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- [00:07]
Francis Pouliot
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all. All the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for bitcoin.
- [00:32]
Matt Odell
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
- [00:34]
Francis Pouliot
Probably should be. Probably should be.
- [00:37]
Matt Odell
Francis, I'm ashamed to admit it, but it's been seven years since you've been on the show. Welcome back.
- [00:42]
Francis Pouliot
It has been seven years. Wow. Yeah. The last time was in San Francisco, I believe, at the Bitcoin 2019 conference,
- [00:50]
Matt Odell
the first ever bitcoin conference. I found out it was a. I was expecting my first child that day right after we recorded. So I remember that day vividly.
- [00:59]
Francis Pouliot
Nice.
- [01:02]
Matt Odell
But we progress. Children have been born, raised a little bit. Since then, bitcoin has persisted and things are going on. We got the bulls on parade in France. We're going to start off with what you and your team at Bull Bitcoin have been doing in terms of trying to protect your users right to privacy, particularly in France, where they've implemented this DAC8. DAC8, which stems from. From MICA, I believe, which is very invasive to privacy. And obviously France is a hotbed for $5 wrench attacks. You guys are on the ground there, obviously serving customers and are having to deal with this up close and personal. So I think we just start there. What's going on with daca? Mica. Mica, how you pronounce it. And how oppressive are these governments getting in terms of trying to collect user data?
- [01:57]
Francis Pouliot
Yeah. So decade is a very interesting piece of legislation because very few people know about it. And it is, in my opinion, the single biggest threat to both the cypherpunk principles of bitcoin and to the lives of our users. So the backstory of Dec8 is that in 2021, kind of like at the peak of the COVID tyranny, the G20 countries had a meeting, probably, I don't know, in Davos or something, one of those globalist hangouts. And they decided during that meeting that bitcoin posed an existential threat to the ability of governments to finance themselves. And when you look at kind of like the minutes and announcements of that meeting, they basically decided that tax evaders are going to bankrupt the state with bitcoin and that they needed to do something about that. So the G20 mandated the OECD, another globalist organization, to come up with a solution to that problem. And that solution is something that they came up with, which is called carf, the Crypto Asset Reporting Framework. And CARF is basically a program or methodology of collecting all of crypto users, transaction information and identity into a big database and allowing countries to share that database with each other and in the EU. And as soon as the OECD came up with Carface, like 70 countries on Earth pledged to implement CARF. So this is a purely technocratic globalist thing, but then the national governments need to implement this in their national legislation. And in Europe they did that at the European Union level with something called DAC8, Directive 8, or also called DAC8. So what DAC8 does is basically turn every single crypto company into a data collection, aggregation and transmission platform, where every year you have to report all of your users, kind of like financial transactions, like their volumes and their cost of acquisition and their identity, their home address, everything about them to your national government. But what's even worse than that is that Deck 8 allows EU countries to share that data with each other. So for example, we bull Bitcoin were incorporated in France, so we share this data with the French tax authority, but then the French tax authority shares this data with the German tax authority, with the Dutch tax authority or whatever. So what it in effect creates is a big fucking list of crypto users and how much Bitcoin they're buying and how much Bitcoin they're selling every single year. And that is what I would say, a very big rupture compared to the system of KYC that we've had before. And I'm going to go off on a little tangent here, but we've already had a globalist institution, force national governments essentially to implement these kind of like KYC regimes. And that is the fetf, the Financial Action Task Force. So the Financial Action Task Force was the, and I believe that is the imf. That is like the head of the FTF might be the BIS.
- [05:32]
Matt Odell
I think
- [05:35]
Francis Pouliot
it's part of the club, like the BIS, IMF, the OECD, the G20. It's always coming from somewhere in Europe. And basically so the FATF came up with this thing called the Travel Rule, and they basically came up with these guidelines. And what they essentially told every country in the world is you have to implement KYC AML on crypto in your country, otherwise you will be considered to be a Bad actor. And you're going to get on what's called the AMF's gray list or blacklist. If you are on the FTF blacklist or gray list, then things don't go really well for you. There's, there's a lot of penalties for a country not to implement FETF rules. They're not obliged to, but they, they're flagged as a, let's say non cooperative state. So it's not the first time that this has happened. But the thing about KYC ML, the way that it's been going on like today, it's, it's not as bad as people think. Okay, I'll give you an example. Most people think that every time you buy bitcoin on an exchange it's like automatically reported to their government. And that's not true. The point of KYC AML that we have now is basically okay, if there is something suspicious, like if one of your clients looks like he's financing terrorism because he's on a sanctions list or something, or if it looks like he's laundering money, you report certain types of behavior that are suspicious and you keep the data internally so that if there is a police investigation and they come to you with a warrant, then you have the data on hand. And that's not something that happens a lot. You know what I mean? It's not like a frequent thing. We don't get the FBI knocking on our door asking for data. I mean, something like, I don't know, bull bitcoin, we get that like once a year or something. So, so yeah, KYC is, is, is bad. But it's not like we're streaming the data to the government in real time. The vast majority, like 99% of clients like their data just never leaves full bitcoin. What DAC8 does is a complete shift because now the government requires us to send all of the data. Regardless of whether you're like a pleb or you're a whale with whether you're sketchy or not sketchy or all of the data gets sent to the government. And that's a massive problem, of course. And it's a big shift. It's a big change. If you thought that KYC was bad before, now it's way worse. And there's multiple reasons why that would be a problem. Well, first of all, just philosophically speaking, you can have a problem with the government just creating a list of people and their assets just generally, because who knows what they're going to do with that information. So just Philosophically speaking, that's just bad. But where it becomes really bad is in places like France, where we are based, where the cybersecurity of the government is so awful that you have, and I'm not kidding, like something like a million user records that are leaked every single month, every four or five weeks you have a top tier institution, whether that's the tax authority or government agency or a big insurance firm, where all of the user records are leaked. And not only are they leaked, but in France specifically, there has been convicted civil servants that were selling crypto users information to criminal gangs so that these gangs could identify victims to kidnap, torture and extort for crypto ransoms. So this is not a conspiracy theory. Those people have been caught and convicted recently. So you have government bureaucrats which are collecting data on crypto users and selling that data to the mafia. And what is the result? The result is France, where again we are based. Bull. Bitcoin in Europe is the crypto kidnapping capital of the world. This year in 2026, we expect about 150 to 180 crypto users to be kidnapped. Last year was like something like 80 or something like that. If you look at just like the Q1, 2026 kidnapping data, it's something like once every two and a half days on average, a crypto user gets kidnapped. And I know personally, I want to say maybe four or five people who had, had either their daughter kidnapped, there's a famous person that I know whose daughter got kidnapped, their wife got kidnapped, they got kidnapped. There's very famous stories. So essentially what we as an exchange have been forced to become is an agent of the EU's mass surveillance program. And if this database, this like mega global honeypots database of all crypto users in Europe is leaked, it will be catastrophic to the extent where I'm very confident that someone is likely to die as a result. Someone is definitely going to get kidnapped as a result, but people will be murdered as a result. So running an exchange, you have to do some kind of compromise when you're a fiat regulated entity for multiple reasons. Bull. Bitcoin does have kyc. We're not a no KYC business. And the reason why we do this compromise is because for bitcoin to succeed in its mission to eliminate fiat currency, you need Bitcoin to be a highly saleable and highly liquid asset. You need Bitcoin to be used for commodities trading, by merchants, for payroll remittance. You need millions and millions of bitcoin holders to use Bitcoin on a day to day basis. And in order for that to happen, you need brokers, you need trading order book platforms. You can't achieve like a global revolution on just like a purely peer to peer exchange basis and meet someone in a parking lot with a bunch of cash. You need exchanges to achieve this level of liquidity and sellability and market penetration. So we've done compromises by implementing kyc, but we believe that this new regime, the decade regime, is a line that we cannot cross. There's a certain, there's a certain level at which we have to say no, we have to make a stand and we have to refuse to see any more territory. If we don't refuse this global database of Bitcoiners, then the message that we're sending to these globalists is very clear, is that they can do anything, right? Like, what's worse than collecting? What's worse than put it there, putting all the corners on a list and having all, all of their wealth, like in a centralized database which is accessible by 27 bureaucracies across the European Union. I mean it's, it's pretty much as bad as it can get in terms of privacy. So we've decided to fight back.
