← The Wolf Of All Streets
The Wolf Of All Streets
The Real Reason The US Government Is Hoarding Bitcoin | Dennis Porter
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Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30th terms at aka mscollegepc. Bitcoin is no longer just being talked about as money, an investment or a hedge. Now it's being discussed on Capitol Hill as a national security tool. A four star admiral just spoke about bitcoin in Congress. The US Military is reportedly running a bitcoin node and strategic bitcoin reserve bills are still moving across the states today. Dennis Porter breaks down what's happening behind the scenes in Washington.
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The behind the scenes viewpoint or thoughts from the lawmakers is that they're not really paying attention to the price at all right now. They don't pay attention to when it goes high or when it goes low. They pay attention to when things are falling apart. That's when they start to really care.
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Why policymakers are finally waking up.
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To have a four star admiral come in and tell members of Congress, tell the Senate that he is working on researching bitcoin and proof of work for the purposes of national defense is incredibly helpful.
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And whether America is positioning itself to lead the bitcoin era or risk falling behind.
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Today we have 38% of the hash rate. That's great. You know, we dominate in hash rate, but if it's built on a foundation of Chinese hardware, that's going to be a major problem.
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B
Let's get into all of it right now with Dennis Porter.
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A
That's dope. Let's dope.
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B
Start with what you've been up to. I think the biggest piece of news and the first thing I did when I saw it was send you a DM on X was the admiral on the floor of Congress talking about bitcoin as a national security tool. So obviously this, you know, reminiscent of Jason Lowry's software. But we had not heard that from the mouth of a four star admiral in the past. So maybe you can break down what happened there for me.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. And it was an incredible thing to be able to be there for. I was fortunate to listen in live, sit in live for that. And it was huge because for years, you know, we're trying to convince lawmakers of the importance of bitcoin for national security interests and to have a four star admiral come in and tell members of Congress, tell the Senate that he is working on researching Bitcoin and proof of work for the purposes of national defense is incredibly helpful, especially for things like Mind in America, which is a bill that we've been working on quite a bit. You know, we want to see more on shoring and manufacturing here in the United States. But you know, what's the argument for why, obviously we want to remove China's backdoor into our energy system. But also, you know, when you're talking about why we need to secure our hash rate, if we're saying that, well, the military is using it because they're securing our national defense. So it's critically important that we actually have our own manufacturing of hardware because today 97% of it is made in China. And if you're going to be building out national security use cases, defense use cases, where Today we have 38% of the hash rate, that's great. You know, we dominate in hash rate. But if it's, if it's built on a foundation of Chinese hardware, that's going to be a major problem. So having him come in and explain that they are researching Bitcoin will be incredibly helpful for us. When we're making the argument that we must have our own manufacturing base of mining hardware here in America.
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B
Let's dig into more how it becomes a tool for national security. And know he repeatedly said for projecting power. Right. And then went on to say that the United States military is running a bitcoin node to monitor the network, monitoring the situation, so to speak. Right. So this was more than even just bringing hardware to the United States. You know, removing Chinese influence on bitcoin mining seemed to go deeper.
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A
Yeah, yeah, it did. And you know, I've had the great fortune of speaking with and, and coordinating with Major Jason Lowry for several years now. For those that aren't familiar, he put out his thesis about three years ago called softwar. And within that thesis he explained how he thought and how he thinks that the military should be using Bitcoin and proof of work as a tool for national defense. One of the biggest components of how this would operate from a use case perspective, because I think it's important to put it in context. Like we have this big thesis, we have admirals going before Congress talking about that they're doing the research. But like, what would they actually use it for? Is the common question that we get. And there's a couple of really good ways to talk about and explain it. But I Think it's good to kind of compare it to some, some real world things that we see on a day to day for folks out there. So a lot of times, you know, people are pretty familiar with the amount of spam that we get in our emails. Partially because it's virtually free to send, is why we see so much spam. Now imagine if you are sending a physical piece of mail, not an email. And imagine if you sent that physical piece of mail and it was totally free, no stamps, no cost at all. Imagine how much more junk mail you would get to your physical address if it was absolutely free to send mail. I mean, today you probably get, you know, two, maybe three pieces of junk mail a day. It's annoying. You know, we all deal with it. But let's compare that to your email. You know, you have to have your own separate inbox for spam because you get so much of it. I mean, you could get 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 pieces, pieces of spam a day. And part of that is because the cost of sending an email is virtually free. In fact, you know, the, the ability for people to receive junk mail, I think is deterred. The physical mail is deterred by the fact that there is a cost to it. Right now every letter requires a USPS First Class Mail Forever stamp, which is about 78 cents. That cost is just enough to make, in my opinion, endless junk mail to your physical address economically painful for someone who wants to send potentially millions of letters. Sending a million emails or sending, excuse me, a million physical pieces of mail. Today is, if you, if you add up the math, you're, you're doing 78 cents. You're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars just in stamps alone to be able to send physical mail that keeps your mailbox from being flooded with junk. But email doesn't have that exact same friction. Email is practically free, as I've mentioned a couple of times here already, which is why we continue to have unmitigated spam problems in the digital universe. So this is exactly where in my opinion, bitcoin comes in. Proof of work brings that same type of friction that we see with physical mail. Where there's a cost to the digital world, it introduces a economic deterrent to our digital behavior. Standard Bitcoin transactions today can cost anywhere from $0.20 to $5 over the last several years. You know, obviously it goes up and up and down over time. And I'm just talking about standard Bitcoin transactions here. Bitcoin's structure is what makes spam on bitcoin limited. Now, we. Spam is never going to go away. We're always going to have spam in all sorts of different shapes and sizes and forms. But it does become this economic deterrent. And without it, spam on Bitcoin would be much, much, much worse. So for the system to work, transaction fees need to be cheap enough that normal use is easy. Me and you can still send a bitcoin transaction today. But it also needs to simultaneously be expensive enough that mass abuse is economically unviable. It's the digital version of putting the stamp on a piece of communication. So in a way, proof of work is like digital postage, so to speak.
