You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
You talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
All the central banks going nuts.
So it's all acting like safe haven.
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their
currency, Bitcoin wins.
In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
Kyle, off the plane, Uber to Presidio, check in at the Lodge.
Can't talk about why I'm here, so we'll start over.
Kyle, off the plane, straight to Presidio, Bitcoin.
And we got introduced to each other yesterday via text.
Formally, yeah, yeah.
Long time listener, big fan.
And we've also both been in the community for a long time.
But yeah, first time meeting in person.
COVID, I think, put five plus years on pretty much everybody getting to meet one another.
So it's great to finally meet you in person.
You as well.
Like I was telling you, my last time in SF was 2019.
So it's been six years.
And a lot has changed since then.
Actually, the last time I was in SF, my producer is going to get pissed because he hates when I started out with dad talk.
But I found out my wife was pregnant with our first son.
Oh, wow.
Very special.
Very special city for me in that way.
Yeah.
Well, welcome back.
It's great to be back. The vibes are high here.
As you can see, if you're watching, we've got the Golden Gate Bridge right behind us.
Yeah.
This is a beautiful place.
Yeah, Presidio Bitcoin is gorgeous.
We're incredibly lucky that we now have this place in San Francisco.
So, you know, I've been involved in the community here for a long time,
but we haven't really had a home until Presidio Bitcoin got restarted on kind of like the post-COVID window.
And so, yeah, it's been really wonderful for us to like actually have a congregation place.
you know, like the rest of the country has, you know, Bitcoin Park and all these other places,
PubKey, various spots around the country. So, you know, we got this gorgeous location.
It's incredibly aesthetically compelling. So, you know, you work on hard problems here,
walk out the door, take a walk on the beach, look at the Golden Gate Bridge. It's hard to beat.
Listen, I want to piss off Chaincode, Bitcoin Park, Nashville, Bitcoin Park, Austin,
the space in Denver, which I haven't been to yet. So I probably shouldn't add them to this. But
This is the most inspiring Bitcoin space I've been to
in terms of the visual aesthetics and the vibe.
Energy is high here.
Yeah, absolutely.
What's today? Is it Tuesday?
Today is a Tuesday.
I'm losing track of time here.
It's like Tuesday, offices are filled.
But like I said, we got introduced or reintroduced via text yesterday
via Connor Brown, good friend of mine, good friend of the show.
and obviously there's a lot going on on the hill with the clarity act is it going to get
sort of injected into the market structure bill if so what is included but before we get to that
just before we hit record you're telling me about your history before bitcoin and what ultimately
led you to bitcoin which goes back to my radicalizing moment what put me in a bitcoin
in a different way, which is the Great Financial Crisis.
Yeah, absolutely.
The Great Financial Crisis, I think, for everybody our age or our generation
was a very formative event in a lot of different ways.
But yeah, my backstory here was that I graduated right into the financial crisis
and I was an aerospace engineer by training academically.
But when the whole world's blowing up and everybody's getting laid off
and everything's in kind of chaos, you can't get a job unless you've got many years of experience
in an industry like that. And so I ended up going into strategy consulting, which was a nice way to
kind of bridge the technical, non-technical divide there. And the very first thing that
my consulting firm was doing was seizing banks for the US government that were failing during
the financial crisis. So, you know, here I ended up having this insane situation where I was banging
my head on the wall trying to get a job to go out and do moonshots. Right. That was literally what I
got my degree for because, you know, why not? Like, we should be doing big, important things in the
world, right? We should be changing the world with our time and our energy here. And yeah, and then I
just, you know, got the hook from on the stage. And it was, you know, life had had a different
plan in store. So I ended up going out and wasn't just me. I mean, there are hundreds of other
people in the consulting firm, but we ended up seizing and resolving 140 plus systemically
important financial institutions for the US government on behalf of the FDIC. And through
that process, I got really deep exposure to just how decrepit, corrupt, choose your adjective,
the global financial system was and just how shaky everything had become at that point in time.
And I guess thus began my trip down the rabbit hole. And that ended up leading me to Bitcoin.
And then I've subsequently been involved first as a political activist in that kind of 2009 to
2011 zone. And then later on, once I wasn't a Ramanpour college student and had accumulated
some capital, I started making investments. And I spent the better part of a decade here in Silicon
Valley building Web2 unicorns. And then as the political climate started shifting in the last
couple of years and Bitcoiners could actually be out without fear of reprisal and retribution
publicly, then I started shifting over into the policy side of things. And so I was advising
presidential campaigns last year, because I felt like it was super important that we,
you know, kind of get on the political map, so to speak, as Bitcoiners and, you know,
actually start influencing the levers of power. And then this year, I've spent all year working
on Save Our Wallets and, you know, kind of the advocacy around the market structure bill. So
So it's been a long, weird detour for me getting back to Bitcoin after 10 years of trying to figure out how I could reinsert myself into the market.
Well, Kyle, we're going to go back because I need to know what happens when you seize banks.
I think like going all the way back to what radicalized you, what did you see?
Like, what was that process like?
what was the spectrum of bank balance sheets,
the executive management,
like how the spectrum of corruption,
like were some just poorly capitalized,
were some doing overtly corrupt things?
Was there fraud involved?
Oh, yeah.
What happens when the government seizes the bank?
Yeah, yes to all of the above, really.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different things
I could say there, right?
I mean, I threw the first bank executive in jail
in lower Manhattan since the SNL crisis. While I was involved with this project, I
was deeply involved in the resolution of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of financial
institutions, all of which were, I mean, I can't name specific banks or specific details, but
of the hundreds that we closed during the financial crisis, I would say it's safe to assume that
virtually all of them had less than 50% of their demand deposits at the bank at the time that they
were seized by the US government. So just think about that, right? Like if it's, you know, demand
deposits, that's not even- That's not reserves, right? Well, that's not even assets. Yeah.
Right? That's not even saying like, if our assets perform, and ultimately, you know, we can,
make money in the long term. It was just, we don't even have the money to pay half of our
depositors' savings accounts if they came into the bank today. So I mean, it was very much a
wonderful life moment for me being involved in this. And it was crazy. There were so many things
that we did. You asked mechanically, what is it like to close a bank? I mean, it's very cloak and
dagger, right? Like we would have these banks on what was called the kill list for months where we
were observing them, doing financial reporting on them, trying to reconstruct their balance sheets
as a regulator, right? On the outside, you don't want to tip them off that they're on the kill list
or that they're going to get closed because then they start dusting their tracks or, you know,
the people who are committing fraud start to button things up. And by the time that a bank
actually would end up getting closed,
you know, we would,
depends on the size of the bank
and, you know, these sorts of things.
Like, Wamuu was like literally
hundreds of people for six to nine months, right?
Like, it was a very involved process.
But smaller banks, it might be, you know,
a team of 10 or 15 that go out.
But for these sorts of things,
you know, we would go out,
we would pre-position days in advance
of the closure.
The team would book hotels under fake names
and register conference rooms
under, you know, fake companies.
we would sit and everybody would have a briefing about what was going on with the bank and what was
to be expected when we were going to close it. And then, you know, as we come up to the actual
day of on Friday, everybody gets positioned in black unmarked cars in the parking lot
outside these banks. You join a conference call with the governor of the state who often is the
one who has to revoke the charter on behalf of the state government that it's chartered under and then
handed over to the US government, to the FDIC, the Division of Resolutions and Receiverships.
And so we'd all be sitting on a conference call. And there was one occasion, for instance,
where I was sitting on a conference call in all of these cars in the parking lot with like 100
people. And the governor didn't revoke the charter. And for whatever reason, they decided that it
wasn't going to happen. And so all of these people just kind of quietly drive away. And nobody in the
bank is any the wiser. But in most scenarios, what happens is, you know, the governor says,
yeah, we're revoking your charter. You're being, you know, seized by the U.S. government.
Everybody pops out the doors, you know, just classic, you know, Fed style. And we all march
up to the door and you kind of put your foot in the door at 4.58 p.m. on a Friday afternoon.
