·
0:00
今天的视频中，正如我们承诺的，我想向大家更新我们的努力情况
0:04
以恢复
0:04
那些在新冠疫情恐慌期间被不公正遣散的军人。
0:09
病毒期间。
0:10
虽然我为过去一年的努力感到自豪，但我们纠正错误的责任
0:15
尚未完成。
0:16
因此，我决定延长国防部去年四月制定的
0:21
恢复服役
0:21
指导方针的适用期限。
0:26
修订后的指导方针适用于愿意在2027年4月1日前复员的前军人，
0:30
我们的良心战士。
0:31
我们延长期限，确保所有想利用此机会的人都有更多时间。
0:37
可能
0:37
大家还在观望我们是否认真的。我们是认真的。希望你能考虑一下。
0:41
也许
0:42
我们希望鼓励有经验和敬业的军人回归，
0:46
从即刻起，
0:46
根据该指导方针回来服役的人员的服役义务从四年缩短为两年。
0:52
这一变化体现了我们
0:53
对复员人员能迅速积极贡献的信心，并使恢复服役政策
0:57
更符合
0:58
军人及军队双方的需求。对某些人来说，也许四年太长了，
1:04
考虑到他们所经历的。
1:05
我们希望吸引这些良心战士回来。
1:09
这一修改将纳入所有未来的恢复服役协议。
1:11
该政策变化同样适用于已恢复服役并承诺四年义务的军人。
1:15
所以这是全方位的，
1:16
鉴于政策调整，为确保所有因新冠疫苗令而被迫提前结束职业生涯的军人
1:20
都能获得应有的尊重，
1:21
我指示陆军、海军和空军部长在60天内再次联系那些尚未重新入伍的军人，
1:27
通知他们这一新信息和新机会。
1:28
我们每天都在努力工作。
1:32
承诺纠正
1:33
拜登政府制造的不公和错误。
0:00
Today, in this video, as we said we would, I want to update you on our efforts
0:04
to reinstate
0:04
those service members who are unjustly forced out of the military during the CO
0:09
VID-19 panic.
0:10
While I'm proud of our efforts over the past year, our obligations to make
0:15
things right
0:16
are not yet complete. I'm therefore extending the application of the Department
0:21
's
0:21
reinstatement and return to service guidance established last April.
0:26
The revised guidance will now apply to former service members, our Warriors of
0:30
Conscience,
0:31
who wish to return to service through April 1st of 2027. So we're extending
0:37
this to make sure
0:37
anybody that wants to take advantage of it has additional time to take
0:41
advantage of it. Maybe
0:42
we're waiting to see whether we meant it or not. We do. We hope you'll take a
0:46
look.
0:46
To further encourage the return of experienced and dedicated service members,
0:52
effective immediately,
0:53
the active service obligation for individuals returning to service under this
0:57
guidance
0:58
is now reduced from four years to two years. And this change reflects our
1:04
confidence that
1:05
returning members will make an immediate and positive impact and aligns our
1:09
reinstatement policy
1:11
with the needs of both the service members and the military services. Maybe for
1:15
some four years
1:16
felt like too much given what had been done to them. We hope to entice his
1:20
Warriors of Conscience
1:21
to come back. This modification will be incorporated into all future rein
1:27
statement agreements.
1:28
And this policy change also applies to those service members who have already
1:32
been reinstated
1:33
and committed to a four year service obligation. So it's across the board and
1:38
given this policy
1:39
modification and to ensure that everyone whose career was cut short under the
1:43
COVID-19 vaccine
1:44
mandate received the respect they deserve. I direct the secretaries of the
1:49
military departments,
1:50
the Army, the Navy and the Air Force within 60 days to once again, re-contact
1:55
those who have not
1:56
rejoined already and inform them of this new information and this new
2:01
opportunity. We are working
2:03
hard every single day. It's our commitment to you to right the wrongs and
2:08
correct the injustices
2:10
of the Biden administration.
+1 积分
·
0:00
大家好，欢迎收看本期《暗马内线》。今天很荣幸与两位朋友同坐一堂。
0:06
特别的
0:07
荣幸和快乐。Aaron Day 是布朗斯通研究所的研究员，我也是该研究所的研究员。
0:11
他是我称之为的数字革命者。
0:13
不过我要提醒你，对于加密货币的希望和前景，以及目前发生的变化，他有些悲观。
0:17
而且我觉得，
0:18
他是数字革命者。当谈论加密货币以及它目前的状况时，他多少有点黑色药丸心态。
0:26
而
0:27
Steve Patterson 是独立研究员，虽然他可能不太认同这个称号，
0:33
但我认为他是我最喜欢的哲学家。
0:34
他是《暗马》的前嘉宾，值得一看。Steve 曾写过至少两本关于加密货币的书。
0:41
尤其是与 Roger Veer 合著的
0:42
《挟持比特币》一书，我强烈推荐。
0:46
关于这本书我遭遇过不少反驳，
0:47
有人坚称这书是胡扯，但你应该注意一个规律：
0:54
当有人告诉你《挟持比特币》胡说八道，
0:55
并说你应该知道其他事实时，他们从不进一步说明那些揭示该书故事有问题的事实。
1:00
这很明显。
1:00
好了，不多说了，欢迎 Aaron 和 Steve 来到《暗马》。谢谢，很高兴来到这里。
1:07
好，我们今天早上有很多内容要讨论，
1:07
因为这是一个复杂且多层次的话题，关键是关乎我们是否能保持自由。
1:12
哪些工具能帮助我们
1:13
保持自由，目前这类工具在技术和法规上都面临什么变化？
1:17
我想我今天的角色是
1:18
尝试以我有限的加密货币和比特币理解来翻译
1:21
所谓的挟持，
1:22
以及我们周围正在形成的技术官僚体系。这两位会帮助我们指向重要问题。
1:27
不知道先从谁开始？
1:27
Steve，你愿意先讲讲比特币的历史及你和 Roger 指控的挟持事件，
1:31
以及最近出现的任何证据，说明你们的观点是对还是错？Aaron 你随时打断。
1:39
本期《内线》的首个赞助商是 Helix，
1:41
他们生产出色的床垫。我们的 Helix 床垫用了四年多，
1:50
依然让我们睡得很好。
1:51
它是我们喜欢的硬度，但他们也有软款。散热好，安静，极其舒适。
1:57
大家都睡眠不佳，
1:58
有时是现代生活惹的祸，光线干扰、噪音、脑子停不下来，
2:05
不健康的饮食和药物破坏了生理机能。
2:07
当然，差床垫也会导致睡眠质量下降。Helix 床垫采用独立包装钢圈和优质泡沫，
2:14
很好的脊柱支撑。
2:16
访问 Helix 的睡眠测验网站，花不到两分钟就能知道最适合你的床垫。
2:21
你是侧睡、仰睡还是俯睡？
2:22
你喜欢软硬适中，还是硬床垫？找到合适款后，有120晚无忧退换保障。
2:29
Helix Sleep 的 Midnight Lux
2:31
混合床垫荣获了福布斯和 Wired 2025 年最佳床垫奖。
2:35
Helix 床垫美国制造，
2:37
且全部不含玻璃纤维。Helix 还支持军人、急救人员、教师和学生，提供特别优惠。
2:44
所有使用过 Helix 的人都赞不绝口，
2:47
有的家人睡几晚就决定买一张，Zach Scott 在大学公寓里也用着爱不释手。
2:52
Helix 真棒。
2:53
据说许多人睡得更好，打呼噜也少了。访问 helixsleep.com/darkhorse
2:58
享受全场27%折扣。
2:59
helixsleep.com/darkhorse，输入节目名让他们知道是我们推荐。
3:05
再次提醒，
3:06
helixsleep.com/darkhorse，享受超舒适床垫。
3:10
我觉得从一开始讲比特币的初衷最合适。
3:11
很多人不知道，2009 年，比特币起初是设计为可日常使用的替代货币。
3:15
最初设想
3:16
是要有一种不由政府或银行发行的货币，可以用于线上买咖啡等日常交易。
3:20
比特币创造者中本聪，
3:21
尽管身份不明，却公开说过希望这技术能被用在自动售货机等小额支付。
3:26
当时
3:26
在线支付手段还不成熟，信用卡虽可用但费用高，需要 VISA 或万事达许可。
3:30
而当时还没有方便的 Venmo 或 Zelle。
3:31
最初的目标是打造互联网支付系统。
3:36
但到了2026年，
3:36
人们已把比特币视作价值储存工具，不再当作支付系统或货币使用。
3:42
认为它是一种稀缺资产，
3:42
买入持有后希望升值，进而带来自由。可这不是最初设计目标。
3:46
我想先说两点，
3:47
首先人们得理解你提到的交换媒介和价值储存的区别。
3:52
这两者价值不同。
3:52
举例来说，纸币本身用途有限，
3:56
但却被认作交换媒介，它会升值或贬值取决于市场对其背书的看法。
3:57
你提到必须得有 VISA 或万事达的许可，这对大多数人来说是理所当然的。
4:01
但关键是
4:02
有历史案例显示，某些被视作威胁权力的人会被剥夺进出该系统的权限。
4:06
比如我早期通过信用卡支持维基解密，
4:08
后来再支持时就被拒，这些人曾被网络封杀。
4:12
早先我还见证一个卖合法迷幻植物的人交易受阻。
4:13
最近加拿大抗议疫情暴政的卡车司机也遭遇该类封禁。
4:18
这说明有些巨头无视法律，
4:20
不给予守法者交易机会，影响其经济活动。
4:24
这种情况虽未普遍，
4:25
但普通人应当高度警惕。疫情期间疫苗强制就利用了此类机制。
4:30
是个极其可怕的系统。
4:32
我还想谈谈“数字现金”的概念：现金交易无需中介，资产交换直接发生。
4:37
这也让政府反感现金交易，
4:37
因为难以介入监管。相比之下，电子支付都有中介介入，
4:41
如银行或信用卡公司，
4:42
所以更易监管和控制。
4:46
比特币的诞生
4:47
旨在打造一种电子现金，既有现金的点对点特征，
4:50
又是数字化，
4:51
不依赖实体纸币。交易记录公开，但身份可匿名，实际是伪匿名。
4:56
不过事实证明，
4:57
用 AI 和链上分析技术其实很容易识别交易者身份，
5:03
所以隐私方面问题很多。
5:05
还有量子计算被认为能破解加密，但专家认为量子威胁被夸大，
5:12
算法可以被抗量子化。
5:14
另外，现有交易量较少，没必要动用量子计算机大规模分析。
5:17
如果比特币恢复初设计的高扩展性，
5:20
才会需要更高级的 AI。
5:24
现在这链上99%的交易能被很容易地分析。
5:31
回到比特币初期，
5:32
它诞生于2009年，正值2008年金融崩溃之后，
5:38
这段期间，
5:39
政治光谱左右两派都认同银行救助是错误的决定。
5:46
所以比特币
5:47
作为同行现金，是针对银行系统的一种反叛。
5:54
当时
5:55
信用卡手续费高昂，商家需付30美分交易费和2.9%的手续费。
6:01
相比之下，
6:02
比特币当时快又便宜。
6:06
我个人也在2014年之前购买过比特币，
6:08
直到最近讯息曝光后才出售，感觉整个项目前景堪忧。
6:13
卖出的过程极其复杂且昂贵，
6:14
需要先小额测试地址准确性，花了我半天时间才确认资金安全转出。
6:21
由于通过 Coinbase，
6:23
所有交易无需匿名，接受 KYC，完全公开透明。
6:27
这与最初设想的自由匿名货币大相径庭。
6:29
比特币核心代码中的交易吞吐量有限制，网络容量是每秒7笔交易，成为瓶颈。
6:35
出现了多次交易积压，
6:36
甚至曾有交易确认等待超过一周的记录。
6:40
用户体验急剧下降，费用暴涨，
6:42
不适合日常支付，核心的交换媒介功能荡然无存。
6:49
虽有闪电网络等层二方案弥补，但大多是营销噱头，实际充当托管钱包。
6:54
依赖第三方托管，再次失去去中心化特性，与比特币最初设想背道而驰。
7:02
另一方面，加密货币交易所让转换加密货币变得简单，
7:07
但交易所持有资金，类似纸黄金，只是承诺而非实物持有。
7:10
风险依然存在。
7:13
第二个赞助商是 Armra 初乳，一种古老的全营养活性食物。
7:18
现代社会充斥电磁场、人造光、种子油、微塑料等，破坏身体信号，
7:23
影响肠道、免疫和整体健康。初乳能从细胞层面提升健康，
7:28
助力免疫和肠道，增强体能表现。
7:33
Armra 初乳选用美国牧场草饲牛初乳，采用创新工艺保护营养，
7:38
去除致敏蛋白与脂肪，
7:39
质量严格超标，且认证无草甘膦残留。
7:44
使用者报告皮肤更好，头发更快更厚，精神更集中，
7:48
运动后肌肉酸痛减少，睡眠改善，糖欲降低。
7:53
访问 armra.com/darkhorse，首次订购享30%折扣。
7:58
再回到比特币历史，
8:00
早期体验其实相当好。2012年我在新罕布什尔州一场自由峰会上，
8:10
有人送我比特币，瞬时到账且无手续费。
8:15
比起处理信用卡过程复杂且费用高昂，这体验极致便捷。
8:22
2017年，
8:23
许多零售商开始直接接受比特币支付，无需第三方。
8:31
我们曾用比特币购买机票、商品。
8:32
之后网络被人为限制为每秒7笔交易，费用飙升到数十美元，确认需时近一周。
8:36
商家无法承受此成本，
8:38
交易媒介功能彻底丧失。
8:40
这场关于扩大区块大小的争论导致网络分裂成比特币和比特币现金两派。
8:46
比特币现金试图回归最初设计理念，
8:47
但没成功。Blockstream 公司成立于2014-2015年间,
8:53
这家公司成为限制比特币扩容的中心，雇佣关键开发者，
8:58
他们将比特币吞吐量锁定低位，推动二层解决方案营收。
9:04
Blockstream CEO Adam Back
9:06
甚至劝用户使用其另一个区块链“Liquid Network”，收取高额费用。
9:11
这明摆着是卡通式的反派角色。
9:13
Epstein 曾投资 Blockstream，资金也流入麻省理工等研究机构支持相关开发者。
9:20
Epstein 不仅资助核心开发，还控制了部分加密货币行业发展方向。
9:27
Tether 这家稳定币公司由 Epstein 的顾问 Brock Pierce 联合创办。
9:34
2017 年，Tether 大量印钞推动比特币价格攀升，但其储备明显不足。
9:40
美国监管机构发现，Tether 仅用不到30%实际资产支撑其代币。
9:44
这靠印虚拟美元支撑的行为极似庞氏骗局。
9:48
Bitfinex 交易所与 Tether 有同一母公司 iPhonex，
9:52
Blockstream 筹资活动也由 iPhonex 领导，利益冲突极大。
9:58
Tether 容易被追踪与冻结其代币，且比比特币更集中化，实为私企发行。
10:04
未来数字货币普及，稳定币等将成为隐秘的数字控制工具。
10:11
Howard Lutnik 投资 Tether，独占其国债管理合约，同时积极推动监管立法。
10:16
该法案要求稳定币100%用国债做背书，进一步巩固其中心化控制。
10:20
类似冷战时代，金融巨头通过隐秘途径掌控数字经济命脉。
10:26
比特币曾被寄予厚望能打破此格局，如今却几乎沦为局中棋子。
10:33
我们必须高度警惕数字货币和代币化资产带来的新型专制风险。
10:39
虽然技术仍有希望，但普遍存在被劫持、操纵的风险，不容小觑。
10:45
最初的比特币社区对货币的定义及用途存在深刻经济学考量，
10:53
这被少数核心开发者忽视，导致方向偏离，社区出现分裂。
10:58
区块链也遭遇了内容审查，信息控制扭曲了用户获得的视角，
11:05
言论自由被压制，不利于去中心化理念的实现。
11:12
Epstein 文件揭露了比特币发展背后惊人的阴谋，显示技术被权力利用。
11:20
如今最重要的是要认清这场权力博弈，坚定维护自由和真相。
11:27
同时亦不能盲目乐观，技术本身的潜能虽然存在，但易被黑暗势力操控。
11:33
真正的守护者需有经济、技术、哲学和战略的全方位洞察和行动。
11:37
任何释放的新技术都可能被劫持，保持清醒、谨慎并团结合作至关重要。
11:43
我们深知人性复杂，恶劣者总寻找机会操控系统，正义者需长远坚持。
11:49
理想虽然破碎，但信念依然是对抗黑暗的最强盔甲。
11:56
本次谈话涵盖技术内幕、权力运作及社会经济影响，供你我深思。
12:02
未来道路崎岖，但我们得共同努力争取更自由、更公正的数字时代。
12:09
感谢收看，期待未来继续探索这些重要话题。
12:15
到此结束。
42:48
祝大家好运，继续为自由奋斗！
0:00
Hey, folks. Welcome to this episode of the Dark Horse Inside Rail. I have the
0:06
distinct
0:07
honor and pleasure of sitting this morning with two friends. Aaron Day is a
0:11
fellow fellow at
0:13
the Brownstone Institute. I am also a fellow at the Brownstone Institute. And
0:17
he is what I would
0:18
call a digital revolutionary. He is, I will warn you, something of a black pill
0:26
when it comes to
0:27
understanding the hope and promise of cryptocurrency and what is happening to
0:33
it in the present.
0:34
And Steve Patterson is an independent researcher. I will say he may push back
0:41
on the designation,
0:42
but I will say he is also my favorite philosopher. He is, of course, a previous
0:46
guest on Dark Horse,
0:47
and you should check out that episode. Steve has written two books on at least
0:54
cryptocurrency,
0:55
if not Bitcoin. The more famous of them, he co-authored with Roger Veer, the
1:00
book,
1:00
hijacking Bitcoin, which I highly recommend. I've taken a ton of pushback for
1:07
talking about what
1:07
is in that book. People swear the book is nonsense, but here's a pattern you
1:12
should be aware of.
1:13
When people tell you that hijacking Bitcoin is nonsense and that there are
1:17
other things you
1:18
should know, they never follow up with the things that make it clear that there
1:21
's something wrong
1:22
with the story presented in hijacking Bitcoin. That's conspicuous. So without
1:27
further ado,
1:27
Aaron and Steve, welcome to Dark Horse. Thanks. Great to be here.
1:31
All right. So we have our work cut out for us this morning because we have
1:39
multiple layers of
1:41
a very difficult, at least highly complicated topic to discuss in order to get
1:50
to the part that
1:51
matters to people. The question of, are we going to remain free? What are the
1:57
tools that allow us to
1:58
remain free? And what is happening to them both technologically and legisl
2:05
atively at the moment?
2:07
So the role I think I'm going to end up playing this morning is I am going to
2:14
try to translate
2:16
based on an admittedly imperfect understanding of cryptocurrency, of Bitcoin,
2:21
of the hijacking,
2:22
and of the technocracy that seems to be emerging around us. And these two
2:29
gentlemen are going to
2:31
do their best to point us at the stuff that really matters. So I don't know who
2:35
we should start with.
2:37
Steve, do you want to start off and talk a little bit about the history of
2:44
Bitcoin and the hijacking
2:47
that you and Roger allege has happened and any evidence that has emerged more
2:52
recently that would
2:53
suggest your model is either correct or flawed. And Aaron, you feel free to
2:58
jump in anywhere that
2:59
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5:24
I think the best place to start is right at the very beginning with what the
5:31
purpose of Bitcoin
5:32
was supposed to be. A lot of people don't realize this in 2026, but Bitcoin was
5:38
actually designed
5:39
to be an alternative currency that was usable in everyday exchange. The
5:46
original vision was
5:47
that we need an alternative currency that's not being issued by a government or
5:54
a bank that you can
5:55
use in commerce online for everyday coffee transactions. We have writing from
6:01
the creator of Bitcoin,
6:02
whose name is Satoshi Nakamoto, whose identity we don't know, but that's his
6:06
name. He's on record
6:08
to say envisioning this Bitcoin technology could be used even in vending
6:12
machines, not for large
6:17
payments, but for everyday payments. The technology was released in 2009 at a
6:24
time where we didn't
6:25
have great payments for online commerce. You could use credit cards, which have
6:35
their own fees,
6:36
high fees associated with them. You need permission from Visa or tolerance from
6:42
Visa or MasterCard
6:43
in order to participate in that system. They're heavily regulated. We didn't
6:48
really have things like
6:49
Venmo at that time or Zell, which is pretty easy for sending money digitally.