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Yeah. And that's just one of, I think, the many ways that they could use it for national security. Right. I mean, there's kind of a list of ideas, I'm sure, that you can touch on others. But also for securing networks in general and kind of all for the same reason. Right. Because there's a cost and there's an electricity requirement. And so the incentives for doing something that's nearly free are misaligned. But for the purposes of national security, I've got to imagine there are other things they could be talking about using this for also. I mean, just for.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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One really interesting actual government, Right?
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Yeah. And one really interesting use case that I've already discovered, and there are folks building out these products is this idea of creating that type of deterrent around login credentials. So there's a really interesting company that I have been communicating with and happy to, you know, I'll probably kind of keep them in the corner for now as far as, you know, putting their name out there. But, but they have created a system where you have to have a, you have to spend in order to log in. And so there's this way to prevent essentially like mass DDoS login attempts. Because if there's a cost to attempt a login, even if it's trivial, that is going to be a deterrent and that is going to be incredibly useful for the military if their login credentials are sort of guarded behind some type of economic paywall. Another good example of trying to explain this, cause I think it's good to just put it into context, is when you go into a concert, you're going to a sporting event, there's always some type of transaction fee. There's a service fee associated with buying that ticket. Sometimes that fee is 20, 30, 40, 50. I paid $150, I think, for my, my bitcoin Vegas ticket. Right. The service Fee that was associated with it. Now, if you're a fan, you're going to the bitcoin conference or you're going to a sporting event, you know, you just sort of associate that fee with the general cost of doing business. You pay it, you move on, no big deal. Now picture a scalper trying to sweep the entire arena. They, they want all 10,000 Bitcoin Vegas tickets or all 20,000 Bitcoin Vegas tickets, they're going to scalp them and they're going to resell them. That same fee applies to every single one. So even $20 per ticket, that's $200,000 in fees. At $50 per ticket, you know, that's half a million dollars. You know, at the bitcoin conference they were well over that. So you can imagine doubling and tripling this for large scale type of events. Again, for the fan, the fee is acceptable. For the scalper, it is a big problem for their business model, it creates a cost which disincentivize scalping at scale. Now, scalping will still happen and there will be Taylor Swift concerts where people are doing everything and anything possible to get those tickets before anybody else. But generally speaking, that fee prevents that type of scalping from being rampant. And this is exactly what bitcoin and proof of work can do for the digital world. The normal user barely notices the fee. The attacker, by the nature of what they're doing, has to pay that cost thousands or potentially even millions of times over. Now, putting this into context as it applies to national security and military operations, we can firewall, in my opinion, and I'm not going to say that they're doing this today or I will not verify, so to speak, if this is an actual use case that they are exploring. But in my opinion, we can firewall critical infrastructure behind bitcoin. This creates a dynamic where good actors pay a small fee to use that system and bad actors who try to ddos that infrastructure have to pay a massive amount of fees in order to attack it. And the really important thing here, and this is why it's so important to Admiral Poparo and why it's so important to the military, is because this type of dynamic flips the asymmetric advantage of who has to spend more. And when we're talking about the military, whether it's air, land, sea, outer space, you name it, the goal is always to make expensive, to make the attack as expensive as possible. And we want to make our ability to defend ourselves much, much, much cheaper. People are already talking about this all day, every day. About the war in Iran. You've got these drones that are maybe 10, $20,000 that we're shooting down with multi million dollar rockets. The asymmetric advantage is in the hands of Iran in that situation. But even if you take another step back, imagine how expensive it would be and how much money that they would have to spend for China to invade the continental United States. The cost in airplanes, boats and human life alone would be staggering. It could cost trillions of US dollars and take years to build up their military. And there's this huge ocean in between us, between here and there, and making an invasion incredibly difficult. That deterrence through costs is why we will probably never see China in our lifetime try to invade the continental United States. That is where bitcoin comes in. Again, it is this ability to impose those types of costs in the physical world, but doing it, of course, through a digital layer.