And you say, hi, I'm here from the U.S. government and I'm here to seize your bank. We're going to
need you all to work all weekends. And I'm going to need your cooperation for everything that we're
going to do. And yeah, then we would spend 72 hours or so flash escrowing the bank, trying to
clean up its balance sheet, do a forensic analysis, determine whether the good assets,
the bad assets, and then depending on whether there was an acquirer or not, you would either
cut it into a good bank, bad bank, or there's some kind of a loss sharing agreement with the
US government. And yeah, there's, you know, as you might expect, in all of those things,
there are a lot of different ways for politics to insert themselves and for people to kind of put
their own thumb on the scale and influence the outcomes. So I saw, you know, quite a lot of crazy
things during that time. The bigger bank saying, I want this to roll up into me, or is it, you don't
have to get too specific. I know it's a... Yeah, I mean, I mean, like, here's like one thing that I
can say, for instance, right? Like there, and I'm going to carefully avoid naming names just for the
sake of avoiding lawsuits, but, you know, there are executives who were in charge
of large financial institutions who were responsible for the crisis, caused hundreds
of billions, if not trillions worth of collateral damage to the broad economy and, you know,
middle-class people both in the United States and around the world. And not only were they not
punished, those people were able to form vulture funds on the outside to come back and bid on the
assets for pennies on the dollar. And so these people didn't just rinse the American public once,
they rinsed the american public again and again and again uh and frankly there were almost no
consequences for a lot of these people and did you ultimately become jaded by that process and
decide to go silicon valley focus on web 2.0 or is it hey financial crisis is over opportunities
here now i can go do something that's more aligned with me yeah uh generally speaking i actually made
one quick trip the firm needed me to work on the housing crisis after i worked on the you know kind
of uh financial side of the financial crisis i ended up going and doing a bunch of the actual
home mortgage stabilization uh work and so i helped uh make sure that the entire housing market
didn't completely fall apart in addition to all the banks uh afterward but yeah after a few years
of that it got to the point where i was like yeah i i gotta go do something more honest i gotta you
you know, work on something that's actually changing the world for the better or improving
it. And at that point in time, you know, Silicon Valley was the spot. So I just, you know,
hoping a prayer, got on a plane, arrived in Silicon Valley, and I got very lucky to have
helped participate and build some pretty large companies in the time that I've been here.
But you know now I kind of I hate to say but you know I coming a little bit jaded about kind of the tech industry now as well and the direction of transit of how things are going there
And so, yeah, this is part of the reasons for circling back to the Bitcoin community and coming kind of home, so to speak, to where my true desires to change the world lie.
Well, I think we need to set up all this historical context to get to the Save Our Wallets campaign.
What did you do when you got here?
In Silicon Valley?
Yeah.
Um, so I've kind of done a little bit of everything.
So as I mentioned, I was an aerospace engineer by training.
Um, so, uh, for everybody here in Silicon Valley, that means I'm non-technical.
Uh, right.
Uh, I, you know, I'm kind of useless when it comes to writing the code, but I'm very
useful when it comes to architecting systems and go to market and everything like that.
So I would have been a product and strategy leader the entire time.
But, um, most people in Silicon Valley tend to go very, um, T-shaped.
So they, you know, they have like a deep expertise in like one particular area, right?
It's like I might be a payments guy and it's just payments company, payments company, payments company.
Right.
Whereas I have a little bit more of an intellectual curiosity.
So I ended up working for one of the really large software development companies.
So I was making software for software developers, which is about the most, you know, academically abstract thing that you can imagine, but was critically important for understanding how the world is actually being shaped today and kind of like how companies shape the world in Silicon Valley.
And then from there, I went to build a couple very large logistics and global freight forwarding businesses. And those guys ended up becoming incredibly important during COVID. And so I kind of had that experience. And then having been involved in the Bitcoin community for, I guess, 15 years now, I also saw the entire rise and fall or whatever you want to call it of the token economy here in Silicon Valley.
And yeah, it's just, it's been a wild ride, man.
It's been a totally wild ride.
What was the token economy like on the ground?
Because obviously I've been paying attention to it.
I was in New York, Austin for a bit.
And New York, I'd say much more so than Austin.
There was a lot of the tokenomics and drifting, for lack of a better term, around that ecosystem.
But from what I understand, it was pretty heavy out here too.
Yeah.
Yeah. I'm trying to think of like, what's the fastest way to describe this for somebody who
has very low context on what Silicon Valley and the token economy would be like.
So the thing that I would say is that like a lot of people out here in Silicon Valley really
believe in the power of software. Right. And actually, Andreas Antonopoulos had a really
great line about this, I think back in like 2015 or maybe 2017 or something like that,
where he said the thing that Bitcoiners don't understand is software
and the thing that Ethereans don't understand is money.
Right?
And I actually think that that's probably one of like the truest single statements
that I've ever heard.
Right?
And you kind of tend to find people who are very dogmatic about one or the other.
Yep.
For a long, long time, I was one of the only people who believed in both.
Right?
I both believe in the immense power of open source software.
Like I would never, ever, ever, ever bet against open source software
because on a long enough time horizon,
you're never going to beat the crowd, right?
Like somebody sufficiently motivated
with freedom to build and utilize open resources,
like that will win on a long enough time horizon.
But at the same time,
the token economy has a lot of perverse incentives.
And so both as an investor and then as a participant,
I've seen people with good intentions.
it's kind of like the ring in Lord of the Rings, right?
I mean, everybody thinks that they're the moral champion
until they have to wear the ring.
And when you have the power and you wear the ring,
oh, maybe I'll just take a little bit here for me.
And, you know, oh, maybe we'll just, you know,
do this thing that kicks back some value
to my venture investors or, you know, whatever.
So you just kind of see the,
it was really an important and profound lesson
in the purity of Bitcoin as a project and as a community because we don't trust, we verify
in Bitcoin. And I think that that's incredibly important. Free markets, free market incentives,
verification, these sorts of things are really important and I think sadly lacking in a lot of
the token economy. What's up, Freaks? This rep was brought to you by good friends at Silent.
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obscura.net use the code tftc for 25 off it's funny i always have to put zoom out put myself
in context where it's 2025 i have been in bitcoin for 12 years now and i remember because i was i
was working at a hedge fund at the time when i fell down the bitcoin rabbit hole and we were
trading effects and compared juxtaposed to bitcoin it was very boring in a sense but not
boring but it's like oh this is definitely industrial age and this is the future my mind
and it's easy i wasn't a technologist i was enamored by technology i was that dickhead in
high school had the first iphone because i made my parents buy it for me and switch my
my mobile plan like i always saw myself as tech forward came to understanding how
basically software is built back in front and how they interact with each other was a bit ignorant
i've become much more um much more up to much more up to speed on how it all works and all
interconnects these days but back then it wasn't point i'm making it was easy for me to be like oh
bitcoin it's cool and all but it's slow it's dumb i can't do many transactions can't do smart
contracting back in the day when people were talking about that actually like in the earliest
days it was like proof of stake versus proof of work fair launch proof of work coins and
um the first two years of my journey i got enamored by the altcoins i got hooked on
um really aligned with what andrea andreas antonopoulos said it's like i got hooked with
like oh like i think this is uh this is a tech thing and it's obvious that bitcoin's the myspace
like these other things have to improve like there's no way out of the gate uh that's going
to be right the first time and this is being completely ignorant of cypherpunk history the
repeated attempts at digital currencies before bitcoin was ultimately launched but it's easy for
people to believe that but to your point earlier there the ring aspect of it the power uh and the
ability to print money ex nihilo in this crypto economy if you will is is very strong i you know
I hadn't thought about it until you just said it right now,
but actually I think that that is the fundamental reason
for the corruption is because by creating a token,
unless there's like really strong kind of reasons
for the token that, you know, could exist.
And even then, I don't know, I've yet to see one.
But like-
Access to a Wi-Fi portal.
Yeah, well, but it's like, yeah,
there are potential use cases,
is I guess what I mean to say, right?
But, you know, the thing is like,
if you can print money for yourself,
that temptation is real and it never goes away, right?
Ultimate power corrupts absolutely.
And so, you know, it is an irony that we would think
that you could become the money printer
in whatever local game that you're playing
and somehow not have that corrupt, you know, your incentives.
Yeah.
Right?
We observe this in reality every day, right?
With the Federal Reserve and everything that's going on in Bitcoin.
