B (5:25)

Yeah, so I think the best place to start is right at the very beginning. With what the purpose of bitcoin was supposed to be. So a lot of people don't realize this in 2026, but Bitcoin was actually designed to be an alternative currency that was usable in everyday exchange. The original vision was that we need an alternative currency that's not being issued by a government or a bank that you can use in commerce online for everyday coffee transactions. We have writing from the creator of bitcoin, whose name is satoshi nakamoto, whose identity we don't know, but that's his name. And he's on record envisioning this. Bitcoin technology could be used even in vending machines, Just not for large payments, but for everyday payments. Now, the technology was released in 2009 at a time where we didn't have great payments for online commerce. You could use credit cards, you know, which have their own fees, high fees associated with them. You need permission from visa or tolerance from visa or mastercard in order to participate in that system. They're heavily regulated. We didn't really have things like venmo at that time or zelle, which is pretty easy for sending money digitally. But in the earliest days, the idea was, okay, we're going to have a payment system for the Internet. Now I'll jump ahead here to 2026. The way that people are talking about bitcoin is as a store of value and not as a payment system, not as a currency. It's supposed to be something that one gathers. You buy it and then you hold it, and then hopefully it appreciates in price. And that's going to make the world a freer place because it's scarce. That's the idea. But this is not what the original purpose was.

A (7:31)

Okay, so I want to. I want to slow you down there. Sure. And just say a couple things. One people should have in their mind. The distinction that you're pointing to between a mechanism of exchange, a way to buy and sell things, and a store of value. So those two things are separate values. It is conceivable that you could have something that functions as a store of value that has no intrinsic value. Like, for example, a dollar, A physical dollar isn't very useful for much, but it is understood to be valuable as a mechanism of exchange. It also, of course, appreciates and declines in value based on how the world perceives the strength of what backs it. You hid in what you said. Maybe you were going to get there, that the idea that you need permission from visa or mastercard in order to use their system is pretty remote to Most people, because we can all get that permission. But what you need to understand is that there is a history of selectively removing that position or that permission from people who have confronted power in ways that are not deemed acceptable by the powers that be. So I remember in the early days of WikiLeaks, I donated to them because I thought it was a great idea to have more transparency. And I did so with a credit card. When I tried to do it again, it had become impossible. They had been banished from the network. That was the second time that I encountered this. The first one was somebody who was selling an entheogen, perfectly legal, called Salvia was actually a scientist who had discovered the compound within this plant that accounts for its psychoactive properties. And it had become extremely difficult to transact with him, even though what he was selling was perfectly legal. So, and then more recently, we can look at the example of the truckers in Canada who were protesting Covid tyranny, who found themselves debanked. Now, that's obviously not a credit card issue, but the basic point is you have a bunch of corporations that are unaccountable, that are in a position to render you effectively poor by hobbling your ability to transact in the market with no location you can go to look at the evidence they have that you've done something wrong. No basic agreement that as long as you're within the bounds of the law, that they need to have no prejudice against you. So it's a frightening system that has been used sparingly so far. But the average person should be very concerned in an era where we've seen things like vaccine mandates that to the extent that a private system that can be turned off at will can be used to coerce you into taking a novel medical technology, for example, there is no bar to that happening.

B (10:49)

Yes, that's an excellent point and a concept we should dwell on another minute is this idea of digital cash. So when you think about cash transactions, one of the features of cash transactions is that you've got the asset, you want to exchange good or service with somebody. You just hand them the cash. There isn't an intermediary between that transaction. This is one of the reasons why governments don't like cash transactions around the world is because. Because it's more difficult to put a third party between that exchange. Now contrast this with electronic payments. Outside of cryptocurrency, think of essentially all electronic payments. They're going through an intermediary, they're going through a bank, they're going through a company, they're going through a credit card. So it's much easier to have that middleman to step in and regulate and control and survey when you're dealing with electronic payments. Well, this, this is a great opening here that Satoshi Nakamoto saw for digital cash, electronic cash. Maybe we could get the peer to peer feature of cash transactions, but make it digital so you don't have. It doesn't have to be tied to, you know, physical bills. That was part of the beauty and the excitement around Bitcoin is it seemed like we're going to capture the features and the efficiencies of electronic payments, but we're going to get around the, the cost of it being electronic in the sense that it's going to be centralized because it's going to be a, this is going to be a peer to peer electronic cash system.

A (12:31)

Peer to peer and anonymous. So the idea that you could have an exchange, the record of your exchange between wallets exists in public, but your identity would not inherently be tied to it if you didn't want it to be.

B (12:48)

So the, a bit, just one technical point here because people will say, well that's not anonymous, that's pseudonymous. The idea of anonymity is that the record, there's no record and there's no identity. The idea with pseudonymity is that you have essentially accounts that are public, sometimes names that are public. In this case the transactions are public, but you don't inherently know the identity of the person behind that transaction. Now in practice that the it. It's actually not that difficult in hindsight in particular to analyze this public ledger of the Bitcoin blockchain and figure out who those identities are. So in practice, the pseudonymity. There are privacy problems that are pretty deep in, in Bitcoin. So a lot of people thought that Bitcoin was supposed to be anonymous. It turns out it wasn't.

A (13:41)

Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but the job of analyzing the pattern in those transactions to discover individual identity has grown greatly worse with the advent of AI. It is much easier to point an AI at the question and have IT analyze large amounts of data and look for logical patterns that identify people. And this is something we need to be concerned about in general. I mean, one thing, this is weird, deep in the weeds here, but I can't say that based on what I've seen that I'm convinced that quantum quantum computing is really what it pretends to be. That it has the potential to do what people who are pushing it claim, that it has the potential to do. But certainly if it did, the thing that makes Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency secure would fall by the wayside because the computing power to break the cryptographic pattern would then be in reach. Am I wrong about that?

B (14:41)

Yeah. So I think with the. The quantum threats are generally overblown, because even if we get the capacity for quantum computers to do what they are claimed to do, it shouldn't be that difficult to make the algorithms quantum resistant. So I, I tend to think that those, those concerns really aren't going to be a threat.

A (15:05)

Well, hold on.

B (15:06)

Yeah.

A (15:07)

There are two questions. One, does the entire past ledger.

B (15:12)

Yeah.

A (15:13)

Get opened? And so you, you can imagine an update where you just increase the complexity of the math necessary to do this work so that it is great enough that the new level of computing power available can't crack it. That I can see, but I can't see how, you know, basically every encrypted message that was ever sent doesn't suddenly become transparent along with the past functioning of cryptocurrencies.

B (15:40)

So with crypto, with Bitcoin in particular, there's a few things going on here that make it, let's say, problematic from the privacy perspective. One is, and we'll get into this maybe a little bit later, let's just say there's something called the block size limit, and we can talk about the details of that future because it turns out to be important in Bitcoin's history. But the way that Bitcoin, we're going to argue, was prevented from scaling made it. So you don't actually even need quantum computers or AI to do mass surveillance of the bitcoin blockchain because the amounts of data are so small, they're so unbelievably small, you can get chain analysis without needing AI. Now, in a world in which Bitcoin scaled the way that it was originally designed to scale, then that becomes a separate question. Then you're dealing with a lot more data, and then I think maybe you would need more AI to do sophisticated chain analysis. But as it is right now, it's probably fair to say that on the bitcoin blockchain, all of the transactions, or 99% of them, are going to be fairly easily analyzed, just as is.

A (16:59)

Fair enough.

C (17:00)

All right, I want to add a couple of things, just for context, about going back to the original launch of Bitcoin. So it was at 2009, and just for context, it was right after the 2008 financial collapse. So, in fact, there's Even reference to this in the, in the code itself. And after the financial collapse of 2008, this was one unique period of time where you actually had the right and the left unified on one idea, which is that the bank bailouts were a bad idea. Whether you were Occupy Wall street or the Tea Party, everybody was kind of sick of these banks and sick of the money printing and sick of 10 million people losing their homes while all of the losses get socialized. And so that was the original concept behind it. So it was peer to peer cash. But it was also in this context of, hey, we know something is wrong with the banks. And you mentioned this idea of, you talked about the fact that there's debanking and issues with the Canadian truckers. But it's even deeper than that. When Bitcoin was originally launched, it was better money. It was actually better, faster and cheaper. And if you're using credit cards, it may not seem like a lot, but if you're a merchant and you are accepting credit cards, you have to pay $0.30 per transaction plus 2.9% of the value of the transaction in fees. Well, we live in a world where 71% of the planet makes less than $10 a day. So the invention of Bitcoin as being money that was separate from state, where you didn't need a bank account, where the fees were low, was something that was life changing for people around the world.

A (18:40)

And let me just add as a personal note, I bought a bunch of Bitcoin understanding loosely what it was supposed to be, understanding the long term trajectory of its growth in value. And I discovered a number of things along the way. I have recently sold that Bitcoin in the aftermath of the Epstein files revelations, believing that I don't know if it's going to go up or not. But my sense is that what was revealed by the Epstein files was enough to bring the whole project into question. And the reason I raised this is because in trying to get out of bitcoin, so I had taken, I had used an exchange, Coinbase, in order to buy Bitcoin and I had put that money in an actual wallet of which I had sole custody. The process of getting the bitcoin back to Coinbase into dollars and then out to my bank account was incredibly cumbersome. It was expensive, it was slow, it was frightening because you literally plug in an address, you know, you send some small amount first to make sure that you've got the basics right. Now, I'm sure this is not true. If you're doing this on a daily basis. But if you're just holding this stuff, it's sitting in some wallet and you say, hey, I want to get out. It took me something like a half a day to do this in a careful enough way that I was sure I wasn't going to evaporate the money into thin air from which there's no recovery.

B (20:43)

Brad.

A (20:43)

Okay, further, because it went through Coinbase, Coinbase has a know your customer kyc. Right, kyc. Know your customer means that there's nothing remotely anonymous about this transaction. It's happening absolutely in the open. And so anyway, the. The point I'm trying to make is that what Satoshi Nakamoto lays out as the plan for what Bitco to be is so far from what it has become slow. I mean, my credit card, I can be cashing out a transaction at the hardware store, and it takes seconds. Bitcoin took 10 minutes to move. Each move took 10 minutes. While you're, you know, the money is nowhere. And it's not anonymous. So it doesn't function as a means of exchange. It isn't cheap, it isn't fast. It. It's amazing how inverted from the initial vision, it's become.

B (21:46)

Okay, several things on that. Thank you for bringing that up, Brett. Believe it or not, I'm not exaggerating. You had a good user experience. Hear me out. Okay, now this sounds crazy. What has happened on multiple occasions because of the, effectively the technical redesign of Bitcoin, which we'll have to talk about later, is on multiple occasions, you'll have. The network will actually itself effectively come to a standstill for the majority of users. There's an artificial cap of 7 transactions per second on the Bitcoin network. And we'll go into detail of why it's there. And this was one of the key technical feature in the hijacking of Bitcoin was this transaction throughput limit. Okay, so what has happened on multiple occasions is there have been more users of Bitcoin than seven transactions per second. And so there's a backlog of transactions that develop, and sometimes that backlog, it can result in days to process a single transaction. And on at least one occasion, it was more than a week to process the average transaction. So what has happened? There are horror stories. You say you were scared. There are people who've been told something about what Bitcoin is, they're trying to cash out. And when they send their transactions to try to get to Coinbase, literally the transaction won't confirm for like a week plus. And in the middle of that, you have the price massively fluctuating. So when would you've had these, these network capacity issues? You might have the value of your bitcoin being dropping 10%, 20% in a short amount of time. And there's literally nothing you can do to get your transactions to go through the network. That's happened on multiple occasions, with the

A (23:35)

thing being a risk. I mean, I know I've said this already, but the idea that you are engaged in a transaction that, because of the way in which it is secure, can't be fixed. You can't walk into the equivalent of the Bitcoin bank and say, I made some kind of error. Where is the $10,000 that I intended to move from here to there? It's on you to get it right. So the combination of it so slow that you can't even tell whether it worked and an error would be fatal and unrecoverable is amazing. I mean, I was, I was stunned that this took me really more than half a day. And now that I hear, you know, the shower I went and took while I was waiting to see if the transaction landed was apparently a small period of time. Yes. And by the way, I got through the shower and it had not landed. So that is stunning to me that the vision has been so inverted. So the punchline here is the means of exchange has evaporated. Now, of course, bitcoin people will say, no, it hasn't. There's a second layer, the lightning layer, that allows you to do just that, which is true, more or less, but it is not the idea of a currency that is hyper secure and trivially expensive and rapid to use. So it effectively functions as cash.

B (25:07)

So a few things on that we'll have to talk about lightning in detail as well, because most of lightning is a marketing hype. It doesn't actually translate into reality of how the tech works. In practice. What lightning is, is just a custodial wallet. So it's the equivalent of having an account on Coinbase or having a PayPal account for that matter, and then. And going through your company to move your Bitcoin. So the. When you are talking about custodial wallets, custodial accounts, corporate accounts, company accounts, that undermines the whole idea of what bitcoin was there to do, which is it was to give you an opportunity to make exchange exchanges without having to go through a company in the first place. So practice. Yeah, go ahead.