6:57
But in the earliest
6:59
days, the idea was, okay, we're going to have a payment system for the internet
7:02
. Now, I'll jump
7:04
ahead here to 2026. The way that people are talking about Bitcoin is as a store
7:10
of value and not as
7:12
a payment system, not as a currency. It's supposed to be something that one
7:16
gathers, you buy it and
7:18
then you hold it and then hopefully it appreciates in price. That's going to
7:22
make the world a freer
7:23
place because it's scarce. That's the idea. But this is not what the original
7:29
purpose was.
7:31
Okay, so I want to slow you down there and just say a couple things. One,
7:36
people should have in
7:38
their mind the distinction that you're pointing to between a mechanism of
7:45
exchange, a way to buy
7:46
and sell things, and a store of value. So those two things are separate values.
7:54
It is conceivable
7:55
that you could have something that functions as a store of value that has no
7:59
intrinsic value,
8:00
like, for example, a dollar, a physical dollar, isn't very useful for much. But
8:06
it is understood
8:08
to be valuable as a mechanism of exchange. It also, of course, appreciates and
8:13
declines in value
8:14
based on how the world perceives the strength of what backs it. You hid in what
8:21
you said,
8:23
maybe we're going to get there, that the idea that you need permission from
8:27
Visa or MasterCard
8:29
in order to use their system is pretty remote to most people because we can all
8:35
get that permission.
8:36
But what you need to understand is that there is a history of selectively
8:40
removing that position
8:42
or that permission from people who have confronted power in ways that are not
8:50
deemed acceptable by
8:53
the powers that be. So I remember in the early days of Wikileaks, I donated to
8:59
them because I
9:00
thought it was a great idea to have more transparency. And I did so with a
9:04
credit card. When I tried
9:06
to do it again, it had become impossible. They had been banished from the
9:10
network.
9:11
That was the second time that I encountered this. The first one was somebody
9:17
who was selling
9:19
an entheogen, perfectly legal, called salvia, was actually a scientist who had
9:26
discovered
9:27
the compound within this plant that accounts for its psychoactive properties.
9:32
And it had become extremely difficult to transact with him, even though what he
9:37
was selling
9:38
was perfectly legal. And then more recently, we can look at the example of the
9:45
truckers in
9:47
Canada, who were protesting COVID tyranny, who found themselves debunked. That
9:53
's obviously not
9:53
a credit card issue. But the basic point is you have a bunch of corporations
9:58
that are unaccountable,
10:00
that are in a position to render you effectively poor by hobbling your ability
10:08
to transact in
10:09
the market with no location you can go to look at the evidence they have that
10:13
you've done something
10:14
wrong, no basic agreement that as long as you're within the bounds of the law
10:18
that they need to
10:19
have no prejudice against you. So it's a frightening system that has been used
10:26
sparingly so far,
10:28
but the average person should be very concerned in an era where we've seen
10:32
things like vaccine
10:34
mandates, that to the extent that a private system that can be turned off at
10:40
will can be used to
10:41
coerce you into taking a novel medical technology, for example, there is no bar
10:47
to that happen.
10:48
Yes, that's an excellent point. And a concept we should we should dwell on
10:54
another minute is
10:55
this idea of digital cash. So when you think about cash transactions, one of
11:01
the features of cash
11:03
transactions is that you've got the asset, you want to exchange a good or
11:09
service with somebody,
11:11
you just hand them the cash, there isn't an intermediary between that
11:15
transaction. This is one of the
11:16
reasons why governments don't like cash transactions around the world is
11:20
because you can't it's more
11:21
difficult to put a third party between that exchange. Now contrast this with
11:28
electronic payments
11:29
outside of cryptocurrency, think of essentially all electronic payments, they
11:34
're going through
11:35
an intermediary, they're going through a bank, they're going through a company,
11:38
they're going
11:38
through a credit card. So it's much easier to have that middleman to step in
11:43
and regulate
11:44
and control and and survey when you're dealing with electronic payments. Well,
11:49
this this is a
11:51
great opening here that Satoshi Nakamoto saw for digital cash, electronic cash,
11:57
maybe we could get
11:58
the peer to peer feature of cash transactions, but make it digital so you don't
12:05
it doesn't have to be
12:07
tied to, you know, physical bills. That was part of the beauty and the
12:12
excitement around Bitcoin is
12:15
it seemed like we're going to capture the features and the efficiencies of
12:19
electronic payments,
12:21
but we're going to get around the the cost of it being electronic in the sense
12:25
that it's going to
12:26
be centralized because it's going to be a this is going to be a peer to peer
12:29
electronic cash system,
12:31
peer to peer, and anonymous. So the idea that you could have an exchange, the
12:40
record of your
12:40
exchange between wallets exists in public, but your identity would not
12:45
inherently be tied to
12:47
it if you didn't want it to be. So the a bit just one technical point here,
12:51
because people
12:52
say, well, that's not anonymous. That's pseudonymous. Yeah, the idea of
12:56
anonymity is that the the
12:58
record, there's no record and there's no identity. The idea with a pseudonymity
13:03
is that you have
13:04
essentially accounts that are public, sometimes names that are public. In this
13:08
case, the transactions
13:09
are public, but you don't inherently know the identity of the person behind
13:12
that transaction.
13:13
Now, in practice, that the it it's actually not that difficult in hindsight, in
13:20
particular,
13:20
to analyze this public ledger of the Bitcoin blockchain and figure out who
13:26
those identities
13:27
are. So in practice, the pseudonymity, there are privacy problems that are
13:32
pretty deep in
13:34
in Bitcoin. So a lot of people thought that Bitcoin was supposed to be
13:38
anonymous. It turns out it
13:39
turns out it wasn't. Well, correct me if I'm wrong. But the job of analyzing
13:47
the pattern in those
13:48
transactions to discover individual identity has grown greatly worse with the
13:54
advent of AI.
13:56
It is much easier to point an AI at the question and have it analyze large
14:01
amounts of data and
14:02
look for logical patterns that identify people. And this is something we need
14:06
to be concerned
14:07
about in general. I mean, one thing, this is weird deep in the weeds here, but
14:11
I can't say
14:13
that based on what I've seen that I'm convinced that quantum computing is
14:19
really what it pretends
14:20
to be that it has the potential to do what people who are pushing it claim that
14:25
it has the potential
14:26
to do. But certainly, if it did, the thing that makes Bitcoin or any other
14:31
cryptocurrency secure
14:32
would fall by the wayside because the computing power to break the
14:37
cryptographic pattern would
14:38
then be in reach. Am I wrong about that? Yeah. So I think with the quantum
14:44
threats are generally
14:45
overblown, because even if we get the capacity for quantum computers to do what
14:53
they are claimed
14:54
to do, it shouldn't be that difficult to make the algorithms quantum resistant.
14:59
So I tend to think that those concerns really aren't going to be a threat.
15:05
There are two questions. One, does the entire past ledger get opened? And so
15:16
you can imagine
15:17
an update where you just increase the complexity of the math necessary to do
15:21
this work so that
15:22
it is great enough that the new level of computing power available can't crack
15:26
it that I can see.
15:27
But I can't see how basically every encrypted message that was ever sent doesn
15:34
't suddenly become
15:35
transparent along with the past functioning of cryptocurrencies.
15:40
So with crypto, with Bitcoin in particular, there's a few things going on here
15:44
that make it
15:47
let's say problematic from the privacy perspective. One is, and we'll get into
15:52
this maybe a little
15:52
bit later, let's just say there's something called the block size limit, and we
15:57
can talk
15:58
about the details of that future because it turns out to be important in
16:01
Bitcoin's history.
16:02
But the way that Bitcoin we're going to argue was prevented from scaling made
16:08
it so you don't
16:09
actually even need quantum computers or AI to do mass surveillance of the
16:15
Bitcoin blockchain.
16:17
Because the amounts of data are so small, they're so unbelievably small, you
16:23
can get chain analysis
16:24
without needing AI. Now in a world in which Bitcoin scaled the way that it was
16:31
originally
16:31
designed to scale, then it becomes a separate question. Then you're dealing
16:35
with a lot more data,
16:37
and then I think maybe you would need more AI to do sophisticated chain
16:41
analysis. But as it is right
16:43
now, it's probably fair to say that on the Bitcoin blockchain,
16:49
all of the transactions or 99% of them are going to be fairly easily analyzed
16:57
just as is.
16:58
Fair enough. I want to add a couple of things just for context about going back
17:04
to the original
17:05
launch of Bitcoin. So it was at 2009, and just for context, it was right after
17:10
the 2008 financial
17:13
collapse. In fact, there's even reference to this in the code itself.
17:18
After the financial collapse of 2008, this was one unique period of time where
17:24
you actually had
17:24
the right and the left unified on one idea, which is that the bank bailouts
17:29
were a bad idea.
17:30
Whether you were Occupy Wall Street or the Tea Party, everybody was sick of
17:35
these banks,
17:36
and sick of the money printing, and sick of 10 million people losing their
17:40
homes while
17:41
all of the losses get socialized. That was the original concept behind it. It
17:47
was peer-to-peer
17:48
cash, but it was also in this context of, "Hey, we know something is wrong with
17:52
the banks." You
17:54
mentioned this idea of you talked about the fact that there's debanking and
17:57
issues with the Canadian
17:59
truckers, but it's even deeper than that. When Bitcoin was originally launched,
18:03
it was better
18:03
money. It was actually better, faster, and cheaper. If you're using credit
18:08
cards, it may not seem
18:10
like a lot, but if you're a merchant and you are accepting credit cards, you
18:14
have to pay 30 cents
18:16
per transaction, plus 2.9% of the value of the transaction in fees. We live in
18:23
a world where
18:24
71% of the planet makes less than $10 a day. The invention of Bitcoin is being
18:30
money that
18:30
was separate from state where you didn't need a bank account, where the fees
18:35
were low, was something
18:36
that was life-changing for people around the world. Let me just add, as a
18:41
personal note,
18:43
I bought a bunch of Bitcoin understanding loosely what it was supposed to be,
18:51
understanding the long-term trajectory of its growth in value. I discovered a
18:58
number of things
18:59
along the way. I recently sold that Bitcoin in the aftermath of the Epstein
19:06
files revelations,
19:07
believing that I don't know if it's going to go up or not, but my sense is that
19:13
what was revealed
19:14
by the Epstein files was enough to bring the whole project into question.
19:23
The reason I raised this is because in trying to get out of Bitcoin, I had used
19:33
an exchange
19:34
Coinbase in order to buy Bitcoin, and I had put that money in an actual wallet
19:42
of which I had sold custody. The process of getting the Bitcoin back to
19:50
Coinbase into dollars
19:53
and then out to my bank account was incredibly cumbersome. It was expensive. It
20:05
was slow.
20:07
It was frightening because you literally plug in an address. You send some
20:16
small
20:17
amount first to make sure that you've got the basics right. Now, I'm sure this
20:21
is not true if
20:22
you're doing this on a daily basis, but if you're just holding this stuff, it's
20:25
sitting in some
20:26
wallet and you say, "Hey, I want to get out." It took me something like a half
20:32
a day to do this
20:35
in a careful enough way that I was sure I wasn't going to evaporate the money
20:40
into thin air from
20:41
which there's no recovery. Further, because it went through Coinbase, Coinbase
20:48
has a
20:50
no-your-customer, KYC. No-your-customer means that there's nothing remotely
20:59
anonymous about this
21:00
transaction. It's happening absolutely in the open. Anyway, the point I'm
21:08
trying to make is that
21:09
what Satoshi Nakamoto lays out as the plan for what Bitcoin is to be is so far
21:17
from what it has
21:17
become. My credit card, I can be cashing out a transaction at the hardware
21:24
store,
21:25
and it takes seconds. Bitcoin took 10 minutes to move. Each move took 10
21:31
minutes while the money is
21:33
nowhere. It's not anonymous. It doesn't function as a means of exchange. It isn
21:40
't cheap. It isn't fast.
21:42
It's amazing how inverted from the initial vision it's become. Okay, several
21:47
things on that. Thank
21:48
you for bringing that up, Brett. Believe it or not, I'm not exaggerating. You
21:51
had a good user experience.
21:54
Hear me out. Okay, now this sounds crazy. What has happened on multiple
21:58
occasions because of the
22:00
effectively the technical redesign of Bitcoin, which we'll have to talk about
22:04
later, is on multiple
22:05
occasions, you'll have the network will actually itself effectively come to a
22:11
standstill for the
22:12
majority of users. There's an artificial cap of seven transactions per second
22:17
on the Bitcoin network.
22:18
And we'll go into detail of why it's there. And this is the key technical
22:26
feature in the
22:26
hijacking of Bitcoin was this transaction throughput limit. Okay, so what has
22:31
happened on multiple
22:33
occasions is there have been more users of Bitcoin than seven transactions per
22:38
second.
22:38
And so there's a backlog of transactions that develop. And sometimes that
22:43
backlog can
22:44
it can result in days to process a single transaction. And on at least one
22:52
occasion,
22:52
it was more than a week to process the average transaction. So what has
22:56
happened?
22:57
There are horror stories. You say you were scared. There are people who who've
23:03
been told
23:03
something about what Bitcoin is. They're trying to cash out. And when they send
23:08
their transactions
23:09
to try to get to Coinbase, literally the transaction won't confirm for like a
23:13
week plus. And in the
23:15
middle of that, you have the price massively fluctuating. So when would you've
23:20
had these network
23:21
capacity issues, you might have the value of your Bitcoin being dropping 10%,
23:27
20% in a short amount
23:28
of time. And there's literally nothing you can do to get your transactions to
23:31
go through the network.
23:32
That's happened on multiple occasions with the thing being a risk. I mean, I
23:37
know I've said this
23:38
already, but the idea that you are engaged in a transaction that because of the
23:42
way in which it
23:43
is secure can't be fixed. You can't walk into the equivalent of the Bitcoin
23:50
bank and say,
23:51
I made some kind of error. Where is the $10,000 that I intended to move from
23:59
here to there?
24:00
It's on you to get it right. So the combination of it's so slow that you can't
24:05
even tell whether it
24:06
worked. And an error would be fatal and unrecoverable is amazing. I mean, I was
24:15
stunned that this took me
24:17
really more than half a day. And now that I hear the shower I went and took
24:22
while I was waiting to
24:23
see if the transaction landed was apparently a small period of time. And by the
24:28
way, I got
24:29
through the shower and it had not landed. So that is stunning to me that the
24:35
vision has been so
24:37
inverted. So the punchline here is the means of exchange has evaporated. Now,
24:44
of course, Bitcoin
24:45
people will say, no, it hasn't. There's a second layer, the lightning layer
24:49
that allows you to do
24:50
just that, which is true more or less. But it is not the idea of a currency
24:56
that is hyper secure
24:59
and trivially expensive and rapid to use. So it effectively functions as cash.
25:06
So a few things on that. We'll have to talk about lightning in detail as well
25:10
because the most of
25:13
lightning is a marketing hype. It doesn't actually translate into the reality
25:18
of how the tech works
25:19
in practice, what lightning is, is just a custodial wallet. So it's the
25:25
equivalent of having an account
25:27
on Coinbase or having a PayPal account for that matter and then going through
25:32
your company
25:32
to move your Bitcoin. So when you are talking about custodial wallets, custod
25:38
ial accounts,
25:38
corporate accounts, company accounts, that undermines the whole idea of what
25:43
Bitcoin was
25:43
there to do, which is to give you an opportunity to make exchange exchanges
25:50
without having to
25:50
go through a company in the first place. Okay, practice. Yeah, go ahead.
25:54
I just want to clarify for people who are new to the topic of crypto, probably
25:58
most of them
25:58
are not listening anymore because this is too technical. But the idea of an
26:02
exchange, an exchange
26:04
makes it, yes, very easy to translate money dollars into whatever
26:11
cryptocurrency you want.
26:13
So you can use a credit card, get some dollars, say I want some Bitcoin. Next
26:17
thing you know,
26:18
you've got however much Bitcoin in your wallet. But the part that's not obvious
26:23
is that you don't
26:24
really have Bitcoin. It's a bit like paper metals. If I have paper metals, do I
26:29
have a metal? No,
26:30
you have a promise of metal. And if the mechanism that promised you the metal
26:34
goes belly up for some
26:36
reason, you don't have anything. And so the reason that I took the money on the
26:41
advice of people who
26:42
were sophisticated about this took the money out of the exchange rather than
26:45
just leave it there where
26:46
it is easy to transact with is that there's an insecurity. I don't know how
26:52
secure the businesses
26:53
are that owe me the Bitcoin. So anyway, you're caught in this bind where either
27:01
you have a
27:02
perfectly secure way of maintaining your currency. But what happens if you lose
27:07
the codes that
27:08
allow you to get into it, then it's gone. There's nothing to be done. Or you
27:13
can have it in a place
27:14
that you can literally just point your cursor at it and say, I want to change
27:18
this to that.
27:19
And it happens easily, but you don't really have it. It's an IOU.
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That's armra.com/darkhorse. Now, I do want to let's return back a little bit to
29:51
the history here,
29:53
and then it'll take us into some of the other concepts that you mentioned. So,
29:56
believe it or not,
29:58
the user experience in Bitcoin was actually pretty great back in 2014. So, the
30:05
experience
30:06
that you're having now of you got to wait 10 minutes because the exchange
30:11
requires so many
30:12
confirmations and it's a high stress, a very cumbersome. That user experience
30:18
is worse
30:19
more than 10 years later than it was in 2014. I know Aaron can attest to this.
30:26
Aaron was early
30:27
in living off of crypto a long time ago. So, maybe you can talk about, this
30:33
sounds crazy,
30:34
that this technology, this is world changing technology, is actually a worse
30:38
experience now
30:39
than it was 12 years ago, but isn't that the case? It's absolutely the case. So
30:43
, I first was
30:44
exposed to Bitcoin in 2012, and I remember when I received Bitcoin, it was at a
30:48
Liberty Form
30:49
conference in here in New Hampshire. Somebody just sent me Bitcoin to my mobile
30:54
device,
30:54
and it was nearly instant with no fees. I've experienced as a serial
31:00
entrepreneur
31:00
dealing with credit card processing companies and everything else. I'm like,
31:03
wow, there's no bank,
31:04
there was essentially no fees. And, you know, as Steve said earlier, at this
31:08
point in time,
31:09
Zell didn't exist. You didn't have Google Pay or Apple Pay. So, it was
31:14
definitively a better,
31:16
faster, cheaper product. It was the best way to move money. And so, my original
31:23
use of Bitcoin
31:24
into 2012 and all the way up until 2017 was as a medium of exchange. And a lot
31:30
of people don't
31:30
know this history, but moving into 2017, there were major retailers and
31:36
companies that started
31:37
accepting Bitcoin directly, not through third parties. You would go to a
31:42
website like overstock.com,
31:44
or you would go to Expedia to buy airline tickets, and then it would give you
31:49
their
31:49
wallet address, and you would just send them the cryptocurrency directly
31:53
without third parties.
31:54
People are unaware of that history, but then as Steve started to discuss,
31:58
and I'm sure we'll talk about in more detail, they throttled the network to
32:03
seven transactions
32:04
per second. And all of a sudden, what was instant and nearly free became an
32:09
average of $50 per
32:11
transaction in fees in seven to 10 days, which obviously no merchant can afford
32:18
that as a payment
32:18
mechanism. All right. And I would also point out that what you're describing is
32:23
a tipping point
32:24
that never happened. So, you had a mechanism of exchange with super low viscos
32:31
ity, right?
32:32
It just worked if you happen to be one of the rare people who had Bitcoin and,
32:36
you know,
32:37
wanted to spend it. At the point that that becomes true, that it becomes
32:43
possible for me to go buy,
32:45
I think you could even at one point buy a Tesla with Bitcoin, am I right?
32:51
But at the point that you can go buy real goods and services in the world,
32:55
then it becomes a question for us normies. Well, should I be taking Bitcoin?