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Yeah. And in context of everything that we're seeing in Defi and the North Korean hackers getting their hands on billions of dollars in crypto and stablecoins. And it's just what a time to be alive in the crypto market. And I think the differentiation with all of that and bitcoin is greater than ever.
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Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, we're very interested in a lot of the national security angles here where we're talking a lot about how we can thwart the attacks by North Korea trying to steal all of our crypto. So that's definitely something that Satoshi Action is working on. We're doing deep, deep policy research on. But also again, I think just to kind of continue to expand on the conversation of what's possible and why the military might be looking at these things. There is a tamper proof component to bitcoin that is really important that I don't. Very few people actually are aware of. But imagine you're like pouring a slab of concrete, right? And you walk by and someone writes their name in it and they write the date in it before the concrete dries up, when it hardens 20 years later, someone walks past and sees it and yeah, they know, okay, maybe this person was probably here at this date. And you can't quietly go back and just hammer up the concrete to rewrite the history of what was etched into that concrete. You'd have to get a jackhammer out. You have to jackhammer the whole slab and repour the entire block. And every neighbor on the street is going to see that you're doing that. They're going to hear that you're doing that. Bitcoin does exactly that. But for digital records and communications, you can take any document, and we're not talking about NFTs here, we're not talking about a whole document on the blockchain, we are talking about putting a small string of letters onto the blockchain. But you can take any document, a contract, a photo, a signal, a message, and you can take a little fingerprint of it, a little hash of it, just a string of numbers and you can press that into the bitcoin block so that 20 minutes from now or 20 years from now, if somebody tries to make a change to that signal or message, you pull out the block and you compare one comma off, one byte off, and the fingerprint won't match. If they match, the message is exactly what it was on day one. To make a change to the bitcoin ledger where a fingerprint is stored, someone would have to build up a massive amount of bitcoin mining for a prolonged length of time. We're talking about a 51% attack here. To do that, someone would need to roughly double the existing bitcoin mining hash rate or Co opt 50% of the Bitcoin mining hash rate, which could cost millions, billions of dollars. Take a lot of coordinated effort and everyone, potentially could take years. Yeah, it's never going to happen. Exactly. So very difficult to do. But, but, but this is what makes bitcoin virtually tamper proof, not, not, not resistant tamper proof. That message, let's say, you know, you got a four star admiral to put this into the, the DOD framing, you got a command and control Signal also called C2. These are the types of messages that commanders, that admirals will send when they want to put troops into battle, when they want to launch a missile. Those are very important messages, as you can imagine. And we have to make sure that the admiral wants to know the message that he received hasn't been edited, hasn't been altered. And so this is where bitcoin comes in again. You can put a message on the blockchain, I should say you can put the fingerprint of the message on the blockchain and at any point within the next 20, 30, 40, 50 minutes or beyond, that admiral can look and check and cross reference the bitcoin blockchain and know for a fact, irrefutable fact, that this message has not been changed or altered. And that's, that's huge. I mean the opposite side of this is what we did with stuxnet. I don't know if your listeners are familiar with stuxnet, but it was a virus that we sent to Iran. And what ended up, it ended up getting embedded into their nuclear centrifuge engineering. And we, we were spun up and slowed down their centrifuges over a certain period of time, and that ended up breaking those centrifuges. But when the engineers were looking at all the readings, when they were looking at all the messages coming from their, their communication devices, everything looked fine. And so think about it again, in like a hot war situation. You've got China and us, hot war. And this is how Admiral Paparo thinks. Admiral Paparo, who is the head of Indopacom, he oversees 60% of the world's population, including some of the most important threats that we face today. North Korea, China being the two biggest ones. But he's always thinking, okay, if we actually go to war with China, like, we need to make sure that we, we always are in a better position. They call it overmatch. We're always in a better position than our adversary. And if he can't trust the signals that are being sent to him in that sort of dangerous hot war environment, that could be very troubling. And China has the cyber capacity, they have the cyber ability to really go after us and really attack us. And we need to make sure in those types of environments that we can trust the signals that are being sent between some of the most important people within our military.
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B
Maybe worth asking you, as a slight pivot, what are your thoughts on the quantum threat to bitcoin? Since that's been the hottest topic for the past few months, luckily it's quieting a bit.