A (25:54)

I just want to clarify for people who are new to the topic of crypto, probably Most of whom are not listening anymore because this is too technical. But the idea of an exchange, an exchange makes it, yes, very easy to translate money, dollars, into whatever cryptocurrency you want. So you can use a credit card, get some dollars, say, I want some bitcoin. Next thing you know, you've got however much bitcoin in your wallet. But the part that's not obvious is, is that you don't really have bitcoin. It's a bit like paper metals, right? If I have paper medals, do I have a metal? No, you have a promise of metal. And if the mechanism that promised you the metal goes belly up, for some reason, you don't have anything. And so the reason that I took the money, on the advice of people who were sophisticated about this, took the money out of the exchange rather than just leave it there. Where it is easy to transact with is that there's an insecurity. I don't know how secure the businesses are that owe me the bitcoin. So anyway, you're caught in this bind where either you have a perfectly secure way of maintaining your currency, but what happens if you lose the codes that allow you to get into it? Then it's gone, there's nothing to be done. Or you can have it in a place that you can, you know, literally just point your cursor at it and say, I want to change this to that. And it happens easily, but you don't really have it. It's an iou. Our second sponsor this week is Armor Colostrum, an ancient bioactive whole food. Here at Dark Horse, we talk frequently about the fact that we live in an age of hypernovelty. Humans are the most adaptable species on the planet, and even we can't keep up with the rate of change that we are imposing on ourselves. We are bathed in electromagnetic fields, artificial light, seed oils, microplastics, endocrine disruptors in our air, water, food and textiles. And there are myriad other modern stressors like overcrowding and having too little control over our own choices in life. Here is something you can strengthen your immune health with the bioactive whole food that is Amra Colostrum. All of this hypernovelty can disrupt the signals that your body relies on, negatively impacting gut, immune and overall health. Armor Colostrum works at the cellular level to boost your health from within. Colostrum is nature's first whole food, helping to strengthen gut and immune health and fuel performance. Armor Colostrum is great added to smoothies. I love it. With banana, mint, cacao and raw milk. Bovine Colostrum can support health, metabolism and strengthen gut integrity. And Armor Colostrum is a bioactive whole food with over 400 functional nutrients including but not limited to immunoglobulins, antioxidants, minerals and prebiotics. Armor Colostrum starts with sustainably sourced colostrum from grass fed cows from their co op of dairy farms in the USA and they source only the surplus plus colostrum after calves are fully fed. Unlike most colostrums on the market which use heat pasteurization that depletes nutrient potency, Armor Colostrum uses an innovative process that purifies and preserves the integrity of hundreds of bioactive nutrients while removing casein and fat to guarantee the highest potency and bioavailability. The quality control is far above industry standards, including being certified to be glyphosate free. People who have used Armour's Colostrum have reported clearer skin, faster and thicker hair growth and better mental concentration. In addition, people using Armour's Colostrum have noticed a decrease in muscle soreness after exercise, better sleep and fewer sugar cravings. Armour Colostrum is the real deal. We've got a special offer for the Dark horse audience. Receive 30% off your first subscription order. Go to armor.comdarkhorse or enter darkhorse to get 30% off your first subscription order. That's a RMRA.com darkhorse now I do

B (29:49)

want to let's return back a little bit to the history here and then it'll take us into some of the other concepts that you mentioned. So believe it or not, the user experience in bitcoin was actually pretty great back in 2014. So the experience that you're having now of you got to wait 10 minutes because the exchange requires so many confirmations and it's high stress, very cumbersome. That user experience is worse more than 10 years later than it was in, in 2014. And, and I know Aaron can attest to this. Aaron was early in living off of crypto for, you know, a long time ago. So maybe you can talk about this sounds crazy that this technology, this is a, you know, world changing technology is actually a worse experience now than it was 12 years ago. But isn't that the case?

C (30:42)

It's absolutely the case. So I first was exposed to Bitcoin in 2012 and I remember when I received bitcoin it was at a Liberty Forum conference here in New Hampshire. Somebody just sent me bitcoin to my mobile device and it was nearly instant. With no fees. And I've experienced as a serial entrepreneur dealing with credit card processing companies and everything else. I'm like, wow, there's no bank. There was essentially no fees. And as Steve said earlier, at this point in time, Zelle didn't exist. You didn't have Google Pay or Apple Pay. So it was definitively a better, faster, cheaper product. It was the best way to move money. And so my original use of Bitcoin in 2012 and all the way up until 2017 was as a medium of exchange. And a lot of people don't know this history, but moving into 2017, there were major retailers and companies that started accepting bitcoin directly, not through third parties. You would to a website like overstock.com or you would go to Expedia to buy airline tickets, and then it would give you their wallet address and you would just send them the cryptocurrency directly without third parties. People are unaware of that history. But then, as you know, as Steve started to discuss, and I'm sure we'll talk about in more detail, they throttled the network to seven transactions per second. And all of a sudden, what was instant and nearly free became an average of $50 per transaction in fees in seven to 10 days. Which obviously no merchant can afford that as a payment mechanism.

A (32:19)

All right. And I would also point out that what you're describing is a tipping point that never happened. So you had a mechanism of exchange with super low viscosity. Right. It just worked. If you happen to be one of the rare people who had bitcoin and, you know, wanted to spend it, at the point that that becomes true, that it becomes possible for me to go buy, I think you could even at one point buy a Tesla with bitcoin. Am I right? But at the point that you can go buy real goods and services in the world, then it becomes a question for us normies. Well, should I be taking bitcoin? What if people like Dark Horse and they're afraid of technocracy and they say, is there a way that we can support you with bitcoin instead of dollars? It would be great to be able to say, yeah, hell yeah. And then even if I can't spend it on anything I want, if some amount of bitcoin comes in and I can buy something that's useful to me with it, then the point is, suddenly there's a reason for me to be participating in the network, which makes it stronger because of the network effects. So the amazing thing is that that did not cat a revolution in which the utility of bitcoin only got better, as Steve is pointing out, didn't happen.

B (33:44)

You're breaking my heart, Brett, because believe it or not, that fight, that was. That was a big fight in. In bitcoin. It was. And we, for a short period of time, we won. So I learned about bitcoin back in 2011. It was less than a dollar. I learned about it at an economics conference. And I remember being intrigued from a point where nobody had heard about bitcoin. It wasn't accepted for commerce anywhere. And there was this great plan, this great agenda, this exciting project that early bitcoiners were. Were partaking in to try to get the world to start adopting bitcoin. And we went from nothing, zero adoption to actually getting Microsoft through Steam and expedia and overstock.com they were actually using it in commerce. We had, I know, the biggest. My wife worked at BitPay, which was the. I think still is the world's biggest bitcoin payment processor. And at one point, I think they reached more than a billion dollars of processing transactions in a single year, or it was close to that or at that level. And we were like, wow, it's actually working. This is so great. We're so excited about it. The businesses, the entrepreneurs, were excited about it. But there was this urgent problem in the background, which is that at the rate of adoption, were going to run into scaling problems because there was this technical limit called the block size limit that effectively capped the throughput of the network at seven transactions per second. Now, it was put there by Satoshi Nakamoto as a temporary spam feature. Satoshi. And we have. This is all documented in the book he wrote, for the record, saying that eventually this limit will be raised or eliminated altogether. But for now, while the network is young, we're going to have a temporary spam measure here. So in 2015 or so, there was a war going on between the entrepreneurs and the business people and the idealists who were trying to get bitcoin adopted. They saw the trajectory, and a group that emerged that said, no, no, no, you're not supposed to use bitcoin in commerce as a medium of exchange. In fact, it's supposed to be a store of value. It's digital gold, not digital cash. And bitcoin doesn't scale. They said, we don't want to lift the transaction throughput limit. And so the entrepreneur business types said, what do you mean you don't want to lift this throughput limit? Like, what's going to happen is the Network's going to crash, you're going to have the transit. At that time, transaction fees weren't an issue. And he said, well, if you just understand how the system works, as soon as you hit this throughput limit, you're going to have network crash, where transactions aren't going to be processed, the fees are going to absolutely skyrocket and you're going to get a bad user experience, you're going to get negative adoption of Bitcoin. And that's exactly what happened. Literally the disaster scenarios that the early bitcoiners were talking about actually happened in 2016 and then in 2017. And it looks like. Yeah, you have a question.

A (37:17)

All right, so I want to just put this in context so people get it. You've heard me describe my painful experience making what in essence is just a move from one account to another, you know, more than half a day and a lot of trauma. That's sort of what's happened to the core. Core is a bad word to use here. But the central processing of transaction technology at the same time you described. Do I have this right? In 2011, a Bitcoin was less than a dollar?

B (37:53)

Yeah.

A (37:54)

Okay, so a bitcoin, a full bitcoin, was worth less than a dollar in 2011?

B (38:03)

Yeah.

A (38:03)

Okay, that's 15 years ago. It is now worth, I haven't checked today, but something like $70,000, is that correct?

B (38:14)

Yeah, give or take.

A (38:15)

Okay, so you've got people who are looking at that growth in the value that is understood to exist in the currency. So people are getting very wealthy based on the skyrocketing perceived value of this cryptocurrency. And mind you, when they say it's digital gold, it's not digital cash, I think. Isn't the second part of cryptocurrency currency? And why, you know, why wouldn't you? I mean, even gold was initially a currency. The idea of spending something that has an agreed upon value because it has an intrinsic value is very sensible. So anyway, my point is you can understand part of what's going on in the social phenomenon of the discussion of Bitcoin, the vehemence with which people will defend the current system, as broken as it is, because the growth from worth $1 to worth $70,000 is pretty fucking persuasive.

B (39:22)

Yes.

A (39:22)

And so anyway, everybody who gets involved in this discussion and tries to figure out what's going on needs to understand how big an incentive it is to have something that you might have invested a dollar in in 2011 that's now worth $70,000. And you know, it's why there's a kind of religious fervor surrounding this currency, certainly.

B (39:41)

And, and, and I, I remember having a lot of these discussions where people were trying to envision the future value of bitcoin. In fact, the true story I. 2014, maybe 2015, I remember going out to dinner with some friends at, at, at BitPay, that this, the payment processor that my wife worked at. And we were laughing because we were trying to envision like if this, if we're correct in saying this is going to be future money, you know, the value of, of the, the bitcoin, it might be $10,000 that we were speculating at the time. I don't know what the price was at the time, but it was that. That was a crazy amount to think it'd be 10,000 dol. Laughing because we paid for our smoothies or something in bitcoin and we were like, someday this is probably going to be the equivalent of taking a cruise. In hindsight, it's like, yeah, that was probably about an accurate assessment, but there was a spirit in the early bitcoin community that was excited about that. We want to spend the money. It's a currency. It's like we're trying to build the future. And so you want to spend it. It seemed so bizarre to so many people in early bitcoin to hear people say, no, no, you're not supposed to spend it. If you're spending your bitcoin, you're doing something wrong. And so there's a theme in, in the history of crypto which is the, the interest, the, let's say, the importance of economic thinking in cryptocurrency and in bitcoin. Because there's a lot of people who want to make purely technical arguments about software and about code, and they think that bitcoin is reducible just to software and code, and it's not. Bitcoin is this very complex social and economic phenomenon where some of the developers that were insisting we can't raise this transaction throughput limit, they didn't understand economics at all. They thought the idea that a $20 transaction fee, well, that's not a big deal. They thought that some of the developer, the software engineers that were working on bitcoin didn't really care if this coin was usable in everyday commerce because they had this vision of. They wanted it to be some separate system. But yes, the economic and monetary aspects of bitcoin are deep and important and unfortunately overlooked. Because when people are making gobs of money. I feel like the quality of careful analysis and reasoning has gone downwards.

A (42:17)

Well, actually, can I take this moment to preempt something that I think all of us are certain is going to happen here? This discussion in which we talk about cryptocurrency, its promise, its warts, and specifically talk about the promise of bitcoin and what has happened to it, one thing that is 100% guaranteed is that we are going to get incredibly vehement pushback. People are going to say we don't know what we're talking about, that we misunderstand what this is supposed to be, we misunderstand the remedies that take care of all of the problems we're pointing to. And I would just point this out because I've been here 100 times already. You guys have probably been here thousands of times already. I don't accept anything that amounts to bluster. I will entertain actual arguments with content that can be evaluated logically. But if your point is that Aaron, Steve and Brett are dumbfucks and that they just don't get it, that's not an argument. And if you have a lot of bitcoin and therefore the perception of its value is what is feeding you, and then there is an obvious question about the conflict of interest that that raises in you. So definitely check the comments on this one. You're going to find a lot of vitriol, but check the vitriol for content. And if what happens is somebody says something complicated, complicated, complicated, so that you assume they know what they're talking about, the chances are that doesn't stand up.

B (44:00)

And let me say, just one more note on that sort of maybe preemptively here is a pattern. There's an overlapping pattern in what happened with what happens in bitcoin and elsewhere, which is that people want to claim that the secret knowledge of the technical experts is what's needed here in order to have an informed opinion. And really, if you understand the details of the lightning network, if you understood the details of how nodes operate on the network, then you would see why we're all so ill informed here what has happened. And this was the same thing, if you recall, during COVID it was, well, what about these, these shots is an issue. It seems like on paper we should be skeptical that this is a new technology that's rolling out. And they're saying, listen, there are some technical experts who know that the MRNA shots for such and such and such a reason are going to be safe and effective. And you just got to trust us. It really is the same pattern here. And something that was incredible to witness, incredible to witness firsthand, is that in bitcoin there were competing technical camps. And I've never called myself technical. However, relative to the people who have strong opinions on the subject, I'm like hyper technical because I understand some basics here that a lot of people don't understand in 2026. However, in. Despite being non technical, I have seen now over the past decade, the track record of these supposed technical experts in bitcoin versus the, the technical experts that I was listening to that a lot of the old school bitcoiners were listening to, and I've just compared them. Were the claims of the core developers, the bitcoin core developers, were they correct in hindsight, or were the critics of bitcoin core correct in hindsight? And on the technical points themselves. It's overwhelmingly in the, the, the favor of the people like myself and others who were critical of the direction that bitcoin went on in the, in the. From the technical perspective. And it's going to be the same thing in, with technical criticisms of the MRNA platforms, right? All of the promises that we heard about how special these shots were and how the, the, the lipid nanoparticle. Is this a miraculous design of engineering and it's not going to give us problems with, well, those technical experts that we were supposed to be, you know, deferring to turned out to be critically wrong on their own subject matter.