- [12:55]
Matt Odell
The, I mean, not only is it incredibly invasive to privacy, but by sharing it with 27 other agencies, I mean, you're just expanding the attack surface dramatically. And especially in the world that we're living in now, with AI emerging and being able to attack critical systems rather trivially, it seems like we should be going in the opposite direction. Try to collect the least amount of data as possible to protect end users and individuals and their lives and the lives of their loved ones at the end of the day. And I think this has obviously been a massive topic on this podcast for the last nine years, which is the encroachment of KYC aml. And I'm very happy that you and your team are drawing the line and saying, no, we're not ceding any more ground. What is, what does that look like? How, how big is this fight going to get, do you think?
- [13:48]
Francis Pouliot
I think this is going to be possibly one of the biggest tax law cases in Europe. So what we're doing is we are challenging the implementation of decades in France at the French government. So we actually did this, we started doing this in February where we, we first did our legal challenge. We decided not to talk about it until recently because we were in the process of applying for a meek license in Europe and we didn't want to, you know, attract too much, too much. I Guess anger from the French state. So as soon as we got our MICA license, we started to talk about it. So we're challenging the national implementation of DAC 8 in France under three principles. One of them is proportionality. So basically the concept of creating this pan European global database of crypto users is completely disproportional to the objective of the French government to evade tax evasions. In other words, they already have the tools in place to like do all their investigations. They don't need like this new set of tool. It's not necessary. There's also violations of the EU Charter of Human Rights. I hope I'm not. My lawyer might be a little pissed at me because I need to be careful about exactly what we're doing. But we're kind of like breaching the EU constitution and there's a bunch of technical things also that the government did wrong. So our objective is to repeal the implementation of DAC 8 in France, which would in effect allow, prevent or exempt bull Bitcoin from complying with this regulation. At the same time we also have a, let's call it multi angle legal strategy. So we have two more legal recourse that we're preparing that I can't really talk about, but one of them is about temporarily suspending compliance with this at the same time. And if we lose at the French court level, we're going to take this to the European Court of Justice, which is kind of like the higher judicial authority in Europe. And there are precedents and this is not like a frivolous lawsuit that we're doing for marketing. Like we have very good chances of winning this because there's like a lot of legal precedents around this. So if we lose, then we're going to take this to the European Court of justice. And DAC 8 is a, is a purely European thing. But I also want to remind the viewers that this is actually coming to the United States as well in 2029. I think 2028 or 2029, Carf is coming to the U.S. carf is also coming to Canada this year. And pretty much every kind of like major, you know, developed nation are going to have their own version of DAC 8. So we're starting with France as the first opening salvo of this battle. But soon after we're probably going to be looking at challenging this constitutionally in Canada. And hopefully someone in the US also does a constitutional challenge in the us Although as far as I know, Bol is the only company in the world, it's the only legal challenge of CARF anywhere on earth, as far as I'm aware of. So our goal is to. I mean, a legal precedent in Europe doesn't create a legal precedent in the US or in Canada. But ideally we can motivate people in their own countries to pursue legal action because politically there's nothing to do, like nobody gives a fuck. Right. There's no congressman or there's no parliamentarian that really and truly does anything about. You know, even in the US you have like a pro, A pro crypto government or something like that. But even in the us like, there hasn't been a challenge of this concept at all. So ideally we motivate people to use the justice system, the courts as a method of defending crypto users. Yeah, sure, we can use like all sorts of technology. You know, we can use pay, join, coinjoin, silent payments, you know, liquid swaps, all that kind of stuff. Like, like we cypherpunks can build the tools, but it doesn't, it doesn't stop every leakage. Like we need to also do this battle on the legal front as well.
- [18:05]
Matt Odell
Yeah, I completely agree. And I mean, timing is of the essence, particularly for decade in France. Looks like from my research, they wanted you to start tracking beginning on January 1st of this year. And like the first mandatory report will be January 31, 2027. So we have about six, seven months here before exchanges are expected to hand over this data.
- [18:31]
Francis Pouliot
Yeah, and even if we lose the core challenge that we're doing now, we have a pretty good strategy of having a bunch of backup plans. So our goal is to using any and all legal means at our disposal to repeal. Repealing is the number one goal. Delaying is the second goal. And mitigating the plan C is basically negotiating to have something that is less harmful. But completely repealing is our objective, and I think we have pretty good chances.
- [19:07]
Matt Odell
Yeah, I think we should dive into the philosophy of this deeper because I think it's gotten to an insane point globally where exchanges, individuals have just been expected to just completely hand over the data. The government says, hey, new guideline. And the thing about FATF too, it's like a supranational, unelected, bureaucratic institution that sits under the BIS or imf. Doesn't matter who it really sits under, but they're technically not implementing laws. They get together, the globalists get together. They say, hey, here are the guidelines. And like you said earlier, if a country doesn't adopt the guidelines, Financial Action Task Force comes in and says, you're on the Blacklist. And there's just some weird leverage incentives at play where you have this unelected, supranational, bureaucratic institution that nobody asked for that is dictating basically what we can hold private in our lives in the digital age. And it's completely insane. And I think France is a good example, but we have plenty examples across the world of turning exchanges into data honeypots and now extending that further into government agencies which are notoriously incompetent, turning them into even larger data honeypots and sharing that data amongst each other, which is even more frightening. And it just gets to the core of like, what it means to be human, like why, why do we need to do all this? And they opine that it's to protect, protect you from terrorists and child abusers and things like that. And they try to mark you as an insensitive rube if you don't go along with it because you're, why don't you want to do this? You support terrorism, you support the trafficking of children. It's like, no, of course not. But there's a better way to do these things, which is actual law enforcement. I think the proof is in the pudding of 50 years of this KYC AML regime, which really stems from the bank secrecy act here in the United States, that these data collection mandates are completely ineffective at stopping crime. And in fact, to, to your point earlier, actually put more people in harm's way 100%.
