didn't take it up on the substance.
If you're paying for this kind of content because you want entertainment — a fun, speculative, "what if" lens on crypto and media — that's a reasonable thing to pay for, and this delivers it. If you're paying for it because you think it contains verifiable insight into where XRP is headed or what BG123's riddles actually decode to, the honest answer, based on everything I've read, is that it doesn't. Nothing here reaches the bar of a reproducible decode. It's pattern-matching on public information, run through a framework flexible enough to explain almost anything after the fact — which is precisely what makes it feel so persuasive in the moment, and precisely why it can't be checked.
Before publishing any of this, I made this same offer to him directly: let an independent party — including an AI system with no stake in either side, working from his own material — actually test his claims the way the Codex tested BG123's. Pull the specific, falsifiable predictions out of his catalog, check them against what actually happened, and publish the scorecard either way. If the analysis holds up, he gains a credibility no amount of self-assertion can buy. If it doesn't, the audience paying for this content deserves to know that too.
He didn't take me up on it. What I got back was an accusation that "we both know what you do," with nothing specific attached to it — no claim I could actually address, correct, or learn from.
The invitation still stands, publicly this time. If the creator of NotFinancialAdvice.Crypto believes the criticism above is unfair, or that his methodology holds up better than I've represented it here, I'd welcome that conversation on the record. Anyone confident their work is accurate shouldn't need to block scrutiny to protect it — and shouldn't need to duck a direct, private offer to test it fairly before it becomes a public one.