33:01
What if people
33:02
like Dark Horse, and they're afraid of technocracy, and they say, is there a
33:07
way that we can support
33:09
you, you know, with Bitcoin instead of dollars? It would be great to be able to
33:14
say, yeah,
33:15
hell yeah. And then even if I can't spend it on anything I want, if some amount
33:21
of Bitcoin comes
33:22
in and I can buy something that's useful to me with it, then the point is
33:26
suddenly there's a
33:27
reason for me to be participating in the network, which makes it stronger
33:30
because of the network
33:31
effects. So, the amazing thing is that that did not catalyze a revolution in
33:37
which the utility of
33:38
Bitcoin only got better as Steve is pointing out didn't happen. You're breaking
33:44
my heart,
33:45
Brad, because believe it or not, that fight, that was a big fight in Bitcoin,
33:53
and for a short
33:55
period of time we won. So, I learned about Bitcoin back in 2011, it was less
33:59
than a dollar. I learned
34:00
about it in economics conference. And I remember being intrigued from a point
34:07
where nobody had
34:12
heard about Bitcoin. It wasn't accepted for commerce anywhere. And there was
34:18
this great
34:18
plan, this great agenda, this exciting project that early Bitcoiners were
34:28
partaking in to try to get the world to start adopting Bitcoin. And we went
34:37
from nothing, zero
34:38
adoption to actually getting Microsoft through of steam and Expedia and over
34:44
stock.com.
34:45
They were actually using it in commerce. We had, I know the biggest, my wife
34:50
worked at BitPay,
34:51
which was the, I think still is the world's biggest Bitcoin payment processor.
34:56
And at one point,
34:57
I think they reached more than a billion dollars of processing transactions in
35:03
a single year,
35:03
or it was close to that or at that level. And we were like, wow, this is
35:07
actually working.
35:09
This is so great. We're so excited about it. The businesses, the entrepreneurs
35:12
were excited about
35:13
it. But there was this urgent problem in the background, which is that at the
35:20
rate of adoption,
35:22
we're going to run into scaling problems because there was this technical limit
35:27
called the block
35:28
size limit that effectively capped the throughput of the network at seven
35:31
transactions per second.
35:32
Now it was put there by Satoshi Nakamoto as a temporary spam feature. Satoshi
35:38
and we have,
35:39
this is all documented in the book. He wrote for the record saying that
35:43
eventually this limit will
35:46
be raised or limited altogether. But for now, while the network is young, we're
35:52
going to have
35:52
a temporary spam measure here. So in 2015 or so, there was a war going on
36:03
between the
36:04
entrepreneurs and the business people and the idealists who were trying to get
36:08
Bitcoin adopted.
36:09
They saw the trajectory and a group that emerged that said, no, no, no, you're
36:15
not supposed to use
36:16
Bitcoin in commerce as a medium of exchange. In fact, it's supposed to be a
36:20
store of value.
36:21
It's digital goal, not digital cash. And Bitcoin doesn't scale. They said, we
36:28
don't want to lift
36:29
the transaction throughput limit. And so the entrepreneur business types said,
36:35
what do you mean,
36:36
you don't want to lift this throughput limit? Like, what's going to happen is
36:40
the network's
36:40
going to crash. You're going to have the transaction, at that time, transaction
36:43
fees weren't an issue.
36:45
And he said, well, if you just understand how the system works, as soon as you
36:48
hit this
36:49
throughput limit, you're going to have network crash where transactions are
36:53
going to be processed,
36:54
the fees are going to absolutely skyrocket. And you're going to get a bad user
36:58
experience,
36:59
you're going to get negative adoption of Bitcoin. And that's exactly what
37:02
happened. We saw literally
37:05
the disaster scenarios that the early Bitcoiners were talking about actually
37:11
happened in 2016
37:12
and then in 2017. And it looks like yeah, you've got a question.
37:16
All right. So I want to just put this in context so people get it.
37:20
You've heard me describe my painful experience making what in essence is just a
37:28
move from one
37:31
account to another, you know, more than half a day and a lot of trauma. That's
37:36
sort of what's
37:37
happened to the core, core is a bad word to use here, but the central
37:41
processing of transaction
37:44
technology. At the same time, you described, do I have this right? In 2011, a
37:50
Bitcoin was less than
37:52
a dollar? Yeah. Okay. So a Bitcoin, a full Bitcoin was worth less than a dollar
38:00
in 2011.
38:03
Yeah. Okay. That's 15 years ago. It is now worth, I haven't checked today, but
38:10
something like $70,000.
38:13
Is that correct? Yeah. Give it to you. Okay. So you've got people who are
38:17
looking at that
38:18
growth in the value that is understood to exist in the currency. So people are
38:26
getting very wealthy
38:28
based on the skyrocketing perceived value of this cryptocurrency. And mind you,
38:36
when they say,
38:36
it's digital gold, it's not digital cash, I think, isn't the second part of
38:44
cryptocurrency currency?
38:45
And why wouldn't you? I mean, even gold was initially a currency, the idea of
38:53
spending
38:53
something that hasn't agreed upon value because it has an intrinsic value is
38:58
very sensible.
39:00
So anyway, my point is, you can understand part of what's going on in the
39:04
social phenomenon of
39:06
the discussion of Bitcoin, the vehemence with which people will defend the
39:09
current system as
39:10
broken as it is, because the growth from worth $1 to worth $70,000 is pretty
39:20
fucking persuasive.
39:21
Yes. And so anyway, everybody who gets involved in this discussion and tries to
39:26
figure out what's
39:26
going on needs to understand how big an incentive it is to have something that
39:31
you might have invested
39:31
a dollar in in 2011 that's now worth $70,000. And you know, it's why there's a
39:37
kind of religious
39:38
fervor surrounding this currency, certainly. And I remember having a lot of
39:47
these discussions
39:48
where people were trying to envision the future value of Bitcoin. In fact, the
39:51
true story, I remember
39:52
this would have been 2014, maybe 2015. I remember going out to dinner with some
39:59
friends at BitPay,
40:01
that this payment processor that my wife worked at. And we were laughing
40:07
because we were trying to
40:08
envision like if this, if we're correct in saying this is going to be future
40:13
money, you know, the value
40:15
of the Bitcoin, it might be $10,000 that we were speculating at the time. I don
40:20
't know what the
40:21
price was at the time, but it was that that was a crazy amount to think it'd be
40:23
$10,000. And I
40:25
remember laughing because we like we paid for our smoothies or something in
40:28
Bitcoin. And we were
40:30
like, you know, someday this is probably going to be the equivalent of taking a
40:33
cruise, you know,
40:35
and in hindsight, it's like, yeah, that was probably about an accurate
40:39
assessment. But there was a
40:40
spirit in the early Bitcoin community that was excited about that. We want to
40:44
spend the money.
40:46
It's a currency. It's like we're trying to build the future. And so you're
40:50
going to spend it.
40:52
It seems so bizarre to so many people in early Bitcoin to hear people say, no,
40:58
no, you're not
40:59
supposed to spend it. If you're spending your Bitcoin, you're doing something
41:02
wrong. And so
41:04
there's a theme in the history of crypto, which is the let's say the importance
41:11
of economic
41:12
thinking in cryptocurrency and in Bitcoin, because there's a lot of people who
41:17
want to make purely
41:18
technical arguments about software and about code. And they think that Bitcoin
41:23
is reducible
41:24
just to software and code. And it's not Bitcoin is this very complex social and
41:30
economic phenomenon,
41:31
where some of the developers that were insisting, we can't raise this
41:37
transaction throughput limit.
41:38
They didn't understand economics at all. They thought the idea that a $20
41:42
transaction fee,
41:43
well, that's not a big deal. They thought that, you know, some of the
41:46
developers that software
41:48
engineers that were working on Bitcoin didn't really care if this coin was
41:53
usable in everyday
41:54
commerce, because they had they had this vision of they wanted it to be some
41:58
separate system.
41:59
But yes, the economic, the economic and monetary aspects of Bitcoin are deep
42:05
and important and
42:06
unfortunately overlooked because when people are making gobs of money, you know
42:10
, I feel like the
42:12
quality of careful analysis and reasoning has gone downwards. Well, actually,
42:17
can I take this
42:18
moment to preempt something that I think all of us are certain is going to
42:22
happen here? This discussion
42:25
in which we talk about cryptocurrency, its promise, its warts, and specifically
42:35
talk about
42:36
the promise of Bitcoin and what has happened to it. One thing that is 100%
42:41
guaranteed
42:42
is that we are going to get incredibly vehement pushback. People are going to
42:48
say, we don't know
42:49
what we're talking about that we misunderstand what this is supposed to be. We
42:55
misunderstand
42:56
the remedies that take care of all of the problems we're pointing to. And I
42:59
would just
43:00
point this out because I've been here a hundred times already. You guys have
43:04
probably been here
43:05
thousands of times already. I don't accept anything that amounts to bluster. I
43:14
will entertain actual
43:17
arguments with content that can be evaluated logically. But if your point is
43:23
that Aaron, Steve,
43:24
and Brett are dumbfucks and that they just don't get it, that's not an argument
43:28
. And if you have a
43:31
lot of Bitcoin and therefore the perception of its value is what is feeding you
43:37
, then there is an
43:38
obvious question about the conflict of interest that that raises in you. So
43:43
definitely check the
43:45
comments on this one. You're going to find a lot of vitriol, but check the
43:49
vitriol for content.
43:51
And if what happens is somebody says something complicated, complicated,
43:54
complicated, so that
43:55
you assume they know what they're talking about, the chances are that doesn't
43:58
stand up.
43:59
And let me say just one more note on that sort of maybe preemptively here is a
44:05
pattern. There's
44:06
an overlapping pattern in what happened with COVID and what happens in Bitcoin
44:10
and elsewhere,
44:11
which is that people want to claim that the secret knowledge of the technical
44:15
experts is
44:16
what's needed here in order to have an informed opinion. And really, if you
44:19
understand the details
44:20
of the lightning network, if you understood the details of how nodes operate on
44:23
the network,
44:24
then you would see why we're all so ill-informed here. What has happened, and
44:30
this was the same
44:30
thing if you were called during COVID, it was, well, what about these shots? It
44:35
seems like on paper,
44:37
we should be skeptical that this is a new technology that's rolling out. And
44:41
they're saying,
44:41
listen, there are some technical experts who know that the mRNA shots for such
44:46
and such and such a
44:47
reason are going to be safe and effective and you just got to trust us. It
44:50
really is the same
44:51
pattern here and something that was incredible to witness, incredible to
44:55
witness firsthand,
44:57
is that in Bitcoin, there were competing technical camps and I've never called
45:08
myself a technical,
45:10
how we're relative to the people who have strong opinions on this subject. I'm
45:13
like hyper-technical
45:14
because I understand some basics here that a lot of people don't understand 20
45:18
26. However,
45:20
despite being non-technical, I have seen now, over the past decade, the track
45:26
record of the
45:27
supposed technical experts in Bitcoin versus the technical experts that I was
45:34
listening to that a
45:35
old-school Bitcoiners were listening to and I've just compared them. Were the
45:41
claims of the
45:42
core developers, the Bitcoin core developers, were they correct in hindsight or
45:48
were the critics
45:49
of Bitcoin core correct in hindsight and on the technical points themselves, it
45:54
's overwhelmingly
45:55
in the favor of the people like myself and others who were critical of the
46:02
direction that Bitcoin
46:04
went on from the technical perspective and it's going to be the same thing with
46:10
technical criticisms
46:12
of the mRNA platforms. All of the promises that we heard about how specialty
46:16
shots were and how the
46:19
lipid nanoparticle is this a miraculous design of engineering and it's not
46:22
going to give us problems.
46:24
Well, those technical experts that we were supposed to be deferring to turned
46:28
out to be
46:29
critically wrong on their own subject matter. Actually, the analogy is perfect
46:35
because you
46:35
have a highly technical subject. You have a small number of dissidents whose
46:42
track record is getting
46:44
better by the week and then you have a mainstream, in this case, it's weird
46:50
because Bitcoin itself
46:51
is not mainstream, but within Bitcoin, you have a mainstream consensus about it
46:56
's just fine,
46:57
it's digital gold. We've solved your problems, the block wars are over, get
47:02
over it.
47:02
But at some level, I think one of the things that changed the Covid
47:11
conversation
47:12
radically was the fact that we had Robert Malone, the literal inventor of the
47:17
mRNA technology,
47:18
telling us, "Hey, they're not telling you the truth about this." And at some
47:25
level, it's not a
47:27
precise analogy, but somebody like Roger seems to be like a Roger Robert Malone
47:33
figure.
47:33
Oh, he was better.
47:34
Yeah. Can I just jump in here?
47:38
Yeah, please. Excellent point. I'll give you two names that are the equivalent
47:44
of Robert Malone,
47:45
and it's not Roger Wier. One is a guy named Satoshi Nakamoto, who is the
47:50
creator of Bitcoin.
47:52
One of the technical arguments that are made for people, because this will come
47:55
up, and we won't
47:56
go into detail here, but they'll say, "Well, we have to keep this throughput
48:01
limit low
48:02
so that people can run their own nodes because they think they claim that it's
48:06
important that
48:07
Bitcoin has run their own nodes in order to get the benefits of using Bitcoin."
48:11
This is a ground level mistaken. This is not the way that Bitcoin was designed,
48:17
and we have record of Satoshi Nakamoto himself saying he didn't design it where
48:23
regular users
48:24
had to run their own nodes because that system wouldn't scale. So Satoshi
48:28
himself is the one
48:29
saying, "We can scale to mass adoption." Satoshi Nakamoto is using analogies
48:35
with transaction
48:36
throughput processing of Visa. Satoshi is the one giving us examples of putting
48:42
Bitcoin into
48:43
like a vending machine. So that should have some authority when people say, "
48:48
When they're trying
48:49
to make technical arguments, okay, what you're dealing with Satoshi Nakamoto."
48:51
The second name
48:52
is a guy named Gavin Andreessen. Gavin Andreessen was the leader, the technical
48:58
lead of the project,
48:59
after Satoshi Nakamoto left. He gave the keys of the code, essentially, to be
49:05
the leader of
49:06
the project once Satoshi left it. He was also on record saying, making the
49:12
claims that I would be
49:13
making in all of my camp of the dissident Bitcoiners here, just to skip ahead
49:21
very briefly,
49:22
the disagreements in Bitcoin resulted in a split of the network into what's
49:29
called Bitcoin and
49:30
Bitcoin Cash. We don't have to go into the details here. However, in the
49:34
Bitcoin Cash
49:35
camp, that was made up by people who said, "We're going to scale the way that
49:39
Bitcoin was designed
49:40
to scale. We're just going to try to implement Satoshi's vision." Well, Gavin
49:45
Andreessen is on
49:46
record saying that Bitcoin Cash is the project that I got originally involved
49:51
with. From the
49:52
beginning, he thought that Bitcoin Cash was what Bitcoin was supposed to be. So
49:56
there's two names
49:57
for you that are akin to Robert Malone. Satoshi and then his heir said that our
50:05
technical arguments are correct and not the arguments that are the contemporary
50:09
mainstream,
50:10
let's say. So the literal inventor and the person that he tapped to carry on
50:14
the project.
50:15
Exactly. Fascinating. All right. So you keep going, Steve.
50:21
Okay, so I'm going to try to accelerate the history here, and then we're going
50:25
to bring in
50:26
Aaron to talk more about what's going on at present, because I think this is
50:30
also critically
50:30
important. So let me try to just accelerate the history here. So in Bitcoin,
50:38
there are two camps
50:39
emerging. We're going to call them the small block camp and the big block camp.
50:44
The small block
50:45
camp said, "We need to keep the transaction throughput very low." And the big
50:50
block camp said,
50:51
"No, we can actually make the transaction throughput much larger." Well, the
50:56
big blockers and the
50:58
spirit of Satoshi and Gavin Andreessen, we were noticing that some weird things
51:03
were happening in
51:04
2015, 2016, 2017 that looked like, especially in hindsight, the project was
51:11
being taken over.
51:12
Not only had the narrative shifted, but you also had a critical set of these
51:20
software developers,
51:21
the Bitcoin core developers that formed their own company or employed by this
51:26
company called
51:26
Blockstream. Now, Blockstream turned out to be, at the time, I think they were
51:33
founded in 2015,
51:33
I want to say, 2014, 2015, there was a bunch of smoke around this company Block
51:38
stream. This was the
51:39
boogeyman that the big blockers were saying, "This is a problematic company."
51:45
And now we've learned just in the past few months with what has happened with
51:49
some of the
51:49
Epstein emails, which we can talk about. All of that smoke was coming from a
51:53
raging fire. Okay,
51:55
Blockstream does look like this. I would say they're the most important company
51:59
in Bitcoin's history
52:00
because they were employing some of the key developers during this time period
52:08
of 2014 to 2017.
52:10
So to summarize, you had these two factions, and then there was a great split
52:18
in 2017. You had the
52:21
big blockers went with Bitcoin Cash, the small blockers went with Bitcoin core,
52:25
the core developers.
52:26
The big blockers are the people who were advocating to scale the network so it
52:31
would
52:31
continue to function as a currency. That's term big block. Maybe we don't even
52:41
have to go into it,
52:41
never mind. We just wanted to scale layer one the way that Satoshi designed the
52:46
thing to scale,
52:47
and we thought that this layer two idea, why there could be good ideas
52:50
incorporating layer twos,
52:52
in order to have a functional layer two system, you have to have a functional
52:56
layer one system.
52:57
If you have high transaction fees on layer one, the second layer solutions don
53:02
't really check out.
53:03
They don't really make sense. And the result we cautioned is that it would be a
53:08
custodial system.
53:10
So people are going to stop using the actual technology and they're going to
53:13
use a company
53:13
instead. And this is, in fact, this is, in fact, what we saw. So fast forward
53:18
to after the split,
53:19
you have, oh, I should mention one more thing. Here's a here's a critical piece
53:22
of the puzzle.
53:23
Around 2015, we had the two largest discussion platforms on the internet for
53:31
discussing Bitcoin
53:32
were censored at the same time, and they turned out to be owned by the same
53:39
pseudonymous person.
53:41
So there's this entity whose name is Themos. That's his username. We don't know
53:47
his real identity.
53:48
And he owned the two main discussion platforms for Bitcoin on the internet. One
53:53
was the Bitcoin
53:55
subreddit at the time, and the other is called BitcoinTalk.org. The
53:58
overwhelming amount of
54:00
discussion online that was happening about Bitcoin were on these two platforms.
54:05
Around 2015 or so,
54:10
there was alternative implementations that were gaining popularity as people
54:14
were trying to
54:15
route around the Bitcoin core developers. And this individual that owns these
54:21
two discussion
54:22
platforms said, in public, in writing, that for the good of Bitcoin, he was
54:27
going to start censoring
54:28
the mentions of these alternative software implementations that were trying to
54:36
get around
54:36
Bitcoin core. He said, this is a rough quote. He said, "Listen, I've been
54:41
around in forums
54:43
for a long time. I know the effect that censorship has on people, and for the
54:48
good of Bitcoin,
54:49
I'm going to start censoring the big blockers in effect."
54:53
Okay. So I want to point out one reason that may be subtle as to why this is as
54:58
important as it
54:59
turns out to be. Bitcoin is designed to be decentralized in every regard,
55:07
meaning that there is no
55:08
Bitcoin company or official designation. Anybody can take the code of Bitcoin
55:16
and they can modify
55:17
it however they want. They can do what's called forking and basically start
55:22
their own currency from
55:24
it. And in general, people aren't going to adopt those things. But if somebody
55:30
has a superior
55:30
implementation, it can catch on and it can displace whatever was the main
55:35
stream.
55:36
So the idea that in a decentralized decision-making network, that discussion of
55:43
certain things is
55:44
going to be censored in the place where people have gathered creates a problem,
55:48
which is,
55:49
if you want to say, "Well, fine, those people are on the wrong track, let's
55:54
discuss the alternative
55:55
and you can't discuss it in the place where the people are," then basically,
55:59
you're shouting into the wind alone somewhere, unable to talk to the people
56:05
that need to hear
56:05
you. It's like, "Well, if Facebook is censoring, why don't you start your own?"
56:09
Yeah, exactly. If you try to start your own Facebook, you know what happens
56:13
when you do?