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Yeah, I mean, it was all the buzz at the conference. We saw folks not only up there on stage talking about it, we also saw there was a lot of folks in the expo trying to present their solution to the problem. It's definitely something that we pay attention to. We have to pay attention to. I do feel very confident in the fact that we are having these conversations now. You know, some people think that they need to be happening faster and quicker. Some people think that it's not a threat whatsoever. I tend to land somewhere in the middle. So I think we have enough time to be able to put something before the entire bitcoin space to present and say, hey, this is what we're going to do that will cause the least amount of harm. Because that's always my concern when you're talking about changing bitcoin in a big way. It's like, how do we pursue harm reduction for others? And the Big one that always comes up is like, what are we doing with satoshi's coins? Because if you make a change, let's say we're going to go to post quantum addresses, but you have to move your bitcoin into the post quantum address. Well, if satoshi doesn't exist anymore, if he's not alive or he can't access his coins, then his coins will always be sitting out there for someone who has a quantum computer to take. And so a lot of people are concerned about what we would do there. We have some ideas on what could be done on the legislative front, but definitely that is a big concern as you're thinking about the price of bitcoin. Well, hey, a million bitcoin might be coming back into the marketplace post quantum. If those satoshi coins are not moved into a post quantum address, they have
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B
also all the lost coins, effectively.
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A
But yes, absolutely.
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B
I mean, I agree with you. I think it's somewhere in the middle. And I also think the worst case scenario is a lot of coins get hacked and sold and the market moves on eventually. Right. So, yeah, if price goes down 80% because a bunch of bitcoin gets market sold, then I guess I'll just buy some more bitcoin.
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Always happy to buy some more cheap bitcoin.
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B
I mean, I'm one of the few people. I think the longer you're here, the more you enjoy when price is down and everybody's freaking out. Absolutely.
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Yeah. I mean, that's what I always tell people. I'm not complaining.
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B
Yeah, I'd rather buy Bitcoin for 65 than 125.
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A
Yes. Yeah. I always think about the days when, during the shutdowns, when it dropped down to, like, 3,000, I was like, oh, man.
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B
Zoom me back to that.
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A
Yes, please.
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B
All right, so, yeah, we don't need to dig too deeply into quantum. I mean, what's on your plate right now? So, obviously we unpacked everything happening with the military, but there's always a lot of legislation. I don't know if you want to talk about the Clarity act or at least give your hot takes there. Maybe we'll start there and then go into what's more likely to happen.
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A
Yeah. Happy to talk about clarity for the 10,000th time. So the legislation is at a point now where we're coming up against a deadline. If we get to the November election, it's not going to be passed into law. That's sort of the general consensus. And that's true generally, when you look back across time, you really don't see much legislation pass when you get within about a month of an election. So the things that need to happen, I get this asked a lot like, what actually, where are we? What's the timeline, what needs to happen in order for us to get this across the finish line? So we need to see the Senate Banking Committee, they need to have their markup for their portion of the bill. We already had the Ag Committee do their portion of the bill in the Senate. That one's done. We need to have the Banking Committee do theirs. And then the next step after that it would be go to a floor vote, win the Senate, and then after the floor vote in the Senate, you'd have a conference committee between the House and the Senate, because those versions of what they pass are clearly going to be different. That's already, you know, forecasted. So they'll come together and they'll decide, you know, what do we keep and what do we remove the, the issue though, the, where the bottleneck is. Because in Senate banking, you've got a lot of Republicans and a lot of Democrats who've been working really hard on trying to nail out the details of this bill. If Republicans cannot get enough Democrats on board with the banking bill in the committee, they could still move forward with a vote and they could have a partisan vote and they could push it through with no Democrats supporting it. The problem with when you do that is if you go through the banking process or you go through the committee process and you don't get any bipartisan support, when you go do the floor vote where everybody votes on it, every senator, every hundred senator votes on it, it dramatically reduces the chances that you'll get over that 60 vote threshold that you need to pass a bill out of the Senate. You have to get over 60 vot votes. That's a rule in the Senate. And in order to do that, they need six Democrats to join them, and that's assuming they don't lose any Republicans. So we certainly need to be concerned and aware of the fact that this needs to have bipartisan support in the Banking Committee so that it gets the bipartisan support in the Senate floor vote. So then of course, that I can go on to the conference committee between the House and the Senate where once they finish it, I mean, you know, President Trump will likely sign it into law the very next day, so there's no constraint on his. And it's really starting. And it's why it's been so hard to get past this point. It's really starting at the front of the line with that Banking Committee process. And I'll just jump into sort of like, why are we not able to get it done? There's a number of outstanding on his
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B
end, but the constraint might be an ethics clause that I haven't heard anybody actually come clear on. Yes, like, way more of a sticking point nonstarter for both sides than stablecoin yields or defi or any of the other things that we're spending our time vacillating about, you know, like in the media.