A (46:31)

Actually, the analogy is perfect because you have a highly technical subject, you have a small number of dissidents whose track record is getting better by the week, and then you have a mainstream. In this case, it's weird because bitcoin itself is not mainstream, but within bitcoin you have a mainstream consensus about it's just fine. It's digital gold. We've got, we've solved your problems, you know, block wars are over. Get over it. But you know, at some level, what was. You know, I think one of the things that changed the, the COVID conversation radically was the fact that we had Robert Malone, the literal inventor of the MRNA technology, telling us, hey, they're not telling you the truth about this. And at some level, you know, it's not a precise analogy, but somebody like Roger seems to be like a Roger Robert Malone figure. Yeah.

B (47:35)

Okay.

A (47:35)

And.

C (47:36)

Yeah.

B (47:37)

Can I just jump in here?

A (47:38)

Yeah, please.

B (47:39)

Okay, so. Excellent point. Okay, here I'll give you two names that are the equivalent of Robert Malone, and it's not Roger Veer here. One is a guy named Satoshi Nakamoto, who is the creator of bitcoin, one of the technical arguments that are made for people, because this will come up, and I won't go into detail here, but they'll say, well, you.

A (47:59)

You.

B (47:59)

We have to keep this throughput limit low so that people can run their own nodes, because they think. They claim that it's important that bitcoiners run their own nodes in order to get the benefits of using bitcoin. This is a ground level mistaken. This is not the way that bitcoin was designed. And we have record of Satoshi Nakamoto himself saying he didn't design it where regular users had to run their own nodes because that system wouldn't scale. So Satoshi himself is the one saying we can scale to mass adoption. Satoshi Nakamoto is using analogies with transaction throughput processing of Visa. Satoshi is the one giving us examples of putting bitcoin into, like, a vending machine. So that should have some authority when people say. When they're trying to make technical arguments. Okay, well, you're dealing with Satoshi Nakamoto. The second name is a guy named Gavin Andreessen. Gavin Andreessen was the leader, the technical lead of the project after Satoshi Nakamoto left. He gave the keys to the keys of the code, essentially to be the leader of the project once Satoshi left it. He was also on record saying, making the claims that I would be making and all of the. My camp of the. The dissident bitcoiners here, that. Just to skip ahead very briefly, the. The disagreements in bitcoin resulted in a split of the network into what's called bitcoin and bitcoin cash. We don't have to go into the details here, however, in the bitcoin cash camp that was made up by people who said, well, we're going to scale the way that bitcoin was designed to scale. We're going to. Just going to try to implement satoshi's vision. Well, Gavin Andreessen is on record saying that bitcoin cash is the project that I got originally involved with. From the beginning, he thought that bitcoin cash was what bitcoin was supposed to be. So there's two names for you that should are akin to Robert Malone. Satoshi and then his heir said that our technical arguments are correct and not. Not the arguments that are the contemporary mainstream, let's say, the literal inventor and

A (50:13)

the person that he tapped to carry on the project.

B (50:15)

Exactly.

A (50:16)

Fascinating. All right, so you keep going, Steve.

B (50:22)

Okay, so I'm going to try to accelerate the history here and then we're going to bring in Aaron to talk more about what's going on at present. Because I think this is also critically important. So let me try to just accelerate the history here. So in Bitcoin there was the. There are two camps emerging. We're going to call them the Small Block Camp and the Big Block Camp. The small block camp said we need to keep the transaction throughput very low. And the big block camp said, no, we can actually make the transaction throughput much larger. Well, the big blockers, in the spirit of Satoshi and Gavin Andreessen, we were noticing that some weird things were happening in 2015, 2016, 2017 that looked like, especially in hindsight, the project was being taken over. Not only had the narrative shifted, but you also had a critical set of these software developers, the bitcoin core developers that formed their own company or employed by this company called Blockstream. Now, Blockstream turned out to be at, at the time I think they were founded in 2015, I want to say 2014, 2015, there was a bunch of smoke around this company, Blockstream. This was the, this was the boogeyman that the big blockers were saying this is a problematic company. And now we've learned just in the past few months with what has happened with some of the Epstein emails, which we can talk about, all of that smoke was coming from a raging fire. Okay, Blockstream does look like this. I would say they're the most important company in bitcoin's history because they were employing some of the key developers during

A (52:06)

this

B (52:08)

time period of 2014 to 2017. So to summarize, you had these two factions and then there was a great split in 2017. You had the. The big blockers went with bitcoin cash, the small blockers went with bitcoin core. The core developers, the big blockers are

A (52:28)

the people who were advocating to scale the network so it would continue to function as a currency.

B (52:33)

Right, right. And this term big block, maybe we don't even have to go into it. Nevermind. We just wanted to scale layer 1 the way that Satoshi designed the thing to scale. And we thought that this layer two idea, while there could be good ideas incorporating layer twos, in order to have a functional layer two system, you have to have a functional layer one system. If you have high transaction fees on layer one, the second layer solutions don't really check out. They don't really make sense. And the result, we cautioned, is that it would be a custodial system. So people are going to stop using the actual technology and they're going to use a company instead. And this is in fact what we saw. So fast forward to after the split. You have. Oh, I should mention one more thing. Here's a critical piece of the puzzle. Around 2015, we had the two largest discussion platforms on the Internet for discussing Bitcoin were censored at the same time and they turned out to be owned by the same pseudonymous person. So there's, there's this entity who's, whose name is Thamos, that's his username, we don't know his real identity. And he owned the two main discussion platforms for Bitcoin on the Internet. One was the Bitcoin subreddit at the time and the other is called bitcointalk.org the overwhelming amount of discussion online that was happening about Bitcoin were on these two platforms around 2015 or so. There was alternative implementations that were gaining popularity as people were trying to route around the Bitcoin core developers. And this individual that owns these two discussion platforms said in public, in writing, that for the good of Bitcoin, he was going to start censoring the mentions of these alternative software implementations that were trying to get around Bitcoin core. He said, this is a rough quote. He said, listen, I've been around in forums for a long time. I know the effect that censorship has on people. And for the good of Bitcoin, I'm going to start censoring the big blockers in effect.

A (54:53)

Okay? So I want to point out one reason that may be subtle as to why this is as important as it turns out to be. Bitcoin is designed to be decentralized in every regard, meaning that there is no Bitcoin company or official designation. Anybody can take the code of Bitcoin and they can modify it however they want. They can do what's called forking and basically start their own currency from it. And in general, people aren't going to adopt those things. But if somebody has a superior implementation, it can catch on and it can displace whatever was the mainstream. So the idea that in a decentralized decision making network that discussion of certain things is going to be censored in the place where people have gathered creates a problem, which is if you want to say, well, fine, those people are on the wrong track, let's discuss the alternative and you can't discuss it in the place where the people are, then basically, you know, you're, you're shouting into the Wind alone somewhere, unable to talk to the people that need to hear you. It's like, well, you know, if Facebook is censoring, why don't you start your own.

B (56:10)

Yeah, exactly.

A (56:10)

You tried to start your own Facebook. You know what happens when you do nothing.

B (56:15)

Exactly. And one of the consequences, the intended consequences, is that as newcomers would come in post, we're talking 2015. So I don't know how long most people have been around a bitcoin, but only a subset have been around even that long. But those were newcomers coming in. In 2015, they're only going to hear one side of the story. They're going to know there are these bad guys that are trying to take over bitcoin, these big blockers that have bad ideas, and they're not going to hear their perspective unless they go out of their way to find the discussion channels that they are, that those individuals are using, that the dissidents are using.

A (56:51)

Oh, that's. That's an incredibly important point that I, I had missed because of the rate of growth of the size of the community, the number of people who weren't there to hear, hey, we're going to censor this. And what they in effect get is a ongoing discussion in which certain things aren't discussed and presumably aren't to be taken seriously because if they were, people would be talking about them.

B (57:11)

Y and that there's already a set of villains that people know. Oh yeah, this Roger Vere guy is a villain. Some of the, you know, the big block bitcoiners, these are villains. Even the people like Gavin Andreessen, who Satoshi left the project to, were villainized. And people didn't really know why he was villainized. But that was only because they're triangulating based on the behavior of the individuals in the network that they're a part of. And it should be noted that this position, the big block position, believe it or not, this was actually the majority position in bitcoin until at least 2015, maybe 2016. I could make the argument that 20. That even in 2017, and then, and then it's definitely not the majority position today. But this, this was if you were to. To go to a bitcoin meetup group anywhere, almost everybody had the understood that, well, we were going to scale bitcoin by increasing the size of the blocks, increasing the throughput limit, that we're going to go along with Satoshi's design that bitcoin is supposed to be used as an alternative currency. These were the mainstream views until that censorship happened, and then a few years after that, and then now this is. Almost nobody's even heard these ideas at all today.

A (58:26)

All right, I'm sorry to keep jumping in, but I do think from the point of view of the audience, it's important. Back in the day, and I'm a super late comer to all of this, but back in the day, everybody had the experience that somebody who was on board with bitcoin and was excited about it because they had experienced what it was and they had seen its potential would say, you know, you'd say, I don't really understand cryptocurrency. And they'll be like, look, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to set up a wallet. I'm going to send you a little bitcoin. And they would send a little bitcoin, and it would magically arrive in your wallet, and suddenly the light bulb goes on over your head and you think, think, okay, now I see what this could be. If you did that now, it would make the opposite point because, you know, well, I just sent you some. Have you seen it? It's like, well, why is this taking like a million times longer than an email or a text message would? Right. It just doesn't. Doesn't make sense.

B (59:19)

Yes, the pitch was actually to just send people bitcoin. This is one. You know, we mentioned Roger Veer a few times. He's got. He earned the nickname Bitcoin Jesus, even though he doesn't like that nickname name. But he earned it in part because he would go around and he give talks about how excited he was about bitcoin. This is going to be revolutionary alternative currency. And then he would give bitcoin to people. It'd be like, hey, you want the real pitch? Download this app and I'll send money straight to your phone. And there's nothing that a third party can do about it. And it was an incredibly effective pitch. I'm sure you saw that all the time, Aaron.

C (59:53)

Absolutely.

B (59:54)

Yep. Okay, so I'll try to finish the history here, and then we'll talk about the present moment. So. So we have the censorship, we have the fork, and then we have what I would call the mainstream phase of bitcoin, where I know you say it's not mainstream, which I'm sure this is objectively true. However, from my world, going from seeing this thing nobody knew about bitcoin to Tom Brady is making ads on TV about it is like, I feel like we hit the mainstream and this history was not told Somehow, despite it being the mainstream perspective for many years, nobody really knew what happened to bitcoin. Nobody had heard this. And so I teamed up with Roger Veer to try to give the loser's side of the story. We were in a fight. We were fighting for bitcoin. We saw the censorship. We saw. There are connections in here that we discuss in the book where we have one of the bitcoin core developers. For example, it was shown in leaked emails that he was corresponding with somebody that claimed to be high up in intelligence. So we have lots of smoke and lots of fire, and yet nobody had shared this story. So when we wrote Hijacking Bitcoin, we tried to be extremely careful in what we were claiming and our documentation of what we were claiming. There's more than 280 citations in the book.

C (61:23)

Book.

B (61:24)

There's. There was a. A huge realm for possible speculation because the corruption in crypto is. Is very. It's very high. There's a lot of juicy stories here and there, but we try to make all the claims in the book sort of airtight. This is what happened. This is what the. The industry was saying. This is what the bitcoin core developers were saying. This is what Satoshi Nakamoto was saying. And we released this book in 2024. Well, just since we released it, we've gotten a bunch more information about

A (62:00)

the.

B (62:01)

The corruption in the cryptocurrency industry. And just in the last few months, we're getting information out from the Epstein files that is showing that it. It may very well be that in the story of the hijacking of bitcoin, none other than Jeffrey Epstein himself has a role. And the role starts back in 2014, 2015. Well, and a little bit earlier than that. But right when we said there's a lot of smoke coming out of blockstream right here, there's a lot of smoke coming from the core developers. We have emails now from Jeffrey Epstein that is. That are. That are in a parallel timeline, tracking very closely. And I know Aaron's done a lot of this research as well. So this is. It's live. I'm still. We're still actively learning about this right now, where people are still going through these emails and putting the pieces of the story together. But I know, and it intersects with what Aaron's been doing for a few years now.

A (62:56)

Before I let you get to that, Aaron, I just want to say we, you know, obviously we have a frustrating situation where the Epstein data dumps are highly selective. And so, you know, we can see that there's a lot going on there. We can prove very little at the level that it would stand up in court. But nonetheless, if you're just simply logical, you can deduce how important this was and you can infer that it wasn't a lone operator, that this isn't. This is connected to intelligence in some way. How it worked we don't know. But that it worked seems highly likely. But anyway, my point is, imagine from the point of view of powerful forces from the perspective of the deep state. From the perspective of the deep state, the thing that Bitcoin was designed to be is a threat. Yes. To the extent that people can transact outside of any system that can shut them down, there is an ability to function outside of autocratic control. So it is essentially inevitable that those who wish to control us would view this as hostile and that they would have three options. They could either try to stamp it out, which is pretty hard to do when it makes such a powerful case. They could try to capture it, which is, I think, your argument as to what happened, or they could try to displace it with a version that they did control, which Aaron is going to end up telling us is happening in the present. Aaron, did you want to jump in?