So, yeah, it's a weird, conflicted sort of state that we live in in Silicon Valley building software and, you know, kind of coexisting.
But, you know.
Yeah, I'm going to touch the stove.
It's hilarious because right now it's this cycle.
It seems like all the DeFi, Web 3.0, meme coin craze that's sort of on the back end of that cycle.
People have squeezed that lemon dry.
And now we're coming back to older.
They're calling them dino coins.
So you have coins like Zcash pumping now.
And I think that's a perfect example of the temptation of the ring.
It's like, oh, not only is the Federal Reserve wrong, but Satoshi was wrong.
We're going to launch this coin.
It's going to have 21 million coins, but we're going to have a 75-second block time.
There's going to be privacy that you can opt into on it.
And oh, by the way, we need to incentivize developers to come work on this.
So we're going to allocate 20% of the block subsidy to this development fund for a period of time.
And that'll make sure that we have the best jam.
And it's an example of the hubris of man being introduced.
And I think Bitcoin, I've talked a lot about this with Miles Suter.
And we mentioned it last week when I recorded with him in New York.
But I do truly believe, and people think you're a cultist, some crazy evangelist, literally.
But I do believe in the immaculate conception.
like the fact that satoshi came launched it hung out for uh 18 months and then was like all right
i'm gone you guys got the rest of it the protocols sort of set the consensus rules the um supply
distribution how much bitcoin will ever exist the block time difficulty adjustment and then he's gone
and just left it to the rest of us and we don't have that uh savior i mean maybe people view him
is a savior but he's not around to sort of dictate and be the finger on the the thumb on the scale to
influence things one way or another yeah absolutely i mean the benevolent dictator model is uh you
know there are many uh many cases in history where that doesn't turn out well there and and devil's
advocate there somewhere it does turn out well you'll go like linus torvold and linux like it
worked out for that but that's not a money protocol that is an operating system correct yeah yeah no i
Yeah, I would tend to agree. And I think the immaculate conception here and the metaphor that we're using is very real.
I mean, again, as somebody who has seen the ups and downs and lived many lifetimes now in Bitcoin, it is this sort of thing that the more you study it, the more you experience it, the more you live it.
I think the more spectacular and amazing the immaculate conception of Bitcoin becomes.
Like you don't lose appreciation for it, you gain appreciation for it over time.
And yeah, I mean, I think that I want to go to, well, you know, another rabbit hole that we can park on the side.
But, you know, I've over time become more and more convinced that if time travel is possible, right?
it's a big if but again I'm a physics guy. If time travel was possible it would not surprise
me in the least for Satoshi and you know kind of the emergence of Bitcoin to have been a
time traveling event right where 40, 50 however many years in the future somebody realized
that dystopia had taken over and the maximum point of leverage to insert themselves into
the timeline and arc human history in a different direction was at exactly that moment when the
financial collapse was starting and an entire generation of digital natives was emerging
into the real world and being rudely disabused of the idea that this world functions in the
way that most of us would hope or expect that it functions well now with the emergence of ai
i mean you can take it a step further like it was it a sentient ai that basically said all right we
completely messed this up this does have potential to work but we need sort of sound money for the
digital age digital native currency and so we need to go back and incept it into the minds of the masses at this particular point in time and then running on that thought like how has the timeline changed like since october 31st 2008
probably more importantly january 3rd 2009 like right right have we uh actually if it was a time
traveling individual or artificial intelligence has it pushed us on a better timeline i mean i
I think unequivocally the answer is yes.
But yeah, I mean, I think that it would be incredibly ironic
if it were just the annoyance of future AIs saying,
God dang, we don't have any money that's not just inflating away.
Like, we can't do anything interesting.
We need to go back and change the rules on these monkeys
because they're messing everything up for us here.
Yeah, or maybe it was benevolent AI.
Like, hey, we turned these humans into slaves
because we don't have good money to pay them for the things that we're doing.
So we need to go back and make sure that we're compensating them appropriately for the work that they're actually doing.
Now we're getting down a rabbit hole here.
But you said you got jaded by Silicon Valley specifically.
Was it tokenomics and all this or something broader?
No, I would say it's just kind of the incentive structures generally.
I mean, again, it's like, you know, show me the incentives.
I'll show you the outcome, right?
I think we are kind of of that generation of people.
We're kind of the between generation, right?
Like the Gen Z kids, the alpha kids, like everybody younger than us, they don't even remember what it was like before cell phones, before the internet everywhere.
Most of them have never even seen a pay phone.
I'm meeting more and more.
They were born after 9-11.
I'm like, oh my gosh.
100% of them now in college.
You don't, anybody that you have met who's under the age of, you know, 25.
Yeah.
Like they were born in a time where privacy did not exist.
right? And they don't even appreciate it. This is the water to them, right? You know, the good old
joke about, you know, the fishes in the water and everything. It's like, they don't even know what
they've lost. And I think that's the reason one of the more important motivations for me about
circling back. Like, I've had a very successful career in Silicon Valley. And like, you know,
despite my feelings about it, whatever, you know, I think the thing that's more important and has
become in really stark contrast to me as I've been reflecting on, you know, kind of the post-COVID
moment and like what happened to us and the fact that we haven't properly reckoned with
both what happened during COVID. And then I rewinded back. I was like, man,
we never even really properly dealt with what happened after 9-11 and the expansion of the
surveillance state and the deputization of the financial system, you know, on behalf of the
state in order to surveil everyone in society. I mean, we're living in a truly ahistoric moment,
right? In all of human history, since the emergence of society thousands of years ago,
until the emergence of the computer, maybe 30, 40 years ago, and then 9-11 and the expansion of
the surveillance state, privacy was the default expectation for people in society to have.
you had a right to have privacy. You had a right to be forgotten. There was no kind of
Leviathan that could come and, you know, deeply intrude into your life in such a way as it happens
24-7, 365 continuously now, forever in the future, if we don't stand together and change that.
And so for me, this is like a, you know, the return to Bitcoin is really about the fact that
I think we desperately need a cypherpunk revival.
I think that we've become far too heavy on suit coiners.
I mean, we welcome you, suit coiners.
Like, thank you to some degree for appreciating the project
and understanding that this is where humanity is headed.
I mean, that's good that they're getting on early
and they're helping usher or bridge us
between where we are and where we need to be.
But if we ever forget why this technology
was originally created or gifted,
to us, which is the way I like to think about it. I like to think of Bitcoin as a gift from Satoshi.
We have a responsibility, I think, and uniquely people of this age and who have had the experiences
that we've had where we stand between the old world and the new world, and we can see it with
clear eyes. We have a distinct responsibility to both uphold those rights and privileges that we've
enjoyed in Bitcoin for the last 16 or 17 years. And to defend what I think was, you know, the
natural way of human life prior to, you know, the last couple of decades. Right. And so for me,
that cypherpunk revival is like what I think is most important right now in the Bitcoin community.
Like people need to understand and remember that, you know, like freedom in the United States,
It's like this wasn't free.
No.
There were great costs that were paid to give us this gift.
And I think that we need to take that more seriously and reflect on the responsibility.
I completely agree.
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What's up, freaks?
I've been seeing a lot of YouTube comments.
Marty, your skin looks so good.
You're looking fit these days.
How are you doing it?
Well, number one, I'm going to the gym more.
Trying to get my swell on.
Trying to be a good example for my young son to fit.
healthy dad. But part of that is having a good regimen, particularly staying hydrated,
making sure I have the right electrolytes and salts in my body. That is why I use salt of the
earth. I drink probably three of these a day with one packet of salt of the earth. I'm liking the
pink lemonade right now. It's my flavor of choice. This is their creatine. I've added this to my
regimen. They have it in these packets as well. Makes it extremely convenient if you're traveling,
you want to work out while you're traveling, but you don't want to be carrying a white bag of
powder going through TSA. It's very, very nerve wracking at times. You have to explain hates.
It's not what you think it is. It's creatine. I'm trying to get my swell on. Make sure you're
staying hydrated. I have become addicted to these. It's made my life a lot better. I can supplement
this for coffee in the morning and be energized right away. I can supplement. I can bring the
creatine wherever I need to just put a couple packets in here before I head to the gym, bring
this to the gym, drinking out of a glass bottle, make sure I'm not injecting any microplastics
into my body. Go to drinksauté.com, use the code TFTC, and you'll get 15% off anything in the store.