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A
I 100% agree with you. There's a number of issues, including BRCA language, the stablecoin yield rewards issue. There's some committee positions that need to be filled on cftc. But the biggest one, I would say the biggest political problem, because all those are sort of like, we can negotiate that. It's sort of like. But the one that will potentially change the outcome of how people vote is this ethics rule. So what happened was when they passed genius into law, a lot of the Democrats went back home to their. To their communities, to their jurisdictions, and a lot of the progressive groups were like, why? Why'd you pass this law? You're just enriching Trump. And it was really, you know, genius was just one tiny little type of cryptocurrency. It wasn't even all stable coins. It was one specific type of stable coins. And so that was a very narrow bill. Well, with market structure, you're talking about regulating every coin that's ever existed and will ever exist, and that is much more broad and has a much bigger scope. But one of the concerns that's come up now is that because of all the money that Trump has made and has been able to generate and his family has been able to generate off of crypto, we're talking about billions here. I mean, I think they went from 1 billion to like, 5 or 6 billion in net worth in the last 12 to 18 months. So huge amount of return on investment for themselves within the crypto space. Partially from World Liberty 5, partially from the meme coin that has caused a lot of Democrats to be concerned that if they go back to their. Their districts, and not just. Not just Democrats or some Republicans too, but if they go back to their districts, they're going to be like, what are you doing? You didn't, you didn't push back on this. You didn't fight back on this. And one of the big political problems in the Democratic Party right now for. For just all their own voters, but more is that a lot of people feel like they're not fighting back hard enough. They're not doing enough to oppose Trump. And so if they don't get an ethics rule in here that actually has any sort of teeth on it, I don't think they're going to vote. I don't think they would vote for it. That is, in my opinion, where the biggest bottleneck is. Whenever I meet with Democratic offices and I am talking about member meetings here, I hear time and time and time again there has to be a strong ethics rule in here for them to be able to get to a yes. And if they don't get to a yes, if enough of them don't get to a yes, market structure will ultimately fail.
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B
Okay, so I think it's going to fail. I've been saying that for quite a while just because of that very reason. I would love to be proven wrong, but let's say that somehow this does, you know, land on his desk. Are you in the no bill is better than a bad bill camp or that we need a bill no matter what, while we have this Goldilocks moment and the ability to pass anything.
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A
I would just like the other issue. I would say I'm somewhere in the middle. There's definitely some concerns that we have with the current legislation. There are some problems that we see, but at the end of the day also, you know, when are we going to get another chance to get this thing across the finish line? It could be five, ten years from now. And I think there's just, there's too many problems this legislation solves and the foundation that it creates is too important to pass up the opportunity. And then we can always monitor the situation after the bill passes into law and then come back around and make adjustments to it. That is very common. This is not going to be something that is set in stone for the rest of our lives. I think there's enough there there to get it across the finish line and then come back through and make some adjustments. But I'm also of the opinion that I don't think bitcoin is going to die or we're all going to be screwed if it doesn't happen. And I certainly think there could be better versions of what we're trying to accomplish to create a market structure bill.
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B
First of all, yeah, we've gotten this far without it. And I think bitcoin depends less on it than the rest of crypto.
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A
Absolutely.
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B
Obviously, just because I think there's a lot of clarity around bitcoin. We have the ETFs, we have every institution with A bitcoin plan. Government's talking about bitcoin, which is the next topic. Where do we stand on a strategic bitcoin reserve?
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A
Yeah, it's a great, and I will say that again, there's in market structure just to briefly close in there. There's some great stuff in there, right? Like you've got the BRCA stuff, you've got protections for self custody, which is huge. We've been fighting for protections for self custody for years. At the state level we've been able to pass multiple bills into law and also kill anti self custody language. So on strategic bitcoin reserves there is, things are gearing up for a one last big stand to get something done. On strategic bitcoin reserves, you've got what I believe will be multiple efforts within the NDAA to essentially try to get bitcoin reserves attached to the ndaa. The NDAA is a must pass bill. So even though the Congress is fairly unproductive right now when it comes to passing legislation, there are certain bills that are must pass bills and this is one of them. And we do believe there is a possibility of getting a bitcoin reserve into the ndaa. We are already working with different offices on trying to accomplish that. I'm aware there are other groups trying to accomplish that. But, but in my opinion, if whatever we do, we need to be, we need to be measured in our approach. A lot of times people love to be like, oh yeah, like let's just go with the absolute maximalist, best possible version of a bitcoin reserve, you know, and I would, I would say that I love those efforts. That is the pat, the efforts that we've seen in the past. But in my opinion we need to take some of the approaches that a similar approach that we took at the state level, which is let's meet people where they're at. If that means just codifying the strategic bitcoin reserve and there's no new, no new buying, there's no new bitcoin coming in, that is a huge, huge win. If that means we are able to codify and maybe we also can have some budget neutral purchases, that would be an even bigger win. But to be like, hey, let's do, let's buy $100 billion of Bitcoin through the NDAA as we codify the bitcoin reserve, I think that's going to be problematic. It's asking for too much. And I often tell this story of how, you know, one time I was getting ready to buy a house and it had gone independent twice and back onto the market. That's like a death sentence for a house that's really bad. You don't want to go into pending and then get pushed back on the market. Means something was really wrong somewhere along the line. And it happened twice. So I was thinking, all right, I'm going to go buy this house. I'm going to offer something really low because I just know that they're going to have a tough time selling this home now. Well, the offer was so low that the seller came back and was like, this offer so low. Like, we won't even negotiate with you. Like, we're not even going to entertain this conversation. Eventually, of course, we came back and we closed the deal. We still got it for a great price. But that's where we are with, with strategic bitcoin reserves. If we ask for something too big and this window is so short that we have, they're going to say, we're not even going to talk about this. This is just way too insane. So in my opinion, I think we should shoot for a codification as the North Star. Maybe we get lucky with some budget neutral purchases. But I just don't want us to get too greedy here in this moment, this last little moment that we have to possibly get it across the finish line.