- [21:33]
Francis Pouliot
You, you said many great things. I'm, I'm going to touch on the first thing that you mentioned is it's a little reminiscent of COVID isn't it? Right. So there's this Covid. There was this thing called the who, the World Health Organization, and they don't, they can't force countries to do anything. But then you have all the bureaucrats of every country, which basically get a software update from the who, you know what I mean? They get like a mind download from the WHO and then they cook up some kind of, call it emergency or public safety concern, where the national elected governments don't actually make rules. Right. So in Covid, it was basically like, I don't know who he was in the US but like the national public health agencies and they start issuing these edicts and the technocracy, the bureaucrats end up extending the state's power for something that nobody really voted for. Like nobody voted for COVID lockdowns for vaccine mandates. They were arguably popular in some places, but it's certainly not something that came from a Representative government. It came from the bureaucracy, and the international bureaucracy coordinated itself around stuff like the who. And this is exactly what we see in the national legislature. You know, there's no protest on the street from people that want stricter KYC AML regime that exchanges, you know, that just. It's not something on people's minds at all. It's something that's kind of like. It's a slow creep, you know? You know, I mean, it's. It's like it slowly creeps in through the bureaucracy and nobody really knows what's going on until. Until it's too late. CARF and DACAID itself is presented as a purely technical thing. When you look at national debates, there's no national debate. There's no, like, congressional debate about carf. You, you will not find a congressional debate where you have, like, the Democrats and Republicans arguing back and forth about the merits of carf. No, no, no. It's, it's. It's like a. It's like a technical change to, you know, the IRS rules, and it's like a technical change to the French in France. It's just a technical amendment, basically. So it kind of like sneaks under the radar and then that shit just keeps adding up. It just keeps adding up over and over and over. And of course, you have, you know, you had the public health stuff, you have the crypto stuff. Of course, at the same time, we also have regulation of social media under the new public health scare, which is hate speech. And all of that is, is. Is coming in at the same time. And these institutions have a lot of leverage against crypto businesses and businesses in general, because if you're a media, you need to have a broadcasting license or something like that. If you're a crypto exchange, you'd have a crypto license. So basically they use the threat of removing your ability to operate in a certain country if you don't comply. So it's kind of like, again, it's kind of like with the vaccine mandate, it's kind of like, oh, well, you don't have to get a COVID vaccine, but you can't go to the store for us. It's basically like, oh, well, you don't have to do that, but, you know, you don't. We don't have to give you a license either. So it's, it's. Let's just, let's just say I can, I can see the pressure accelerating. I can see, I can see the, the soft tyranny, because it's not. It's not like tyranny in the same. It's not tyranny in the sense of like and Marx's government lighting you up against the wall to shoot you and take your stuff. It's a soft, it's a bureaucratic tyranny. The best way to conceive of this is actually with Alexander de Tocqueville, which is a French author but wrote about the American system of government. And he has this, this, this, this very nice passage, this book called Democracy in America where he specifically talks about this and he says tyranny is not going to look like you think it's going to look like. It's not going to be this military government which is coming into your house and kicking down your door and, and chaining you up. It's, it's going to be a ever growing set of small rules which turn you into basically a docile sheep. And then when you're in the exchange business like I am and you're very regulated, I can, I can see those as adding up. So at some point, at some point you just got to say no, right? At some point we just got to say no. And you got to establish in your mind a line that you will not cross. And that specific one is the one that we just decided like no, we're not crossing this one.
- [26:11]
Matt Odell
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- [26:13]
Francis Pouliot
Guys.
- [26:14]
Matt Odell
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- [30:26]
Francis Pouliot
Right now I'm not an expert in the Clarity act, but of course, like every person, I follow American politics because Canadian politics don't matter at all. You know, the only politics that really matter is the US and maybe the eu. But I haven't seen anything coming from the US that actually makes it easier or better or less restrictive for me or my users. Like imagine that bull Bitcoin was to go to the United States, like launch to the US I haven't seen anything in the Clarity act that makes my life as a business easier or that makes my users safer. And I think bitcoin has reached a certain place where you can't just ban bitcoin, right? You can't just attack bitcoin head on because there's just too much money involved. There's just too many important and influential people that have exposure to the bitcoin price. Not that are self custody and that are cypherpunks, but that have exposure to the bitcoin price. So you can't just say something like oh, the miners were going to shut you off or owning bitcoin is illegal or anything like that. So you have to allow and facilitate institutional adoption of bitcoin and stable coins with like stuff like the Genius act and the Clarity Act. But that doesn't mean that you have to make it easier to self custody and make privacy like legal again. So what I'm concerned is that the pro bitcoin or pro crypto political narrative is focused like more exclusively on stuff that you mentioned, you know, like securities violations and banks being able to do some accounting tricks with bitcoin that they couldn't do before. Or people being able to issue stablecoins in the United States as long as they buy the treasury bonds with the fiat. I see the stablecoin as being kind of like the new petrodollar. You know, you can issue your stable coins. As long as you're buying our treasury bonds with it, you're fine. You know, but if you issue stable coins outside of the US in a non US bank and you don't store in treasuries, you're kind of like they did with the petrodollar. You know, you guys can, yeah, you guys can take foil in your, in your Middle Eastern country as long as you sell it for US dollars. So it is definitely a concern. And there's really never been kind of like a cypherpunk political party or political movement. So it has to happen at the court level, I believe. Even if it's easy to black Bill, for example, even with COVID a lot of constitutional courts validated the vaccine mandates, for example. So you say, okay, well the Supreme Court will save us if it's really bad. It's not always true, but it is a lever that we have. It's the only lever that we have. Basically, either we go fully unregulated, which is an option. Some crypto companies, some bitcoin companies might say, you know what, fuck you, I'm not complying and I'm going to go fully unregulated. But then that is a noble move. It definitely is a noble move. But you have to, you have to assess, okay, well if I do that, what impact am I going to actually have if I'm basically on the run? For example, you know, you're not good to anyone if you're in jail and your service is shut down. That's the thing. And you're also not good to anyone if your service is so cypherpunk, like bisque, for example, decentralized peer to peer marketplace. I mean it's fucking sweet. I mean it's fully unregulated, it's fully decentralized, but you're not going to achieve. There's a critical mass of bitcoiners that we need and we don't need mass adoption. Okay. By the way, we don't need all the normies to get into Bitcoin to have a socioeconomic and sociopolitical change. We do need a certain critical mass of people. I like to think it's like 3%. I think 3% is the number. Why 3%? Because of the meme with the American Revolution where you only had, like, 3% of the population in the US that were actively involved in the US uprising against the British. I don't know if this is true or not. It's just a meme. But anyway, I think you need 3% of the population to become sovereign individuals and fully opt out, withdraw their consent from monetary debasement and withdraw their consent from. From the Fiat system. But 3% of the population is still a fucking lot of people. It's like, my math is probably wrong, but I think it's like 300 million people or something worldwide.