56:14
Nothing. Exactly. And one of the consequences, the intended consequences, is
56:19
that as newcomers
56:22
would come in, we're talking 2015. So I don't know how long most people have
56:26
been around a
56:26
Bitcoin, but only a subset have been around even that long. But those were
56:30
newcomers coming in in
56:31
2015. They're only going to hear one side of the story. They're going to know
56:34
there are these bad
56:35
guys that are trying to take over Bitcoin, these big blockers that have bad
56:39
ideas,
56:40
and they're not going to hear their perspective unless they go out of their way
56:44
to find
56:45
the discussion channels that those individuals are using, that the dissidents
56:50
are using.
56:50
Oh, that's an incredibly important point that I had missed. Because of the rate
56:55
of growth of the
56:56
size of the community, the number of people who weren't there to hear, "Hey, we
57:00
're going to censor
57:01
this," and what they've in effect get is an ongoing discussion in which certain
57:06
things aren't
57:07
discussed and presumably aren't to be taken seriously, because if they were,
57:10
people would be talking
57:11
about them. Yes, and that there's already a set of villains that people know, "
57:15
Oh, yeah,
57:15
this Roger, we're a guy as a villain." The big block Bitcoin is these are
57:20
villains. Even the
57:21
people like Evan Andreessen, who Satoshi left the project too, were villainized
57:25
, and people
57:26
didn't really know why he was villainized. But that was only because they're
57:30
triangulating based on
57:33
the behavior of the individuals and the network that they're a part of.
57:36
And it should be noted that this position, the big block position, believe it
57:41
or not,
57:41
this was actually the majority position in Bitcoin until at least 2015, maybe
57:47
2016.
57:48
I could make the argument that even in 2017, and then it's definitely not the
57:54
majority position today,
57:55
but this was, if you were to go to a Bitcoin meetup group anywhere, almost
58:01
everybody had the
58:02
understood that while we were going to scale Bitcoin by increasing the size of
58:08
the blocks,
58:08
increasing the throughput limit, that we're going to go along with Satoshi's
58:12
design,
58:12
that Bitcoin is supposed to be used as an alternative currency. These were the
58:15
mainstream
58:16
views until that censorship happened, and then a few years after that, and then
58:21
now this is almost
58:22
nobody's even heard these ideas at all today. I'm sorry to keep jumping in, but
58:28
I do think
58:29
from the point of view of the audience, it's important. Back in the day, and I
58:34
'm a super
58:35
latecomer to all of this, but back in the day, everybody had the experience
58:39
that somebody who was
58:40
on board with Bitcoin and was excited about it because they had experienced
58:44
what it was,
58:44
and they had seen its potential, would say, you'd say, I don't really
58:48
understand cryptocurrency,
58:49
and they'll be like, look, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to set up a
58:53
wallet.
58:53
I'm going to send you a little Bitcoin, and they would send a little Bitcoin,
58:56
and it would
58:56
magically arrive in your wallet, and suddenly the light bulb goes on over your
58:59
head, and you think,
59:00
"Okay, now I see what this could be." If you did that, now it would make the
59:06
opposite point,
59:06
because I just sent you some. Have you seen it? It's like, well, why is this
59:11
taking a million
59:14
times longer than an email, or a text message would? It just doesn't make sense
59:19
.
59:19
Yes, the pitch was actually to just send people a Bitcoin. We mentioned Roger
59:25
Beer,
59:26
a few times. He earned the nickname Bitcoin Jesus, even though he doesn't like
59:30
that nickname,
59:31
but he earned it, in part, because he would go around and he give talks about
59:35
how excited he was
59:36
about Bitcoin, and this is going to be revolutionary alternative currency, and
59:39
then he would give
59:40
Bitcoin to people, be like, "Hey, you want the real pitch? Download this app
59:44
and all send money
59:45
straight to your phone, and there's nothing that a third party can do about it
59:49
." It was an
59:50
incredibly effective pitch. I'm sure you saw that all the time, Aaron.
59:53
Absolutely. Yep. I'll try to finish the history here, and then we'll talk about
1:00:00
the present
1:00:00
moment. We have the censorship. We have the fork. Then we have what I would
1:00:07
call the mainstream
1:00:08
phase of Bitcoin, where I know you say it's not mainstream, which I'm sure this
1:00:12
is objectively true.
1:00:13
However, from my world, going from seeing this thing, nobody knew about Bitcoin
1:00:18
, to like Tom Brady
1:00:19
is making ads on TV about it. I feel like we hit the mainstream. This history
1:00:28
was not told
1:00:28
somehow, despite it being the mainstream perspective for many years, nobody
1:00:33
really knew what happened
1:00:35
to Bitcoin. Nobody had heard this. I teamed up with Roger Wier to try to give
1:00:41
the
1:00:41
loser's side of the story. We were in a fight. We were fighting for Bitcoin. We
1:00:47
saw the censorship
1:00:49
we saw. There are connections in here that we discussed in the book, where we
1:00:52
have one of the
1:00:54
Bitcoin core developers, for example. It was shown in leaked emails that he was
1:00:59
corresponding
1:00:59
with somebody that claimed to be high up in intelligence. We have lots of smoke
1:01:05
and lots of
1:01:07
fire, and yet nobody had shared this story. When we wrote hijacking Bitcoin, we
1:01:13
tried to be
1:01:14
extremely careful in what we were claiming and our documentation of what we
1:01:20
were claiming.
1:01:21
There's more than 280 citations in the book. There was a huge realm for
1:01:27
possible speculation,
1:01:29
because the corruption in crypto is very high. There's a lot of juicy stories
1:01:35
here and there,
1:01:36
but we tried to make all the claims in the book airtight. This is what happened
1:01:40
.
1:01:41
This is what the industry was saying. This is what the Bitcoin core developers
1:01:45
were saying.
1:01:45
This is what Satoshi Nakamoto was saying. We released this book in 2024.
1:01:51
Since we released it, we've gotten a bunch more information about
1:01:58
the corruption in the cryptocurrency industry. Just in the last few months,
1:02:04
we're getting information out from the Epstein files that is showing that it
1:02:11
may very well be
1:02:12
that in the story of the hijacking of Bitcoin, none other than Jeffrey Epstein
1:02:18
himself has a role,
1:02:20
and the role starts back in 2014, 2015. A little bit earlier than that, but
1:02:25
right when we said,
1:02:26
there's a lot of smoke coming out of a block stream right here. There's a lot
1:02:31
of smoke coming
1:02:32
from the core developers. We have emails now from Jeffrey Epstein that are in a
1:02:39
parallel timeline
1:02:40
tracking very closely. I know Aaron's done a lot of this research as well. We
1:02:45
're still actively
1:02:47
learning about this right now, where people are still going through these
1:02:50
emails and putting the
1:02:51
pieces of the story together. It intersects with what Aaron's been doing for a
1:02:55
few years now.
1:02:56
Before I let you get to that, Aaron, I just want to say, obviously, we have a
1:03:02
frustrating situation
1:03:03
where the Epstein data dumps are highly selective. We can see that there's a
1:03:10
lot going on there.
1:03:11
We can prove very little at the level that it would stand up in court, but
1:03:15
nonetheless,
1:03:16
if you're just simply logical, you can deduce how important this was, and you
1:03:20
can infer that it
1:03:22
wasn't a lone operator, that this is connected to intelligence in some way, how
1:03:27
it worked, we don't
1:03:28
know, but that it worked seems highly likely. Anyway, my point is, imagine from
1:03:36
the point of view
1:03:37
of powerful forces from the perspective of the deep state, from the perspective
1:03:44
of the deep state,
1:03:46
the thing that Bitcoin was designed to be is a threat. Yes. To the extent that
1:03:53
people can transact
1:03:54
outside of any system that can shut them down, there is an ability to function
1:04:00
outside of
1:04:02
autocratic control. So it is essentially inevitable that those who wish to
1:04:07
control us would view
1:04:09
this as hostile and that they would have three options. They could either try
1:04:14
to stamp it out,
1:04:15
which is pretty hard to do when it makes such a powerful case. They could try
1:04:19
to capture it,
1:04:22
which is, I think, your argument as to what happened, or they could try to dis
1:04:27
place it
1:04:28
with a version that they did control, which Aaron is going to end up telling us
1:04:33
is happening
1:04:34
in the present. Aaron, did you want to jump in? Yeah, it's a little bit of all
1:04:39
of the above.
1:04:40
So I came at this whole thing a couple of different ways. One, I started using
1:04:44
Bitcoin and then in
1:04:45
2019, I started living on cryptocurrency, gold and silver. I stopped using a
1:04:51
personal bank account.
1:04:52
And I noticed that friends of mine were starting to get, were being targeted by
1:04:59
the federal government
1:05:00
that were at this intersection of crypto and liberty, a guy by the name of Ian
1:05:05
Freeman,
1:05:06
who was the cohost of a show called Free Talk Live. Free Talk Live was the
1:05:11
first radio show
1:05:12
in the entire world to discuss Bitcoin. It was in 2010. Roger Veer learned
1:05:20
about Bitcoin
1:05:21
from Free Talk Live. Gavin Andreessen heard Free Talk Live and in fact met with
1:05:27
Mark Edge with
1:05:28
the other co-host and said it was the most profitable lunch he'd ever had and
1:05:32
they paid for their
1:05:33
Thai food or whatever with Bitcoin. And so Ian was targeted. He was rated five
1:05:39
different
1:05:40
departments of the federal government. They broke down his door, arrested him,
1:05:43
so on and so forth.
1:05:44
And targeted him, said, you sold Bitcoin without a license and trumped up a
1:05:50
whole bunch of these
1:05:51
other charges. And then I saw other people were being targeted. So I said, well
1:05:55
, look,
1:05:55
I want to look into this. Why is this happening? And what I found was that
1:06:02
President Biden had
1:06:03
signed this executive order in March of 2022, executive order 14067. And what
1:06:09
it did is it
1:06:10
authorized the US government to pursue a CBDC while taking a whole of
1:06:15
government approach
1:06:16
to crack down on crypto. Because if you're going to roll out a central bank
1:06:19
digital currency,
1:06:20
if you're going to roll out a currency that can be tracked, programmed, and
1:06:24
censored,
1:06:24
people aren't going to like that. So you need to get rid of the competition.
1:06:28
And sure enough,
1:06:29
that's why I believed Ian and others were targeted. And this was the very
1:06:33
beginning. Now,
1:06:34
subsequently, everybody was targeted and people were arrested, but this was
1:06:38
kind of way ahead of
1:06:39
the curve on this. And so as I'm doing my research and my exploration, I write
1:06:45
this book
1:06:45
called the final countdown that that goes into the threat of CBDCs, the threat
1:06:49
of technocracy,
1:06:50
I start exploring, well, what's going on in the United States with CBDCs?
1:06:55
Because we have this
1:06:56
executive order that says, well, now the government's going to pursue it. Well,
1:06:59
what's the status
1:07:00
of that? And what I came across was that we weren't just beginning to research
1:07:06
it. We already had
1:07:08
three pilots, successful pilots that had already been completed. And they were
1:07:13
all out of MIT.
1:07:15
So MIT worked on something called Project Hamilton. Project Hamilton is a it's
1:07:21
a digital
1:07:22
dollar to essentially the replacement for cash. And this project, which started
1:07:28
in 2018, maybe
1:07:29
something like that, can do 1.7 million transactions per second versus Bitcoin,
1:07:37
which is seven
1:07:38
transactions per second. And then there were two other CBDC pilots that they
1:07:44
did in conjunction
1:07:45
with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. So then I'm starting to dig in, well
1:07:48
, who's working on
1:07:50
these projects? So MIT's involved with all three who are some of the technical
1:07:55
developers. And then
1:07:56
I find for this project, Hamilton project, there's this developer called Corey
1:08:01
named Corey Fields,
1:08:02
who was working on that project. And I'm like, well, I've heard that name
1:08:05
before. Where have I
1:08:06
heard that name? He was a Bitcoin core developer. So then I start digging
1:08:10
through the history of
1:08:12
this some more and I find out, well, wait a minute, at some point around 2015.
1:08:16
And let me take one
1:08:18
step back. So we've mentioned the fact that Bitcoin is an open source software
1:08:22
project. There is no
1:08:24
centralized entity, but it turns out much to a lot of people's chagrin
1:08:29
developers aren't just
1:08:31
proactively developing code for free. And then other developers aren't out
1:08:35
there proactively
1:08:36
auditing code for free. At some point, somebody is getting paid to do that work
1:08:42
. And so some
1:08:44
people very early on Roger Veer and I believe Gavin Andreessen and some others,
1:08:48
five of them got
1:08:48
together and said, hey, let's put together a nonprofit called the Bitcoin
1:08:52
Foundation and we'll
1:08:54
raise money from the community. The idea being we'll fund the developers, but
1:08:59
make sure that they
1:09:00
maintain the integrity of the project, essentially follow the white paper, so
1:09:05
on and so forth. And
1:09:06
so this was the main funding source for Bitcoin up to this point. Well, in 2015
1:09:12
,
1:09:12
there were some internal issues and the Bitcoin Foundation collapsed. It could
1:09:18
no longer fund
1:09:19
these developers. And so MIT ended up taking over the funding of these critical
1:09:25
developers.
1:09:26
Corey Fields was one of those developers. So one of the core developers that
1:09:31
MIT was funding
1:09:33
then went on to work on Project Hamilton dollar. Well, then I find right around
1:09:39
this time it gets
1:09:40
exposed that Jeffrey Epstein funded this MIT group, which was run by a guy
1:09:46
named Joy Ito.
1:09:47
And Joy Ito in addition to running the MIT group also has a venture capital arm
1:09:55
where he's making
1:09:56
private investments in or profit cryptocurrency companies. So I wrote an
1:10:01
article on Brownstone
1:10:02
saying, "Hey, look, I don't have definitive proof here, but it looks to me like
1:10:07
Jeffrey Epstein is
1:10:09
funding CBDCs and funding developers from Bitcoin who hobbled Bitcoin, thrott
1:10:16
led Bitcoin at seven
1:10:17
transactions per second, and then had those very same developers go and work on
1:10:20
the United States
1:10:21
CBDC that does 1.7 million transactions per second." I'm like, huh, that's
1:10:26
interesting. But I didn't
1:10:28
know for sure. We didn't know exactly what Epstein invested in. MIT invests in
1:10:33
a lot of
1:10:34
different projects. So I even wrote in the article, I said, "Hey, it looks like
1:10:36
this might be the
1:10:38
case, but we don't know for sure." And so I didn't claim I knew it definitively
1:10:42
. And then the Epstein
1:10:45
files come out. And wow, I mean, first of all, just wow. So Jeffrey Epstein
1:10:53
only went on the record
1:10:55
one time publicly about Bitcoin. It was in 2017, an article called NexaWeb. And
1:11:01
as we now know,
1:11:02
while as we already knew, Jeffrey Epstein was not a public figure. I mean, it
1:11:07
turns out being a
1:11:07
convicted sex offender is not something, you know, you're not the front man,
1:11:13
usually in the media
1:11:13
for these types of things. But he did, interestingly, come out one time in this
1:11:18
next web article and
1:11:20
made this whole argument that Bitcoin is not a currency. It's a store of value.
1:11:26
It's digital gold.
1:11:27
So I scratched my head. I'm looking. I'm just trying to put together a few
1:11:31
pieces here. He's
1:11:32
publicly out saying this narrative that was a new narrative, public narrative,
1:11:37
that Bitcoin is
1:11:38
not a currency. It's digital gold. He's funding this MIT group. This MIT group
1:11:43
funded the developers
1:11:44
that throttled Bitcoin. And they funded all of the CBDCs. That doesn't that
1:11:50
that looks pretty bad.
1:11:51
I want to I want to jump in here and just say at the level of the philosophy of
1:11:56
science,
1:11:57
this is a really important set of evidence. And the reason is because both of
1:12:05
you had predictions
1:12:08
that match the pattern that you couldn't have known ahead of time in these
1:12:12
formerly secret files.
1:12:14
So the point is the allegation that there was a hijacking of Bitcoin just so
1:12:20
happens to match
1:12:22
the evidence that Aaron is talking about, which is then validated by a data
1:12:26
dump of emails.
1:12:28
And so the whole the point is, is that definitive proof? No. But what it is, is
1:12:33
it is more than
1:12:35
just, Hey, look at this pattern. It looks like there was a hijacking. That was
1:12:38
a standing prediction.
1:12:40
And now you have a bunch of evidence that has validated that prediction. That's
1:12:44
the signal we
1:12:45
look for in science that something is somewhere in the neighborhood of the
1:12:48
truth. And we have more,
1:12:50
we have more evidence here. This is just, this is just preliminary stuff. So I
1:12:53
just want to say
1:12:54
two things and we'll let Aaron continue on the story here. The other there's
1:12:59
sort of two components,
1:13:00
let's say to the hijacking one is what was whatever was going on with Epstein
1:13:05
and MIT. And the other
1:13:07
is Tether, which we haven't talked about at all. This turns out to be this
1:13:10
might actually be the
1:13:12
central story of what was going on with the hijacking of Bitcoin. So we'll have
1:13:16
to, we'll have to talk
1:13:17
about Tether. But I do, I do want to take a moment to steal a little bit of
1:13:21
Aaron's thunder because I
1:13:23
have to get Epstein emails pulled up that are going to be relevant here. And
1:13:26
they're going to be,
1:13:27
they're going to be important for several reasons. One, I want to address this
1:13:32
idea that Bitcoin is
1:13:34
decentralized totally and it's outside of anybody's control. It turns out that
1:13:41
despite
1:13:41
great sounding theory, there are many centralized points of control in Bitcoin,
1:13:46
the most important
1:13:46
of which historically has been the control of the software, who gets to
1:13:52
determine what gets put
1:13:54
into Bitcoin's code and what importantly doesn't get put into Bitcoin's code.
1:13:59
The reason that the
1:14:01
latter is important is because in the history of the hijacking, what I
1:14:05
mentioned before,
1:14:06
that was so critical is not scaling the way that Satoshi designed the project
1:14:11
to scale. So
1:14:12
what the the Bitcoiners want to say is they want to say, hey, look, we didn't
1:14:17
make changes. How could
1:14:18
we have hijacked Bitcoin because we didn't change the code? Well, in this case,
1:14:23
it's because that
1:14:24
piece of code was supposed to be changed, was designed to be changed. And by
1:14:28
not changing it,
1:14:29
you've turned it into some totally different economic model that only has seven
1:14:33
transactions
1:14:34
per second and you don't even use it in commerce. Okay, so the other piece of
1:14:40
the puzzle here is
1:14:41
that people have to understand how individuals in power think and how they
1:14:46
operate. And it's not
1:14:49
in a decentralized, emergent way where nobody's scheming or planning or trying
1:14:55
to take control of
1:14:56
things. It's like, it's actually pretty, it's actually pretty clear what they
1:15:02
're trying to do.
1:15:03
And as evidenced by emails that we have from the the Epstein files. So I'm
1:15:09
going to read two,
1:15:09
they're very short, but they're going to be illustrative of several different
1:15:14
concepts here.
1:15:14
Okay, so the first is is from Joy Ito, this individual at MIT. In 2015, he's
1:15:22
writing an email to
1:15:24
Jeffrey Epstein when the Bitcoin Foundation is falling apart. He says, by the
1:15:29
way,
1:15:29
we're in the middle of a shit show right now, as the Bitcoin Foundation melts
1:15:34
down,
1:15:35
I'm going to probably help create a place for the core developers to land. I'm
1:15:40
talking to
1:15:41
everybody involved right now. Okay, so that's in 2015. We have an email. This
1:15:47
is less than 20
1:15:49
days later. It's a little bit longer of a quote. This is also from Joy Ito to
1:15:54
Jeffrey Epstein,
1:15:54
because Epstein contributed some money to Ito to set this project up at MIT. He
1:16:02
says, this is a
1:16:03
direct quote from from the email. The way that Bitcoin is organized currently
1:16:08
is that there are
1:16:08
five core developers and around 100 contributors to the core code. The five
1:16:13
core developers are
1:16:14
like Linus Torvalds of Linux. They decide what changes are made to the code.
1:16:19
One of the five is
1:16:20
the lead developer Vladimir and one is the chief scientist Gavin. Gavin
1:16:25
Vladimir and Corey Fields
1:16:27
were being paid out of a nonprofit organization called the Bitcoin Foundation.