- [29:37]
B
State level is really important. At a national level, obviously it's a signal for the rest of the world. So the signal to me is all that matters. We have a strategic bitcoin reserve. We may or may not add to it. We'll probably go find some more Cambodian pigs butchering scams to take their bitcoin from anyways. We know that the doj and you know, they're going to all end up. FBI are going to find other ways to, you know, end up finding bitcoin, even by. By accident. But if our central bank or our government is saying this is a strategic bitcoin reserve asset, other governments are going to have to buy some.
- [30:13]
A
I agree with you on the signal component. I think it's very important. And I also think it's good for the market because if, you know, we get another admin coming in and they write an executive order to unwind the strategic bitcoin reserve, you'll have those, those coins be auctioned at market price, which I. And of course, not only is that bad for the consumer, but that's also going to potentially be very bad for our country where, you know, it's possible that within the next five to 10 years that we start really Truly using Bitcoin for national security purposes, it could happen much, much sooner than that. I'm just saying, like, if. If we wait and then five years goes by and we're, you know, now using this for national security purposes and we don't have any Bitcoin, like, that's very troubling to me.
- [30:51]
B
Yeah, yeah. It makes absolutely no sense. So is there any more movement at the state level? It was obviously, you had this sort of huge wave. You were right on top of it, where it seemed like we're getting state by state by state by state. Right. And everybody had their own version of a strategic bitcoin reserve. How are they were going to add to it or approach it? But there was this real momentum, and I think just like anything else in bitcoin, crypto or the news cycle in general, things are probably still happening. It's just not the big story.
- [31:20]
A
That's absolutely true. Yes. So last year was incredible, as you mentioned, we had this amazing momentum. There was, like a competition among states to see who could get it done first. I was personally agging that competition on telling one state, like, hey, they're about to do it. You better. You better get it. And I was. I was being truthful. It was true. But they were. Ultimately, we ended up passing into law in New Hampshire. Representative Ammon, who came to the bitcoin conference, so good to see him. We would never be where we are today without his work. He's passed many other bills before as well, not. Not just strategic bitcoin reserve bills, so he was great. We also saw Arizona pass their version, which was like an unclaimed property version, where they generate revenue to the unclaimed property fund, and they use it to buy Bitcoin. And then, of course, Texas passed theirs into law, which was very similar to the New Hampshire model. They made some minor tweaks to it to improve it, but that one was passed into law. But that one did come with an appropriation. So they did spend. They allocated 10 million to the reserve and already spent 5 million of that to buy it. And so we are seeing more progress at the state level. It's not as much of a flurry of madness, 20, 30 states trying to attempt this, but we have some really solid efforts that we've been pursuing. And one actually, in fact, in the state of California that was just passed on consent out of judiciary and also unanimously out of the Banking and Finance Committee. And we expect we'll receive a favorable floor vote in the assembly, where we then expect it to go to The Senate. The Senate will be tougher. Senate is always tougher. In California, fortunately, the bill sponsor is going to be graduating to the Senate next year. So hopefully they'll be kind to the new incoming senator. And also additionally, I'll be flying there soon. I have already got my next trip planned where I'm going to be going and meeting with all the senators, as many as I can, to be able to help them help explain the value of a bitcoin reserve, a digital asset reserve for the state. So that's one, that one's very exciting. We also have one in Massachusetts. We've got the Senator Feingold there who's been a great bill sponsor and also Representative Worrell in the House. We had a great event there. We had like, it was, it was actually pretty very, I was very impressed by it. We put on a, like a lunch and learn with a small panel and normally you get, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20 people to show up. The room was standing room only for us to talk about bitcoin legislation and digital asset legislation in the state of Massachusetts. And I love to tell that story because I think people often think that Massachusetts vis a vis the position of Senator Warren are going to be very anti bitcoin and anti crypto when in reality they're completely disconnected. I wouldn't say they're like the opposite, but her viewpoints on, on this space do not map on to the rest of the lawmakers in the state is what we found. And that was really exciting to see.
- [33:55]
B
So outside of strategic reserves, what else is your focus?