- [35:13]
Matt Odell
Yeah, it's like a quarter of a billion.
- [35:15]
Francis Pouliot
Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. So you do need a critical mass of people. And in order to reach that critical mass of people, you have to remain inside the overturn window, so to speak. At least something. And basically, I think the best that we can do as a regulated exchange is. Is be within the Overton Window, where we can operate legally, but be so far at the extreme of the Overton window that we can slightly nudge it and push it with these kinds of things. There's all sorts of things that in Canada, we've been very highly successful at that, by the way, not necessarily publicized, because we don't want to publicize every victory that we have against the states in terms of privacy, because also, we don't want to rub it in their face. But there's been multiple instances where the government was like, give me all of this data. And we're just like, no. What do you mean? This is the privacy. We have the Privacy act in Canada. We have a very strong privacy. This is a privacy act. You're not allowed to ask me for this data. And then they just kind of back off. So people would be surprised how efficient it can be just to just say no to a government and see what happens. It's kind of like, again, like, you know, you walk into a restaurant with, you know, the COVID mandate. You know, what happens if you just say, no, no, I'm not wearing a fucking mask. I'm just gonna go sit down. Many times it just works, you know, people don't actually bother you. They just expect you to comply. So that's kind of like the philosophy that. That we've tried to build and you know, it's a little bit. It's a little bit of a business risk for us to do that. But at the same time, I mean, everything we're doing is legal and lawful and it's legitimate. And it's kind of like in the US you guys know about that. Like, if you don't exercise your rights, you lose them.
- [37:03]
Matt Odell
Yeah.
- [37:03]
Francis Pouliot
I mean, that's why Americans are so. I mean, I'm not an American. I don't know, but I mean, I have a lot of American friends and a lot of Americans that I know are so adamant about exercising the second Amendment just like very, very visibly, like in public, because they know that if you don't exercise it, it just goes away. The same thing with free speech. If you don't exercise it, then it just goes away. And if you start to comply tiny bit at a time, eventually. Eventually your rights are gone.
- [37:33]
Matt Odell
Yeah. No, it's funny with the. I'm having flashbacks to an instance where I did this. I got funneled into a DUI checkpoint in Missouri in 2012, 2013. And the cop was like, I'm going to need you to get out. We need to breathalyze you. It's a DUI checkpoint. I was like, no, you can't do that. And he was pissed that I knew my rights and said no. And he made me do a field sobriety test. Passed. Was not driving drunk. But it was that little pushback, knowing your rights. And to your point, I think in the industry we need more people to say no to the government, not only in our industry. I think just broadly speaking, people need to develop the intestinal fortitude to know when to say no to the government. Like you're trying to infringe on the rights of us as a company and our clients and we're not going to stand for it. And I think many people would be surprised at how effective that can be. And again, thank God you're doing this. And I think it's important to highlight too. I know it's been seven years since you've been on the show and for anybody listening, I think it'd be worthwhile to talk about how you've designed your business, like the whole stack. And I think you guys talking about working around the edges and within the Overton window, as close to the edge as possible. I think the way you've designed your exchange, how your users buy Bitcoin, they get sent to self custody, how they sell Bitcoin, the ability to do swaps with liquid and liquid Tether. I think from a design and architecture perspective, the way you've built your business, particularly the tech stack, is aligned with cypherpunk principles as closely as possible while operating in the fiat system.
- [39:21]
Francis Pouliot
Exactly. And we actually kind of try to conceptualize this inside the business with a chart, with literally a chart of speed. And the top axis is like speed and scale and mass adoption. And the other axis is compromise. So we try to do the least amount of compromise possible and see where we hit the ceiling. Because there's a point where if you don't do any compromise ever, then you can hit a ceiling. So basically we have this level again, always like a line where we don't cross. An example of that is, for example, with the ball wallet. You know, I wanted to build, and this is completely unrelated to like an exchange, but it's the same kind of philosophy where we wanted to build the most cipher punk wallets, but at the same time be usable on a mobile phone. And, you know, the examples that I like to use is something like Sparrow or Wasabi, which are in my opinion the gold standard of like full cypherpunk software, which is reproducible. It's not always open source, but it's reproducible. And you can do UTXO selection and you can do this and that, and like you can connect your hardware wallets and you're fully in control. And both of them are really usable software. Like Wasabi is easy to use, Ish, you know, Sparrow is easy to use, like a boomer can use Sparrow. It's not that hard. So we wanted to build something that's like, you know, very, very similar for mobile. But the problem that we kind of like reached was when we tried to integrate lightning, when we tried to integrate lightning and we initially tried to do something that's kind of like the Phoenix wallet, which is a purely. Phoenix is also doing its own set of compromises. So it's not with the LSP with just in time channels and the backup system and stuff like that, but when we tried to implement Liquid, sorry, lightning in the bull wallet, we realized that the absence of any kind of compromise just really did actually we did hit a ceiling where we couldn't create a usable product that with satisfying my criteria, which is that I can orange pill a taxi driver and he can leave, I can tip him on my way out of the taxi within a few, you know, within a minute or two, and then he can be onboarded to Bitcoin. So we compromise with Liquid. Liquid was the first big kind of like compromise that I decided to make. And it was very conscious and it was a very hard decision to do, which is like, I'm going to compromise on pure full self sovereignty and use this other network which is not as trustless as lightning. But there were other compromises that we could have made that I think would have been worse. And I don't want to get. This is not like a tech, I guess episode. This is more like a political episode. But ecash, I thought was too much of a big compromise. Even Spark was too much of a big compromise. There's other technologies like arc which have different trade offs. But anyway, so it's about setting up your ceiling of no compromise. And then once you really hit that ceiling, once you really hit the limit, then you can say, okay, we really cannot reach our goal without compromising here. We've tried every single thing that we can and we cannot. Then you can kind of like raise the compromise limit a little bit and see, okay, if I compromise like a little bit, what returns do I get on this compromise? Like you have to think of return on compromise. That's the new business metric. Okay? Fuck return on investment. It's return on compromise. For every unit of compromise that I make, how much units of success am I getting? And that's the way that you have to conceive your business.