C (64:38)

Yeah, it's a little bit of all of the above. So I came at this whole thing a couple of different ways. One, I started using Bitcoin and then in 2019, I started living on cryptocurrency gold and silver. I stopped using a personal bank account and I noticed that friends of mine were starting to get were being targeted by the federal government that were at this intersection of crypto and liberty. A guy by the name of Ian Freeman, who was the co host of a show called Free Talk Live. Free Talk Live was the first radio show in the entire world to discuss bitcoin. It was in 2010. Roger Veer learned about Bitcoin from Free Talk Live. Gavin Andreessen heard Free Talk Live and in fact met with Mark Edge, the other co host, and said it was the most profitable lunch he'd ever had. And they paid for their Thai food or whatever with bitcoin. And so, so Ian was targeted. He was raided five different departments of the federal government. They broke down his door, arrested him, so on and so forth, and targeted him. Said, you sold bitcoin without a license and trumped up a whole bunch of these other charges. And then I saw other people were being targeted. So I said, well, look, I want to look into this. Why is this happening and what I found was that President Biden had signed this executive order in March of 2022, Executive Order 14067. And what it did is it authorized the U.S. government to pursue a CBDC while taking a whole of government approach to crack down on crypto. Because if you're going to roll out a central bank digital currency, if you're going to roll out a currency that can be tracked, programmed and censored, people aren't going to like that. So you need to get rid of the competition. And sure enough, that's why I believe Ian and others were targeted. And this was at the very beginning. Now subsequently everybody was targeted and people were arrested. But this was kind of way ahead of the curve on this. And so as I'm doing my research and my exploration, I write this book called the Final Countdown that goes into the threat of CBDCs, the threat of Technocracy. I start exploring, well, what's going on in the United States with CBDCs because we have this executive order that says, well, now the government's going to pursue it it. But what's the status of that? And what I came across was that we weren't just beginning to research it. We already had three pilots, successful pilots that had already been completed and they were all out of mit. So MIT worked on something called Project Hamilton. Project Hamilton is a, it's a digital dollar. It's essential, essentially the replacement for cash. And this project, which started in 2018, maybe something like that, can do 1.7 million transactions per second versus Bitcoin, which is seven transactions per second. And then there were two other CBDC pilots that they did in conjunction with the Federal Reserve bank of New York. So then I'm starting to dig in, well, who's working on these projects? So MIT's involved with all three, who are some of the technical developers. And then I find for this Project Hamilton project there's this developer called Corey named Corey Fields who was working on that project. And I'm like, well, I've heard that name before. Where have I heard that name? He was a Bitcoin core developer. So then I start digging through the history of this some more and I find out, well, wait a minute, at some point around 2015. And let me take one step back. So we've mentioned the fact that that Bitcoin is an open source software project. There is no centralized entity. But it turns out, much to a lot of people's chagrin, developers aren't just proactively developing code for free. And then other developers aren't out there proactively auditing code for free. At some point somebody is getting paid to do that work. And so some people, very early on, Roger Veer and I believe Gavin Andreessen and some others, five of them got together and said, hey, let's put together a nonprofit, it called the Bitcoin foundation and will raise money from the community. The idea being we'll fund the developers but make sure that they maintain the integrity of the project, essentially follow the white paper, so on and so forth. And so this was the main funding source for Bitcoin up to this point? Well, in 2015, there were some internal issues and the Bitcoin foundation collapsed. It could no longer fund these developers. And so MIT ended up taking over the funding of these critical developers. Corey Fields was one of those developers. So one of the core developers that MIT was funding then went on to work on Project Hamilton $. Well, then I find right around this time, it gets exposed that Jeffrey Epstein funded this MIT group which was run by a guy named Joy Ito. And Joy Ito, in addition to running the MIT group, also has a venture capital arm where he's making private investments in for profit cryptocurrency companies. So I wrote an article on Brownstone saying, hey, look, I don't have definitive proof here, but it looks to me like Jeffrey Epstein is funding CBDCs and funding developers from bitcoin who hobbled bitcoin, throttled bitcoin at seven transactions per second, and then had those very same developers go and work on a United States CBDDC that does 1.7 million transactions per second. I'm like, huh, that's interesting. But I didn't know for sure. We didn't know exactly what Epstein invested in. MIT invests in a lot of different projects. So I even wrote in the article, I said, hey, it looks like this might be the case, but we don't know for sure. And so I didn't claim I knew it definitively. And then the Epstein files come out and wow. First of all, just wow. So Jeffrey Epstein only went on the record one time publicly about Bitcoin. It was in 2017, an article called Nexaweb. And as we now know, well, as we already knew, Jeffrey Epstein was not a public figure. I mean, it turns out being a convicted sex offender is not something you don't want to. You're not the front man usually in the media for these types of things. But he did interestingly come out one time in this next web article and made this whole argument that bitcoin is Not a currency, it's a store of value. It's digital gold. So I scratched my head. I'm looking again. I'm just trying to put together a few pieces here. He's publicly out saying this narrative, that was a new narrative, public narrative, that bitcoin is not a currency, it's digital gold. He's funding this MIT group. This MIT group funded the developers that throttled Bitcoin and they funded all of the CBDCs. That looks pretty bad.

A (71:51)

All right, well, I want to jump in here and just say, at the level of the philosophy of science, this is a really important set of evidence. And the reason is because both of you had predictions that match the pattern that you couldn't have known ahead of time in these formerly secret files. So the point is, the allegation that there was a hijacking of Bitcoin just so happens to match the evidence that Aaron is talking about, which is then validated by a data dump of emails. And so the whole. The point is, is that definitive proof? No, but what it is, is, it is more than just, hey, look at this pattern. It looks like there was a hijacking that was a standing prediction. And now you have a bunch of evidence that has validated that prediction. That's the signal we look for in science that something is somewhere in the neighborhood of the truth.

B (72:49)

And we have more. We have more evidence here. This is just. This is just preliminary stuff. So I want. I just want to say two things and we'll let Aaron continue on the story here.

A (72:57)

Here.

B (72:59)

There's sort of two components, let's say, to the hijacking. One is whatever was going on with Epstein and mit, and the other is Tether, which we haven't talked about at all. This turns out to be. This might actually be the central story of what was going on with the hijacking of Bitcoin. So we'll have to talk about Tether, but I do want to take a moment to steal a little bit of Aaron's thunder because I have two Epstein emails pulled up, up that are going to be relevant here. And they're going to be. They're going to be important for several reasons. One, I want to address this idea that bitcoin is decentralized totally and it's outside of anybody's control. It turns out that despite great sounding theory, there are many centralized points of control in bitcoin, the most important of which historically has been the control of, of the software who gets to determine what gets put into Bitcoin's code. And what importantly doesn't get put into Bitcoin's code? The reason that the latter is important is because in the history of the hijacking, what I mentioned before that was so critical is not scaling the way that Satoshi designed the project to scale. So what the bitcoiners want to say is they want to say, hey, look, we didn't make changes. How could we have hijacked Bitcoin because we didn't change the code? Well, in this case, it's because that piece of code was supposed to be changed, was designed to be changed. And by not changing it, you've turned it into some totally different economic model that only has seven transactions per second and you don't even use it in commerce. Okay, so the other piece of the puzzle here is that people have to understand how individuals in power think and how they operate. And it's not in a decentralized, emergent way where nobody's scheming or planning or trying to take control of things. It's like, it's actually pretty. It's actually pretty clear what they're trying to do. And as evidenced by emails that we have from the. The Epstein files. So I'm going to read two. They're very short, but they're going to be illustrative of. Of several different concepts here. Okay, so the first is from Joy Ito, this individual at MIT in 2015. He's writing an email to Jeffrey Epstein when the Bitcoin foundation is falling apart. He says, by the way, we're in the middle of a shit show right now. As the Bitcoin foundation melts down, I'm going to probably help create a place for the core developers to land. I'm talking to everybody involved right now. Okay, so that's in 2015. We have an email. This is less than 20 days later. It's a little bit longer of a quote. This is also from Joy Ito to Jeffrey Epstein because Epstein contributed some money to Ito to set this project up at mit. He says this is a direct quote from the email. The way that Bitcoin is organized currently is that there are five core developers and around 100 contributors to the core code. The five core developers are like Linus Torvalds of Linux. They decide what changes are made to the code. One of the five is the lead developer, Vladimir, and one is the chief scientist, Gavin. Gavin, Vladimir and Corey Fields were being paid out of a nonprofit organization called the Bitcoin Foundation. A few weeks ago, it blew up when one of the board members declared the foundation bankruptcy. Many organizations scrambled to step in into the vacuum created by the foundation and take control of the developers. We moved quickly, talking to all of the various stakeholders, and the three developers decided to join the Media Lab. This is a big win for us. Earlier in the thread, he says used gift funds to underwrite this, which allowed us to move quickly and win this round. Thanks, Joy Ito. So that's there. He is using the language of taking control of the bitcoin core developers. That's not some crazy conspiracy. That is a message from the MIT guy to Jeffrey Epstein in the process of thanking him for sending those funds. So that's a critical little glimmer into the world of how power is operating here.

A (77:25)

Yeah, when I read that, my first thought was about your book, because this is the evidence that you guys are right. And I've certainly heard a million times from people who don't seem to have substantive arguments that you guys don't understand what you're talking about or something. But here it is, you know, in black and white in the Epstein files. Who would have thunk?

C (77:46)

I mean, again, this brownstone article that I write, where I wrote, where I think, well, hey, maybe he was involved in this. That is the smoking gun. Not only did he fund, and we have an email that says he funded that project and those developers by name. I mean, it doesn't get any more conclusive than that.

A (78:04)

We will link your article and those couple of emails so people can take a look at them.

C (78:09)

Yeah, and I think the emails, at least one of them is in the article. But then you start expanding outward because then you start asking these questions, because all we knew was Epstein writing about cryptocurrency Bitcoin in 2017. So how far back does this go? Well, we then find it actually goes back to 2009. And there's a whole other segment of this that I'm researching and tracking down. But Epstein gets heavily involved in crypto in 2011. He has this conference on his island called the Mindshift conference. And there he meets a guy by the name of Brock Pierce. And Brock Pierce, from that point forward, becomes Epstein's number one crypto advisor and becomes the front for his investments. Literally is the guy that is structuring the investment vehicles through which Epstein money flows. Because of course, people try to say, well, Epstein's not an investor. Of course, that's not how money works. You're not going to have a convicted sex offender on your cap table. You're going to try to find another way so that his money is there, but without him being there by name. And we typically never get to know how any of this works. This is offshore LLCs and all of this other stuff. We have these emails, which is a gold mine for this. So we find, I think there's something like 1800 messages between Brock Pierce and Jeffrey Epstein. I mean, they are working together on countless crypto projects. So we find, for instance, that Epstein invested in. You mentioned you use Coinbase. Epstein invested in Coinbase in 2014. So 12 years ago, Jeffrey Epstein is in Coinbase. But now the story gets even more interesting and I'll try to get the timetable. Well, I get the timetable right, but I want to put it in a compelling way. And I'm actually going to write a book about this. I'm thinking of calling it the Creature from Epstein Island. But what you have is we talked about 2015 being this pivotal year when the Bitcoin foundation collapsed, where Joy Ito got this email saying, yeah, we heard from a board member that the Bitcoin foundation collapsed. Well, guess who the chairman of the Bitcoin foundation was? It was none other than Brock Pierce, Jeffrey Epstein's crypto advisor. So that's one piece of information. Now, I want to go back to Blockstream, which Steve talked about as being this entity that people were sounding the alarm bells off, because Blockstream was a company founded by Bitcoin core developers. And their whole business model is based on throttling bitcoin@ the L1 so that they can create layer two solutions that they charge for. That is the basis of the Blockstream business model.

B (81:01)

Let me pause you just there, just to add a little color. Okay, this sounds cartoonish, what I'm about to say, but get this. All right, so we've got the critical Bitcoin core developers being employed by this company, Blockstream. The CEO of Blockstream is this guy Adam back.

A (81:17)

Okay?

B (81:18)

He's on record. This is another quote from the book. He's on record during one of these network capacity failure moments where the fees are 10, $20. He's literally on record saying, hey, why don't you be part of the solution to the problem of high fees on Bitcoin and use this product called the Liquid Network. Well, the Liquid Network is an alternative blockchain issued, created by Blockstream. It's not bitcoin. It's their own proprietary alternative network on which they issue tokens. And now we're learning they're working with nation states to try to onboard them onto the Liquid Network network. So you have, you have the CEO of Blockstream employing critical bitcoin core developers. That CEO is saying, hey, you know how there are high fees on bitcoin? Why don't you be part of the solution and use our product instead? And on their proprietary network, they get 100% of the transaction fees. It's like a cartoon villain, right?

A (82:35)

Yeah. Yeah. That's incredible. And if it's true, as you say it, it puts the lie to the whole line of the bitcoin core. Because these people are moonlighting on a competitive product where they're disproportionately incentivized.

B (82:54)

At least a critical. It's not all the bitcoin core developers, but it was the ones that held critical positions of power, especially at the most critical moments in bitcoin's history. They're liter. The CEO is advising people not to use bitcoin and to use their corporate product instead.

A (83:14)

All right, Aaron, do you want to pick up the story?