- [33:58]
A
Right now we've got a banking bill we're working on in the state of California that would allow every state chartered bank and state credit union to be able to hold digital assets on behalf of their customers and engage in other types of digital asset services. That one is very exciting. We could wake up in a year and see every state charter bank and state charter credit union in the state saying hey, we'll hold you. You know, you can now buy bitcoin here, you can now hold your bitcoin here. So that would be massive considering that California is the most populous state in the country and thus has the most local community banks in the entire country. In fact, I think they by far and away have the largest amount of membership. So that would be huge for adoption in that state. We're also working a lot on making sure that we fight back against any attacks on self custody. We view ourselves as the bitcoin rights or the digital asset rights organization. We're always going to be fighting for, fighting to make sure that the average American can access Bitcoin directly. If you can't self custody, if you can't engage in peer to peer transactions, if you can't run a node, you can't truly engage with Bitcoin. And so we will always be in the fight to kill that type of language. And we recently helped kill some anti self custody language in Kentucky. There were some other groups as well that played a big role in that. I think Ledger was one of them. You know, that was great to see them get active and fight back against that language. But we are, funny enough, we passed a bill to protect the right to self custody in Kentucky the year before. So even if it had passed, if this anti self custody language had passed, it would conflict with prior law and I think we would see that go through the court system. But that's plan B, right? You don't want to go to plan B unless you have to. Luckily we were able to get that language pulled out. Another area that we're working on quite a bit is crypto atm. So as you might have seen that Tennessee and Indiana banned Bitcoin ATMs. It is now illegal, is now crying
- [35:38]
B
to have a. Canada just moved to potentially ban all this country. And that's obviously, you know, the first one was in Vancouver in 2013. And it's for thousands and thousands of Bitcoin ATMs. But I think it's like 80% are in the United, 88% are in the United States. Right. So it's a big, bigger fight here if that comes to our turf.
- [35:57]
A
Absolutely. And they already banned. It's now a crime to have a bitcoin ATM in the state of Tennessee and the state of Indiana. There are other states that are pushing this as well. What happened was, and unfortunately Bitcoin ATMs, especially ones that were not well ran, that were maybe ran by some, you know, some, some, some, some folks that we would be, we'd consider to be criminals in other sort of, other sort of industries were running some of these machines. And then what would happen is scammers would call elder people and, and have them, you know, put their cash, $50,000, $100,000 in cash in these machines and then send the crypto to the, to the scammer. So huge problem.
- [36:31]
B
That's the pig butchering I alluded to before. Right. I mean we broke away. We cracked a 15 billion dollar Bitcoin ring in Cambodia in October. And most of that was American and Canadian elderly who had been socially Engineered to believe someone was their friend and like 50% of it or something was go deposit your cash into these ATMs,
- [36:51]
A
you know, put it in and it's a big problem, It's a huge problem and we need it to go away. It's not, first of all, it's horrible what's happening to elders who are being scammed of their life savings. Beyond that, it's a blight on the ecosystem to if the first time you hear about bitcoin is you're you know, 70 year old grandmother getting scammed out of $100,000, like that's not good and we need to put an end to that. And so we are, we wrote a model bill to be able to stop fraud which comes up with certain restrictions limitations that these operators have to engage in. But, but unfortunately the AARP got very involved and the AARP is one of the most well funded lobbies in the entire country at the state level. They have chapters in every single state, they have a budget for lobbying in every single state. And they started pushing these very restrictive, almost like backdoor ban type of, type of kiosk, anti Bitcoin ATM bills. Now what happened though was in the last 6 to 12 months was law enforcement started to get involved and that's where we saw it go from a de facto ban to an actual ban. So now we're seeing multiple states have passed it and now more states are going to try to ban it. And our whole thing is again going back to access. We deeply care about access to Bitcoin and Bitcoin ATMs are basically the last place that any person can buy bitcoin for cash. And you know, for most people that probably doesn't matter. You know, 95% of us, we have access to traditional finance, we have access to a bank account, we have brokerage accounts, we don't need crypto ATMs, we don't need a Bitcoin ATM. Unfortunately though still in America, roughly 8% of people still operate on a cash only basis. And a lot of them it's because they can't access the traditional financial system. And financial inclusion is incredibly important to us as satoshi action. And so what we are saying to these lawmakers is totally fine, regulate them, regulate them strictly if you want to. In fact, a lot of the great operators that are participating in this dialogue already self regulate. Yes, already self regulate. They want it, they want the bad actors to go away. But don't ban it. Don't, don't take away the last way for an Individual who is left out of the traditional financial system to be a part of the next financial system.
- [39:01]
B
Yeah.
- [39:01]
A
You want those people that are on cash to be able to access Bitcoin?
- [39:04]
B
Yeah. To me, it's still akin to banning an iPhone for everyone because some drug dealers are using them. You know, I know it's a bigger problem, but you're talking about an agnostic technology that's being used for fraud. And that fraud will persist whether you get rid of that agnostic technology or not. It's not like butchering is going to stop because the ATMs are removed.