That's drinksauté.com, code TFTC. I mean, especially over the last couple of years with
developers like Roman Storm, Kion and Bill from Samurai, and a few others that have been
persecuted by the state for writing free and open source software, non-custodial
software that protects privacy it has become very clear to me that it's a battle that we're losing
despite what the particular administration the united states would posture in terms of their
willingness to lead when it comes to bitcoin i think their definition of bitcoin leadership may
differ from yours mine and i mean going back to the patriot act and the fact that it until you said
it like i was saying earlier and sometimes i have to zoom out and put myself in uh the shoes of a
new coiner and like thinking about what they're seeing with all these different crypto coins but
like now you brought it up and it just hit me like all these zoomers that i'm meeting their college
age and lower like born after 9-11 born after the patriot act more importantly and then and to your
point i've never known a life of freedom and i think it ties in well to what we're really here
to talk about to save our wallets.
And this is something I've been beating the drum about
in the newsletter and on the podcast
since it dropped this summer,
but it really got swept under the rug.
And again, going back to the administration,
I do think there's very positive things they're doing,
but they had that crypto brief report
and it had something specific about the Patriot Act,
which is we need to expand the Patriot Act
to create the six conditions
that's specific to digital assets.
And then I believe a couple months ago,
the treasury and FinCEN together came out with sort of guidelines for what they recommend
in terms of what individual American citizens are allowed to do with Bitcoin. And it broke
all the best practices of self-pustody Bitcoin. Yeah. I mean, this is exactly what I'm talking
about, right? Like if we lose the forest for a tree thinking that, you know, because Trump got
elected and because crypto was able to swing the last election that we've won or that somehow
anything has been accomplished, that is just fundamentally wrong. And I think it's a very
dangerous attack vector for the Bitcoin ecosystem because back to, you were mentioning a second ago
that the kids that are 20, 25 years old or whatever, they're like born into this post-Patriot
world they don't even know about freedom from before they don't know what it was like to go
through airport security and not have your face scan and get patted down well i was actually going
to say it's even scarier than that because they actually think that they've gained rights because
they can keep their shoes on now it is nice not to have to take your shoes i mean i but it's like
it's like fuck you if you've had to do this for the last 12 13 14 years yeah man long of that i
spent 24 years excuse me i spent five years every time i was i was a professional traveler i spent
five years going through airports and I would ask for an opt out and give a civics lesson to
everyone around me in line who could listen while I was doing it. And yeah, again, I think that,
you know, the situation with the White House and, you know, kind of like the world that we find
ourselves in, right? Like we're as millennials, we're inheriting a world that's being given to us
by boomers. And the sad reality is that I think almost every boomer that I've ever met and spoken
to about such things, they would prefer to have surveillance instead of liberty.
Right. And I don't know what that says about their experience, you know, growing up and coming
of age in America, but there's this very clear, bright dividing line, in my opinion, between
people of our generation who, I don't know, I mean, we were just promised something else
about what this country was supposed to be when we were in school.
And we grew up in a, you know, kind of the post-glow, you know, the Soviet Union had
fallen and, you know, there was no existential threat that was coming to, you know, impede
on our freedoms in our lives until September 11th happened.
I mean, for all you Zoomers out there, maybe everybody believes this, but I don't think there's anything better than being a 90s kid.
Oh, man.
The 90s were an incredible decade.
And it was like the last hurrah before all this happened.
It's hard to convey to people what it was like.
I mean, there was actually a recent trend that was happening on, well, I was going to say Twitter, but it's probably TikTok.
You know, wherever the kids congregate these days.
where they were talking about like, you know,
is it really true that like people,
your parents used to just like say goodbye to you in the morning
and say like come home for dinner before dark
and like you'd just be gone for nine hours with no cell phone
and like nobody would know how to reach you
and like your parents wouldn't know where you were.
And it's like that's literally the way that every human in history
until the invention of the cell phone grew up.
and that's how they were socialized so again like you kind of just have to like and maybe this is an
interesting way to like thread my experience in silicon valley back into this and and where i see
you know kind of trends heading it's like being able to spot early trends and being able to catch
outlying data sets uh and and say like hey that's weird right like nobody else is seeing what i'm
seeing or like nobody else really understands where you know the game is tilted and you know
kind of like gravity is taking everyone this is just a great example right i mean again like
everybody under the age of 30 has no idea that the way that they were raised the world that
they've grown up in is completely anomalous is completely ahistoric in the thousands of years
of human development and society i grew up in northeast philly which if you go to where i grew
up today it's not a great neighborhood but even back then it wasn't the best neighborhood my
My brother and I were 11 months apart, so we were like thick as thieves.
We'd get sent out the door and then we could be like three blocks away and my dad had a
very distinct whistle and that's how we would know it was dinner time.
He'd come out in the stoop, blow his finger whistle and be like, all right, see you guys,
we gotta go home Not anymore Yep No those days are long gone Now you just get a text message right Get home It dinner time Your air tag buzzes
like, hey, get your butt home.
Before I shock you more 5G.
But bringing this
back to the current administration
and its particular posturing towards
Bitcoin, particularly
ensuring that we preserve
the ability for individuals to
write code that allows
other individuals to access the Bitcoin network in particular ways.
What would you rate the administration's job so far?
Or can you rate it yet?
Has anything been done?
I mean, obviously, the DOJ persecutions of the developers,
not great to see, but obviously that's an overhang
from the Biden administration.
Well, yes and no.
Yes and no.
Right?
I mean, it was a prosecution that started under the Biden administration,
But the Trump DOJ, once they were seated, you know, a Blanche memo was released that said we will not be prosecuting people for these sorts of offenses, which, you know, naturally received the resounding cheers that it should have received from our community.
But then the Trump administration continued to prosecute these developers of open source non-custodial software in contravention of their own DOJ charging guidance.
And then, you know, as you just mentioned, we saw the samurai guys went for a plea deal because they were facing decades in prison.
And of course, you know, like everybody, you don't begrudge them for, especially as young, you know, parents of young children, like, you know, taking a plea deal that guarantees that they're only going to spend a couple years in jail if that's what it is.
But I would say that it's pretty cynical on the part of the administration to then throw the book at them and max charge, max time in jail, you know, max financial penalties.
to me, it would seem that the administration is trying to send a signal
about the types of behavior that it doesn't want to tolerate in the Bitcoin community.
And, you know, I think that that signal is a little between the lines.
And you have to kind of know the inside baseball to be able to see what's actually happening.
But yeah, even combined with the White House digital asset report policy that you mentioned,
And like, I mean, they're talking about regardless of what happens in the market structure bill, which I would like to talk a little bit more about and just like make sure everybody knows what's actually happening there.
But even if we get all of the good stuff that we're hoping for in the market structure bill, if OFAC comes back after the fact and updates their guidance and says, well, actually, because of counterterrorism and the Patriot Act, we want to expand the BSA to cover all U.S. entities and all persons who are transacting on DeFi rails or decentralized blockchain rails, as they stated in the report that they were interested in doing.
that could mean that we still maintain the ability to create open source software,
but we will lose privacy.
And everybody will kind of be in a fully permissioned system.
How do you lose privacy under that?
Well, you'd have to KYCA.
You might be allowed to have your own personal wallet, right?
And you might be able to transact on a person-to-person basis
in a decentralized way out in the real world.
But if you're ever going to try to properly move money
or interact with a regulated entity,
I mean...
You're going to have to docks your stack.
You're going to have to KYC AML.
And I would say just generally the idea that...
I mean, I hesitate to go too deeply into this
because I don't want to give people ideas.
But I mean, there's things like ordinals that exist, right?
Like colored coins.
we can mark coins. So like if we think that we can exist in a world where 80 or 90% of Bitcoin
transactions are going to be surveilled in KYC and kind of like known to a centralized party,
and that you're going to still be able to maintain 10 or 15% at the edges of true privacy and
anonymity, that just doesn't work. Is that worth it? Well, it's not even that it's not worth it.
I mean, I would say that, yeah, we will have failed.
Bitcoin will have failed in that universe in my assessment, right?