- [43:11]
Matt Odell
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- [46:46]
Francis Pouliot
Yeah, and there's so many technologies that you know, people think that bitcoin is like old tech and it's not good for privacy. And you know, you should use zcash instead. You've got the like the suits that are pushing for zcash and then you've got like the Jason Bourne style, you know, hardcore cypherpunks pushing for Monero and then you've got the retards pushing for Ethereum and so on. But there's a lot of technologies in Bitcoin. You know, if I was to design from scratch, like I don't think that privacy would be that much of an issue. And for whatever reason, people are afraid to use bitcoin privacy technologies in their stack because somehow they think the government is going to be upset at them. There are cases in Europe where a bunch of exchanges decided to drop the lightning network. And who knows why, in truth, but I suspect that it was because they believed that lightning was not necessarily compatible with like the travel rule or KYC AML laws, which I think is complete bullshit. Like when we got our Mika license we still kept lightning and we still kept liquid, we still kept page on and all those kinds of technologies. And then I'm sure the government, they ask questions about like what is this page on thing? And we're like, don't look at that. It's just, you know, it's not transaction batching, it's collaborative transaction batching and it helps you save on fees. And there's a side effect that it improves privacy. Same thing with Lightning and same thing with liquid. And all you have to do is say no, you have to defend those technologies as being purely valid and you have to also defend the user against. That's kind of like the argument that we're using in France. It's like, let's reframe this as from bad people trying to finance terrorism to people trying not to get kidnapped. And that's a very successful reframing. And you know, to your point, like if KYC was not mandated legally, I would still probably do some. We would still probably do some voluntarily. A good example of that is in Costa Rica. In Costa Rica there is no KYC rules. Bitcoin is entirely unregulated in Costa Rica, there's no legislation at all forcing us to do any type of kyc. But we do enhance due diligence and we do KYC some people in Costa Rica because I don't want to have. I'm not a fan of Islamic terrorism. Killing my people in Europe. I don't want to deal with as a business. I do not want to deal with Islamic terrorists. I do not want to deal with. There is child trafficking. That is a thing. And some of them might use bitcoin. I don't think they do use bitcoin in reality, but some probably do. There's probably some instances of that where bitcoin is used. I don't want to deal with that. I don't want to deal with cartels that smuggle fentanyl and decimate my civilization. And I also certainly do not want to deal with scammers that steal money from old people with a bunch of crypto scams. So there is a point where even as a business that's not mandated to do kyc, I would still probably do some of it, especially for fraud and especially to protect elderly people from getting scammed. But that's a purely voluntary business decision. Another thing where the industry has been super cucked, very cucked, is chain analysis. So chain analysis at the same time is a big threat to privacy, but at the same time as well is a fucking scam. It's a pure larp. The amount of false positive that you get on chain analysis is surreal. We get a bunch of requests from a bunch of law enforcements and bunch of governments and bunch of people all the time at bull Bitcoin that are like, hey, our chain analysis is identify that this transaction belongs to you. And we look and it's like, no, it's not us. So chain analysis just, just completely sucks. And I don't think provides and it's not legally mandated. Chain analysis was never legally mandated in any country that I'm aware of. What you have to do as an exchange is to make sure that sanctioned entities are not using your company. But what you can do is, and that's what we do. For example, we don't use a third party chain analysis service. We download the list of addresses and we check internally to see if one of those sanctioned entities is dealing with us. You don't have to send all of your data to third party chain analysis companies. And I guarantee you that all exchanges are doing that. Every single bitcoin address that's ever been used on, let's say Almost all of the exchanges, except the select few that are kind of like Bol. Bol is not the only one, but there's like, I don't know, maybe two or three or four worldwide that I know that have like the same approach. So you don't have to use chain analysis to be compliant. But then the industry kind of like had this desire to be overcompliant and to show the banks that we're doing as much as we want. So we created, not we, they created this kind of like meme around chain analysis that in order to be a good crypto citizen, you have to have this hundred thousand dollars a year subscription to the chain analysis software company and you have to send every single address that you have. And that's a big problem. That's also one of the reasons why all of the exchanges, they don't support, they force address reuse. They're forcing address reuse because it makes their chain analysis easier. And what that does is that not only that fucks with everybody's privacy, but it also exposes these addresses to quantum risks. Because if we, if you reuse an address, you've revealed the public key when you spend it. That exposes a new level of quantum risk. So, so this kind of like it's, it's, it's not only that people are not fighting back, the industry is not fighting back, but the industry is proactively cucking itself in order to try to dispel the myth of the, the shadiness. You know, it's like they have like an inferiority complex. Like no, you know, we're not sketchy. Like, we're just like you guys, we're just like Wall street, we're just like banks. We want to play by the rules. So we're going to invent these industry wide rules. And the thing about like chain analysis, it's an interesting rule again that was fully created by exchanges, not by governments. The requirements use chain analysis. And now like eight years later, if you're an exchange that doesn't, you know, and if you're applying for a partnership with a bank, they're going to be like, which chain analysis provider do you use? And if you say no, then they're immediately going to flag you as sketchy because we've created this expectation of compliance which was not required at all. And then eventually this custom, so this is like an industry custom. Customs tend to become law. So currently chain analysis by third parties, even with mica, which is really hardcore European regulation, they do not actually legally mandate chain analysis. But if you don't have like a channel subscription, you have to go above and beyond to demonstrate that you're still, you're still doing that. So yeah, the industry has been cooking itself pretty, pretty badly. And of course it creates a moat, right? And you know, like bull. If I was to start Bull Bitcoin today, there's zero chance, zero chance that I would be able to succeed. Zero chance. Because the moat of compliance is so big, like Mika. I don't know how much it cost us, but I don't know, there's all sorts of costs, but probably close to a million dollars just to get the Mika license. And it took like two years and at some point we had like six people working like full time on this for, for many, many months. The cost of compliance is huge. And the level of, you know. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's really huge. And then when, when I launched Bull Bitcoin, I launched Bull Bitcoin like, like a classic American startup like in my garage basically, with no funding, just like hustling, you know, with one person and then two and three. And then that's kind of like how we were able to, I believe, be so successful is because of the lack of funding. We had to be very, very, very careful about A, not spending too much money and B, treating the customers correctly. Because if you're massively funded, you don't really need customers to like you, you just need to raise the next round. Whereas if you're self funded, like if the customers don't like your product, then you're fucked because they're your number one source of funding. But like with all the regulation that you had to. If I was to start today, it would not be possible. Of course, like the reason why we can afford to spend a fucking million dollars on this license is because through the, because we were early essentially because we did that 10 years ago, but if I was to start today, wouldn't be able to do that. So these companies have obviously a massive interest in creating this moat. To give you an example, like in Europe There was about 4,000 something crypto companies in Europe and about 260 got a license. I make a license in Europe. So it's like about 90% of all crypto companies just got kicked out of Europe a week ago.
- [56:06]
Matt Odell
Right. And it went live July 1st.
- [56:08]
Francis Pouliot
Yeah, a week ago. Even Binance didn't make it. If Binance can't make it. Well, also Binance is Binance, but even Binance didn't make it. And pretty much all the crypto companies, we made it like at the last minute and it was a close call. You know, strike got it. The deadline was like, June, July 1st. We got it on June 2nd, 22nd. Strike got it on like July 28th or something like three days before the deadline was over. And if you didn't get it before the deadline, you were essentially fucked. And yeah, so there's tons of little brokers and that's how bull Bitcoin started in Europe, actually. Was this broker, this bitcoin only cypherpunk brokerage from France called Leonard, and they've been operating since like 2018. And they were like, you know, your local, kind of like your local bitcoin broker. And they came to me and they're like, dude, there's zero chance that, there's zero chance that we're ever going to be able to get Nika. So, you know, either we, we sell you the business or we're just going to close shop. So I acquired this brokerage in order to get grandfather. And it's a long regulatory story, but I acquired this brokerage and I can tell you, I've had many, many people reach out to bull Bitcoin to be like, we're closing shop in Europe. We can't afford to comply. Do you want to buy us out? And of course, like, I can't, I don't want to. So it's kind of like all the small good guys are getting closed down and only the big guys, very few of the small good guys are able to, to remain in operation. So it sucks. It sucks because of course, all the Coinbases and Binances and Kraken and all these guys have nothing against them, but they obviously have a vested interest in the regulation because they have the bandwidth and they have the funding and they have the weight, the political capital to remain in operation. So they want these moats. Whether they subconsciously want to expel their competition or not is another thing. But, you know, deep down I'm sure they, Coinbase likes regulation. You know, Binance likes regulation, except when they get kicked out of Europe, but they usually like regulation.