1:16:31
A few weeks ago,
1:16:32
it blew up when one of the board members declared the foundation bankrupt. Many
1:16:36
organizations scrambled
1:16:38
to step in into the vacuum created by the foundation and take control of the
1:16:43
developers.
1:16:45
We moved quickly talking to all of the various stakeholders and the three
1:16:49
developers decided to
1:16:50
join the media lab. This is a big win for us. Earlier in the thread, he says,
1:16:57
used gift funds to
1:16:58
underwrite this, which allowed us to move quickly and win this round. Vinks,
1:17:02
Joy Ito. So he is using
1:17:06
the language of taking control of the Bitcoin core developers. That's not some
1:17:12
crazy conspiracy.
1:17:13
That is a message from the MIT guy to Jeffrey Epstein in the process of
1:17:17
thanking him for sending
1:17:19
those funds. So that's a critical, critical little glimmer into the world of
1:17:23
how power is
1:17:24
operating here. Yeah, when I read that, my first thought was about your book
1:17:28
because this is the
1:17:31
evidence that you guys were right. And I've certainly heard a million times
1:17:34
from people who
1:17:35
don't seem to have substantive arguments that you guys don't understand what
1:17:38
you're talking
1:17:38
about or something. But here it is, in black and white, in the Epstein files,
1:17:44
who would have thought?
1:17:45
I mean, again, this brownstone article that I wrote where I think, well, hey,
1:17:50
maybe he was
1:17:50
involved in this, that is the smoking gun. Not only did he fund, we have an
1:17:54
email that says he
1:17:56
funded that project and those developers by name. I mean, it doesn't get any
1:18:00
more conclusive than
1:18:02
that. But we will link your article and those couple of emails so people can
1:18:07
take a look at them.
1:18:08
Yeah, I don't think the emails, at least one of them is in the article. But
1:18:12
then you start
1:18:14
expanding outward because then you start asking these questions because all we
1:18:17
knew was Epstein
1:18:20
writing about cryptocurrency Bitcoin in 2017. So how far back does this go?
1:18:24
Well, we then find,
1:18:26
it actually goes back to 2009. And there's a whole other segment of this that I
1:18:30
'm researching
1:18:31
and tracking down. But Epstein gets heavily involved in crypto in 2011. He has
1:18:37
this
1:18:38
conference on his island called the mine shift conference. And there he meets a
1:18:42
guy by the name
1:18:43
of Brock Pierce. And Brock Pierce, from that point forward, becomes Epstein's
1:18:51
number one crypto
1:18:52
advisor and becomes the front for his investments. Literally is the guy that is
1:18:59
structuring the
1:19:00
investment vehicles through which Epstein money flows. Because of course, you
1:19:05
know, people try to
1:19:06
say, well, Epstein's not an investor. Of course, that's not how money works.
1:19:08
You're not going to
1:19:09
have a convicted sex offender on your cap table, you're going to try to find
1:19:13
another way so that his
1:19:14
money is there, but without him being there by name. And we typically never get
1:19:18
to know how
1:19:19
any of this works. This is offshore LLCs and all this other stuff. We have
1:19:23
these emails, which is a,
1:19:25
which is a gold mine for this. So we find, I think there's something like 1,800
1:19:30
messages
1:19:31
between Brock Pierce and Jeffrey Epstein. I mean, they are working together on
1:19:36
countless crypto
1:19:38
projects. So we find, for instance, that Epstein invested in, you mentioned you
1:19:43
use Coinbase,
1:19:44
Epstein invested in Coinbase in 2014. So 12 years ago, Jeffrey Epstein is in
1:19:51
Coinbase.
1:19:53
But now the story gets even more interesting. And I'll try to get the time
1:19:56
table. I'm sure,
1:19:58
well, I get the timetable right, but I want to put it in a compelling way. And
1:20:01
I'm actually
1:20:01
going to write a book about this. I'm thinking of calling it the creature from
1:20:04
Epstein Island. But
1:20:05
what you have is we talked about 2015 being this pivotal year when the Bitcoin
1:20:14
Foundation collapsed,
1:20:15
where Joy Ito got this email saying, yeah, we heard from a board member that
1:20:19
the Bitcoin
1:20:20
Foundation collapsed. Well, guess who the chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation
1:20:25
was? It was none other
1:20:26
than Brock Pierce, Jeffrey Epstein's crypto advisor. So that's one piece of
1:20:31
information.
1:20:32
Now, I want to go back to Blackstream, which Steve talked about as being this
1:20:38
entity that
1:20:39
people were sounding the alarm bells off, because Blackstream was a company
1:20:44
founded by
1:20:45
Bitcoin core developers. And their whole business model is based on throttling
1:20:52
Bitcoin
1:20:52
at the L1 so that they can create layer two solutions that they charge for.
1:20:57
That is the basis
1:20:58
of the Blackstream business model. Let me pause you just there, just to add a
1:21:03
little color. Okay,
1:21:04
this sounds cartoonish, what I'm about to say. But get this. All right, so we
1:21:09
've got the critical
1:21:11
Bitcoin core developers being employed by this company, Blackstream. The CEO of
1:21:15
Blackstream is
1:21:16
this guy Adam Back. Okay, he's on record. This is another quote from the book.
1:21:22
He's on record
1:21:23
during one of these network capacity failure moments where the fees are $10, $
1:21:31
20. He's literally
1:21:33
on record saying, hey, why don't you be part of the solution to the problem of
1:21:39
high fees on Bitcoin
1:21:41
and use this product called the liquid network. Well, the liquid network is an
1:21:47
alternative blockchain
1:21:48
issued created by Blackstream. It's not Bitcoin. It's their own proprietary
1:21:55
alternative network on which they issue tokens. And now we're learning they're
1:22:01
working with
1:22:02
nation states to try to onboard them onto the liquid network. So you have the
1:22:09
CEO of Blackstream
1:22:11
employing critical Bitcoin core developers. That CEO is saying, hey, you know
1:22:17
how there are high
1:22:18
fees on Bitcoin? Why don't you be part of the solution and use our product
1:22:24
instead? And on their
1:22:26
proprietary network, they get 100% of the transaction fees. It's like a cartoon
1:22:33
villain, right?
1:22:35
Yeah, you know, that's incredible. And you know, if it's true, as you say it,
1:22:41
it puts the lie to,
1:22:43
you know, the whole line of the Bitcoin core, because these people are moon
1:22:49
lighting on a competitive
1:22:51
product where they're disproportionately incentivized. At least a critical, it
1:22:56
's not all the Bitcoin
1:22:57
core developers, but it's the one it was the ones that held critical positions
1:23:02
of power,
1:23:02
especially at the most critical moments in Bitcoin's history.
1:23:05
Or they're literally the CEO is advising people not to use Bitcoin and to use
1:23:11
their corporate
1:23:12
product instead. All right, Aaron, do you want to pick up the story?
1:23:17
Yeah. So so now we know that Epstein is funding the Bitcoin core developers
1:23:25
after his advisor,
1:23:26
Brock Pierce running Bitcoin Foundation collapses. And what they fund is the
1:23:30
cementing of this
1:23:31
digital golden narrative. They fund segwit lightning network, the things that
1:23:35
kind of cap
1:23:36
Bitcoin at seven transactions per second. But there's more. We then find out in
1:23:41
the files
1:23:42
that Epstein invested a half a million dollars in block stream, seven or eight
1:23:48
months before
1:23:49
funding the developers to cement these changes. So he had a direct financial
1:23:53
interest
1:23:53
benefiting from his that his now block stream investment in hobbling and taking
1:24:00
over the funding
1:24:01
of these MIT funding of these developers through MIT. It's it's unbelievable,
1:24:07
but it doesn't even
1:24:08
stop there because as Steve mentioned, the big part of this story, which
1:24:12
carries through in a big way
1:24:15
today is tether. So it turns out, then in addition to being Epstein's advisor
1:24:21
in the chair of the
1:24:22
Bitcoin Foundation, I think he may even still be the chair of the Bitcoin
1:24:25
Foundation. That's
1:24:26
another story for another day. Brock Pierce is the co founder of tether. Now,
1:24:32
we talk about the fact
1:24:33
that the narrative changed from digital cash to store value. And in order for
1:24:40
something to be
1:24:40
seen as a store of value, it would need to either maintain its value or go up
1:24:44
in value, right?
1:24:45
Well, 2017 was a pivotal year. It was a breakout year for Bitcoin. This is
1:24:52
where the Bitcoin price
1:24:53
really skyrocketed and it started to hit mainstream news all over the world.
1:24:58
There is a study from the University of Texas at Austin that found that more
1:25:04
than 50% of the price
1:25:07
appreciation of Bitcoin in 2017 was due to tether. We also know during this
1:25:15
time period from two
1:25:17
different actions, one from the CFTC and one from the state of New York, that
1:25:22
tether didn't have the
1:25:25
full reserves backing their stable coin. So just by way of explanation here, a
1:25:31
stable coin is a
1:25:32
digital currency that's tied to or pegged to the dollar. So one tether equals
1:25:37
one dollar.
1:25:38
And your assumption is, well, if I have one tether that's supposed to represent
1:25:42
a dollar,
1:25:42
then there must be at least a dollar's worth of assets. It doesn't necessarily
1:25:46
have to be
1:25:47
dollars. It could be gold or Bitcoin or something else, but there are some
1:25:50
assets in theory backing
1:25:53
tether. Well, tether to this day has never passed an audit. And until I think
1:25:59
in the last week or two,
1:26:00
they were never even able to secure an audit firm to audit them. And the CFTC
1:26:06
found during this time
1:26:08
period where all of this is going on around 2017 that they only had about 25,
1:26:12
26 cents on the dollar
1:26:14
backing their tokens. So in other words, at this period of time, where the
1:26:20
store value story was
1:26:21
being created, tether was printing digital dollars out of thin air that weren't
1:26:27
even backed by
1:26:28
real dollars, which are also printed out of thin air. It's kind of like a Metap
1:26:32
onzi scheme,
1:26:33
I guess. Yeah, I was going to say this, this sounds like an exact mirror of the
1:26:37
,
1:26:39
what's it called fractional reserve currencies, in which banks effectively
1:26:44
invent money by
1:26:45
loaning it out, loaning out money they don't have based on having a small
1:26:50
fraction in house.
1:26:52
So here's information that we couldn't put in the book because it wasn't
1:26:58
rigorous enough.
1:26:59
But this is, let's say industry knowledge that people would talk about, but it
1:27:04
's nothing that
1:27:04
you can prove. During this time, common knowledge is probably an overstatement,
1:27:10
but among people who understood the power players in Bitcoin, it was clear that
1:27:16
there
1:27:16
was something funky going on, something suspicious going on with tether and
1:27:21
with this exchange called
1:27:23
Bitfinex. And it was like, there seemed to be bad actors, there seemed to be
1:27:28
employing people in the,
1:27:31
let's say the domain of like information warfare, that there are some people
1:27:35
who are making these
1:27:36
really strong arguments that we got to have small blocks. And you follow the
1:27:40
money trail and it's
1:27:41
like, I think it's this weird circle of people that are involved, but it's
1:27:48
smoke there, but it's
1:27:49
nothing you can put right down in a book. Wow. Plot twist. It turns out that
1:27:55
tether and Bitfinex
1:27:58
have the same parent company called iPhonex. And would you believe it? That's
1:28:03
also the parent
1:28:04
company of tether. So, and we have, we have also learned just in the past few
1:28:12
years that a block
1:28:14
stream has been raising hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. And that
1:28:18
investment is
1:28:19
led through iPhonex, the company, the parent company of tether. So, when block
1:28:28
stream is raising,
1:28:29
was doing these hundreds of millions of dollars of fundraising grounds, that's
1:28:33
being led by the
1:28:35
people that are the owners of tether. So, you have the conflict of interest
1:28:41
here is absolutely enormous.
1:28:45
And it also confirms what I was saying before, the suspicions that we had, that
1:28:49
there's something
1:28:50
wrong. There's something, in this weird network, there's something that really
1:28:55
doesn't match up.
1:28:57
And again, that appears to be where there was smoke, there was fire here.
1:29:02
All right. I also want to, I hope this argument tracks, but there's also some
1:29:08
evidence in what
1:29:10
the pattern you're both describing that flows the other direction. In other
1:29:16
words, I think we can
1:29:17
infer from the fact that Epstein was all over the alterations to Bitcoin, that
1:29:24
he must have worked
1:29:26
for intelligence. Because here's the thing about Epstein. Many of us hadn't
1:29:31
really heard him speak
1:29:32
until we saw this one hour, Steve Bannon, I guess it was a test for the
1:29:40
documentary that Bannon then
1:29:41
made that we haven't seen. But it becomes immediately obvious to anybody who is
1:29:47
a high quality thinker,
1:29:48
that Epstein wasn't. That he was basically parroting commonly known things,
1:29:55
trying to put them in
1:29:56
where he's basically, if you wanted to create a character that you couldn't
1:30:01
give a script, he had
1:30:02
TED talk level understanding of enough topics that he could respond to
1:30:09
questions, but he makes
1:30:10
strange errors. He's obviously not, he's not a super genius. He's just not. So
1:30:18
if he's not a
1:30:20
super genius, why does he show up in the world as a financial super genius, as
1:30:27
a science super genius,
1:30:29
and as a Bitcoin super genius or crypto super genius? And the answer is, well,
1:30:35
it wouldn't make
1:30:36
sense for somebody who, I'm sure he's not stupid, but he's not, crypto is hard
1:30:44
to deal with at a
1:30:45
logical level. So you would have to be highly dedicated. You couldn't be
1:30:49
dedicated to 14
1:30:51
other things at the same time. So the point is, it makes logical sense that the
1:30:56
deep state
1:30:57
would spot crypto as an important problem and would put a leverage guy on it.
1:31:04
We need a leverage
1:31:05
guy to make things happen. It does not make sense that Jeffrey Epstein as a
1:31:11
lone operator would
1:31:12
have his hand in every pot and be able to be doing anything productive. So, you
1:31:17
know, the fact that
1:31:18
he's somehow at the core of Bitcoin development. At the same time, he's at the
1:31:26
core of science
1:31:27
publishing and all the people whose books you want to read are being published
1:31:31
by somebody who's
1:31:32
at arm's length to Epstein. It just doesn't make any sense, right? The only way
1:31:36
it makes sense is
1:31:37
if a bunch of smart people are deciding what to focus on and pointing Epstein
1:31:42
at it. And would
1:31:43
you believe it? Since we got the Epstein emails, it's now come out that
1:31:49
apparently Adam Back,
1:31:52
the CEO of Blockstream, was in fact on Epstein Island. I believe it was in 2014
1:31:59
. And he waited
1:32:01
until the emails came out to tell people, well, I don't think he's admitted
1:32:06
publicly yet that he
1:32:07
was on Epstein Island. He did admit that Epstein invested into Blockstream. But
1:32:15
we also know that
1:32:16
Austin Hill, one of the other co-founders of Blockstream, was also in the
1:32:21
emails. It appears
1:32:22
to be that the emails that we have appear to be them coordinating to go to
1:32:27
Epstein Island.
1:32:28
And there's one fascinating email. I don't know how many. This is one that I
1:32:33
recommend
1:32:33
people look at also to kind of see the thought process here of power players.
1:32:40
It's from Austin
1:32:41
Hill, one of the co-founders of Blockstream. And he has this long, long, like
1:32:50
several paragraph
1:32:52
long email where he's going into detail of all the great world changing things
1:32:58
he's going to do
1:32:58
with his money. And it's going to be like, we're going to give free health care
1:33:02
out to people and
1:33:03
blah, blah, blah. And we're going to change the world. And it's going to be
1:33:06
financed by taking a
1:33:08
percentage of like the cash float of nation states. In other words, he, this
1:33:14
was, I want to say this
1:33:15
was in 2014 or 2015, he was envisioning that the company Blockstream was going
1:33:21
to be onboarding
1:33:22
nation states to their thing, not to Bitcoin to their thing. He'll take, they
1:33:26
'll be the new middleman,
1:33:27
take a transaction fee. And with all that money they were going to make, he's
1:33:32
going to help,
1:33:33
you know, change the world and give people free health care. And there's a
1:33:38
tweet. I believe it's
1:33:40
still up there. I retweeted it maybe a month ago. There's a tweet. I want to
1:33:43
say it's from 2014 or
1:33:45
2015, the same time period from Austin Hill, where it's a photo of the
1:33:50
Caribbean island. And it
1:33:52
says something on the lines and by paraphrasing, you know, a great day on the
1:33:58
islands, trying to
1:34:01
figure out the future of finance by merging blockchain with traditional, trying
1:34:07
traditional
1:34:07
finance, something like that. And it matches up perfectly with the dates of the
1:34:12
emails that were
1:34:12
released in the Epstein files. But as you go through this, so what you find is
1:34:19
that Epstein,
1:34:20
so again, he's funding this, the throttling of Bitcoin. They're funding the CB
1:34:25
DC development.
1:34:26
He's also an early investor in 2014 in Circle, which is the company behind USDC
1:34:31
, which is now the
1:34:32
largest stable coin. And I haven't been able to prove this yet, but just
1:34:38
because it's complicated
1:34:39
structure. But if, if Brock Pierce is his crypto advisor, and he's getting him
1:34:44
into all of these
1:34:45
deals, what are the odds that he didn't invest in tether in one way or another?
1:34:49
Because there
1:34:50
are emails back and forth at the very early formation of tether, where Brock
1:34:56
Pierce is asking
1:34:57
Jeffrey Epstein for an introduction to Larry Summers. And in fact, by the way,
1:35:03
and I'm still
1:35:03
finding more and more emails in this, but I think in 2013, Larry Summers sends
1:35:08
an email to Jeffrey
1:35:08
Epstein and says, "Hey, what do you think about this Bitcoin, Mr. Money?" I
1:35:12
guess Larry Summers
1:35:14
referred to Epstein as Mr. Money. So maybe in these circles, they did think
1:35:17
that this guy was this
1:35:18
super genius on these alternative currencies. One more thing. And I know that
1:35:24
not to overwhelm
1:35:25
you and your audience, there's one more line here that ends up being important
1:35:30
through tether.
1:35:31
And it's the connection with Lutnik, Howard Lutnik, who is at least, I think he
1:35:36
is still there,
1:35:37
is it the Commerce Secretary or was? Aaron knows, Aaron, I just had a
1:35:43
conversation a week or two ago,
1:35:45
and he was telling me some of the details here between Lutnik and tether that I
1:35:50
hadn't even heard
1:35:51
before. But it should be noted that Lutnik was also Jeffrey Epstein's neighbor.
1:35:57
So they apparently
1:35:59
knew each other, he was on the island, and then we keep coming back to tether
1:36:04
and the corruption
1:36:05
here. Lutnik, who just because it's narratively interesting, people should be
1:36:11
aware that he's
1:36:11
also an extremely lucky man who didn't happen to be at work in the World Trade
1:36:18
Center on 9/11.
1:36:19
Anyway, even though he because he was taking his son to his first day of
1:36:26
kindergarten, which the
1:36:27
New York City Schools claimed didn't start on that day. So Aaron, can you give
1:36:33
some of those
1:36:34
details on the Lutnik tether connection here? Yeah, so this gets really
1:36:39
fascinating. So remember,
1:36:40
the backdrop on all this tether has never completed an audit before. They have
1:36:45
been found to not have
1:36:46
reserves in two separate occasions. And so then this interesting thing happens
1:36:53
a few years before
1:36:55
the election, Howard Lutnik gets involved with tether and makes a $600 million
1:37:02
investment into
1:37:03
tether. In exchange for his company, Cantor Fitzgerald, essentially the
1:37:09
exclusive contract to manage
1:37:11
all of the treasuries backing tether. This is a very interesting thing to have
1:37:17
done a few years back,
1:37:18
given a few things. One, it's not clear if tether was backed by anything at all
1:37:23
, but there was no
1:37:24
requirement that tether be backed by US treasuries. There was no regulation on
1:37:28
this. So tether could
1:37:29
have been backed by again gold crypto, whatever happens to be. Cantor
1:37:30
Fitzgerald just comes in and
1:37:34
says, Hey, I'm going to invest $600 million. But I want to be able to manage
1:37:38
the treasuries
1:37:39
backing your stable coin. Then, and you have to understand something about
1:37:44
Howard Lutnik in politics.