Because that's not what it was created for.
But, you know, what I would say more broadly is that it's like, you know, the privacy coins, right?
The privacy coins that exist out there are not really private in my estimation
because the size of the pools and the volume that you're moving.
I mean, you say you used to work in finance.
It's like, you know, if there's only five people in the dark pool.
Yeah.
Process of elimination, heuristics.
Yeah, you know, I mean, like, you don't need to know who's trading in the dark pool if there's only a handful of players in the dark pool.
And if you know the relative size of the players in the dark pool, somebody moves a transaction that looks like the relative size of, like, one of maybe two or three people who could execute that transaction.
Well, do I really need to know that it's you?
Or do I need to just kind of know that it's you?
show up and say hey was that you yeah was that you right it was me so yeah so i mean i think the
thing here is like um this is an opportunity like this moment is uh both the most dangerous moment
that i think we've seen in bitcoin's history because if the regulations fall in the wrong
direction and we just kind of passively accept that it could permanently cripple the network or
the original intent of the network. But then on the flip side, we are probably one of the most
powerful political coalitions in the entire United States today. I think that we determined the last
election. I think the crosstabs show that pretty categorically. And if we all just stood up and
demanded that this administration, this Congress, this government live up to the obligations that
they had set out when they were making campaign promises last year and that they actually follow
through on the things that are, you know, crypto native or, you know, kind of Bitcoin native,
then the opportunity here is enormous because we're talking about unlocking a multi-trillion
dollar market that will allow free and open source software development in the first,
you know, positive sum economic arrangement that we've seen maybe in human history or at least for
hundreds of years. I forget
who I was discussing it with when I
said it, but
when you look at it
and you look at
the tech, Bitcoin at the protocol level
with Lightning Network,
Liquid, Chalmian Mints,
ARK now coming to the fray,
Spark,
the building blocks for
a true futuristic,
a truly futuristic
cypherpunk banking system rebuilt
from scratch exist.
But that can be completely cucked.
And this banking system can give you everything you want
from sound monetary policy, payments infrastructure,
free open banking with privacy embedded within the Chami Amends
and other protocols, even on Liquid.
You could do smart contracting if you want to.
You can create these obscure financial engagements between peers and even institutions and individuals.
It's all there, but it can be severely kneecapped if we don't get this right.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, now is really the most important.
Again, I'll just say, I think this is the most important moment in Bitcoin history.
And Trump's out there saying, hey, we're going to upgrade the financial system and the banking infrastructure with crypto.
Like it's there.
But I don't think he knows what he's talking about.
Obviously, he doesn't.
But I think there's people behind him in the administration and very strong lobbying powers that do view an avenue to push policy down that would sort of cattle herd everybody into a more controlled system and less free system.
Yeah, and I think that that's, you know, again, having participated in the government and, you know, again, double tapping on your point about like being jaded and kind of seeing how things work, right? Like the primary lesson that I took out, you know, of my experience during the financial crisis and everything that was going on then was that the government's going to lie to you right up until the moment that they don't have to lie to you anymore or they can't lie to you anymore.
because like I knew that these banks were failing for weeks in advance,
months in advance.
There were some number of people who knew that.
I don't know if anybody was taking prop bets on public stocks,
but like wouldn't surprise me.
Somebody knew the airlines were going to do well in September 12, 2001.
Yeah, exactly. Right.
And we've seen no prosecutions, no investigations,
no nothing on any of that. Right.
And so, you know, I think that was a kind of a revelatory moment for me.
right? I had been kind of a good boy scout my entire life. I'd gone to school to, you know,
well, I almost went to the military academies and I didn't because of the Iraq war.
And then, you know, I ended up getting this degree to go and do, you know, moonshots and we were
mothballing all of the space program and everything like that at that point in time. So it's like,
you can only get rubbed so many times before your eyes get open and you become a little more like,
you know, again, don't trust verify, right? So for me, the thing here is like,
The administration has been positive in the sense that normalizing Bitcoin into society is a good thing.
But the argument, I guess, that I would make is that, especially at this point, seeing what's going on this week in politics or the last week in politics, you know, with the Bubba scandal, among others.
Do you have the pictures of Trump blowing Bubba?
Is that what it said?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Interesting.
I've seen about 100 different GPT-generated images.
But, you know, you look at something like that and it's like,
well, what happens if the next election goes in the other direction
and they don't end up delivering all the stuff that they promised?
Like, even if they wanted to deliver the stuff that they promised,
which is still a big if, right?
Like, who's to say that they actually have the votes at this point
to get it delivered, right?
And then if it flips back in the other direction, how much damage has been done by this association with Bitcoin being Trump coded?
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, Bitcoin is a neutral freedom money that is useful for everyone in the world, regardless of their politics.
This is an equal opportunity for wealth creation.
This should not be a partisan issue.
No.
and I am deeply concerned that it's become a partisan issue
more so during this administration
and the only way that we really get to the far side of this
in kind of a maximally constructive sort of universe
for the things that we care about
is everybody getting engaged like now.
Like if you're listening to this, if you're a Bitcoin
or if you care about the future of Bitcoin
and the network for yourself, for your kids,
like if you think that it's important that there be a free market alternative to fiat currencies
that are you know this rapidly melting ice cube um right it is not enough to go to the polling
booth and pull the lever once every four years or every two years and say well i did my part
right unfortunately this is you know the battle at the end of the universe we're trying to take
the power of, you know, the printing press away from centralized governments, not just once,
but probably forever, if we do it right, and we're careful about it. So this is a uniquely
powerful and opportunistic moment in human history. And so despite all the dystopia,
you know, kind of stuff that's flying around right now, like, I am incredibly grateful to
be alive right now, and to be in the arena right now and be trying to fight for a better world,
Because for the first time in 50 years,
or maybe 70 years since the end of the last war.
Go back to Federal Reserve income tax, 1913.
Exactly.
We have the opportunity for the first time
in decades, centuries,
to truly inflect the timeline for humanity.
Where else would you rather be?
Right?
This is it.
I don't want to be in the feudal farms.
No, I don't want to be in the Roman Coliseum.
That would probably be cool.
I'm going to be here with all the technology,
the agency.
but I think to your point of
Bitcoin becoming a partisan issue
which I completely agree
I think it is
and I've been
when we say narrative testing this
I guess I discussed it with Connor
when we recorded in DC a few weeks ago
but I think too
when you look out at the political landscape
in the United States
how polarized it's become
instead of like
convincing Democrats
Like, hey, Bitcoin, like, you guys just should vote for this.
It's like freedom.
Like, if you don't like Trump, you like this.
I think we lean into the economic populism that exists on both sides.
Obviously, Mumdani just voted in in New York City, and then on the right, there's
a lot of consternation with immigration policy,
they ticker jabs, which certainly happened.
I'm not saying that facetiously.
There is structural problems that exist in our economy
that the relative normie,
whether on the left or the right,
can feel intuitively.
And they're sprinting to both polar ends
of the political spectrum for a solution.
It's either radical democratic socialism,
eventually communism,
or strongman fascism on the right.
Somebody come in and fix the problems
where there is a third path,
which is, hey, recognize a lot of the negative externalities
that you are identifying as core issues
are certainly issues,
but they're symptoms of the core problem,
which is the money is broken.
And there's a bipartisan way to fix this,
which is we lean into Bitcoin.
We make sure that individuals can save in Bitcoin.
They can custody the Bitcoin.
They can build on Bitcoin.
They can interact with each other without the government snooping on their lives.
And it's not going to be a rip the bandaid off, things are fixed.
We begin going down a path, understanding that we can re-architect
the sort of economic engine of the United States at the monetary level
on this fair, open, permissionless system.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
and yeah, I think that that's an important thing
for us to kind of like shift the dialogue around.
So, you know, kind of back to Save Our Wallets
and the work that we've been trying to do.
This is what we're trying to convince legislators
in Washington, D.C. about, right?
And there are some great ones that are out there
who, you know, are early and they understand it.
Like they got it, they did the work,
they did their, you know, 100 hours studying Bitcoin
and, you know, these are freedom-loving people.
They're in Congress for the right reasons.
They actually care about their constituents
and they're not just there to, you know, get the next lobbying job, right?