- [58:16]
Matt Odell
Yeah, they probably don't mind their competition getting taken behind the woodshed.
- [58:20]
Francis Pouliot
I don't think they share the same. Yeah, I don't, I don't think they share the same free market ideas as we do.
- [58:28]
Matt Odell
But they're, they're liberating. They're liberating finance and money on the Internet. That's what Coinbase is doing.
- [58:35]
Francis Pouliot
They're bringing freedom money to Everybody, they're democratizing finance. That's what I heard. Yeah. With USDC and prediction markets and gambling. Democratizing gambling is more like it.
- [58:50]
Matt Odell
But yeah, it's disgusting. On the point of chain surveillance too. I know we talked about it, you mentioned it a while ago, but I wanted to bring it up like, Roman Sterling, OB's in jail. And it's like there's been plenty of people pointed out that chain analysis, their analysis of what they deemed to be him buying that domain, was completely wrong. And still he's in jail. The defense said, hey, can we audit chain analysis their systems to make sure that they actually did this right? And they said, no, it's a black box. You don't get access to it. It's proprietary.
- [59:26]
Francis Pouliot
That is one of the biggest travesties. It is very dangerous. And I can confirm and guarantee that chain analysis reports are being used to get warrants and also to convict people. And they are false positives. So this is like the equivalent of using 1970s fingerprint technology to convict somebody of a crime based on probability heuristics, which are completely bogus. I have some personal stories that I will share eventually. I don't want this to be the scenario, but I can guarantee you that false positives are very bad. People are getting arrested with false positive chain analysis. And it's frightening because judges will take a chain analysis report at face value and consider it to be as damning as DNA fingerprint on the gun. Like the video camera. Chain analysis will come up with this report, say, okay, Roman Chernoff is the guy that was operating the bitcoin fog because of this PDF that I have which proves that it's, it's him. The judge will, will see that and be like, that is the same thing. It has the same weight as a fingerprint on the gun and there's like video camera with like 93 facial recognition and the DNA was on the victim. They really believe that this evidence is, is like flawless. Whereas I can guarantee you that it's retarded because it's, it's so retarded. And even there's a brilliant report by Peter Todd where I don't know how this wasn't like major news, but Peter Todd in his report on chain analysis and Wasabi points out that he was at a dinner with one of the founders of chain analysis or like a VP of chain analysis or something.
- [61:34]
Matt Odell
He was drunk, right? And he was loose lips.
- [61:37]
Francis Pouliot
He was drunk and he was bragging that their shit is fucking phony as hell. It's Complete larp. It's just. It's a warrant factory. You want it, you want to warrant on anybody on earth, just go to chain analysis and, you know, they'll find a way to link his Bitcoin to some crime. And then they meet you at the airport and they fucking cuff you. And then, you know, and then you have to hire your own counter. Chain analysis. And then. And then it becomes a battle of experts. Yeah, it's frightening. That's part of the reason why I'm so interested in technologies like pageoin, for example, because one of the foundational heuristics of chain analysis is the common input ownership heuristic. There's a lot of false assumptions that chain analysis makes. Some of it is about identifying change, and some of it is about fingerprinting and stuff like that. But the worst one, I think, is the assumption. Chain analysis makes the assumption that every input in a transaction belongs to the same person. And from this heuristic they build their analysis. So part of the reason why I'm so involved in building and promoting pageoin is that on a massive scale, if enough people use pageoin and what pageoin does is it breaks this heuristic. Like in a page on transaction, the inputs don't belong to the same person. Some of them belong to the recipient and some of them belong to the sender. So if a sizable percentage of transactions on the network are pageoin, then at a legal level, we can actually legally challenge chain analysis as evidence. And there's a legal principle in US case law that. Which I think that would be probably the next legal battle that I want to do is to. Is to challenge the legality of chain analysis, to be like, hey, it is based on faulty evidence. Like, like. And if that's the case, then not only can it not be used for a warrant, but people that were convicted, they should be retried because the evidence was not. Was not good. Kind of like, you know, I think this is a common thing where, you know, 30 years later, now that the DNA evidence is better, we realize that the previous DNA evidence was like, Was not. Was not good. So that's probably the next. And again, we need to be using the courts to our advantage. Like, cypherpunks write code, but cypherpunks also use the legal system. We don't really have a choice. I really do believe that. I've had many discussions with cypherpunks and they also tell me like, yes, this is a key cypherpunk principle is to Hal Finney and Adam, back with the arms exports kind of thing that they did. Like, like we need, we need to, we need to. There we go.
- [64:29]
Matt Odell
Always in the background.
- [64:31]
Francis Pouliot
Hell yeah. Yeah. So cypherpunks use the law to their advantage and they also fight legal battles. And I, I also want to make a distinction between political battles and legal battles. I think political battles are, are not fully obsolete. They're mostly obsolete. But thank God we still have some kind of legal system where the courts are presumably at least making a half assed attempt to protect the rights of the individuals and we should leverage that to the maximum.
- [65:01]
Matt Odell
Completely agree. What's the current state of page One adoption? Obviously you guys have implemented it in what you're doing at Bull Bitcoin. I think there's a couple others maybe. But are you talking to any? Because I think if you get exchanges like Bull, Bit need a few others to do it and that's a good, a good jumping off point to get towards that critical mass that you described earlier.