1:37:46
He's not been a player in Republican politics. In fact, he was a major
1:37:51
contributor to Hillary
1:37:53
Clinton's presidential campaign in 2016. So no one in political circles was
1:37:57
talking about Howard
1:37:59
in the context of high level Republican Party politics. He goes from being a
1:38:04
backer of Hillary
1:38:05
Clinton to the chair of Trump's transition committee, an incredibly important
1:38:11
position that's involved
1:38:12
in selecting and vetting the entire cabinet. So he gets into that position and
1:38:18
actually tries
1:38:19
to put himself up for treasury secretary. So just think about this for a second
1:38:24
.
1:38:25
Your company's got an exclusive deal to manage treasuries for tether. And now
1:38:30
you're angling to
1:38:31
get the treasury secretary position. I think people looked at that and said,
1:38:34
Hey, that's,
1:38:35
that's a little bit too far, even on the surface of things. So he ends up
1:38:40
getting commerce secretary.
1:38:42
But then what happens is they bring in this guy, Bo Heins, to be the crypto
1:38:47
advisor. And
1:38:49
Lutnik and Bo Heins are two of the big driving forces behind the Genius Act.
1:38:54
And the Genius Act is known as this stable coin legislation. I call it a
1:39:01
backdoor CBDC,
1:39:02
which which I'll explain. But what this bill does is essentially, instead of
1:39:07
having the Federal
1:39:08
Reserve issue a central bank digital currency, what they decided is, well, hey,
1:39:12
why don't we take
1:39:13
private stable coins that are already really popular. People use tether and
1:39:19
they use USDC. In
1:39:21
fact, in the last 12 months, there was something like $33 trillion worth of
1:39:26
transaction volume
1:39:27
using these stable coins more than visa. So let's take these popular private
1:39:32
stable coins
1:39:33
and put them under the control of Congress. It's Congress, not the Federal
1:39:37
Reserve, by the way,
1:39:38
that's responsible for financial surveillance. You know, we talked earlier
1:39:41
about these,
1:39:42
know your customer, anti money laundering laws, all of this kind of reporting
1:39:47
that comes from
1:39:48
Congress, not the Federal Reserve. So now through the Genius Act, two things
1:39:51
happen.
1:39:52
That financial surveillance now applies to private stable coins, but they added
1:39:57
one other
1:39:58
component. If you are going to be a legitimate legal stable coin, you now have
1:40:03
to back your stable
1:40:05
coin a hundred percent by US treasuries. So the biggest single beneficiary of
1:40:12
the Genius Act
1:40:13
is Howard Lutinik's firm, Cantor Fitzgerald. So when I say, you know, the
1:40:17
creature from Epstein's
1:40:19
island, we're talking about a situation where literally he's making money on
1:40:24
every single
1:40:25
transaction made using tether because he's managing all of the treasuries that
1:40:30
back all of tether.
1:40:32
Well, I did say he was a very lucky guy. He is, he's a very lucky guy. And so,
1:40:37
but you know,
1:40:38
why that isn't a major news story. I mean, people like to talk about Nancy
1:40:42
Pelosi and insider
1:40:43
trading. This is a guy that came in and, you know, cut a deal to basically back
1:40:48
the digital dollar
1:40:49
and then, you know, push legislation to force the, you know, this company to be
1:40:53
backed by treasuries.
1:40:54
It's, it's amazing. A couple more things on this. So
1:40:57
we should, we should also talk a little bit about the, the consequences of
1:41:06
using something like
1:41:07
tether and stable coins. So with Bitcoin, for example, it's, when one is using
1:41:15
Bitcoin,
1:41:16
even if you own it and you're not using custodial wallets, it's still fairly
1:41:23
easy for the
1:41:24
government to track and control and survey. But also, if your coins move to an
1:41:33
exchange or if they
1:41:35
move to a, a, a hop where the, the government has control, they can essentially
1:41:43
seize your funds.
1:41:45
This happens all the time where coins on the Bitcoin network will be identified
1:41:49
by the feds
1:41:50
as being, you know, participating in crime or whatever, whatever those coins
1:41:54
end up moving
1:41:55
to an exchange or a place as a central, you know, a central hub, the, the feds
1:42:00
will say, okay,
1:42:01
we're going to seize these assets now because we think they're involved in
1:42:05
crime happens constantly.
1:42:06
Well, with tether and with stable coins, it becomes effectively trivially easy
1:42:14
to track control sensor and, and just take one's digital money here. And again,
1:42:21
this also happens
1:42:22
all the time. So there's, I think it's, I don't, I don't know off the top of my
1:42:25
heads, I'm not
1:42:25
going to speculate, but I was just reading a news article about another, you
1:42:30
know, so many 10
1:42:31
millions dollars that were just frozen on behalf of the US government, pinging
1:42:37
tether to say, hey,
1:42:38
you know, freeze, freeze this money, make sure this money doesn't move. And it
1:42:42
's easy on the,
1:42:43
the tether network to do that. It's even, it's more centralized than, than
1:42:48
Bitcoin. It's like,
1:42:50
it's essentially like a private company that's issuing these tokens and it has
1:42:53
control over the
1:42:53
tokens. So if we go into the future world, which is everybody's going to be
1:42:57
using digital currency
1:42:58
like tether, even if it's not a formal CVDC, that is already the dystopian
1:43:03
future. And one,
1:43:05
one more point of sad, a sad point to make here is that tether has been very
1:43:11
strategic in some of
1:43:12
its marketing and obviously its plays here. And I know that they have invested,
1:43:18
I want to say it's
1:43:19
either tens of millions or maybe hundreds of millions into rumble, which is the
1:43:23
, the alternative,
1:43:24
you know, video company where you can host videos. So, so I, I have, I get the
1:43:34
impression
1:43:34
that they want to start monetizing with rumble. So people, you know, they're
1:43:43
going to have their
1:43:43
decent, they're more decentralized or something, you know, video platform. And
1:43:48
then people are going
1:43:49
to be using tether to pay content creators there and people should know this,
1:43:54
this might be,
1:43:55
this might be a bad trend, unfortunately. So there are two ways to interpret
1:43:59
this.
1:44:00
One of them is clearly rumble is a problem because it's where people who've
1:44:07
been censored on YouTube
1:44:09
go. And so to the extent that you want to snuff out a kind of discussion, rum
1:44:15
ble is the same kind
1:44:16
of problem that Bitcoin was. If you use tether and backdoor CBDCs and stable
1:44:24
coins that are readily
1:44:26
controllable, the point is you can shift the incentives on rumble. That's one
1:44:30
interpretation.
1:44:31
Yeah. The other interpretation is that there is an attempt to corrupt rumble
1:44:34
itself.
1:44:34
Sure. So that's fascinating. I do want to make sure people understand
1:44:42
two things. One, the question of CBDCs is pretty arcane, but should be top of
1:44:53
mind for people.
1:44:55
If you care about freedom, the idea that you are going to be lured into or
1:45:01
forced into the use
1:45:03
of a centralized bank digital currency, that is effectively game over for our
1:45:09
ability to speak
1:45:10
independently. Because what it does is it creates a control lever where
1:45:16
effectively your ability to
1:45:18
function as a citizen accessing the market can evaporate just as it did for the
1:45:25
Canadian truckers.
1:45:26
And if all your money is this way, and suddenly you can't buy chicken
1:45:31
because you don't like mRNA shots, then the discussion that we had during COVID
1:45:36
that actually
1:45:37
allowed us to push back becomes impossible. The number of people who can
1:45:41
withstand that kind of
1:45:43
pressure where they are suddenly insulated from access to their own money is
1:45:50
tiny.
1:45:51
So you won't win another battle if we lose this one. So even if it doesn't seem
1:45:55
like your cup of tea
1:45:56
in terms of things you like to think about, CBDCs should be on your mind. The
1:46:00
second point I wanted
1:46:01
to make is that by many measures, we are headed towards a financial collapse of
1:46:12
, it could be many
1:46:13
times 2008, but something in that order of magnitude. That collapse offers
1:46:23
those who have been quietly
1:46:26
scheming behind the scenes to usher in a CBDC offers them a backdoor mechanism
1:46:32
for doing it,
1:46:33
because most of us have a fair fraction of our wealth in banks. If those banks
1:46:39
default,
1:46:40
which is a natural consequence of what is likely to unfold as a result of
1:46:43
bubbles and fraud in the
1:46:45
market among other things, then your money comes back to you through the FDIC,
1:46:51
the Federal Deposit
1:46:52
Insurance Corporation. And as far as I understand, the Federal Deposit
1:46:57
Insurance Corporation could
1:46:59
give you your money back in CBDC form, take it or leave it. And if that
1:47:03
happened, suddenly,
1:47:05
we are living in a brand new world in which all of the people you're depending
1:47:09
on to make sense of
1:47:09
the world so that you can understand it are now in danger of starvation if they
1:47:16
step out of line.
1:47:19
Well, there are several things to this has obviously been my big issue for the
1:47:22
last three and a half
1:47:23
years and the more and more I explored how our current system works. We already
1:47:28
effectively have
1:47:29
a CBDC anyway. The money that you have in the bank is already digital. In fact,
1:47:34
the government writes checks through the Federal Reserve, which is used as an
1:47:39
oracle database.
1:47:40
So most of our money is digital, it's already tracked. So we already have a
1:47:45
problem. So that's
1:47:46
one of the things that my research revealed on this front. But these stable
1:47:52
coins are a backdoor
1:47:53
CBDC. This has become difficult for me because I was fighting CBDCs and
1:47:57
everybody's like, well,
1:47:58
you must be celebrating now that Trump has signed an executive order saying
1:48:01
there's no CBDC. And
1:48:03
I'm like, no, it's the opposite. We've done this backdoor CBDC where $33
1:48:08
trillion worth of
1:48:09
transaction volume is now basically under CBDC type control and regulation. And
1:48:16
based on the
1:48:17
growth rate of these stablecoins and popularity of these stablecoins by 2030,
1:48:22
there'll be more
1:48:22
stablecoin use than Visa, MasterCard, and direct deposit combined. That's
1:48:26
actually just the natural
1:48:27
growth rate right now. So it's already kind of game over through these
1:48:32
regulated stablecoins. But
1:48:35
that's not the worst part of it. There's something now called the Clarity Act.
1:48:39
So money represents
1:48:41
about 5% of global assets. Your retirement plan, your 401k, stocks, bonds,
1:48:47
commodities, gold,
1:48:49
your house, those things make up 95%. And what the Clarity Act is trying to do
1:48:55
is what they're
1:48:57
trying to do with the Clarity Act is basically create digital tokens that
1:49:02
represent everything
1:49:03
that you own, and then add the same surveillance to that. So they're going to
1:49:08
have the ability to
1:49:09
program, track, and censor, not just your money. We'd say you don't want the
1:49:14
shot. They could shut
1:49:15
off your ability to sell your car. They could shut off your stock portfolio. We
1:49:20
are moving towards
1:49:21
the tokenization of everything Larry Fink said at Davos, everything will be
1:49:26
tokenized. And I've
1:49:27
been a big fan of tokenization for a long time, but not the form of token
1:49:30
ization where it's controlled
1:49:33
by governments and third parties, and they can shut it off. I thought the
1:49:36
promise of tokenization,
1:49:37
kind of like Bitcoin was supposed to be money you could use without third
1:49:40
parties.
1:49:40
I thought tokenization could be a way for people to trade anything of any value
1:49:46
around the world.
1:49:46
And instead, it's turning into what I think is the anchor piece of the digital
1:49:51
control system.
1:49:52
And that's the Clarity Act, which is being slammed through right now, even when
1:49:57
we're in the midst of
1:49:58
what could turn out to be World War III, if you actually look at what the
1:50:02
administration is doing
1:50:03
and what they're pushing fast and furious right now through Congress is to get
1:50:07
this Clarity Act signed.
1:50:09
So A, that may not be a mere coincidence that these things are happening at the
1:50:14
same time.
1:50:15
But B, let me make sure I understand it because, you know,
1:50:20
I struggle a little bit with the question of tokenization and what it means. I
1:50:24
have a house
1:50:27
for it to become a token doesn't turn it into something virtual. It's still a
1:50:30
house.
1:50:31
But if the idea is that my house becomes represented by a token,
1:50:36
which is somehow legally tied up with that property such that to trade the
1:50:41
house,
1:50:42
I must trade the token, then it becomes, it becomes a mirror of a centralized
1:50:48
bank digital
1:50:49
currency because at the point that I say something awkward about mRNA shots,
1:50:53
then the point is, well, your house isn't yours to sell, right? In fact, we've
1:50:57
sold it to someone
1:50:58
else. So that is a frightening prospect if that's what you're getting at. Am I
1:51:05
right so far?
1:51:07
That's what I'm getting at. But where they're starting is not necessarily with
1:51:10
your house,
1:51:10
where they're starting is with your 401k and with your stocks and your bonds.
1:51:14
And you already have,
1:51:15
for instance, the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange building
1:51:19
platforms for this kind
1:51:20
of tokenization, BlackRock is invested in this and Cantar Fitzgerald and Howard
1:51:26
Lutnik has invested
1:51:28
in this. And so this is something where the technology's been built and the
1:51:32
passage of the
1:51:32
Clarity Act is what's going to enable that to happen. So all of a sudden, you
1:51:37
don't ever have
1:51:38
to touch cryptocurrency. You don't have to have a wallet. Your existing
1:51:42
financial instruments,
1:51:43
they'll just change the technology underlying that and add all of these
1:51:47
surveillance features.
1:51:48
That's why this is so critically important. So I want to ask you something.
1:51:53
This is now connecting to a different conversation that I thought was an
1:51:59
independent thread.
1:52:00
The conversation about the great taking and the virtualization of assets. So
1:52:07
this is not
1:52:08
tokenization. But what I learned in pursuing, I read the book The Great Taking
1:52:13
and I recommend
1:52:15
others do it as well. I learned a tremendous amount from it. It's a short book.
1:52:18
Is that the example of stocks, many of us remember a day when to own a stock.
1:52:30
Let's say you had
1:52:31
stock in IBM. If you have stock in IBM, it actually came in the form of a
1:52:38
physical certificate,
1:52:39
which if you're smart, you put in your safe. Because a physical certificate is
1:52:46
physical,
1:52:47
it is governed by the laws of physical ownership. So it can be stolen from you.
1:52:52
It can be recovered.
1:52:53
These sorts of things. What it turns out has happened, if I understand it
1:52:58
correctly,
1:52:59
is that stocks are now owned in an analogous way to the way people who have
1:53:06
Bitcoin in Coinbase
1:53:08
own Bitcoin. They own an IOU, not the real thing. And in the case of stocks,
1:53:17
there is a provision
1:53:19
in the contract through which you acquired your IOU for stock in our example,
1:53:26
IBM,
1:53:27
that says that it's yours to buy and sell. But that there is a priority given
1:53:35
to using it to
1:53:37
settle the debts of a third party who has used it as collateral. So only in the
1:53:44
extreme case that
1:53:45
we have a bunch of defaults are people even going to know that there is a
1:53:49
provision in which the
1:53:50
stock that they owned yesterday is no longer theirs because it's been used to
1:53:55
settle a debt they know
1:53:56
nothing about because some entity they've never heard of has defaulted. So that
1:54:02
is not
1:54:03
tokenization. That's virtualization. But how do these two things relate?
1:54:06
Well, the token is going to represent that contractual interest that you have.
1:54:14
Because right
1:54:15
now you have an IOU, right? You don't own the physical shares. That's what's
1:54:18
going to be tokenized.
1:54:19
So something like the Great Taking could happen with a click of a mouse button.
1:54:24
All of a sudden,
1:54:25
the economy blows up, oil goes to $500, derivatives blows up, and then your
1:54:29
broker
1:54:30
files for bankruptcy, even your broker files for bankruptcy, they're going to
1:54:33
be able to transfer
1:54:34
the ownership through tokenization to their secured creditor who's likely to be
1:54:39
one of the big four
1:54:40
four banks. So I view tokenization as the technical catalyst that makes the
1:54:47
Great Taking
1:54:47
efficiently possible. Okay, so let me let me ask you this then.
1:54:55
As you pointed out, so incisive at the beginning, it didn't matter whether you
1:55:01
were on the right
1:55:02
or left in the aftermath of 2008 and the TARP program bailouts, etc. Citizens
1:55:08
were irate that
1:55:10
they were paying the debts of people who had steered us into this harm while
1:55:15
people who had done nothing
1:55:17
but have a loan function in a way they didn't expect under conditions they
1:55:21
couldn't foresee
1:55:23
lost their homes and their their their wealth. The technological change ushered
1:55:34
in by virtualization
1:55:35
and then tokenization that you describe is almost like programming the bailout
1:55:42
into
1:55:43
the physical world. So if I own a house that is represented by a token and the
1:55:50
laws that govern
1:55:51
that token allow it to be transferred under some circumstances that I haven't
1:55:55
thought to look for
1:55:56
in the fine print and probably wouldn't understand if I read them, right? Then
1:56:01
the point is the bailout
1:56:02
is baked in when the stuff starts going belly up because people have made
1:56:07
reckless decisions,
1:56:08
then my house ends up in somebody else's somebody else's possession and then
1:56:14
somebody's going to
1:56:14
have to explain to me, oh, that's because it was used as collateral blah, blah,
1:56:17
blah, blah, on the
1:56:18
point as well. When did we vote for that? And the answer, oh, you know, it
1:56:23
happened, you know,
1:56:24
the clarity acted, you're not here about that. No, is there some reason I
1:56:29
wouldn't have heard
1:56:30
about? Well, we, you know, we were going to war against Iran. So, I mean, yes,
1:56:36
I'm sure that's
1:56:36
an overly simplified version of the picture. But am I right that a bailout is
1:56:40
effectively
1:56:41
baked into the tokenization? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, to a large degree
1:56:46
, I've been arguing that
1:56:47
we're facing this threat of technocracy, which is digital IDs and the token
1:56:52
ization of all of our
1:56:53
assets and everything else. And technocracy is a political ideology that doesn
1:56:57
't value property
1:56:58
rights or individual rights. It basically says, you know, all of our decisions
1:57:03
and assets will be
1:57:03
managed. Well, they won't even be ours anymore, but it'll be scientists and
1:57:07
engineers and now,
1:57:08
increasingly, AI that will be deciding what it is that we can and cannot do.
1:57:12
This has been a movement
1:57:14
for 90 years. And really, since, you know, for the last 50 years, since 1973,
1:57:21
there's been a lot
1:57:22
going on behind the scenes legally to make this happen. So you talked about
1:57:27
what the clarity act
1:57:29
is only the final piece of it. The great taking, there have been changes that
1:57:32
have happened
1:57:33
in the UCC laws in all 50 states that make this happen. That started in 1994.
1:57:39
This has been a
1:57:40
long plan. And actually, I did an article about this. I started thinking about
1:57:44
these click wrap
1:57:45
agreements that we sign. You know, every time you get a piece of software or
1:57:48
rental car agreement,
1:57:49
or even your, you know, bank agreement, you just scroll to the bottom, right?
1:57:53
So I wanted to look
1:57:54
at, well, wait, what are we actually giving up? And what I've come to now is
1:57:59
that the average person
1:58:01
signs about 200 of these click wrap agreements a year. And if you were to read
1:58:05
these agreements,
1:58:06
it would take two hours a day, 365 days a year, which of course, nobody does
1:58:11
nor could you do.
1:58:12
But I then created an AI to kind of analyze and break up a score that shows
1:58:17
what's actually
1:58:18
happening. And it turns out we've already given away our privacy. We've given
1:58:23
away our data.
1:58:24
We've given away our ability to dispute. And in some cases, we've given up our
1:58:30
economic ownership
1:58:31
interest. You know, you know, a lot of people like to say Black Rock, Vanguard,
1:58:35
State Street,
1:58:36
these guys own everything. That's not true. They are actually managing money on
1:58:42
behalf of us
1:58:43
and others. But what we've already given them is voting rights. Because, you
1:58:48
know, back to your
1:58:49
story about a physical stock certificate, if you own an ownership interest in a
1:58:53
company,
1:58:54
you have a physical share and then you have the right to vote, you get to vote
1:58:57
on the board of
1:58:58
directors, you get to vote on these shareholder issues. Well, your 401k is a
1:59:01
whole basket of stocks.