C (83:17)

Yeah. So now we know that Epstein is funding the bitcoin core developers after his advisor, Brock Pierce running bitcoin foundation collapses. And what they fund is the cementing of this digital gold narrative. They fund Segwit, Lightning Network, the things that kind of catch bitcoin at seven transactions per second. But there's more. We then find out in the files that Epstein invested a half a million dollars in Blockstream seven or eight months before funding the developers to cement these changes. So he had a direct financial interest benefiting from his now blockstream investment in hobbling and taking over the funding of these mit. Funding of these developers through mit. It's unbelievable. But it doesn't even stop there. Because as Steve mentioned, the big part of this story, which carries through in a big way today, is Tether. So it turns out that in addition to being Epstein's advisor and the chair of the bitcoin foundation, I think he may even still be the chair of the bitcoin foundation. That's another story for another day. Brock Pierce is the co founder of Tether. Now we talk about the fact that the narrative changed from digital cash to store value. And in order for something to be seen as a store of value, it would need to either maintain its value or go up in value. Right. Well, 2017 was a pivotal year. It was a breakout year for bitcoin. This is where the bitcoin price really skyrocketed and it started to hit. Hit mainstream news all over the world. There was a study from the University of Texas at Austin that found that more than 50% of the price appreciation of Bitcoin in 2017 was due to Tether. We also know during this time period from two different actions, one from the CFTC and one from the State of New York, that Tether didn't have the full reserves backing their stablecoin. So just by way of explanation here, a stablecoin is a digital currency that's tied to or pegged to the dollar. So one tether equals one dollar. And your assumption is, well, if I have one tether that's supposed to represent a dollar, then there must be at least a dollar's worth of assets. It doesn't necessarily have to be dollars, it could be be gold or Bitcoin or something else. But there are some assets in theory backing Tether. Well, Tether to this day has never passed an audit and until I think in the last week or two, they were never even able to secure an audit firm to audit them. And the CFTC found during this time period where all of this is going on around 2017, that they only had about 25, 26 cents on the dollar backing their tokens. So in other words, at this period of time where the store value story was being created, Tether was printing digital dollars out of thin air that weren't even backed by real dollars, which are also printed out of thin air. It's kind of like a Metaponzi scheme, I guess.

A (86:33)

Yeah, I was going to say this sounds like an exact mirror of the, what's it called, fractional reserve currencies in which banks effectively invent money by lo out loaning out money they don't have based on having a small fraction in house.

B (86:54)

So here's information that we couldn't put in the book because it wasn't rigorous enough. But this is, let's say industry knowledge that people would talk about, but it's nothing that you can prove during this time. Common knowledge is probably an overstatement, but among people who understood the power players in Bitcoin, it was clear that there was something funky going on, something suspicious going on with Tether and with this exchange called Bitfinex. And we did and it was like there, there seem to be bad actors, there seem to be employing people in the, let's say the, the domain of like information warfare, that there are some people who are making these really strong arguments that we got to have small blocks and you follow the money trail and it's like, I think it's this, this weird circle of people that, that are involved, but it's smoke there, but it's nothing you can, you you can put right down in a book. Well, plot twist. It turns out that Tether and Bitfinex have the same parent company called Ifinex. And would you believe it, that's also the parent company of Tether. So, and we, we have, we have also learned just in the past few years that Blockstream has been raising hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and that investment is led through Ifinex, the, the, the company, the parent company up Tether. So when, when Blockstream is raising, was doing these hundreds of millions of dollars of fundraising rounds, that's being led by the people that are the owners of Tether. So you have the, the, the conflict of interest here is absolutely enormous. And it's, it also confirms what I was saying before, the suspicions that we had that there's something wrong, there's something, there's, there's, in this weird network, there's something that really doesn't, that, that, that doesn't match up. And, and again, that, that appears to be where there was smoke, there was fire here.

A (89:02)

All right, I also want to, I hope this argument tracks, but there's also some evidence in what the pattern you're both describing that flows the other direction. In other words, I think we can infer from the fact that Epstein was all over the alterations to Bitcoin that, that he must have worked for intelligence. Because here's the thing about Epstein. Many of us hadn't really heard him speak until we saw this one hour Steve Bannon. I guess it was a test for a documentary that Bannon then made that we haven't seen. But it becomes immediately obvious to anybody who is a high quality thinker that Epstein was, wasn't that he was basically parroting commonly known things, trying to put them in way. He's basically, if you wanted to create, you know, a character that you couldn't give a script, he had the, you know, TED Talk level understanding of enough topics that he could, you know, respond to questions, but he makes strange errors. He's obviously not, he's not a super genius. He's just not. So if he's not a super genius, why does he show up in the world as a financial super genius, as a science super genius, and as a bitcoin super genius or crypto super genius? And the answer is, well, it wouldn't make sense for somebody who, you know, I'm sure he's not stupid, but he's not. He's. Crypto is hard to deal with at a logical level. So you would have to be highly dedicated. You couldn't be dedicated to 14 other things at the same time. So the point is, it makes logical sense that the deep state would spot crypto as an important problem and would put a leverage guy on it. We need a leverage guy to make things happen. It does not make sense that, that Jeffrey Epstein as a loan operator would have his hand in every pot and be able to be doing anything productive. So you know, the fact that he's somehow at the core of Bitcoin development at the same time he's at the core of science publishing and all the people whose books you want to read are being published by somebody who's at arm's length to Epstein. It just doesn't make any sense. Right. The only way it makes sense is if a bunch of smart people are deciding what to focus on and pointing Epstein at.

B (91:43)

And would you believe it? Since we got the Epstein emails, it's now come out that apparently Adam Back, the CEO of Blockstream was in fact on Epstein Island. I believe it was in 2014. And, and he waited until the emails came out to tell people. Well, I don't think he's admitted publicly yet that he was on, on Epstein Island. He did admit that Epstein invested into Blockstream Stream. But we also know that Austin Hill, one of the other co founders of Blockstream was also in the emails. It appears to be that the emails that we have appear to be them coordinating to go to Epstein Island. And there's one fascinating email, I don't know how many, this is one that I recommend people look at also to kind of see the thought process here of power players. It's from Austin Hill, one of the co founders of Blockstran Stream and he had, he's, he's, it has this long, long like several paragraph long email where he's going into detail of all the great world changing things he's going to do with his money and it's going to be like we're going to give free health care out to people and blah, blah, blah, and we're going to change the world. And it's going to be financed by taking a percentage of like the, the cash float of nation states. In other words, he, this was, I want to say this was in 2014 or 2015. He was envisioning that the company Blockstream was going to be onboarding nation states to their thing, not to Bitcoin to their thing. He'll take, they'll be the new middleman, take us the transaction fee and with all that money they were going to make, he's Going to help, you know, change the world and give people free health, healthcare. And there's a tweet. I believe it's still up there. I retweeted it maybe a month ago. There's a tweet. I want to say it's from 2014 or 2015, the same time period from Austin Hill, where it's a photo of the Caribbean island. And it says something along lines. I'm paraphrasing, you know, a great day on the islands, trying to figure out the future of finance by merging blockchain with traditional, traditional finance finance, something like that. And it matches up perfectly with the dates of the emails that were released in the Epstein files.

C (94:17)

But as you go through this, so what you find is that Epstein. So again, he's funding the throttling of bitcoin. They're funding the CBDC development. He's also an early investor in 2014 in Circle, which is the company behind USDC, which is now the largest stablecoin. And I haven't been able to prove this yet, but just because it's complicated structure. But if, if Brock Pierce is his crypto advisor and he's getting him into all of these deals, what, you know, what are the odds that he didn't invest in Tether in one way or another? Because there are emails back and forth at the very early formation of Tether, where Brock Pierce is asking Jeffrey Epstein for an introduction to Larry Summers. And in fact, by the way, and I'm still finding more and more emails in this, but I think in 2013, Larry Summers sends an email to Jeffrey Epstein and says, hey, what do you think about this Bitcoin, Mr. Money? I guess Larry Summers referred to Epstein as Mr. Money. So maybe in these circles they did think that this guy was this super genius on these alternative currencies.

B (95:23)

One more thing, and I know not to overwhelm you and your audience, there's one more line here that ends up being. Being important through Tether, and it's the connection with Lutnick, Howard Lutnick, who is, at least I think he is still the. Is it the Commerce Secretary or was. Aaron knows. Aaron and I just had a conversation a week or two ago and he was telling me some of the details here between, between Lutnick and Tether that I hadn't even heard before. But it should be noted that Lutnick was also Jeffrey Epstein's neighbor. So they apparently knew each other. He was on the island. And then we keep coming back to Tether and the corruption.

A (96:06)

Lutnick, who you know, just because it's narratively interesting, people should be aware that he's also an extremely lucky man who didn't happen to be at work in the World Trade center on 911 anyway, even though, because he was taking his son to his first day of kindergarten, which the New York City schools claim didn't start on that day.

B (96:32)

So, Aaron, can you give some of those details on the Lutnick Tether connection here?

C (96:38)

Yeah. So this gets really fascinating. So remember the backdrop on all of this. Tether has never completed an audit before. They have been found to not have reserves in two separate occasions. And so then this interesting thing happens. You know, a few years before the election, Howard Lutnick gets involved with Teth Tether and makes a $600 million investment into Tether in exchange for his company, Cantor Fitzgerald, getting essentially the exclusive contract to manage all of the Treasuries backing Tether. This is a very interesting thing to have done a few years back, given a few things. One, it's not clear if Tether was backed by anything at all, but there was no requirement that Tether be backed by US Treasuries. There was no regulation on this. So Tether could have been backed by, again, Gold, Crypt, whatever it happens to be. Caner Fitzgerald just comes in and says, hey, I'm going to invest $600 million, but I want to be able to manage the Treasuries backing your stablecoin then. And you have to understand something about Howard Lutenick in politics. He's not been a player in Republican politics. In fact, he was a major contributor to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2016. So no one in political circles was talking about Howard in the context of high level Republican Party politics. He goes from being a backer of Hillary Clinton to the chair of Trump's transition committee, an incredibly important position that's involved in selecting and vetting the entire Cabinet. So he gets into that position and actually tries to put himself up for Treasury Secretary. So just think about this for a second. Your company's got an exclusive deal to manage Treasuries for Tether, and now you're angling to get the Treasury Secretary position. I think people looked at that and said, hey, that's, that's, you know, a little bit too far even, you know, on, on the surface of things. So he ends up getting Commerce Secretary. But then what happens is they bring in this guy Bo Hinds to be the crypto advisor. And Lutenick and Bo Hinds are two of the big driving forces behind the Genius App Act. And the Genius act is known as this stablecoin legislation. I call it a backdoor cbdc which, which I'll explain. But what this bill does is essentially instead of having the Federal Reserve issue a central bank digital currency, what they decided is, well, hey, why don't we take private stablecoins that are already really popular. People use Tether and they use USDC. In fact, fact, in the last 12 months there was something like $33 trillion worth of transaction volume using these stablecoins, more than Visa. So let's take these popular private stablecoins and put them under the control of Congress. It's Congress, not the Federal Reserve by the way, that's responsible for financial surveillance. You know, we talked earlier about these know your customer anti money laundering laws. All of this kind of reporting that comes from Congress, not the Federal Reserve. So now through the Genius act two things happen that financial surveillance now applies to private stablecoins. But they added one other component. If you are going to be a legitimate legal stablecoin, you now have to back your stablecoin a hundred percent by US Treasuries. So the biggest single beneficiary of the Genius act is Howard Lutenick's firm, Cantor Fitzpatrick Gerald. So when I say, you know, the creature from Epstein's island, we're talking about a situation where literally he's making money on every single transaction made using Tether because he's managing all of the treasuries that back all of Tether.

A (100:32)

Well, I did say he was a very lucky guy.

C (100:34)

He is. He's a very lucky guy. And so, but you know why that isn't a major news story? I mean people like to talk about Nancy Pelosi and insider trading. This is a guy that came in and know, cut a deal to basically back the digital dollar and then, you know, push legislation to force the, you know, this company to be backed by Treasuries. It's, it's amazing.

B (100:56)

A couple more things on this. So we should, we should also talk a little bit about the, the consequences of using something like tether and Stablecoin. So with Bitcoin for example, it's when, when one is using Bitcoin, even if you own it and you're not using custodial wallets, it's still fairly easy for the government to track and control and survey. But also if your coins move to an exchange or if they move to a, a hop where the government has control, they can essentially seize your funds. This happens all the time. Where Coins on the Bitcoin network will be identified by the Feds as being participating in crime or whatever. And whenever those coins end up moving to an exchange or a place, a central hub, the Feds will say, okay, we're going to seize these assets now, now because we think they're involved in crime. Happens constantly. Well, with Tether and with stablecoins, it becomes effectively trivially easy to track, control sensor and just take one's digital money here. And again, this also happens all the time. So there's, I think it's, I don't, I don't know off the top of my head, so I'm not going to speculate, but I was just reading a news article about another, you know, so many 10 millions dollars that were just frozen on behalf of the US government, pinging tether to say, hey, you know, freeze, freeze this money. Make sure this money doesn't move. And it's easy on the Tether network to do that. It's even, it's more centralized than, than Bitcoin. It's like, it's essentially like a private company that's issuing these tokens and it has control over the tokens. So if we go into the future world, which is everybody's going to be using digital currency like Tether, even if it's not a formal cbdc, that is already the dystopian future. And one more point of, a sad point to make here is Tether has been very strategic in some of its marketing and obviously its plays here. And I know that they have invested, I want to say it's either tens of millions or maybe hundreds of millions into Rumble, Rumble, which is the, the alternative, you know, video company where you can host videos. So I get the impression that they want to start monetizing with Rumble. So people, you know, they're going to have their more decentralized or something, you know, video platform and then people are going to be using Tether to pay content creators there. And people should know this, this might be a bad trend, unfortunately.