- [39:25]
A
Exactly. And that was going to be my point. But also that a lot of the good operators, there's, there's a handful of them that we've been able to discover in this process are, are actually very good at stopping and preventing future fraud because they get all this information from these scammers. They get to see the telephone numbers, they get to see the addresses that the attempts are being made to be sent to. And so they get to sort of create this catalog and help really identify and map out all of the fraudsters. In fact, one of them put together a whole website, you know, breaking down the, the anatomy of fraud and how you have, you know, the phone, the phone call happening and then you have the person taking the money out of their bank account and then they have that money being taken to the atm. But there's all these steps that can also be taken at those first two layers. What are the phone companies doing? They're not being, they're not being blamed for any of this. What are, what is the bank doing? They're not being blamed for any of this. So to blame just the endpoint is the wrong way to think about it because there will always be a new endpoint. They're just going to swap ATMs out for some other type of approach. Whether that's Bitcoin ATMs or whether that's gift cards. There's an always going to be a way for a scammer to find their way around. And I would much prefer, prefer a system where there's a safe, efficient and effective way for people to access Bitcoin with cash that is also helping us to root out and discover a lot of these scammers and fraudsters.
- [40:41]
B
Yeah, I totally agree. I think it's just classic massive overreaction and overcorrection that is wildly unnecessary. But yeah, the fraud is terrible. When I saw that one in October, I'll never forget that, when I saw that 15 billion number I was like, yeah, that's a lot of $50,000 from Granny.
- [41:03]
A
Yeah. Yes. And a lot of that. Six billion from North Korea just in the last several years alone. And that's why we are not only worried about. So not only are we engaging in this crypto ATM policy, the bitcoin ATM policy, to try to create regulations, help prevent the fraud, we are also working on legislation to help prevent future hacks and attempts by folks like North Korea and the Lazarus Group from stealing our crypto. Because that's another big problem. If people, if you're like, why would I buy $100,000 in Bitcoin if North Korea is just going to steal it from me, like right out from underneath my bed? Which is probably not true, but it paints that picture in people's minds that that could happen to the them. And so we really need to put an end to this stuff. And it's only going to get worse as AI continues to proliferate.
- [41:42]
B
It's like just the endless fight about the new fud, Right. When you think that the pendulum is fully swung in our direction, the Trumps come in and Trump and North Korea comes in and North Korea's. And we're back to having a whole new narrative that we need to fight.
- [41:59]
A
Yeah, that's the battle we signed up for. I guess it is.
- [42:03]
B
What else is on your mind, on your radar right now? What do you think of the market in general? I know you don't care about price, price up, price down. I'm not talking about that, but more just general sentiment. How do you sort of view everything in context of everything you're working on? Because you kind of have this inside view on what the people that matter are saying. And most of that doesn't break through, I think, to your average person.
- [42:27]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And so one thing I will say about this down market is it feels very different from other down markets. Most of the. So people are always like, hey, is the price. Is it affecting the lawmakers and is it changing the way that they think about whether they want to work on Bitcoin digital asset policy? And it hasn't. And the reason why I think it hasn't is because you don't see any major collapses taking place. When FTX happened, I mean, that spooked the hell out of the lawmakers. They. You had, for instance, you know, you had some lawmakers who were super pro bitcoin and crypto turn to be anti bitcoin and crypto crypto because of how bad that was. So in general, I would say that the behind the scenes viewpoint or thoughts from the lawmakers is that they're not really paying attention to the price at all right now.
- [43:09]
B
Yeah.
- [43:09]
A
Because it just hasn't gotten bad enough in the marketplace. Like, they don't pay attention to when it goes high or when it goes low. They pay attention to when things are falling apart. That's when they start to really care.
- [43:20]
B
Anything else on your mind before I
- [43:22]
A
let you go, man, you can keep me on here. We could be chatting all day, every day about the work that we're doing. But I really appreciate you having me on. I would just tell people if they, you know, we're a small little nonprofit. We punch certainly above our weight. But we're completely supported by individuals who contribute to us. The vast majority of our funding comes from individuals, so if they want to support the work that we're doing, you know, they can go to SatoshiAction IO and support us or sign up for our newsletter.
- [43:47]
B
Awesome. I encourage everybody to absolutely do that. Dennis, thank you very much, always for coming on, but also for, you know, your work behind the scenes and making these big headlines happen.
- [43:58]
A
Thanks, Scott. I really appreciate the time. Mother's Day has a way of sneaking up on you, but when it does, 1-800-FLowers makes it easy to send mom something beautiful, thoughtful, and worthy of everything she does. Right now with double blooms from 1-800-Flowers, order one dozen roses and get another dozen for free. It's a bigger gesture with fresh, beautiful flowers arranged to make Mother's Day feel as special as she is. Mother's Day feel bigger with double blooms at 1-800-flowers.com Spotify. That's 1-800-Flowers.com Spotify.