1:59:03
Why aren't you getting hundreds and hundreds of notices for all of these
1:59:06
companies that you own
1:59:07
a small percentage interest in? Well, the reason is that if you actually read
1:59:11
the fine print of
1:59:12
your agreement, you've given your voting rights to Black Rock, State Street,
1:59:15
Vanguard, and so forth.
1:59:17
Holy moly. So this has been happening for a couple of decades, and we've been
1:59:22
conditioned
1:59:23
to it. And so now we really already own nothing, but the Clarity Act gives the
1:59:28
technical capacity
1:59:29
for them to lock down and transfer assets in a very efficient way. That's why I
1:59:35
've been
1:59:36
sounding the alarm on it. The reason nobody's talking about it is the way that
1:59:39
it's been
1:59:40
presented, the propaganda behind it. And I have a big article coming out on
1:59:45
this. They're saying,
1:59:46
well, this is great for crypto because once we pass these clear rules, now 401
1:59:53
ks are going to be
1:59:54
able to buy Bitcoin and 401ks are going to be able to buy these other
1:59:58
cryptocurrencies. They don't
1:59:59
realize that the actual purpose of it is to create a framework, a technical
2:00:04
framework to tokenize
2:00:05
our real world assets, not crypto, and put it under this regulatory regime. And
2:00:10
so it's hard to fight
2:00:11
against this because there are a lot of people that want to make money off of
2:00:14
this. The crypto
2:00:15
people think trillions of dollars are going to come in and pump up and inflate
2:00:19
the price of
2:00:20
their cryptocurrency. And the people that are building the tokenization
2:00:23
platform certainly
2:00:24
aren't going to alert people about what's going on. And so it's very difficult
2:00:28
to get this information
2:00:29
out because of the forces against it and because of how complex it is and how
2:00:34
nuanced it is.
2:00:35
I want to say a couple of things. One about this idea of the Trojan horse being
2:00:42
celebrated as it's being rolled into inside the city wall. So this is something
2:00:50
that I'm certainly
2:00:51
guilty of having been a terribly naive libertarian in the early Bitcoin days. I
2:00:57
bought the hype
2:01:00
around Bitcoin. I really thought this was this world changing technology. That
2:01:04
was going to disrupt
2:01:06
power structures. I had no idea, no idea the sophistication of the opponents
2:01:16
that we were facing. So the
2:01:18
idea that they like this ragtag group of libertarian idealists are going to
2:01:23
create a private money
2:01:24
that can't be controlled. And maybe people won't be forced into paying for wars
2:01:32
that they don't
2:01:33
support. And we're going to do this with our cool new technology. That's just
2:01:37
crazy naive. I think
2:01:38
in hindsight, in hindsight, I don't even think they had to work very hard to
2:01:43
hijack Bitcoin.
2:01:44
I think that was when you consider the types of projects that these people have
2:01:49
undertaken,
2:01:50
the established power players, the central banks, you're talking about
2:01:54
organizations and groups
2:01:56
of people and networks that can topple dictators if they like all over the
2:02:00
world. The idea that
2:02:02
they're just going to roll over and accept some alternative currency is not
2:02:08
really feasible
2:02:09
from the beginning. So one thing that I have heard suggested is that maybe part
2:02:14
of the reason
2:02:15
that Bitcoin was maybe allowed to operate as long as it was out in the open is
2:02:22
to get
2:02:23
some of the loudest critics on board with this idea of digital currency. So
2:02:30
like the libertarian
2:02:31
idealistic folks here who really don't like CBDCs, they're really skeptical of
2:02:38
centralized power.
2:02:39
A huge percentage of them have been effectively captured by the Bitcoin
2:02:44
narrative and they
2:02:44
think they're going to get rich. If they just go long to get along and don't
2:02:48
upset the apple cart,
2:02:50
maybe the price of Bitcoin will keep going up and they'll make money. So I do
2:02:54
think that
2:02:55
we're seeing this too with the Genius Act and the Clarity Act. There's this
2:02:59
push that like,
2:03:00
yeah, we're going to adopt cryptocurrencies and it's going to make the world a
2:03:04
better place.
2:03:05
And meanwhile, the devil's in the details and it's like accomplishing the
2:03:09
opposite of what the
2:03:11
ideologues and naive people thought it would accomplish. But I do want to step
2:03:16
back and just
2:03:17
and say it's not all doom and gloom here because there is in fact a big
2:03:22
difference between let's say
2:03:24
the formally stated law and the common law. So when we're talking about when
2:03:35
you have a stock
2:03:36
certificate and the ownership of it is playing by the laws of physics because
2:03:40
it's a physical thing,
2:03:42
even that I don't think that's quite that doesn't that's not quite right
2:03:45
because we still have social
2:03:48
infrastructure in practice that says I lost my certificate and so I am the
2:03:55
rightful owner of it
2:03:57
and then I have other ways of proving that I was that I'm the real owner. If
2:04:00
somebody steals
2:04:02
a copy and they they go to the Xerox machine and then they have now there's two
2:04:05
certificates.
2:04:06
Who is the rightful owner? Oh, wait, hold on. I didn't mean to imply that they
2:04:11
obey the laws
2:04:12
of physics. What I meant to imply was that we have comprehensible laws that
2:04:18
adjudicate this.
2:04:20
Yes. Yes. Well, that's that's the part is that the laws are separate from the
2:04:27
document
2:04:29
and this is also going to be the case here with let's say digital the digital
2:04:33
world
2:04:35
and the the contracts we're agreeing to. So just because we are accepting the
2:04:42
terms of agreement
2:04:43
when we download a piece of software doesn't actually mean that we are legally
2:04:48
obligated by
2:04:49
the rules that we're accepting. I know it seems intuitive that we are but if it
2:04:52
turns out that
2:04:53
it's predatory in there there is actually a social technology political
2:04:59
technology and
2:05:00
infrastructure that can say actually that contract is invalid. We have the
2:05:04
common law tradition is
2:05:05
trying to protect from let's say abuses of the formal law to preserve order and
2:05:12
civilization.
2:05:14
Yeah, there are many reasons a contract can be invalid. It can be invalid
2:05:18
because you don't
2:05:19
benefit from it presumably if you get a piece of software you do but could be
2:05:23
invalid for that
2:05:24
reason. It can be invalid because it's deliberately opaque which I think they
2:05:29
are.
2:05:29
But you're right the the very the fact that you have signed something that
2:05:33
technically says
2:05:34
yes, I accept the surrender of this and you know you can't sign away your
2:05:40
constitutional rights
2:05:41
interestingly. So there are lots of reasons it can be invalid and people should
2:05:46
not
2:05:47
take the assumption that just because it's there in black and white and they
2:05:49
clicked
2:05:50
okay that these things are enforceable because many are. Exactly and if they're
2:05:54
coming for your
2:05:54
assets you know and if let's say you got your the deed the property deed that
2:06:00
to your house
2:06:01
got digitized and somebody is claiming up. Look because of this such and such a
2:06:06
rule now we own
2:06:07
your house we are forced to to submit to that being a legitimate legal
2:06:13
structure.
2:06:14
So there is hope there's hope here that sort of lies outside the law that says
2:06:18
even if these
2:06:19
schemes are pulled off that doesn't mean it doesn't mean we're all going to
2:06:22
actually be
2:06:23
impoverished to necessarily. Well here's a thing Steve. You said that you had
2:06:30
been painfully naive
2:06:32
about the fact that we were going to make a better world with crypto and I
2:06:36
wanted to suggest
2:06:38
you're the right person to suggest this to you because of your philosophical
2:06:42
bent. I have a
2:06:44
a principle that I live by which I've probably said to you before which is no
2:06:50
matter how cynical
2:06:51
you become you're still being naive. So I want to fix that. I think it's true
2:06:59
but the reason why it's
2:07:01
true is explains the naivete of people even like us who are used to looking
2:07:08
into the abyss.
2:07:09
Imagine for a second that minted at some rate were people who were completely
2:07:21
free
2:07:22
of moral constraint. We know that these people exist we have names for them
2:07:28
right arguably
2:07:29
sociopath is certainly a psychopath is but imagine that they circulate among us
2:07:36
and that there are processes even unintentional processes that cause them to
2:07:41
cluster together
2:07:42
and to seek power. Well the answer is they have every move on the board
2:07:49
including all of the
2:07:50
moral moves they can behave morally as long as that pays and as soon as it
2:07:53
doesn't pay they're
2:07:54
free to do things that you and I wouldn't be. So once you imagine that these
2:08:00
people exist there
2:08:01
are forces that will group them together and that they will together seek power
2:08:06
and they will do so
2:08:07
with tools you can't even imagine because you would never think to do it right.
2:08:12
What would those
2:08:13
people look like? They would look like what is strongly suggested by the
2:08:21
collection of evidence
2:08:23
around Epstein and in fact the Epstein phenomenon appears poised to drag people
2:08:31
in that direction
2:08:32
right if Epstein found everybody's weaknesses pulled everybody beyond their own
2:08:38
moral limits
2:08:39
and then there was no route back for one reason or another whether it's because
2:08:43
somebody was afraid that their wife would find out or somebody had committed a
2:08:47
crime and didn't
2:08:48
want to go to jail or whatever it was. Once those people have nothing to lose
2:08:53
then the point is
2:08:55
they are in a position to be dragged further and further into the darkness. So
2:08:59
basically what I'm
2:09:01
saying is I don't think it is repeat instances of naivete. I think it is the
2:09:08
downside of being
2:09:09
decent. If you are decent you are going to find yourself shocked by the indec
2:09:15
ency of others again
2:09:16
and again and you wouldn't want it any other way like it's good to prepare for
2:09:21
this thing but
2:09:21
just get ready because people with no moral compass exist and they're going to
2:09:26
find new ways of
2:09:28
gaming the system and taking advantage of everybody else at every opportunity.
2:09:34
Well you know and I will say I used to believe in the political process spent a
2:09:40
lot of time in
2:09:41
that and then you know I thought well maybe there's a legal recourse and now
2:09:45
you know there's Roger's
2:09:47
case but you know we're going to do another enemies of the state event at the
2:09:51
Libertarian
2:09:52
Party Convention and the number of people that have been incarcerated is
2:09:56
doubled and I've seen
2:09:58
enough of these court hearings and read enough of these court documents and
2:10:02
people that I know
2:10:03
personally and you know this isn't a civil case but the DOJ I mean they have a
2:10:09
pattern and it's not
2:10:11
around finding the truth they are interested in getting wins and they will
2:10:15
suppress information
2:10:17
they will misrepresent information as a matter of process and it's very demoral
2:10:21
izing and I've
2:10:22
actually talked to some lawyers that have gotten into this where maybe their
2:10:25
first case was working
2:10:26
on one of these crypto prisoners and it completely warped their view of the law
2:10:31
like finding out
2:10:31
that judges own some of the private prisons it's just you know and it gets to a
2:10:36
point where you don't
2:10:37
want to continue to dig into it because it never comes out favorable yeah it's
2:10:43
everywhere you look
2:10:44
so let me let me speak a little bit more precisely then so to be clear my
2:10:52
operating model of worldly
2:10:54
power has gotten so pessimistic that I am saying I think that there are groups
2:11:04
of individuals
2:11:06
who who who one will have predictive power of their next action if you model
2:11:15
them as Satan
2:11:16
incarnate okay so I have bad news for you Steve okay you're still being naive
2:11:22
okay I was more
2:11:23
worse than saying okay you got to help me out on that one I don't know how to
2:11:26
make it more extreme
2:11:27
but I was actually just talking to friend about this and I was saying that one
2:11:30
of the ways I'm viewing
2:11:32
it is that if one is so so turns out morality is this really powerful
2:11:42
constraint on people's behavior that gets unbelievably deep into their
2:11:47
psychology
2:11:47
and when one is thinking about how to interact with the world one is implicitly
2:11:55
always checking
2:11:56
with one's moral constraints and this is good this is a feature this is what we
2:12:00
want however as you
2:12:01
said you know there are some percentage of people who don't have that moral
2:12:06
constraint and it might even be more accurate to model them as saying they have
2:12:12
embraced
2:12:13
inverting the morality of regular folks to to see that there are tactics and
2:12:22
tools available
2:12:23
to them that give them an enormous amount of power that other people are not
2:12:28
participating
2:12:29
it so I was I was using the analogy of cake there's like a certain amount of
2:12:32
cake on the table and
2:12:34
if you behave yourself you eat the good cake and then there's a the people that
2:12:38
are constraining
2:12:39
themselves with morals or eating a good cake and then they all leave and then
2:12:43
there's like a ton
2:12:44
of evil cake that's left over and all you got to do to eat the evil cake that's
2:12:48
there is just you
2:12:49
know loosen your moral constraints and you'll find there's there's a bounty a
2:12:53
waiting a waiting one
2:12:56
for for embracing evil so that is that is how I'm modeling things here at least
2:13:00
I do think that's
2:13:01
what we're up against that sort of makes sense that that space is going to be
2:13:04
taken by some
2:13:05
entities however my point is to say despite that in the face of that there's
2:13:10
still cause for optimism
2:13:12
because even if in in their diabolical schemes they're trying to harm you and
2:13:18
take your money and
2:13:19
take your stuff and you know harm your neurology whatever it is it doesn't mean
2:13:24
that even if they
2:13:25
find some crazy legal little technically legal way of harming you and stealing
2:13:30
from you doesn't
2:13:31
mean you have to go along with it so I don't want people to feel like they're
2:13:34
locked in it's like
2:13:36
oh no this this criminal says he owns my house and I'm just gonna roll over and
2:13:39
give him my house
2:13:40
I don't think we have we don't have to live in that world you know no we don't
2:13:44
have to live in
2:13:44
that world and I always hesitate to say it because you know it will be
2:13:48
portrayed by whoever is some
2:13:50
you know crazed admission of criminal intent it is nothing of the kind but
2:13:54
there's a reason that
2:13:56
the First Amendment is what it is and there's a reason that the Second
2:13:59
Amendment is what it is
2:14:00
and it is because the founders were well aware of the danger of tyranny and
2:14:07
they enabled us
2:14:09
to fight back and these schemes ultimately may leave us no choice if people
2:14:17
have targeted
2:14:18
anything and everything that we own and they clearly have then we will do what
2:14:24
human beings do to
2:14:26
stave off you know starvation and wolves and that is you know that is just
2:14:32
simply the nature of
2:14:33
of the beast I do find your point fascinating I've been struggling over the
2:14:38
same question as I see
2:14:42
what is not exactly in the Epstein evidence we've seen but is strongly implied
2:14:47
by what we have seen
2:14:49
question is how could a person possibly find themselves desiring of the things
2:15:00
that Epstein
2:15:01
was apparently availing them of and more to the point to the extent that
2:15:07
occasionally some person
2:15:09
is so broken that they would find that appealing there are a bunch of them and
2:15:14
they've got a lot
2:15:14
of power and they function in the world and you know that is a shocking
2:15:19
discovery so the question
2:15:22
really is is there something that beyond some threshold pushes people in the
2:15:27
direction of
2:15:28
elaborating their capacity for evil rather than stifling it and I agree with
2:15:35
you something does
2:15:37
seem to push in that direction the more and and I would guess at the following
2:15:41
Morality is interesting I've written a paper on why it evolves basically my
2:15:48
argument is my argument
2:15:49
with David Lottie is that it comes down to a trade-off that morality moral
2:15:58
actions involve a
2:16:00
constraint the unwillingness to do something that would be profitable and so
2:16:07
for the context of this
2:16:08
conversation those of us who are morally constrained are passing up profits
2:16:14
that we might make in
2:16:15
evolutionary terms and why would we do that and the obvious answer is there are
2:16:22
ways in which that
2:16:23
can be a wise strategy which is why morality itself has evolved and I would
2:16:28
argue that one of them
2:16:30
is that the people who lean in the direction of evil the people who are less
2:16:35
morally constrained
2:16:36
have an advantage in the short term yes and those who are morally constrained
2:16:42
have an advantage in
2:16:43
the long term now there's nothing that says that these short-term motherfuckers
2:16:48
aren't going to do
2:16:49
us in in the near term we have to be on our guard much to Aaron's point about
2:16:54
the things that are
2:16:55
in motion that we're not paying attention to but as you say Steve we shouldn't
2:17:02
lose hope because in
2:17:03
the end apparently the fact that human beings are overwhelmingly capable of
2:17:08
moral self restraint
2:17:10
says that that has counterintuitively been a successful strategy so let us hope
2:17:16
that those
2:17:17
forces that make it a successful strategy are in play at this moment let us do
2:17:22
what we can to augment
2:17:24
and enable them and let us embrace others who clearly are agreed to the same
2:17:30
principle yes and
2:17:32
one of the strategies that we have I get uncomfortable talking about we the
2:17:38
morally righteous and the
2:17:39
morally good like that you know it's very we got to be real careful we got to
2:17:43
be well I didn't say
2:17:44
that I said we who are willing to be morally constrained and I take it that all
2:17:49
good people
2:17:50
no well but all good people bypass some opportunities I'm just saying even even
2:17:57
the idea of you know
2:17:58
good people I I think I am I'm really in the middle of learning the depth of
2:18:06
traditional faith here we're failing at the white-pilling you initiated 10
2:18:11
minutes ago
2:18:11
I don't know I'll get around to it we're going there I just I think put it this
2:18:18
way
2:18:18
it is incredibly important if we care about goodness and truth and love that we
2:18:31
do not
2:18:32
mistake let's say that we don't trick ourselves into thinking we're better than
2:18:39
we are we need a
2:18:41
kind of a moral humility here and I think it is paramount and strategically
2:18:46
necessary so this is
2:18:46
kind of where I'm getting where I'm getting at one of the issues that the the
2:18:52
dark side has is
2:18:54
they have a they have problems with trust because they're liars and schemers
2:18:58
and Machiavellians that's
2:19:00
sort of the rules of the space in which they're operating that affords the many
2:19:04
you know short-term
2:19:06
opportunities but they're losing out on long-term coordination opportunities
2:19:11
that you only get like
2:19:12
we have some we have some cake they can't eat and it's like really trying to
2:19:17
speak truthfully and
2:19:18
honestly even at short-term cost you know you're trading sometimes you're
2:19:22
trading your short-term
2:19:23
credibility for long-term credibility here by saying things that are true but
2:19:28
but you know harm
2:19:28
you in in the short run and I think obviously you know living through covid
2:19:34
prime example of this
2:19:35
all kinds of short-term pain that skeptics of the mRNA vaccine for example had
2:19:42
to go through that
2:19:43
end up ends up being vindicated in the long run and it's important that we do
2:19:47
the exact same thing
2:19:48
right now in crypto and with the threat of the digitization of our economy that
2:19:55
you know
2:19:57
the guarantee there's going to be a whole lot of hate coming your direction my
2:20:01
direction errands
2:20:01
directions after this conversation but it is critically important now on this
2:20:06
team that if
2:20:07
there are wolves in the pin there are there are wolves wearing sheep clothing
2:20:14
with us we have to
2:20:15
point out that that is the case even at at the cost of being ricked ridiculed
2:20:22
and and and mocked here
2:20:24
because the stakes are great so the the optimistic story is this I think this
2:20:28
is what the process
2:20:29
looks like of us you know using what we have to our strategic advantage with
2:20:36
this which is like
2:20:37
long-term truth telling and this type of thing but it's going to require I
2:20:41
think a lot of people
2:20:42
hopefully more and more prominent people like yourself and others to come out
2:20:45
and say hey guys
2:20:46
let's not sign everybody up for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies right now because
2:20:53
this might
2:20:53
actually be the that might be an in-game it's not that maybe you're not going
2:20:58
to make money or
2:20:59
whatever it's like that that might actually be a disaster scenario that that we
2:21:03
should avoid and
2:21:05
that's so it hurts also just like it hurts my soul to say a little bit because
2:21:08
I literally wrote
2:21:10
I wrote this book what's the big deal about Bitcoin in 2014 I was the guy
2:21:14
making the case for how
2:21:16
Bitcoin is this amazing world-changing thing a bunch got a big bunch of people
2:21:20
involved and excited
2:21:21
about it and now I got to kind of put my tail between my legs and say geez not
2:21:25
only uh is this
2:21:26