- [65:28]
Francis Pouliot
So when we integrated pageoin it was kind of like the reckless thing to do. It was very early alpha level technology and there was a few other companies that did it at the same time as us. There's Cake, Cake Wallet, a shitcoin Wallet, but we love them anyway. And Sparrow and Blue. But all of us were kind of like on incompatible versions of pageoin because either the technology was shifting so much that there was like breaking change or we were using different page on protocols. Like Blue was using Samurai's page on protocol and Sparrow was using I think also Samurai's page protocol, whereas we were using bip77. Anyway, technical stuff, but the Pay Join project, which is supported by private companies but also a lot of nonprofits, has reached a level where we have what's called pageoin version one, where the protocol is stable. So Bull has it, but we're like on version 0.23 or something. Anyway, long story short, Bull is upgrading to the latest version. Everybody's doing that. Cake is also upgraded to the latest version. So Cake and Bull are going to be compatible. And in terms of exchanges, I think that. So technically Bull, this is kind of like breaking news. But page one was only in the wallet. It was not in the exchange. So we've just managed to put it in the exchange. It is currently in the exchange now. It hasn't been announced and it's, it's kind of like hidden from the general public. It's like an experimental, experimental feature. But Bull is now. The exchange now has page on allowing people to buy and sell Bitcoin with Pay Join. And I believe that a bunch of others, maybe two or three that I know of that are either exchanges or swap providers or swap providers would be, would be massive. Like companies like Bolts, like, you know, if they were to integrate Page on that would be massive. So it's unfortunately, the adoption is low. Adoption of Page on is low. But think about it like this. Like if the Bull Wallet and the Bull Exchange talk to each other and both have page on and transactions are page on by default, like every single transaction between a Bull Wallet user and the Exchange is going to be page on by default. So just that is going to create tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Page on transactions. If you add bolts to that, everybody that does a swap with bolts from the Bolt Wallet, that's going to be another page on. And if you add cake to that, anybody that sends and it's, it's going to be growing. And then of course there's, there's Sparrow and then there's Wasabi as well. So it's low right now. But I think it's just because the technology was early. Page on is really complicated. It's not that simple. And of course the other big one is silent payments. I'm insanely bullish on silent payments. When Sparrow introduced it, people were like, oh, well, it doesn't really do much. It doesn't solve chain analysis. Yeah, it solves the address reuse problem. And address reuse is the number one cause of Bitcoin privacy issues. Because so many people reuse addresses that it's kind of like the chain analysis companies can cluster a bunch of entities. Because if a lot of people are really bad at their privacy, you who are good at your privacy, you stand out essentially. So other people reusing addresses is bad for them, but it's also bad for us. And part of the reason why people reuse addresses is because we like to have a reusable payment code. You don't want to have to like, let's say like for your mining pool rewards, like you don't want to be every time you get a payout. You don't want to be putting a new address or something. Or if you're like dcaing or something, you don't want to have to put a new address. Or there's tons of reason if you have a donation. The Pirate Bay on their website has a static Bitcoin. Everybody that's using a donation address puts a static donation address. So silent payment really solves that. And that's something that we've been working on. There was a pull request that was just opened today. Finally after one year of R and D, we actually literally opened the silent payments pull request in the Bull wallet this morning. And we're also bringing it to the exchange as well. So that again, the user of the Bull wallet would only give one address to bull forever. It's going to be a silent payment address and we will just generate new addresses on the fly. So there are tools and there are technologies. You know, there's liquid, there's, you know, ecash, which I'm not, it's a bigger rabbit hole to talk about, but liquid swaps, lightning, pageoin, silent payments, there's other experimental technologies. There's another one that I'm looking at now called Octajoin by this guy called Floppy. Very interesting transactional tool and people are building awesome software. That's also one of the really nice effects of vibe coding and the AI software revolution is that it reduces the asymmetry of, of, of power between the state and the individual because the state has enormous power for surveillance. And, and we as individuals, we don't have like 7,000 engineers and a data center to protect ourselves like the NSA has, you know, but now that we have by coding, we can build self defense tools very cheaply. So one of the best examples that I know is this, these guys, they have something called Am I exposed? And it's an open source chain analysis that you can run yourself and you can see what the chain analysis companies know about you by replicating. And of course if you look at the software repository, it's not slop, like it's pretty cool. But you can tell like this is vitecode stuff, you know what I mean? The capital required to build this kind of software. Five years ago this would have been like a $5 million VC race. To build this kind of software, you need a Runway for three, four years with 780 engineers and a product manager and that kind of stuff. Now you can just build these tools yourself. Yeah, I'm pretty excited. Even the stuff that we've been doing with the wallet, of course as a wallet developer, you can't vibe code a wallet that's asking for trouble. But you can do a lot of testing and you can save a lot of time. So the pace of progress that we have as cypherpunks, and again, you can't do slop with cryptography, it's very dangerous. But it is 100% true that we are accelerating way faster than the state, than the bureaucrats Right. So I'm very bullish on that because it's kind of like, you know, drone tech or you know, 3D printing or you know, look at 3D printing now. Like it's fucking insane what you can do with 3D printing. Look at. So, you know, right now I think we're still at the liberator level of AI, you know, like the first 3D printed gun. But in two years, I mean sovereign individuals are going to be able to do a lot of damage, so to speak, like metaphorical damage. Anyway, I'm kind of rambling, but I'm not bearish on the state of the cypherpunk movement. Even though I am very concerned for sure because I'm probably less concerned than a lot of people. But I'm probably more accurately concerned than a lot of people because being inside the industry as a regulated entity, I can see the tag vectors. I'm not as concerned because I also know that there's methods of resistance that are being employed. So I am worried. But I'm also bullish. I'm also bullish on the cipherpunk principles of bitcoin. A lot of people are black pilled about Sailor and blackrock and whatever bitcoin has been co opted and whatnot, decipherpunk dream is dead and blah blah blah. And that's just because the ratio of noise to signal is higher. Right? The ratio of noise to signal is higher because the absolute amount of garbage slop in bitcoin like ngu, Bitcoin, treasury company, Wall street financialization of bitcoin is increasing more than the cypherpunk base. So the, the institutional narrative and the anti cypherpunk narrative of bitcoin is increasing faster than the cypherpunk. But who cares? What matters is the absolute amount of cypherpunks working on bitcoin. I don't care about the ratio of cypherpunk to non cypherpunk in bitcoin. I don't care about that. I care about the absolute number of cypherpunks in bitcoin and being in this space. And of course there are signal chat groups and you know, telegram groups where I talk with a lot of privacy devs and we meet in person at conferences and we work on technology collectively. And I've never been so stoked by the way, like all the wallet developers are. I mean, I wouldn't say we're all friends, but a lot of us are friends. Like I talk with the cake guys, I talked with the sparrow guy about silent Payments. I talk with Breeze, I talk with these guys like we talk all the time. I talk with Aqua and we're, most of us are on the same page when it comes to privacy tech.
- [74:48]
Matt Odell
I love to hear that and that's, I'm happy you said that because I agree there's a lot of black pilling out there. But similar to you, I mean I don't have as much inside knowledge in terms of the attack. I think I understand them pretty well. But you see it day in and day out and obviously you're talking to these wallet developers. I talk to a lot of the privacy tech people too. But just again to reiterate the vibe coding unlock is real. And when it comes to blackpilling, yes, the noise is way louder and yes you may not agree with what Michael Saylor is doing. You may think it's going to end in cataclysm. It doesn't matter if you can run a node, if you can create a private public key pair, if you can use tools like Pay Join, silent payments and use Bitcoin the way in which you want to. Which I hope is in a sovereign and private fashion. It's never been easier and it's only going to get easier.