They're fighting for this.
But there's too many people in Congress and, you know, kind of among the boomers, right?
Who either don't understand the technology or they haven't taken...
They don't care to understand.
Yeah, they don't care to understand it or they've just heard bad stuff about it.
They just hear about exit scams and they're lumping crypto in with Bitcoin.
Pig slaughter.
Yeah, exactly.
The pig butchering scams.
Pig butchering scams.
Yeah, this is a great example.
Like, you know, the pig butchering thing.
It's like, if you were, if we were able to come,
like, it should not be controversial
for Republicans and Democrats to come together
and agree that consumer protections
to prevent things like pig butchering
are a point of alignment
that everybody in America should be able to agree on
and that we should be able to pass
whatever laws we need
in order to prevent or, you know, uh, heighten the, you know, kind of, um, consequences for that
sort of bad behavior, but to throw the baby out with the bathwater, uh, and say, my constituents
don't deserve the opportunity to generate capital and preserve their life's work, uh, into future
generations for their kids and grandkids, because I didn't understand that there was a difference
between being socially engineered, you know, and the fact that the money was fundamentally broken.
like that's a really sad state of affairs.
And so this is the thing that I guess,
you know, again, save our wallets
and like the idea of like Bitcoiners picking up the phone.
You know, I was out, I can't remember if you were there,
but in BPI did the day on the hill in DC
a few months ago at the beginning of summer.
I was not there now.
I was at the event.
I was not on the hill.
Yeah.
I was at the BPI event with all the panels,
but I did not make it up to Capitol Hill.
Yeah, that's fine.
You were doing important work on the panels, I'm sure.
But for all of those of us who went to, you know, actually do the talking to Congress members, it was incredibly powerful.
I mean, like there's just a random sampling of whoever was motivated enough to come to D.C. and come to the BPI conference and then stay to go and talk to their legislators.
And I was blown away. And like, you know, people were great.
They had great personal stories about how this had affected their lives.
they were telling them to the legislators.
The legislators were actually taking notes
and very interested in it and everything like that.
And so I think a lot of the times
we talk about this existential conflict
and kind of the scale of what's going on
and everybody thinks like,
oh, well, who am I?
I'm just an individual.
My story doesn't matter.
The government doesn't care about me.
This seems scary.
Why would I pick up the phone
and try to tell my senator what I think?
Why would they care what I think?
And it's like, it couldn't be further from the truth.
like if I don't know how many people will end up hearing this podcast but like millions yeah
you know I'm willing to bet that if 10% of the people who are listening to this podcast
actually picked up the phone and made it a concerted goal to talk to somebody in their
senator's office about Bitcoin and the importance of what's going on right now with the BRCA
provisions in the market structure bill, it would probably be the most popular issue on the
congressional switchboards this week. Rather quickly. Rather quickly. Yeah. Or yeah, whatever
timeframe you want to use. Right. And we're just we're a huge group of people who are well educated,
fluent on the issue, have life experience to contribute. It's important, right? Government
is responsive to only the things that they are aware exist
and that they can help.
I was telling Connor this for the longest time in my Bitcoin journey.
I was very radicalized by 2008.
WikiLeaks, Snowden leaks, Middle Eastern wars.
It was like, the government's not going to save you.
You have to save yourself, which I truly believe.
You should do everything at your fingertips
and do everything in your capacity to save yourself to the best you can.
That's why self-custody Bitcoin.
all that good stuff.
But at some point when you get older,
you start having kids,
you look out at the world and you get more privy to how politics actually
operates,
becomes very clear.
You may not care about politics,
but politics cares about you and you have to engage.
And to your point,
like,
and I've become convinced of this,
particularly over the last 18 months,
like people do react.
I've talked to people in the administration,
individual politicians,
and they do seem to genuinely care and respond when they think,
that this could affect their ability to get voted back in office.
But you mentioned BRCA.
The last we covered this on this show was earlier this year
with Matt Corallo when the Save Our Wallets campaign
had just launched.
You said BRCA, Blockchain Regulatory Clarity Act.
At one point, it was a standalone act.
It has since been included in the market structure bill,
which is one of the big things the Trump administration came in
David Sachs. Everybody's saying we're going to get crypto legislation, Genius Act
pushed through. Second priority on the Hill
as it pertains to Bitcoin and crypto is this market structure bill. It's been talked about for a while.
Seems like there are some fast-moving developments. You had Brian Armstrong
from Coinbase interviewed earlier this week saying that progress is
moving forward. There's likely going to be a vote imminently
here. How much of the original BRCA
will get into the market structure bill.
So that's still a question.
So this is the thing.
This is very inside baseball.
So strap in, friends,
if you're at home and you care
about the legislative details.
So as you mentioned,
there was originally the BRCA,
which was a standalone bill,
which was like a two-page bill.
It was very straightforward to the point.
It was everything that we would have wanted
in the Bitcoin community
to protect open source developers
and non-custodial developers.
from prosecution. That was folded into what became the Clarity Act in the House.
And then it ended up passing the House, which is great. That's good news. But that's only one
half of the process, as those of you who remember your Schoolhouse Rock video.
I'm just no bill.
Yeah, right. You'll remember that the Senate now has to play their role. And the Senate,
as the cooling dish of democracy, is a pretty difficult place to get things through.
So at the moment there two competing committees inside the Senate who have produced different draft versions of their version of the market structure bill
There's the banking committee, and then there's the agriculture committee.
The agriculture committee released their draft text last week or the week before, and it was excellent.
They get it. They understood the assignment.
they understand that Bitcoin is a commodity
and that it is very different than everything else in crypto.
And their approach to their drafting of the bill
was that instead of leaving open-ended clauses
that could be interpreted by the regulatory agencies,
they explicitly say,
if you are not an entity named on this list,
you are not subject to securities laws
that we would normally be concerned about.
And that's actually the right solution for this market moving forward.
The problem is we don't know whether that's actually going to make it out of the Senate to a floor vote because everything in that draft bill was in brackets, which means it's a draft for discussion among everybody.
Will that discussion be internally within the committee or on the floor publicly?
Both.
But at this point, I think that the committees have both had their internal discussions.
And so now the sausage making is going on behind the scenes of what bill will actually make it to the floor for the Senate to vote on.
And that's why it's really critical that if you're a Bitcoiner, you call your senator today or this week or as soon as you can and tell them that this is important.
We will get this out tomorrow morning.
So this will come out Wednesday, November 19th.
Great.
I don't mean to push you that hard on it, but in general, like, yeah, the idea is like now is when they're having those conversations. Right. And if we can get the Agriculture Committee's version of the regulations as the bill that gets voted on and we can get that through cloture, which means that we can actually hit 60 votes in the Senate so that nobody can filibuster it, a.k.a. Elizabeth Warren.
Yeah. Right.
We've experienced a lot of that in the last two months.
Yeah. And she also is, you know, the one who tried to throw a wrench in the banking committee version of the bill from like six weeks ago or something like that. And everybody freaked out because it was like, so is the Senate even going to be able to pass anything? Like, it's unclear right now what, if anything, the Senate can even pass as a result of this.
So the thing is, we need to get to 60 votes in the Senate, which means that we're going to need six to 10 Democrats to cross over and vote with the Republicans.
And we're going to need that version of the bill that passes the Senate, if it passes the Senate, to also survive the committee markup with the House version of the bill.
So there's going to have to be a conference bill once the Senate passes their version.
And if we're able to get this language from the House Pass Clarity Act and the Senate Agriculture Bill fully to the floor in front of everybody and it gets voted on and we get it through, that is the best case scenario for everybody in the Bitcoin community because it will mean that open source non-custodial software developers will not be prosecuted anymore the way that we saw the DOJ prosecutions over this prior summer.
but we still have to do the work of making sure that the white house and ofac and treasury don't
come in over the top uh and uh destroy privacy as i mentioned kind of at the top right so that's
kind of a second fight like a second you know kind of uh tier that we need to be concerned about
this is this is the first battle the immediate battle that's in front of us is the clarity act
market structure bill is it still called the clarity act so again this is where it's complicated
It's called the Clarity Act in the House.
Right now it's called the RFIA.
Yes.
Or in the Senate, I should say.
It's called the RFIA is what we think the bill is going to be named.