not so exciting it might be like something that's profoundly dystopian and and
2:21:33
and evil at the
2:21:34
at the end of the the run here so yeah I mean that's that's always the danger
2:21:38
that anything
2:21:39
that is set in motion can be captured or disrupted or displaced or whatever it
2:21:46
is that happens
2:21:49
and I do you know there's another if we zoom out
2:21:53
we were granted some rights we were given a brilliant skeletal description of a
2:22:03
civilization
2:22:04
in which we're right we are free to think independently to fearlessly speak
2:22:12
about what we have
2:22:13
concluded to defend ourselves to have property to not have the government rifle
2:22:19
through our
2:22:20
stuff because it feels like it if we are accused of a crime in which our rights
2:22:27
might be taken away
2:22:28
we have every advantage that we are entitled to in court we're allowed to
2:22:32
confront the witnesses
2:22:34
against us we are allowed to see the evidence we are allowed to have uh
2:22:39
ourselves presented
2:22:41
to our lawyers without delay speedy trial all of these things none of that has
2:22:47
changed
2:22:48
it is a profound irritant to those who wish to control us and so they are
2:22:56
always plotting
2:22:57
ways to undo it and here I'm afraid what we've spotted is a mechanism whereby
2:23:03
they don't really
2:23:04
have to oh they don't have to undo it because they can supersede it in a way
2:23:09
that the founders if
2:23:11
they had understood that it was possible would surely have blocked but they
2:23:15
couldn't because the
2:23:17
technology is so central to the way it functions and so we have to just
2:23:21
remember who we are what
2:23:24
we're entitled to and what the logical implications of that are for what they
2:23:29
're doing right they
2:23:31
may think they have the right to give me a shot I don't want to take and they
2:23:35
may think they have
2:23:36
the right to prevent me from spending money if I resist the answer is no that's
2:23:41
obviously wrong
2:23:42
you may have the power to coerce me you may be able to bring men with guns hold
2:23:47
me down and
2:23:47
inject me with something doesn't mean you had the right to do it even if it
2:23:51
says so on paper
2:23:52
strong agree hallelujah hallelujah uh Aaron do you want to uh yeah I mean I don
2:23:59
't think I'm
2:23:59
blackfield you know I actually spend most of my time trying to exit the system
2:24:03
and use parallel
2:24:03
systems and you know so the the answer to getting stuck with cbdc's is to exit
2:24:08
the dollar and use
2:24:09
alternative currencies the answer to getting stuck with the health care system
2:24:13
that we have that
2:24:15
you know one person every minute in this country files for medical bankruptcy
2:24:18
and most of those
2:24:19
have insurance is to form medical trust exit the system looking to medical
2:24:23
tourism and just not
2:24:24
comply enough enough of us do that it's hard to fight within the system because
2:24:28
I think the
2:24:29
system itself is so corrupted that you know you lose by fighting it to a degree
2:24:34
but we can build
2:24:35
alternatives and that's what's where I spend most of my time but even still
2:24:40
with that I look
2:24:41
at something like the hijacking of bitcoin and I say well how do we prevent
2:24:43
that from happening
2:24:44
again and I still don't have a good answer yeah well not only that though I
2:24:49
agree with you that
2:24:50
there are many things that we can do um to insulate ourselves from some of this
2:24:58
I don't think we
2:24:58
can insulate ourselves perfectly I mean for one thing take the example of your
2:25:05
home ownership
2:25:07
and the danger posed to you by a bank default that makes it impossible for you
2:25:13
to to pay your
2:25:16
loan on time that then subjects you to your house being repossessed that is
2:25:23
something you can resist
2:25:27
if you can own your home outright which most of us can't so there's technically
2:25:33
something to do
2:25:34
but practically it's going to be very difficult and what's really protecting us
2:25:38
is that they can't
2:25:40
afford to do it to all of us at once so I guess the question is on the one hand
2:25:49
protecting yourself
2:25:50
by exiting in rational ways it would be great if there was a central repository
2:25:54
of descriptions
2:25:56
of how to do that maybe there is um but the other thing is we do have to figure
2:26:01
out how to fight back
2:26:03
the fact that we may be protected from a CBDC because we've spotted it coming
2:26:07
doesn't help us so
2:26:09
much if our neighbors are about to have the squeeze put on them because they
2:26:13
didn't see it coming and
2:26:15
suddenly they're going to be starving because they can't spend their money yeah
2:26:19
and I would love to
2:26:20
be able to sit here and say well that's why this new cryptocurrency project is
2:26:24
going to revolutionize
2:26:26
everything and this is the one you know you could escape to and um look at
2:26:29
bacon hijack bitcoin
2:26:31
as far as I could tell they can hijack anything so so going forward there are
2:26:35
some interesting
2:26:36
other crypto projects out there that seem to have privacy more baked into them
2:26:40
from the beginning
2:26:40
I think those are those are promising but whatever the attempted solution is
2:26:47
going forward we always
2:26:49
have to keep in mind everything can be hijacked even if we have some amazing
2:26:53
liberating technology
2:26:55
for a few years if it becomes too successful we should expect that the forces
2:26:59
will try to
2:27:00
infiltrate and corrupt it just as they've done before yeah and I think maximal
2:27:05
ism is a bad idea
2:27:07
I mean so I mean I use you know privacy coins like Xano and everything else but
2:27:10
I also use gold but
2:27:11
my approach is that you know I want to be a sovereignty maximalist I guess and
2:27:15
not
2:27:16
wedded to any particular technology but at the same time be vigilant we've
2:27:19
learned something
2:27:20
right we may have been naive originally but I think we've got some battle scars
2:27:24
and so maybe
2:27:24
we can uh maybe not prevent it entirely but buy a little bit more time
2:27:29
within these projects hopefully people will be more vocal but as much as I say
2:27:34
that I mean the
2:27:34
people honestly you know when you look at the genius act and the clarity act
2:27:38
and everything else
2:27:39
part of the reason that more people don't know about it is that a lot of the
2:27:44
people that were on
2:27:44
the forefront are in prison or have been suppressed by the state that's
2:27:49
actually actively happening
2:27:51
still to this day so the the people that would be the best voices for this can
2:27:55
't speak so
2:27:55
now other people have to stand up and talk about it I have a friend who we've
2:28:02
talked about this
2:28:02
before and he essentially says it can be modeled as the eternal cat and mouse
2:28:06
game so it's not that
2:28:09
one is ever going to reach the point of liberation and then everything is good
2:28:13
from here on out it's
2:28:15
that you buy a few more years for freedom a few more years a few more years and
2:28:19
then there's this
2:28:19
ongoing strategic adjustment as both sides are reacting to one another I also
2:28:25
think you don't
2:28:26
reminds me when we had our first conversation brought about the the dark age it
2:28:29
was like okay
2:28:30
what do we what do we do from here what do we go because it's sort of
2:28:35
overwhelming to say yeah
2:28:36
okay maybe we've been living in a dark age but like in terms of like concrete
2:28:41
action or what do
2:28:42
you do it's if the if the paradigms are wrong it doesn't tell you what the you
2:28:46
know if the old
2:28:47
paradigms are wrong doesn't tell you what the new correct paradigms are and you
2:28:51
know my my take
2:28:52
then is that the first step towards getting out of the dark age is recognizing
2:28:57
that you've been in
2:28:58
one and I feel like the first step here in trying to play this cat and mouse
2:29:04
game about money and
2:29:05
digital currency is just recognizing the stakes involved and recognizing that
2:29:10
there is both smoke
2:29:11
and fire and speaking and identifying it I don't know exactly what comes after
2:29:15
it but I think step
2:29:16
one is just identifying it yeah I agree this is obviously step one and the hard
2:29:22
part unfortunately
2:29:23
for this modern incarnation of it is that it's so technical that it is hard to
2:29:28
call people's
2:29:29
attention to it because their eyes glaze over as soon as you get into the nitty
2:29:33
gritty so I mean
2:29:36
I think we've done a pretty good job of it but it's important for people to
2:29:40
understand that you don't
2:29:41
need to understand cryptography to understand why Bitcoin was hijacked and who
2:29:47
might have
2:29:47
wanted to do it and what their ultimate purpose for what they've created might
2:29:52
be right that's a
2:29:54
narrative story it's not a technical story primarily so some years back I had a
2:30:05
contact
2:30:06
with Roger Fier and I was despairing having just discovered hijacking Bitcoin
2:30:13
and having
2:30:14
realized that this thing that held so much promise was not promising anymore to
2:30:19
say the least
2:30:20
and I knew that he had backed Bitcoin cash and I thought maybe he thought that
2:30:27
was the way to go
2:30:29
and it turned out that basically didn't work as a solution to the problem and
2:30:36
so I was hoping that
2:30:38
he would say something about what one might do if you were excited about the
2:30:44
technology and
2:30:44
promise of crypto but not excited about those projects where might you go and
2:30:49
at the time I
2:30:50
don't think there was anything to offer I understand that there are now at
2:30:54
least a couple of projects
2:30:56
that might be worth talking about do you guys know about these do not I'm
2:31:00
referring to yeah I mean
2:31:02
I know that you know Roger had introduced me when I had him on my podcast three
2:31:07
weeks before he was
2:31:08
arrested he mentioned a cryptocurrency called Zano which I looked at based on
2:31:13
his recommendation
2:31:14
and it's a it's a privacy coin and in fact I've moved to privacy coins if you
2:31:19
read the first edition
2:31:20
of my book I list you know a whole bunch of different cryptocurrencies that you
2:31:24
can use
2:31:24
but we talked earlier about the degree to which Bitcoin and even these stable
2:31:29
coins can be tracked
2:31:31
and I want to say something about that in relation to to Zano and Freedom
2:31:34
Dollar there's a company
2:31:36
called Chainalysis that's been around since 2014 and they work with exchanges
2:31:41
and law enforcement
2:31:42
and they have a complete database and a solution now that private investigators
2:31:48
can get certified
2:31:50
in so last year three different people came to me and they had either a divorce
2:31:54
or business dispute
2:31:55
and you know the counterparty had hired one of these private investigators and
2:31:59
they were able to get
2:32:00
more information about their crypto transactions than they could get from the
2:32:04
bank because the bank
2:32:05
only has records for seven years and so my you know focus and my shift has been
2:32:11
you know not just Zano
2:32:12
but on the importance of privacy by default as being a tool against CBDCs and
2:32:19
the surveillance
2:32:21
state. Zano is one project that does that Zano allows you to create tokens we
2:32:26
talk about tokens
2:32:27
with CBDCs and everything else but tokens that are private where you can't see
2:32:32
the transaction
2:32:33
match you can't see who's doing the transactions and you can have the tokens in
2:32:36
your own possession
2:32:38
and then there's a project built on Zano called Freedom Dollar which is a
2:32:42
stable coin
2:32:44
except that it's not it's a it's what's called an algorithmic stable coin but
2:32:49
it's not backed by
2:32:50
US Treasuries it's and it's completely private so you can't actually freeze it
2:32:55
or stop the transaction
2:32:56
so those are maybe you know those are two that are are promising amongst a
2:33:03
bunch of others but
2:33:03
you know I live on this stuff so this is what I actually I actually use I
2:33:07
actually have a debit card
2:33:09
that I load with Freedom Dollar and Zebic and when I travel around the world
2:33:13
you know I'm literally
2:33:14
using these things. So from the point of view of the vendors that you're buying
2:33:19
from it looks
2:33:20
like dollars to them because is that right? It looks like dollars to them yeah
2:33:26
I mean either
2:33:27
their Freedom Dollars it's pegged to the dollar so it's a token it'll be a
2:33:31
token in your wallet
2:33:33
and then that token has the stable value of a dollar that's the idea what I'm
2:33:38
trying to understand
2:33:39
is how these two projects have escaped the fate of Bitcoin how is it possible
2:33:48
for these things to
2:33:48
be truly anonymous and how is it possible to spend them seamlessly if most
2:33:53
people have never
2:33:54
even heard of them yeah I I'll take a stab at that so so um they're small that
2:34:00
would be
2:34:01
number one is the Zana project is small Freedom Dollars very very small so I
2:34:05
don't think they've
2:34:06
gotten the regulatory eye of Sauron on them yet and one reason I say that is
2:34:11
because Manero is
2:34:12
this other long-term cryptocurrency coin which has been around for a long time
2:34:20
and their focus is
2:34:20
on privacy but they've had such success that they've been blacklisted from a
2:34:25
bunch of the exchanges
2:34:26
you can't it's very hard to get because the the exchanges in particular they
2:34:35
don't sell it and
2:34:36
in a bunch of places because know your customer is impossible yeah yeah that's
2:34:41
the idea and so
2:34:43
you know I guess I guess this is one of the big ones that's used on the on the
2:34:47
the black markets
2:34:48
online it used to be Bitcoin many years ago and now I guess Manero is a big one
2:34:53
and if that if
2:34:54
it's actually being used that way I think that would suggest that there's real
2:34:59
privacy in that
2:35:00
project however I would just say you know the fact that Zano hasn't yet I don't
2:35:06
think it's met that
2:35:08
that level of scrutiny yet but it's like a it's tiny compared to Manero and we
2:35:13
already know that
2:35:13
Manero has been targeted from the government okay but but help me out here I'm
2:35:20
not understanding
2:35:23
if something is tiny like Xano and I wish to use it for normal if I wish to buy
2:35:30
bagels with it
2:35:32
how does it function so that that at the point of the vendor what I'm spending
2:35:42
is Zano
2:35:43
and the vendor is getting dollars so so how this works right now so I have
2:35:48
something
2:35:49
it's called a zebec mastercard so it's a kind of a non-kyc mastercard so I load
2:35:55
my freedom dollar
2:35:57
or Zano onto that card and then I use that card to pay so the merchant doesn't
2:36:02
isn't actually
2:36:03
receiving cryptocurrency there is kind of this intermediary in this step that
2:36:08
is the non-kyc debit
2:36:10
card and so that's that's one solution obviously long-term we need people to be
2:36:16
using these things
2:36:17
peer-to-peer without debit cards but there's you know you got to build this
2:36:22
build this stuff
2:36:22
out and so there's an ecosystem being developed and people are are you know I
2:36:28
've launched this
2:36:29
medical tourism marketplace there's no revenue model but I've just created a
2:36:33
database of all of
2:36:34
major medical tourism facilities and to help people find lower-cost higher
2:36:38
quality care and
2:36:40
when they make that match it just sends a message to the provider saying hey
2:36:43
would you like to get
2:36:44
paid in freedom dollars and or consider that because medical tourism is like a
2:36:49
hundred
2:36:49
billion dollar a year industry but one of the big issues is if you go to your
2:36:53
bank and you say hey
2:36:54
I want to wire $15,000 to this medical facility in Thailand that's gonna set
2:36:58
off a whole bunch of
2:36:59
red flags you're gonna have issues with that if you use a credit card there are
2:37:02
chargebacks and so
2:37:03
it's about building out an ecosystem of of these types of solutions in market
2:37:10
places and those are
2:37:11
those are propping up now so but I do want to say the Zano technology the guy
2:37:16
who created
2:37:16
it actually created the technology behind Monero so it is very much Monero-like
2:37:22
with some
2:37:23
added bells and whistles and so it does have that shared you know technological
2:37:28
approach
2:37:28
also I think a different way to answer your question Brett is we are in that
2:37:35
space it's 2012
2:37:37
again as as we were in Bitcoin in 2012 2013 almost no adoption it was a pain
2:37:43
and they asked to get
2:37:44
it pain and they asked to use it you didn't really you couldn't really use it
2:37:47
until payment
2:37:48
processes it came along it's the same case in in Zano land where it's just
2:37:54
there's not a lot of
2:37:56
infrastructure right now and that's why I think it's also relevant that you
2:37:59
know if we do get
2:38:00
more infrastructure and and maybe that'll happen that would be great if there's
2:38:05
too much success
2:38:06
if it becomes too large I imagine that's where you're going to get more
2:38:08
pressure from the government
2:38:09
coming in all right well that's interesting and what do you guys think about
2:38:14
cowrie shells
2:38:15
or cowrie shells coming back well they're physical so that's a very physical
2:38:20
that's true
2:38:21
they are interestingly though the cowries know little about it they are
2:38:25
governed by the physical
2:38:26
laws of possession yeah well I have these as well I'm holding up a goldback
2:38:31
this is one one thousand
2:38:32
of an ounce of gold in uh bill form so I use crypto cards sir I use whatever
2:38:38
and in New Hampshire
2:38:39
there are 150 businesses that take goldbacks and you know there are also
2:38:46
locations here that take
2:38:47
silver so it's all about starting and trying to build an ecosystem but it isn't
2:38:50
easy and it is
2:38:51
steves right it's like 2012 all over again but the good news is that there were
2:38:55
a lot of people
2:38:56
that kind of gave up on crypto that people that had the initial enthusiasm in
2:39:01
2012 in that phase
2:39:02
saw what happened to bitcoin and they were disillusioned a lot of those people
2:39:06
are getting involved with they know so it almost does feel like 2012 because it
2:39:10
's some of the same
2:39:10
and to be to be honest too like I've said this multiple times now that part of
2:39:17
my own personal
2:39:18
motivation for helping Roger write hijacking bitcoin is that I could get out of
2:39:21
crypto I felt
2:39:22
like I had this information and I couldn't in good conscience be like hey I I
2:39:27
was really I was
2:39:28
the bitcoin guy and then I disappeared and now like I'm not in support of it so
2:39:31
I felt like I had to
2:39:32
help write the explanation for why I was leaving crypto and uh and I'm pretty
2:39:39
pessimistic on virtually
2:39:40
all the all the crypto projects but I have you know I have I have one pinky toe
2:39:45
still in in crypto
2:39:47
my heart is like okay maybe it could make the world a better place and that's
2:39:50
just in a couple of
2:39:51
these these privacy projects all right well I am going to try these things um
2:39:58
because at this point
2:40:01
a I know that crypto could be an important weapon in our fight to preserve our
2:40:09
freedoms
2:40:10
and if these things are too small to have attracted the eye of saran so far
2:40:15
then I'd like to get
2:40:16
on the ground floor and then the question becomes how do we defend them right
2:40:21
so anyway hey I'd like
2:40:23
to just go through a transaction or two and discover what it feels like and
2:40:27
what the actual
2:40:28
implications of it being so small are and then you know maybe maybe we can
2:40:35
learn the lesson of
2:40:37
what's happened to bitcoin and with vigilance on the front end protect these
2:40:46
things from what we
2:40:47
know will as soon as they become significant come for them so anyway I hope
2:40:53
others will
2:40:54
will join me I hope you guys will are will also sounds like Aaron you at least
2:40:58
are already
2:40:59
experimenting with these things so maybe we should check back um and talk about
2:41:04
what the
2:41:05
experiences yeah we'll check I can I'll send you some so you know offline I'll
2:41:09
get you a wallet
2:41:10
I'll show you how I'm happy to show you how it works fantastic that sounds like
2:41:14
the old bitcoin
2:41:15
days exactly yeah Brett's like okay that's gonna be $70,000 a few years though
2:41:22
no it's going to be
2:41:26
nothing that might be worth $70,000 in you know 15 years as long as we don't
2:41:35
use it yeah yes right
2:41:37
no no I I can already tell you in the upcoming block size war is over say no
2:41:44
and freedom dollars
2:41:45
I am in favor of keeping them spendable and uh uh like that all right gentlemen
2:41:52
um is there
2:41:53
anything more you want to say before we close this out no thanks thanks for
2:41:57
your time I feel like
2:41:58
this uh this was a really great conversation I thought so too all right Aaron
2:42:03
Day and Steve
2:42:04
Patterson oh maybe you should tell us uh where to find you Aaron you're at
2:42:07
least findable on the
2:42:09
brownstone institute site have written numerous articles anywhere else people
2:42:14
should look for you
2:42:15
you can find me at daylightfreedom.org and also on x at Aaron our day at Aaron
2:42:22
our day and Steve
2:42:23
I'm at steve-patterson.com I've been in the process of opening up this new
2:42:28
research institute
2:42:29
for a few years it's called the natural philosophy institute completely
2:42:32
separate from bitcoin
2:42:33
and maybe something we can talk about later but all right steve-patterson.com
2:42:37
very exciting I do
2:42:39
look forward to talking to you about that all right gentlemen it's been a uh
2:42:42
long but I think
2:42:43
very good discussion I know I know a lot more now than I did when we started so
2:42:47
thanks to you both
2:42:48
and keep up the good fight
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