A (103:57)

So there are two ways to interpret this. One of them is clearly Rumble is a problem because it's where people who've been censored on YouTube go. And so to the extent that you want to snuff out a kind of discussion, Rumble is the same kind of problem that Bitcoin was. If you use tether and backdoor CBDCs and stablecoins that are readily controllable, the point is you can shift the incentives on Rumble. That's one interpretation.

B (104:31)

Yeah.

A (104:31)

The other interpretation is that there is an attempt to corrupt Rumble itself.

B (104:36)

Sure.

A (104:38)

So that's fascinating. I do want to make sure people understand two things. One, the question of CBDCs is pretty arcane but should be top of mind for people. If you care about freedom, the idea that you are going to be lured into or forced into the use of a centralized bank digital currency that is effectively game over for our ability to speak independently. Because what it does is it creates a control leverage where effectively your ability to function as a citizen accessing the market can evaporate just as it did for the Canadian truckers. And if all your money is this way and suddenly you can't buy chicken because you don't like MRNA shots, then the discussion that we had during COVID that actually allowed us to push back becomes impossible. Right. The number of people who can withstand and that kind of pressure where they are, you know, suddenly insulated from access to their own money is tiny. So you won't win another battle if we lose this one. So even if it doesn't seem like your cup of tea in terms of things you like to think about, CBDC should be on your mind. The second point I wanted to make is that by many measures we are headed towards a financial collapse of it could be many times 2008, but something in that order of magnitude that collapse offers those who have been quietly scheming behind the scenes to usher in a CBDC offers them a backdoor mechanism for doing it. Because most of us have have a fair fraction of our wealth in banks. If those banks default, which is a natural consequence of what is likely to unfold as a result of bubbles and fraud in the market, among other things, then your money comes back to you through the fdic, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. And as far as I understand, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation could give you your money back in CBDC4 form. Take it or leave it. And if that happened suddenly, we are living in a brand new world in which all of the people you're depending on to make sense of the world so that you can understand it are now in danger of starvation if they step out of line.

C (107:19)

Well, there are several things. This has obviously been my big issue for the last three and a half years. And the more and more I explored how our current system works, we already effectively have have a CBDC anyway. The money that you have in the bank is already digital. In fact, the government writes checks through the Federal Reserve which uses an Oracle database. So most of our money is digital. It's already tracked. So we Already have a problem. So that's one of the things that my research revealed on this front. But these stablecoins are a backdoor cbdc. This has become difficult for me because I was fighting CBDCs, and everybody's like, well, you must be celebrating now that Trump has signed an executive order saying there's no cbdc. And I'm like, no, it's the opposite. We've done this backdoor CBDC where $33 trillion worth of transaction volume is now basically under CBDC type control and regulation. And based on the growth rate of these stable coins and popularity of these stablecoins, by 2030, there'll be more stablecoin use than Visa, MasterCard and direct deposit combined. That's actually just the natural growth rate rate right now. So it's already kind of game over through these regulated stablecoins. But that's not the worst part of it. There's something now called the Clarity Act. So Money represents about 5% of global assets. Your retirement plan, your 401k stocks, bonds, commodities, gold, your house. Those things make up 95%. And what the Clarity act is trying to do, is it. What they're trying to do with the Clarity act is basically create digital tokens that represent everything that you own and then add the same surveillance to that. So they're going to have the ability to program, track and censor not just your money. Let's say you don't want the shot. They could shut off your ability to sell your car. They could shut off your stock portfolio. We are moving towards the tokenization of everything Larry Fink said at Davos. Everything will be tokenized. And I've been a big fan of tokenization for a long time. But not the form of tokenization where it's controlled by governments and third parties and they can shut it off. I thought the promise of tokenization, kind of like Bitcoin, was supposed to be money you could use without third parties. I thought tokenization could be a way for people to trade anything of any value around the world. And instead it's turning into what I think is the anchor piece of the digital control system. And that's the Clarity act, which is being. Being slammed through right now, even when we're in the midst of what could turn out to be World War 3. If you actually look at what the administration is doing and what they're pushing Fast and Furious right now through Congress is to get this Clarity act signed.

A (110:09)

So a, that may not be a mere coincidence that these things are happening at the same Time. But B, let me make sure I understand it because, you know, now I struggle a little bit with the question of tokenization and what it means. I have a house. For it to become a token doesn't turn it into something virtual. It's still a house. But if the idea is that my house becomes represented by a token which is somehow legally tied up with that property, such that to trade the house, I must trade the token, then it becomes. It becomes a mirror of a centralized bank, digital currency. Because at the point that I say something awkward about MRNA shots, then the point is, well, your house isn't yours to sell, right? In fact, we've sold it to someone else. So that is a frightening prospect if that's what you're getting at. Am I right so far?

C (111:07)

That's what I'm getting at. But where they're starting is not necessarily with your house. Where they're starting is with your 401k and with your stocks and your bonds. And you already have, for instance, the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange building platforms for this kind of tokenization. BlackRock is invested in this, and Cantor Fitzgerald and Howard Lutnick has invested in this. And so this is something where the technology's been built and the passage of the Clarity act is what's going to enable that to happen. So all of a sudden you don't ever have to touch cryptocurrency. You don't have to have a wallet wallet. Your existing financial instruments, they'll just change the technology underlying that and add all of these surveillance features. That's why this is so critically important. So.

A (111:51)

So I want to ask you something. This is now connecting to a different conversation that I thought was an independent thread. The conversation about the great taking and the virtualization of assets. So this is not tokenization, but what I learned in pursuing. I read the book the Great Taking, and I recommend others do it as well. I learned a tremendous amount from it. It's a short book. Is that the example of stocks? Many of us remember a day when to own a stock. Let's say you had stock in ip, if you have stock in IBM, it actually came in the form of a physical certificate, which, if you're smart, you put in your safe. Because a physical certificate is physical. It is governed by the laws of physical ownership. So it can be stolen from you, it can be recovered, these sorts of things. What it turns out has happened, if I understand it correctly, is that stocks are now owned in an analogous way to the way people who have bitcoin in Coinbase own Bitcoin, they own an iou, not the real thing. And in the case of stocks, there is a provision in the contract through which you acquired your IOU for stock in, in our example IBM, that says that it's yours to buy and sell, but that there is a priority given to using it to settle the debts of a third party who has used it as collateral. So only in the extreme case that we have a bunch of defaults, are people even going to know that there's a provision in which the stock that they owned yesterday day is no longer theirs because it's been used to settle a debt they know nothing about because some entity they've never heard of has defaulted. Right. So that is not tokenization, that's virtualization. But how do these two things relate?

C (114:08)

Well, the, the token is going to represent that contractual interest that you have, so that IO, because right now you have an iou, right? You don't own the physical shares. That's what's going to be tokenized. So something like the Great Taking could happen with a click of a mouse button. All of a sudden the economy blows up, oil goes to $500, derivatives blows up, and then your broker files for bankruptcy. When your broker files for bankruptcy, they're going to be able to transfer the ownership through tokenization to their secured creditor, who's likely to be one of the big four banks. So I view tokenization as the technical catalyst that makes the Great Taking efficiently possible.

A (114:49)

Okay, so let me ask you this then. As you pointed out so insightfully at the beginning, it didn't matter whether you were on the right or left. In the aftermath of 2008 and the tarp program, bailouts, et cetera, citizens were irate that they were paying the debts of people who had steered us into this harm, while people who had done nothing but have a loan function in a way they didn't expect under conditions they couldn't foresee, lost their homes and their, their, their wealth.

B (115:28)

The,

A (115:30)

the technological change ushered in by virtualization and then tokenization that you describe is almost like programming the bailout into the physical world. So if I own a house that is represented by a token, and the laws that govern that token allow it to be transferred under some circumstances that I haven't thought to look for in the fine print and probably wouldn't understand if I read them right, then the point is the bailout is baked in. When the stuff starts going belly up because people have made reckless decisions, then my house ends up in somebody else's somebody else's possession. And then somebody's going to have to explain to me, oh, that's because it was used as collateral. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the point is, well, when did we vote for that? And the answer? Oh, you know, it happened, you know, the Clarity Act. Did you not hear about that?

C (116:28)

No.

A (116:28)

Is there some reason I wouldn't have heard about? Well, we, you know, we were going to war against Iran. So I mean, yes, I'm sure that's an overly simplified version of the picture, but am I right that a bailout is effectively baked into the tokenization?

C (116:44)

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, to a large degree I've been arguing that we're, you know, facing this threat of technocracy, which is digital IDs and the tokenization of all of our assets and everything else. And technocracy is a political ideology that doesn't value property rights or individual rights. It basically says, you know, all of our decisions and assets will be managed well, they won't even be ours anymore. But it'll be scientists and engineers and now increasingly AI that will be deciding what it is that we can and cannot do. This has been a movement for 90 years and really since, you know, for the last 50 years, since 1973, there's been a lot going on behind the scenes legally to make this happen. So you talked about what the Clarity act is, only the final piece of it, the great taking. There have been changes that have happened, happened in the UCC laws in all 50 states that make this happen that started in 1994. This has been a long plan. And actually I did an article about this. I started thinking about these click wrap agreements that we signed. You know, every time you get a piece of software or rental car agreement or even your, you know, bank agreement, it you just scroll to the bottom, right. So I wanted to look at, well, wait, what are we actually giving up? And what I've come to now is that the average person signs about 200 of these click wrap agreements. A and if you were to read these agreements, it would take two hours a day, 365 days a year, which of course nobody does, nor could you do. But I then created an AI to kind of analyze and break up a score that shows, well, what, what's actually happening. And it turns out we've already given away our privacy, we've given away our data, we've given away our ability to dispute and in some cases we've given up our economic ownership interest. You know, you know, a lot of people like to say, BlackRock, Vanguard, State street, these guys own everything. That's not true. They are actually managing money on behalf of us and others. But what we've already given them is voting rights. Because, you know, back to your story about a physical stock certificate. If you own an ownership interest in a company, you have a physical share and then you have the right to vote. You get to vote on the board of directors, you get to vote on these shareholder issues. Well, your 401k is a whole basket of stocks. Why aren't you getting hundreds and hundreds of notices for all of these companies that you own a small percentage interest in? Well, the reason is that if you actually read the fine print of your agreement, you've given your voting rights to BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard and so forth.

A (119:17)

Holy moly.

C (119:18)

So this has been happening for a couple of decades and we've been conditioned to it. And so now we really already own nothing. But the Clarity act gives the technical capacity for them to lock down and transfer assets in a very efficient way. That's why I've been sounding the alarm on it. The reason nobody's talking about it is the way that it's been presented, the propaganda behind it. And I have a big article coming out on this is they're saying, well, this is great for crypto because once we pass these clear rules now 401ks are going to be able to buy Bitcoin and 401s are going to be able to buy by these other cryptocurrencies. They don't realize that the actual purpose of it is to create a framework, a technical framework, to tokenize our real world assets, not crypto, and put it under this regulatory regime. And so it's hard to fight against this because there are a lot of people that want to make money off of this. The crypto people think trillions of dollars are going to come in and pump up and inflate the price of their cryptocurrency. And the people that are building the tokenization platform certainly aren't going to alert people about what's going on. And so it's very difficult to this information out because of the forces against it and because of how complex it is and how nuanced it is.

B (120:35)

I want to say a couple things. One, about this idea of the Trojan horse being celebrated as it's being rolled into inside the city walls. So this is something that I'm certainly guilty of, having been a terribly naive libertarian in the early bitcoin days, is I bought the hype around bitcoin. I really thought this was this world changing technology that was going to disrupt power structures. I had no idea, no idea the sophistication of the opponents that we were facing. So the idea that this ragtag group of libertarian idealists are going to create a private money that can't be controlled and like, you know, maybe, maybe people won't be, you know, forced into paying for wars that they don't support. And like we're going to do this with our cool new technology. That's just crazy naive. I think in hindsight, in hindsight, I don't even think they had to work very hard to hijack bitcoin. I think it was sort of a. When you consider the types of projects that these people have undertaken, the established power players, the central bank banks, you're talking about organizations and groups of people and networks that can topple dictators if they like, all over the world. The idea that they're just going to roll over and accept some alternative currency, it's not really feasible from the beginning. So one thing that I have heard suggested is that maybe part of the reason that bitcoin was maybe allowed to operate as long as it was out in the open is to, is to get some of the loudest critics on board with this idea of digital currency. So like the libertarian idealistic folks here who, you know, who really don't like CBDCs, they're really skeptical of centralized power. A huge percentage of them have been effectively captured by the bitcoin narrative and they think they're going to get rid of rich. If they just kind of go along to get along and don't upset the apple cart, maybe the price of bitcoin will keep going up and they'll make money. So I do think that we're seeing this too with the genius act and the clarity act, sort of there's this push that like, yeah, we're going to adopt cryptocurrencies and it's going to make the world a better place. And meanwhile the devil's in the details and it's like accomplishing the opposite of what the ideologues and naive people thought it would accomplish. But I do want to, I do want to step back and just. And not and say it's not all doom and gloom here because there is in fact a big difference between, let's say the formally stated law and the common law. So when we're talking about when you have a stock certificate and the ownership of it is playing by the laws of physics because It's a physical thing.

A (123:42)

Even that.

B (123:42)

I don't think that's quite. That doesn't. That's not quite right because we still have social infrastructure in practice that says I lost my certificate and so I am the rightful owner of it. And then I have other ways of proving that I was, that I'm the real owner. If somebody steals a copy and they go to the Xerox machine and then now there's two certificates, who is the rightful owner?