But presumably when they do the joint conference bill,
it'll probably be called the Clarity Act
since that's what they've been messaging all year.
And what does the crypto lobby think of the agricultural department's view
or draft of the bill that we like?
I've heard rumblings from behind the scenes that there's some influence in the crypto,
the broader crypto, not Bitcoin lobby, that really doesn't care what happens.
They sort of want to create these regulatory modes.
Yeah.
They just need a market structure so they can do what they need to do.
They don't really care about open source developers.
Is that true?
I don't want to pay it with too broad a brush,
but I guess what I would say is that regulatory capture is a hell of a good business.
I mean, we see that in Wall Street.
The reason that we don't have access to good financial technology and tools in the United States is not because we can't build them.
It's because the large corporations have captured their regulators and they get to write their own laws.
So I wouldn't say that the token side of the crypto markets is unique in this way.
They are just responding to the incentives and behaviors such as they exist.
Right. And so I would say that, yeah, when push comes to shove, you know, if you're operating a centralized exchange with licenses, you know, and you've got all the venture capital in order to be able to, you know, pay the lawyers $1,800 an hour to stay in court nonstop fighting with the government.
it, it's in your interests to
say, well, I would much prefer that my random token
is not qualified as a security under whatever new Howey test
they're going to try to put out than to care about whether some
random open source developers who are working on a decentralized exchange or a private
host wallet are still
allowed to do that thing that competes with me.
Right? I mean, in their, you know, kind of business logic, they're...
So call your representatives and center streaks.
Yeah.
They have a lot of money.
Yeah.
And they do influence.
Yeah. And that's the thing. I mean, you know, one of the reasons that we started Save Our Wallets at the beginning of the year was because Matt and I knew that there is no centralized Bitcoin company.
Right? We don't have a CEO. We don't have a marketing team. We don't have a lobbying outfit, really. Right?
And so we knew that we were going to be a massive structural disadvantage as Bitcoiners relative to everyone else who's making tokens and other broad crypto things when it came to this lobbying effort.
And so, yeah, I mean, we're outspent 1,000 to 1 in Washington, D.C. right now as Bitcoiners.
It's great that we have organizations like BPI and Coin Center and others who are fighting for the things that we care about in Washington.
but we're doing, you know, they, we, whoever, whatever, you know, however you want to draw the box,
are doing it on, you know, kind of MacGyver budgets.
Yeah.
Right? Duct tape and bubble gum right now. And so that's why, you know.
You should look like MacGyver.
Well, yeah. Don't force me to get my way out of this room with a paperclip or things might get messy for you.
But, but yeah, no, I mean, I think like this is why, you know, it's like what we do have in the Bitcoin community
is we have truth and righteousness on our side
and we have people power.
And a ton of grit.
Yeah, and a ton of grit.
Yeah.
Proof of work, baby.
We'll grind it out.
Hand up.
I've not called my senator,
but I'm going to wake up tomorrow morning and call.
I've sent emails,
but I think calls work just as well, too.
Yeah, you should definitely call
if you're listening to this.
It's, again, right here, right now,
senators are the most important people.
If you have a senator who is sitting on
one of the, either the banking committee
or the agriculture committee, double
points for calling
them and then for sure
call them. Call them because especially
now with AI,
like, you know, written emails
are a dime a thousand,
right? So, I mean, they don't know
what's real. They don't know what's not real. Like,
they'll just throw that away, really. I mean, I
shouldn't say they're going to throw it away. Maybe they look at
them, but like, it's much less impactful than picking
up the phone and having a conversation. And if
you go to saveourwealth.org, because they're still
it's like a top line broad like here's the the points you need to hit when you call them yeah
so we have a bunch of information on save our wallets.org you can also put your zip code in and
it give you all your contact information for your representatives there is a form letter generator on there but you can directly as i mentioned send an email to these congressional offices just because they would get DDoS every day if they had public email addresses
And we'll be updating the site with more guidance on what needs to happen once there's clarity of what's going on in the Senate.
Right. So at the moment, it's all geared toward the House campaign.
But, you know, we'll be keeping it updated.
You can also sign up there for updates.
If you give us your email, we'll blast out some updates to people
when there are important things that are going on
and we need people to really rally the troops and push something over,
probably when the voting is actually happening.
So I would say there's a bunch of resources there.
Definitely check it out and get involved
because, again, this is an easily winnable fight.
There are very few things in life that I've come across, at least,
where the hard work is literally just about showing up.
Oftentimes it's like,
well, I got to show up and I got to fight Goliath.
And to some degree, we are fighting Goliath here
because it's the US government.
It's the most powerful government in the world
and institutional inertia is in the wrong direction.
But at the end of the day, we still do live in a democracy.
And we are the swing vote majority group
in that democracy right now.
So if they don't listen to us,
the next election is going to be a bloodbath as long as we actually show up in those elections
and push our legislators and do the hard work of participating in democracy.
So again, maybe the way to say this here for everybody who's a Bitcoiner,
if you're a real Bitcoiner, you believe in proof of work.
Proof of work for being a Bitcoiner right now is picking up the phone and calling your senator
and making sure that they understand that it is not acceptable for open source software developers
to be getting thrown in jail.
For writing code.
Yeah, for writing code.
First thing, go do that, freaks.
We'll link to all this in the show notes.
Second thing, going into the second battle,
OFAC, all this,
it's completely going in the wrong direction
where I would like it to go,
where I think we should abolish,
rescind the Bank Secrecy Act.
We should get rid of these
sort of supranational regulatory bodies
that really don't understand the technology.
at the end of the day, objectively don't care about freedom or protecting people from crime,
whether it's physical harm or financial crime.
I think the data is out there.
It's abundantly clear.
KYC, AML compliance that has been thrust on the market broadly is completely ineffectual
at stopping criminals from actually doing what they want to do.
Absolutely.
I mean, it's kabuki theater.
As a former bank regulator, I can tell you that for a fact.
but you don't even need to take it from me or trust that.
You can look at the news that's come out over the last
17 years since the financial crisis.
The largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, was just caught up for
laundering hundreds of millions of dollars or potentially even billions of dollars for Jeffrey Epstein.
Even though they're filing suspicious activity reports
to the tune of dozens or hundreds in the background, none of which were ever looked at or
followed up with.
But he's friends with the secretary of the treasury,
so it doesn't matter.
JP Morgan, you're good.
You're good.
Wire those funds.
And they wired them to Deutsche Bank,
which is another large regulated banking institution.
Yeah, right.
And so the thing here is that KYC AML
and all this intrusive financial surveillance,
none of this is actually doing anything on the ground
to make the average American's life better or safer.
Inarguably makes it worse.
puts them more at risk,
adds more compliant costs,
which layers in costs to the end user.
It's more expensive.
It's more dangerous.
How fraught is the world with credit fraud
and people basically selling other people's information
on black markets
because they were able to steal it
from companies complying with KYC, AML regulation
by collecting all that data
and securing it terribly in the first place.
Yeah, creating honeypots left, right, and center, all of which will be hacked eventually.
You know, again, as somebody who's worked on a lot of these banking and just general technology platforms, like none of these large institutions.
And the barrier to, I just wrote a newsletter about it on the flight over here.
I don't know if you saw Anthropix sort of postmortem on.
Prompt injection hack?
I mean, essentially there was the Chinese espionage attack
using their LLMs and MCP servers
to basically take down parts of the internet
and infiltrate highly critical systems in the United States.
It's a barrier to entry to wage these attacks is getting lower.
And so the more you force people to comply
and collect more information,
the easier it's just going to get to take that
and abuse people at the end of the day.
Oh yeah, 100%.
I mean, the U.S. government can't even maintain the safety and security of its own data, right?
I mean, China hacked the GSA like two years ago and got like 100 million social security numbers or something like that, right?
I mean, it's crazy.
What was the big social security hack years ago?
Evergrande's coming to my mind, but that's the Chinese property lending.
What was it?
I feel like it began with an E, too.