- [75:41]
Francis Pouliot
It has never been this easy. And people who said that bitcoin was better 10 years ago, shut the fuck up. You have no idea what you're talking about. No idea whatsoever. Running a node like dude, like have my right here. Well you know I don't want to dox my location so I'm not going to turn my camera but I have my start nine right here next to my Starlink just like connect connecting a self custodial wallet to your own Electrum using silent payments and pay join on your phone to doing swaps like, like it's nothing like you can do that like with a few clicks. Like people have absolutely no idea how bad it was like 10 years ago. And you know everybody, everybody that says that, that bitcoin is that it's not advancing or it's not progressing or that the cypherpunk dream is dead, is selling you something. They could be, they could be just uneducated but I think most of them know. But they're selling you something else. They're selling you either a shitcoin or a financial product. Basically Bitcoin's dead. Getting the zcash of course and for example self custody. So there's two major components to making Bitcoin better. It's privacy and self custody. Right. And of course you can't have privacy without self custody by definition. So you need to work like. That's why we work so much on self custody. I see it as the foundation of everything else, like every property that makes Bitcoin valuable as money. So the things that are on the sales pitch, you know, when you sell bitcoin, censorship, resistance, it's this, it's that you can't change the rules. It's immutable, it's trustless, it's private. All of these features of Bitcoin that are on Michael Sino's pitch deck stem from the fact that you can self custody it. If you can't self custody it, then all those features kind of like disappear. And the second one, the second layer is privacy. And there are problems with self custody. But there's a lot of entrepreneurs back in the day, there's a certain type of individual which is again today liberated with AI because they can do stuff now that they couldn't before. But when you see a problem, I see a business and I see, I see a marketing campaign, I see a new feature and I see a new market. That's what I see when I see a problem. And I'm not the only one. There's tons of people that are call it cypherpunk entrepreneurs. So of course self custody is a massive problem. And we've built tools. For example, like the, the main thing that I, that I think that I'm the most, the most proud of in the last couple of years is our backup protocol called recoverable. I mean, it's not, it's not fancy, it's not like really well known out there, but it's a very clever way to create a encrypted backup that is safe for the cloud using a key server protocol. Anyway, so. So it's this tool in the Bull wallet where you can do a backup in like 30 seconds. And it's very secure. It's very, very secure. It's not as secure as like 1212 seat in a plate, but makes self custody like extremely, extremely simple. Kind of like the stuff that we did with, you know, one of the things that Aqua and Bol came up with this at the same time, by the way, none of us were first. It's actually a. I think I was first, but Aqua also thinks they were first. Agree to disagree. But Aqua and Bolt came up with the same idea at the same time, which was, I think a consequence of the first spam attack in 2023, where we realized that a mobile wallet where you manage channels on your phone kind of like Phoenix does not work if the network fees are 150 satoshis per byte. It just doesn't work because you need to open too many channels and it locks up too much liquidity anyway. So that idea of like having what's called a graduated wallet. So Bull and Aqua were the first two graduated wallets. And that's like where you have like a liquid or ecash or fedimint or I don't know, like Spark or something. And it's using swaps to communicate with the Lightning network. So I'm really proud of those tools. And then of course, there's multiple other things that we need to work on, like inheritance. Inheritance is the next big step to solving self custody. But again, these are problems that are being worked on. So if someone is selling you because the people who are selling you away from cypherpunk, bitcoin, they're selling you. It's not private. So use zcash and you can't self custody your coins. It's not safe for you to do that. You're not ready to do that. So buy my stonk, right? So I want to make sure that these people run out of arguments. And also the argument like, well, you can't spend your bitcoin anywhere. We've solved that too. That was like one of the first things that I tried to solve when I was starting out as an entrepreneur in 2013. Where can you spend your bitcoin? Well, that's why we started Bills, which then became Bull Bitcoin. That's already been solved with companies like Bit Refill, like Bitcoin Jungle, all these things like, you can spend your bitcoin. This is not a serious argument, of course, with Square in the United States. Like, you can't have a serious debate with someone who's like, well, you can't spend your bitcoin. Shut the fuck up, man. There's like, look at this map. Like, I can, I can buy bitcoin. I could, we can, we can walk down the street in any American city right now and I will probably find within a few minutes a shop that accepts bitcoin because of the work of the cypherpunks. Like, you know, I wouldn't say that square is necessarily cypherpunk, but you know, close enough. Like they're, they're, they're, they're pretty good in terms of, of doing things the right way within their, you know, they have a different box because they're, you know, publicly traded company and it's a massive, you know, Global empire now, but they've done it pretty well. So anyway, just a lot of words to say that I'm very bullish. That's it.
- [81:53]
Matt Odell
I am. As well. As it pertains to DAC 8, the legal battles and, and honestly, all the cypherpunk tech that we've been talking about for the last portion of this conversation. What calls to action do you have for anybody out there? How can we help on the legal front? How? What?
- [82:13]
Francis Pouliot
Well, by the time this episode is released, we have a website called dac8.com I did buy the domain just to rub it in their face. So Daq8.com is a website which basically shows all the arguments for repealing DAC 8 and explains our legal strategy. So I would say go on decade.com and educate yourself about what that is. I don't really have that much of a call to action because when we decided to fight this legally, we decided not to do an industry group and not to do a crowdfund and not to do a big thing just because of the overhead of doing those things. We're just like, fuck it, we're going to pay the lawyers ourselves and we're going to do it ourselves. So we don't have a donation page and we don't really have any real way for people to help us. We have one partner in this lawsuit, which is another crypto exchange in France. The only other crypto company that I talked to that was willing or had the balls to do it. So there's no donation page, there's no sign up, there's no newsletter, unfortunately. I wish I had a better cta. I would just say just use the wallet. Just use the Bull Wallet. That makes me happy and you know, leave a nice review on, on the Play Store. Like that's, that's the, that's the. The best thing you can do for me is to leave a nice review on the Play Store or on the website because I read all of them and it just makes boosts the morale of the Bull team. It really, really does. Like, we actually do read all the reviews. So just do that, download the wallet and leave us a review and you can say that you've contributed to our mission that way.
- [83:49]
Matt Odell
We'll link to that in the show notes so you can go download and use it. Highly recommend it. Francis. There's not many of you out there. There's only one of you out there. There's only one of you out there. And I'm very glad that you exist because I think what you're doing. What you have done for over a decade now at this point has been extremely impactful for bitcoin and very important for the ability of individuals to use bitcoin in a sovereign fashion. And particularly in this era of bitcoin, a lot of what you do is overshadowed by the orange ties and the suits. And I think it's important to remind people that the cypherpunk dream of bitcoin is nowhere near dead. In fact, it's more alive than ever because of people like you. So I just honestly earnestly thank you for all the work and the commitment that you put into this.
- [84:42]
Francis Pouliot
I appreciate that you appreciate, and it's a nice place to be in because even though it's really hard to do what we do, the community which exists there is such a thing as a bitcoin community. People who say that the bitcoin community is not real are stupid. The community is very supportive of what we do and we really appreciate that. We appreciate that people appreciate and that's what we feed on. So it's. It's a great space. It's a great space to be building it. It's hard, but there's nothing else on earth that I would rather do. So thanks to the viewers, everybody that comments on Twitter and everybody that says good things about us online. We really highly appreciate that and makes it all worth it. Thanks, guys.
- [85:29]
Matt Odell
All right, peace and love, freaks. All right, thank you for listening to this episode of tftc. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to Fountain FM to find that $5 a month gets you every episode a day early. Ad free helps. The show gives you incredible value, so please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time and until next time,