A (124:09)

Hold on, I didn't mean to imply that they obey the laws of physics. What I meant meant to imply was that we have comprehensible laws that adjudicate this.

B (124:20)

Yes, right, yes. Well, that's the part is that the laws are separate from the document. And this is also going to be the case here with let's say the digital world and the contracts we're agreeing to. So just because we are accepting the terms of agreement when we download a piece of software, doesn't actually mean that we are legally obligated by the rules that we're accepting. I know it seems intuitive that we are, but if it turns out that it's predatory in there, there is actually a social technology, political technology and infrastructure that can say actually that contract is invalid. We have the common law tradition is trying to protect from, let's say, abuses of the formal law law to preserve order and civilization.

A (125:14)

Yeah, There are many reasons a contract can be invalid. It can be invalid because you don't benefit from it. Presumably if you get a piece of software, you do, but could be invalid for that reason. It can be invalid because it's deliberately opaque, which I think they are. But you're right, the fact that you have signed something that technically says, yes, I accept the surrender of this and you know, you can't sign away your constitutional rights, interestingly. So there are lots of reasons it can be invalid. And people should not take the assumption that just because it's there in black and white and they clicked okay, that these things are enforceable because many are.

B (125:53)

Exactly. And if they're coming for your assets, you know, and if, let's say you got your, the deed, the property deed that to your house got digitized and somebody is claiming up, up. Ah, look, because of this such and such a rule, now we own your house. We aren't forced to submit to that being a legitimate legal structure. So there's hope here that sort of lies outside the law that says even if these schemes are pulled off, that doesn't mean we're all going to actually be Impoverished, necessarily.

A (126:25)

Well, here's the thing, Steve. You said that you had been painfully naive about. About the fact that we were going to make a better world with crypto. And I wanted to suggest you're the right person to suggest this too, because of your philosophical bent. I have a. A principle that I live by, which I've probably said to you before, which is no matter how cynical you become, you're still being naive. So I would. I want to fix that. I think it's true. But the reason why it's true is. Explains the naivete of people, even like us, who are used to looking into the abyss. Imagine for a second that minted at some rate, were people who were completely free of moral constraints. Constraint. We know that these people exist. We have names for them, right? Arguably, a sociopath is certainly a psychopath is. But imagine that they circulate among us and that there are processes, even unintentional processes, that cause them to cluster together and to seek power. Well, the answer is they have every move on the board, including all of the moral moves. They can behave morally as long as that pays. And as soon as it doesn't pay, they're free to do things that you and I wouldn't be. So once you imagine that these people exist, there are forces that will group them together and that they will together seek power. And they will do so with tools you can't even imagine because you would never think to do it, right, what would those people look like? They would look like what is strongly suggested by the collection of evidence around Epstein. And in fact, the Epstein phenomenon appears poised to drag people in that direction. Right? If Epstein found everybody's weaknesses, pulled everybody beyond their own moral limits, and then there was no route back for one reason or another, whether it's because somebody was afraid that their wife would find out, or somebody had committed a crime and didn't want to go to jail or whatever it was. Once those people have nothing to lose, then the point is they are in a position to be dragged further and further into the darkness. So basically what I'm saying is I don't think it is repeat instances of naivete. I think it is the downside of being decent. If you are decent, you are going to find yourself shocked by the indecency of others again and again, again. And you wouldn't want it any other way. Like, it's good to prepare for this thing, but just get ready. Because people with no moral compass exist and they're going to find new ways of gaming the system and taking Advantage of everybody else at every opportunity.

C (129:36)

Well, you know, and I, I will say I used to believe in the political process, spent a lot of time in that. And then, you know, then I thought, well, maybe there's a legal recourse. And now there's Rogers case. But we're going to do another Enemies of the State event at the Libertarian Party convention. And the number of people that have been incarcerated has doubled. And I've seen enough of these court hearings and read enough of these court documents. People that I know personally, and this isn't a civil case, but the doj, they have a pattern and it's not around finding the truth. They are interested in getting wins and they will suppress information, they will misrepresent information as a matter of process. And it's very demoralizing. And I've actually talked to some lawyers that have gotten into this where maybe their first case was working on one of these crypto prisoners. And it completely warped their view of the law. Like finding out that judges own some of the private prisons. It's just, you know, and it gets to a point where you don't want to continue to dig into it because it, it never comes out favorable.

A (130:43)

Yeah, it's, it's everywhere you look.

B (130:45)

So let me, let me speak a little bit more precisely then. So to, to be clear, my operating model of worldly power has, has gotten so pessimistic that I am saying I, I think that there. Groups of individuals who can, who, who, who. One will have predictive power of their next action if you model them as Satan incarnate.

A (131:17)

Okay, so I have bad news for you, Steve. Okay, you're still being naive.

C (131:22)

Okay.

B (131:23)

Worse than Satan. Okay, you gotta help me out on that one. I don't know how to make it more extreme, but I was actually just talking to a friend about this and I was saying, saying that one of the ways I'm viewing it is, is that if one is so, so turns out morality is this really powerful constraint on people's behavior that gets unbelievably deep into their psychology. And when one is thinking about how to interact with the world, one is implicitly always checking with one's moral constraint constraints. And this is good, this is a feature, this is what we want. However, as you said, you know, there are some percentage of people who don't have that moral constraint and it might even be more accurate to model them as saying they have embraced inverting the morality of, of regular folks to, to see that there are tactics and tools available to them. Them that give them an enormous amount of power that other people are not participating in. So I was, I was using the analogy of cake. There's like a certain amount of cake on the table, and if you behave yourself, you eat the good cake and then there's the people that are constraining themselves with morals or eating the good cake, and then they all leave and then there's like a ton of evil cake that's left over. And all you got to do to eat the evil cake that's there is just, you know, loosen your moral constraints and you'll find that there's. There's a bounty awaiting. Awaiting one for, for embracing evil. So that is, that is how I'm modeling things here. At least I, I do think that's what we're up against. That sort of makes sense that that space is going to be taken by some entities. However, my, My point is to say, despite that, in the face of that, there's still cause for optimism. Because even if in, in their diabolical schemes, they're trying to harm you and take your money and take your stuff and, and, you know, harm your neurology, whatever it is, it doesn't mean that even if they find some crazy legal, technically legal way of harming you and stealing from you doesn't mean you have to go along with it. So I don't want people to feel like they're locked in. It's like, oh, no, this. This criminal says he owns my house and I'm just going to roll over and give him my house. I don't think we have. We don't have to live in that world, you know.

A (133:43)

No, we don't have to live in that world. And I always hesitate to say it because, you know, it will be portrayed by whoever as somebody, you know, crazed admission of criminal intent. It is nothing of the kind. But there's a reason that the First Amendment is what it is, and there's a reason that the Second amendment is what it is. And it is because the founders were well aware of the danger of tyranny and they enabled us to fight back. And these schemes ultimately may leave us no choice. If people have targeted anything and everything that we own, and they clearly have, have, then we will do what human beings do to stave off, you know, starvation and wolves. And that is, you know, that is just simply the nature of, of the beast. I do find your point fascinating. I've been struggling over the same question as I see what is not exactly in the Epstein evidence. We've seen but is strongly implied by what we have seen. The question is how could a person possibly find themselves desiring of the things that Epstein was apparently availing them of? And more to the point, to the extent that occasionally some person is so broken that they would find that appealing, there are a bunch of them and they've got a lot of power and they function in the world and, and that is a shocking discovery. So the question really is, is there something that beyond some threshold pushes people in the direction of elaborating their capacity for evil rather than stifling it? And I agree with you, something does seem to push in that direction the more and I would guess at the following. Morality is interesting. I've written a paper on why it evolves. Basically my argument is, my argument with David Lottie is that it comes down to a trade off that morality, moral actions involve a constraint, the unwillingness to do something that would be profitable. And so for the context of this conversation, those of us who are morally constrained are passing up profits that we might make in evolutionary terms. And why would we do that? And the obvious answer is there are ways in which that can be a wise strategy, which is why morality itself has evolved. And I would argue that one of them is that the people who lean in the direction of evil, the people who are less morally confused, constrained have an advantage in the short term.

B (136:39)

Yes.

A (136:39)

And those who are morally constrained have an advantage in the long term. Now there's nothing that says that these short term aren't going to do us in. In the near term we have to be on our guard. Much to Aaron's point about the things that are in motion that we're not paying attention to. But as you say, Steve, we shouldn't lose hope because in the end, apparently the fact that human beings are overwhelming capable of moral self restraint says that that has counterintuitively been a successful strategy. So let us hope that those forces that make it a successful strategy are in play at this moment. Let us do what we can to augment and enable them and let us embrace others who clearly are agreed to the same principle.

B (137:31)

Yes, and one of the strategies that we have have, I, I, I get uncomfortable talking about we, the morally righteous and the, the morally good like that. You know, it's very. We got to be real careful. We got to be.

A (137:44)

I didn't say that, I said we who are willing to be morally constrained. And I take it that all good people. No, well, but all good people bypass some opportunities.

B (137:56)

I'm just saying even, even the idea of you know, good people. I, I, I, I think I'm really in the middle of learning the depth of traditional faith here.

A (138:08)

We're failing at the white pilling you initiated 10 minutes ago.

B (138:12)

No, no, no, I'll get around to it. We're going there. I just, I think, put it this way, it is incredibly important if we care about goodness and truth and love that we do not mistake. Let's say that we don't trick ourselves into thinking we're better than we are. We need a kind of a moral humility here that I think is, it is, is paramount and strategically necessary. So this is kind of what I, where I'm getting, where I'm getting at. One of the issues that the, the dark side has, has, is they have problems with trust because they're liars and schemers and Machiavellians. That's sort of the rules of the space in which they're operating. That affords them many short term opportunities, but they're losing out on long term coordination opportunities that you only get. We have some cake they can't eat and it's like really trying to speak truthfully and honestly even at short term cost. You're training, trading, sometimes you're trading your short term credibility for long term credibility here by saying things that are true but harm you in the short run. And I think obviously living through Covid prime example of this all kinds of short term pain that skeptics of the MRNA vaccine for example, had to go through that ends up being vindicated in the long run. And it's important that we do the exact same thing right now in crypto and with the threat of the digitization of auction our economy that you know, the guarantee there's going to be a whole lot of hate coming. Your direction, my direction, Aaron's directions after this conversation. But it is critically important now on this team that if, if there are wolves in the pin, there are, there are wolves wearing sheep clothing with us. We have to point out that that is the case even at, at, at that cost of being ridiculed and mocked here because the stakes are great. So the optimistic story is I think this is what the process looks like of us using what we have to our strategic advantage, which is long term truth telling and this type of thing. But it's going to require I think a lot of people, hopefully more and more prominent people like yourself and others to come out and say, hey guys, let's not sign everybody up for, for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies right now because this might actually be the. That might be an end game. It's not that maybe you're not going to make money or whatever. It's like that, that might actually be a disaster scenario that, that we should avoid. And that's so it hurts also just like it hurts my soul to say a little bit because I literally wrote, I wrote this book what's the big deal about Bitcoin? In 2014, I was the guy making the case for how bitcoin is this amazing world changing thing. A bunch got a bunch of people invol excited about it and now I got to kind of put my tail between my legs and say, geez, not only is this not so exciting, it might be like something that's profoundly dystopian and evil at the end of the run here.

A (141:36)

Yeah, I mean that's always the danger that anything that is set in motion can be captured or disrupted or displaced or whatever it is that happens. And I do, you know, there's another. If we zoom out, we were granted some rights. We were given a brilliant skeletal description of a civilization in which we're right. We are free to think independently, to fearlessly speak about what we have concluded, to defend ourselves, to have property, to not have the government, government rifle through our stuff because it feels like it. If we are accused of a crime in which our rights might be taken away, we have every advantage that we are entitled to in court. We're allowed to confront the witnesses against us, we are allowed to see the evidence, we are allowed to have ourselves presented to our lawyers without delay, speedy trial, all of these things. None of that has changed. It is a profound irritant to those who wish to control us. And so they are always plotting ways to undo it. And here I'm afraid, what we've spotted is a mechanism whereby they don't really have to. They don't have to undo it because they can supersede it in a way that the founders, if they had understood that it was possible, would surely have been blocked. But they couldn't because the technology is so central to the way it functions. And so we have to just remember who we are, what we're entitled to, and what the logical implications of that are for what they're doing. Right. They may think they have the right to give me a shot I don't want to take. And they may think they have the right to prevent me from spending money if I resist. The answer answer is no, that's obviously wrong. You may have the power to coerce me, you may Be able to bring men with guns, hold me down and inject me with something doesn't mean you had the right to do it, even if it says so on paper.

B (143:53)

Strong agree. Hallelujah.

A (143:55)

Hallelujah. Aaron, do you want to.

C (143:58)

Yeah, I mean, I don't think I'm black pill, you know, I actually spend most of my time trying to exit the system and use parallel systems and you know, so the, the answer, answer to Getting stuck with CBDCs is to exit the dollar and use alternative currencies. The answer to getting stuck with the healthcare system that we have, that one person every minute in this country files for medical bankruptcy and most of those have insurance, is to form a medical trust, exit the system, look into medical tourism and just not comply. And if enough of us do that, it's hard to fight within the system because I think the system itself is so corrupted that you lose by fighting, fighting it to a degree. But we can build alternatives and that's where I spend most of my time. But even still with that, I look at something like the hijacking of Bitcoin and I say, well, how do we prevent that from happening again? And I still don't have a good answer.