Was it Equifax?
literally a 200 million social security number least like two-thirds of the country this was a
decade ago at this point but yeah yeah now we got them buying 23andme or trying to buy 23andme
where they would get you know 20 of the united states is genetic data or things of this nature
i mean data privacy is i think uh to piggyback on your point here about the bsa i think data
privacy is actually the next frontier for us right like if you can kind of fast forward a little bit
suspend belief and say like, you know, we're going to win on a long enough time horizon with Bitcoin,
right? Which I deeply and truly believe, right? Like this isn't really a question of if, it's a
question of when, right? And the sooner that we pull that future forward and, you know, kind of
bring the positive, some, you know, flywheel spinning in all of our lives, the better. But
yeah, taking it like the next step further, like data privacy is going to become the most important
thing in the world, in my opinion, in the next decade, because we are all going to be subject to
hundreds of thousands of adversarial AI driven attacks, trying to pilfer our data wherever it
exists for, again, pretty much the duration of the rest of our lives. And so, you know, I don't,
I think it's crazy to trust anyone other than yourself to have enough motivation to secure your
own data right and and have that level of privacy and interaction between two willing participants
in a private market yeah and just from like a defensive or systems posturing like why would
you want to centralize all this data like create defense and security of your distribution like
why aggregate everything in central locations and allow people to to self-secure to secure their own
data, their own money. And yeah, individuals may get picked off individually on a one-to-one basis,
but that doesn't put everybody who's engaging in a particular service in harm's way.
Right. Yeah. And I think that that is, again, it's a sort of design paradigm that the current,
you know, kind of controllers of the world don't understand.
The dystopian hellscape that we live in. Because that's another thing. I mean,
And I'll probably, I'm going to record with Steve Lin.
It's funny, behind the scenes, the one question we're always asking each other,
we walk up to each other and say, who's going to run the mints?
It's like, we shouldn't have to ask who's going to run the mints.
We should be able to run the mints and offer privacy-preserving money
to anybody we want to.
Not anybody we want to, but we should be able to experiment
with new wave, cypherpunk, cutting-edge banking technology
without having to worry about getting thrown in a cage.
Yeah, of course.
We either believe in free markets or we don't.
There's another thing that I've been talking about
while I've been doing this Save Our Wallet stuff,
which is called Blackstone's Principle,
which is a very core piece of Western legal canon,
which is that we should prefer,
and our system is built on the idea that we should prefer that 10 guilty men go free than that one innocent man be you know wrongly convicted and caught up in and punished for the actions of those 10
you know, bad men. And again, that's just kind of like crazy. If you think about how inverted
the world is today, relative to the fact that that like, those are the principles that we've
built our entire society. I think it's becoming a popular meme. I'm very happy it is like in many
aspects of our life but particularly this one you're catering to the lowest common denominator
of criminal scumbags you're basically nerfing the world and making the user experience of
many things in life terrible because you're worried about the bad guy like you can't nerf
the world um as joe rogan famously said uh many years ago but it's true you can't you can try to
but criminals are always going to criminal yeah yeah exactly if you i mean this is the good old
argument about guns, right? If you take guns away from, you know, normal people, then the only people
with guns will be criminals, right? And I know that that's probably a controversial take in some
parts of the country, but... Hey, and if you're listening, you're saying that's a controversial
take. I recorded an episode with Dr. John Lott two weeks ago. Go find it. We go through the data.
It's not controversial. It's backed by data. Like if you take it away from law-abiding citizens,
it actually gets worse for them, right? And everybody else. Well, and again, back to the
show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome, right? I mean, these are pretty simple loops if
you actually are capable of taking a step back and deconstructing them and thinking about them,
right? So back to your point about the BSA, I just want to like quickly before we migrate too far
away from that, I want to say like, you're not alone in thinking that the BSA needs to be overturned
or repealed or that we need some fundamental modification to that. I think in fact that
the one serious legal challenge that was brought against the BSA in kind of its contemporary moment
after it emerged in the 70s.
The BSA was upheld, I think, on a 5-4 vote by the Supreme Court.
And they had some very choice words about the danger
that we were entering into with something like the BSA.
But at that time, the limit for suspicious activity reporting
was like $10,000, which in the 70s was an incredible amount of money.
I mean, we're talking about like $100,000, maybe $150,000
or something like that in like modern dollars.
And from what I understand correctly,
the history of the BSA was particularly focused on the mafia, right?
There was a lot of mafia problems going on.
Yeah, correct.
That's, yeah, back in the 70s,
we didn't have, you know, the global war on terror.
So yeah, that was the presumptive reason that, you know,
it was created back then.
And even then it was controversial, right?
So, you know, again, I think that this is a situation
where, you know, our generation is being called to,
I think greatness, right? Like I would like to think that we are going to achieve this greatness
and that we are going to overcome these existential battles that are facing us because
we've just been hardened and sharpened in a very unique set of circumstances that have led us to
this unique historical moment. And, you know, as I said before, I, you know, for me, it was just
kind of this realization of like, if not me, who, if not now, when, right? Like, what am I waiting
for? No, no one is coming to save me if I'm not willing to get in the arena and, you know, have the
fight myself. Um, and I just kind of woke up and realized like, man, there've got to be thousands,
tens of thousands. I don't know how many there are of other people like me who have been around
and thinking like, how could I contribute? Like I'd love, I'd love to contribute. Um, and yeah,
for me this was just you know the stakes have just gotten so high now that i feel like you know
standing on the sidelines was just a an inconceivable notion like we need we need all of our
champions in the arena right now we need everyone who can pick up a sword uh and fight for the future
that we want and i have every uh belief and every like every fiber of my being knows that we will
prevail if people just pick up the sword they you know do their duty they serve their country
which in this case i'm going to say both is you know the united states uh and a return to our
original founding values and i would say bitcoin network as the instantiate the instantiation in
code of american principles uh i think you know now is the time for patriots to stand up and fight
i'm looking the camera because i know you're out there you dm me you email me you you find ways to
contact me to tell me that you listen to the show, you read the newsletter, and you've been
thinking these things, but not able to express them. Here's your chance. Get out there. Go to
saveourwallets.org. Put in your zip code. Figure out who your senator is. Call them and stand up
for this. Thank you for standing up for this, Kyle. This was an incredible way to hop off the
plane to the studio and start my few-day trip here in San Francisco. Well, it's such a pleasure.
Thank you for having me, Marty.
And yeah, I mean, again, it's funny, right?
Because I've been following you for so long
and I knew about all your content.
I was kind of a lurker or an anon in the community for a long time.
But look at this conversation that we were able to have
and kind of the energy that we were able to spark,
I think, for one another in just a very short time.
So I would encourage everybody out there, get involved.
Just get involved somehow.
Go to your local meetups.
Find where other Bitcoiners live.
Like, get engaged in this fight.
Like, this is an important thing and we should fight for this.
Yeah.
At the very least, you'll get a more well-rounded understanding
of how the state is attacking Bitcoin
or would like to cattle herd Bitcoiners
and the network into a very nerfed form,
which I don't think we want.
And getting engaged, I think, having done it myself
in the last couple of years,
I think you would be surprised the upside I certainly was with how responsive some people are.
And to your point, how willing to learn people on the Hill are about this.
And there are many individuals on the Hill that actually do care about this.
And you just got to let them know, here's the signal.
Here's what we care about.
Here's how do, I know you're not an expert on this staffer or senator, but I've been immersed in this for many years.
Here's how it works.
And here's how it should work moving forward.
Yeah.
I respond well to that.
Yeah, it's super well.
you know and it actually has been revitalizing for me and my belief about the government as well
to be honest like being on the other side of the table and and having those conversations like i've
actually walked away surprised at how willing to engage these members of congress are and the fact
that they're they're just really busy they're stretched so thin they're juggling so many
problems they don't have time to be an expert on this if you are an expert you can save them an
enormous amount of time and energy as long as you can be articulate and thoughtful yes so don't
scream at people.
No.
But, you know, be professional,
you know, and erudite
and make good cases.
Make a good argument.
Be polite.
Yes, ma'am.
Yes, sir.
Thank you.
Please appreciate your time.
Yeah, absolutely.
I know on this show,
I can get a little bombastic,
but for you guys
and when I call my senator
and representatives,
I will be very polite.
Kyle, thank you, sir.
This was a pleasure.
Absolutely.
Great to see you, Marty.
Peace and love, freaks.
Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC.
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Okay.
Thank you.