A (144:47)

Well, not only that, though I agree with you that there are many things that we can do to insulate ourselves from some of this. I don't think we can insulate ourselves themselves perfectly. I mean, for one thing, take the example of your home ownership and the danger posed to you by a bank default that makes it impossible for you to pay your loan on time that then subjects you to your house being repossessed. That is something you can resist. List if you can own your home outright, which most of us can't. So there's technically something to do, but practically it's going to be very difficult. And what's really protecting us is that they can't afford to do it to all of us at once. So I guess the question is, on the one hand, protecting yourself by exiting in rational ways. It would be great if there was a central repository, repository of descriptions of how to do that. Maybe there is. But the other thing is we do have to figure out how to fight back. The fact that we may be protected from a CBDC because we've spotted it coming doesn't help us so much if our neighbors are about to have the squeeze put on them because they didn't see it coming and suddenly they're going to be starving because they can't spend their money.

B (146:18)

Yeah, and I would love to be able to sit here and say, well, that's why this new cryptocurrency project is going to revolution everything. And this is the one, you know, you can escape to. And look, if they can hijack bitcoin, as far as I can tell, they can hijack anything. So. So going forward, there are some interesting other crypto projects out there that seem to have privacy more baked into them from the beginning. I think those are. Those are promising. But whatever the attempted solution is going forward, we always have to keep in mind everything can be hijacked. Even if we have some amazing liberating technology for a few years. Years. If it becomes too successful, we should expect that the forces will try to infiltrate and corrupt it, just as they've done before.

C (147:04)

Yeah, and I think maximalism is, is a bad idea. I mean, so, I mean, I use, you know, privacy coins, like Zano and everything else, but I also use gold. But my approach is that, you know, I, I want to be a sovereignty maximalist, I guess, and not wedded to any particular technology, but at the same time be vigilant. We've learned something, right? We may have been naive originally, but I think we've got some battle scars. And so maybe we're. We can maybe not prevent it entirely, but buy a little bit more time within these projects. Hopefully people will be more vocal. But as much as I say that, I mean, the people, honestly, you know, when you look at the genius act and the clarity act and everything else, part of the reason that more people don't know about it is that a lot of the people that were on the forefront are in prison or have been suppressed by the state that's actually actively happening still to this day. So the people that would be the best voices for this can't speak.

A (147:55)

So.

C (147:56)

So now other people have to stand up and talk about it.

B (148:00)

I have a friend who, we've talked about this before, and he essentially says it can be modeled as the eternal cat and mouse game. So it's not that one is ever going to reach the point of liberation, and then everything is good from here on out. It's that you buy a few more years for freedom. A few more years, A few more years. And then there's this ongoing strategic adjustment as both sides are reacting to one another. I also think, you know, it reminds me when we had our first conversation, Brett, about the, the Dark Age. It was like, okay, what do we, what do we do from here? What, where do we go? Because it's sort of overwhelming to say, yeah, okay, maybe we've been living in a dark age. But, like, in terms of, like, concrete action or what do you do if the paradigms are wrong, it doesn't tell you what the. You know, if the old paradigms are wrong, it doesn't tell you what new, correct paradigms are. And, you know, my, My take then is that the first step towards getting out of the dark age is recognizing that you've been in one. And I feel like the first step here in trying to play this cat and mouse game about money and digital currency is just recognizing the stakes involved and recognizing that there is both smoke and fire and speaking and identifying it. I don't know exactly what comes after it, but I think step one is just identifying.

A (149:18)

Yeah, I agree. This is obviously step one. And the hard part, unfortunately, for this modern incarnation of it, is that it's so technical that it is hard to call people's attention to it because their eyes glaze over as soon as you get into the nitty gritty. So I. I mean, I think we've done a pretty good job of it, but it's important for people to understand that you don't need to understand cryptography to understand why bitcoin was hijacked and who might have wanted to do it and what their ultimate purp purpose for what they've created might be. Right. That's a narrative story. It's not a technical story, primarily. So some years back, I had a contact with Roger Vere, and I was despairing, having just discovered hijacking Bitcoin and having realized that this thing that held so much promise was not promising anymore, to say the least. And I knew that he had backed bitcoin cash, and I thought maybe he thought that was the way to go. And it turned out that basically didn't work as a solution to the problem. And so I was hoping that he would say something about what one might do if you were excited about. About the technology and promise of crypto, but not excited about those projects, where might you go? And at the time, I don't think there was anything to offer. I understand that there are now at least a couple of projects that might be worth talking about. Do you guys know about these? Do you know what I'm referring to?

C (151:01)

Yeah, I mean, I know that, you know, Roger had introduced me when I had him on my podcast three weeks before he was arrested. He mentioned, mentioned a cryptocurrency called Zano, which I looked at based on his recommendation, and it's a privacy coin. And in fact, I've moved to Privacy coins. If you read the first edition of my book, I list a whole bunch of different cryptocurrencies that you can use. But we talked earlier about the degree to which Bitcoin and even these stablecoins can be tracked. And I want to say something about that in relation to Zano and Freedoms Dollar. There's a company called Chainalysis that's been around since 2014, and they work with exchanges and law enforcement, and they have a complete database and a solution now that private investigators can get certified in. So last year, three different people came to me and they had either a divorce or business dispute. And, you know, the counterparty had hired one of these private investigators and they were able to get more information about. About their crypto transactions than they could get from the bank because the bank only has records for seven years. And so my focus and my shift has been not just Zano, but on the importance of privacy by default as being a tool against CBDCs and the surveillance state. Zano is one project that does that. Zano allows you to create tokens. We talk about tokens with CBDCs and everything else, but tokens that are private, where you can't see the transaction amounts, you can't see who's doing the transactions, and you can have the tokens in your own possession. And then there's a project built on Zano called Freedom dollar, which is a stable coin, except that it's not. It's a. It's what's called an algorithmic stablecoin, but it's not backed by U.S. treasuries. It's. And it's completely private, so you can't actually freeze it or stop the transaction. So those are maybe, you know, those are two that are promising amongst a bunch of others. But, you know, I live on this stuff. So this is what I actually, I actually use. I actually have a debit card that I load with Freedom dollar and zbic. And when I travel around the world, you know, I'm literally using these things to.

A (153:15)

So from the point of view of the vendors that you're buying from, it looks like dollars to them because. Is that right?

C (153:25)

It looks like dollars to them. Yeah. I mean, either the Freedom Dollars, it's pegged to the dollar, so it's.

B (153:29)

Yeah, it'll be a token in your wallet, and then that token has the stable value of a dollar. That's the idea.

A (153:38)

What I'm trying to understand is how these two projects have escaped the fate of Bitcoin. How is it possible for these things to be truly anonymous. And how, how is it possible to spend them seamlessly if most people have never even heard of them?

B (153:56)

Yeah, I'll take a stab at that. So they're small. That would be number one is the Xana project is small. Freedom dollar is very, very small. So I don't think they've gotten the regulatory eye of Sauron on them yet. And one reason I say that is because Monero is this other long term cryptocurrency coin Coin which has been around for a long time and their focus is on privacy. But they've had such success that they've been blacklisted from a bunch of the exchanges. It's very hard to get because

A (154:32)

the

B (154:33)

exchanges in particular, they don't sell it in a bunch of places.

A (154:37)

Is that because know your customer is impossible with it?

B (154:40)

Yeah, that's the idea. And so, so, you know, I guess, I guess this is one of the big ones that's used on the, on the, the black markets online. It used to be bitcoin many years ago and now I guess Monero is a big one. And if that, if it's actually being used that way, I think that would suggest that there's real privacy in that project. However, I would just say, you know, the fact that Zano hasn't yet, I don't think it's met that, that level of scrutiny yet. But it's like it's tiny compared to Monero and we already know that Monero has been targeted from the government.

A (155:17)

Okay, but help me out here. I'm not understanding if something is tiny like Xano and I wish to use it for normal, if I wish to buy bagels with it, how, how does it function? So that at the point of the vendor, what I'm spending is Zano and the vendor is getting dollars.

C (155:47)

So how this works right now. So I have something that's called a ZBEC MasterCard. So it's a kind of a non KYC MasterCard. So I load my Freedom Dollar or Zano onto that card and then I use that card to pay so the merchant doesn't, isn't actually receiving cryptocurrency. There is kind of this intermediary in this step that is the non Kyc debit card. And so that's, that's one solution. Obviously long term we need people to be using these things peer to peer without debit cards in the middle. But there's, you know, you got to build this, build this stuff out. And so there's an ecosystem being developed and people Are, you know, I've launched, launched this medical tourism marketplace. There's no revenue model, but I've just created a database of all of the major medical tourism facilities and to help people find lower cost, higher quality care. And then when they make that match, it just sends a message to the provider saying, hey, would you like to get paid in freedom dollars in or consider that because medical tourism is like $100 billion a year industry. But one of the big issues is if you go to your bank and you say, hey, I want to wire $15,000 to this medical facility in Thailand, that's going to set off a whole bunch of red flags. You're going with that. If you use a credit card, there are chargebacks. And so it's about building out an ecosystem of these types of solutions in marketplaces. And those are propping up now. But I do want to say the Zano technology, the guy who created it, actually created the technology behind Monero. So it is very much Monero, like with some added bells and whistles. And so it does have that shit shared technological approach Also.

B (157:30)

I think a different way to answer your question, Brett, is we are in that space. It's 2012 again. As we were in Bitcoin in 2012, 2013, almost no adoption. It was a pain in the ass to get it, pain in the ass to use it. You couldn't really use it until payment processors came along. It's the same case in Xano Land where it's just there's not a lot of infrastructure right now. And that's why I think it's also relevant that, you know, if we do get more infrastructure and maybe that'll happen, that would be great. If there's too much success, if it becomes too large, I imagine that's where you're going to get more pressure from the government coming in.

A (158:10)

All right, well, that's interesting. And what do you guys think about cowry shells? Are cowry shells coming back?

B (158:18)

Well, they're physical, so that's a.

A (158:20)

They're physical. That's true, they are. Interestingly though, the cowries know little about it. They are governed by the physical laws of possession.

C (158:28)

Yeah, well, I, I have these as well. I'm holding up a gold back. This is 1/1,000th of an ounce of gold in bill form. So I use cryptocurrency, I use whatever. And in New Hampshire there are 150 businesses that take gold backs. And you know, there are also locations here that take silver. So it's all about starting and trying to build an ecosystem. But it isn' easy. And it is. Steve's right. It's like 2012 all over again. But the good news is there were a lot of people that kind of gave up on crypto. The people that had the initial enthusiasm in 2012, in that phase, saw what happened to bitcoin, and they were disillusioned. A lot of those people are getting involved with Zano. So it almost does feel like 2012 because it's some of the same people.

B (159:11)

And to be honest, too, I've said this multiple times now, that part of my own personal motivation for helping Roger Wright hijacking bitcoin is that I could get out of crypto. I felt like I had this information and I couldn't in good conscience be like, hey, I, I, I was really, I was the bitcoin guy. And then I disappeared. And now, like, I'm not in support of it. So I felt like I had to help write the explanation for why I was leaving crypto. And, and I'm pretty pessimistic on virtually all, all the crypto projects. But I had, you know, I have one pinky toe still in crypto. My heart is like, okay, maybe it could make the world a better place. And that's just in a couple of these privacy projects.

A (159:54)

All right, well, I am going to try these things because at this point, a, I know that crypto could be an important weapon in our fight to preserve our freedom, freedoms. And if these things are too small to have attracted the Eye of Sauron so far, then I'd like to get on the ground floor. And then the question becomes, how do we defend them? Right? So anyway, a, I'd like to just go through a transaction or two and discover what it feels like and what the actual implications of it being so small are. And then, you know, maybe, maybe we can learn the lesson of what's happened to bitcoin and with vigilance on the front end, protect these things from what we know will, as soon as they become significant, come for them. So anyway, I hope others will join me. I hope you guys will also. It sounds like, Aaron, you at least, are already experimenting with these things, so maybe we should check back and talk about what the experience. Experiences.

C (161:06)

Yeah, we'll check back and I'll send you some. So, you know, offline, you know, get you a wallet. I'll show you how. Happy to show you how it works.

A (161:12)

Fantastic. That sounds like the old bitcoin days.

C (161:16)

Exactly.

A (161:17)

Yeah.

B (161:18)

Brett's like, okay, that's going to be $70,000?

A (161:22)

No, it's going to be nothing that might be worth $70,000 in, you know, 15 years.

C (161:34)

As long as we don't use it.

A (161:36)

Yeah.

B (161:36)

Yes. Right.

A (161:37)

No, no, I, I'm. I. I can already tell you, in the upcoming block size wars over Zano and Freedom Dollars, I am in favor of keeping them spendable and like that. All right, gentlemen, is there anything more you want to say before we close this out?

B (161:56)

No, thanks. Thanks for your time. I feel like this. This was a really great conversation.

A (162:00)

Conversation. I thought so, too. All right. Aaron Day and Steve Patterson. Oh, maybe you should tell us where to find you, Aaron. You're at least findable on the Brownstone Institute site. Have written numerous articles anywhere else people should look for you.

C (162:15)

You can find me at daylightfreedom.org and also on XAR AaronRday, Aaron Rday and Steve.

B (162:23)

I'm@steve-patterson.com I've been in the process of opening up this new research institute for a few years. It's called the Natural Philosophy Institute. Completely separate from Bitcoin. And maybe something we can talk about later, but steve-patterson.com very exciting.

A (162:39)

I do look forward to talking to you about that. All right, gentlemen, it's been a long but I think very good discussion. I know. I know a lot more now than I did when we started. So thanks to you both and keep up the good fight.