You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
We 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.
Francis, I'm ashamed to admit it, but it's been seven years since you've been on the show.
Welcome back.
It has been seven years.
Wow.
Yeah.
The last time was in San Francisco, I believe, at the Bitcoin 2019 conference.
The first ever Bitcoin conference.
I found out I was expecting my first child that day, right after we recorded.
So I remember that day vividly.
nice uh but we progress children have been born raised a little bit since then uh bitcoin has
persisted and things are going on we got the bulls on parade in france we're going to start off with
what you and your team at bull bitcoin have been doing in terms of trying to protect your users
right to privacy particularly in france where they've implemented this dac8 dac8 um which stems
from from mica i believe which is very invasive to privacy and obviously france is a hotbed for
five dollar wrench attacks you guys are on the ground there obviously serving customers and are
having to deal with this up close and personal so i think we just start there what's going on with
dak8 mica mica however you pronounce it and how oppressive are these governments getting in terms
of trying to collect user data.
Yeah, so DAC8 is a very interesting piece of legislation
because very few people know about it.
And it is, in my opinion, the single biggest threat
to both the cypherpunk principles of Bitcoin
and to the lives of our users.
So the backstory of DAC8 is that in 2021,
kind of like at the peak of the COVID tyranny,
the G20 countries had a meeting, probably, I don't know, in Davis or something, you know,
one of those globalist hangouts. And they decided during that meeting that Bitcoin posed
an existential threat to the ability of governments to finance themselves.
And when you look at kind of like the minutes and, you know, announcements of that meeting,
they basically decided that tax evaders are going to bankrupt the state with Bitcoin
and that they needed to do something about that.
So the G20 mandated the OECD, another globalist organization,
to come up with a solution to that problem.
And that solution is something that they came up with,
which is called CARF, the Crypto Asset Reporting Framework.
And CARF is basically a program or methodology of collecting all of crypto users' transaction information and identity into a big database and allowing countries to share that database with each other.
And in the EU, and as soon as the OECD came up with CARF, like 70 countries on earth pledged to implement CARF.
So this is a purely technocratic globalist thing. But then the national governments need to implement this in their national legislation. And in Europe, they did that at the European Union level with something called DAC-8, Directive 8, or also called DAC-8.
So what DACA does is basically turn every single crypto company into a data collection, aggregation, and transmission platform where every year you have to report all of your users' financial transactions, their volumes and their cost of acquisition and their identity, their home address, everything about them to your national government.
But what's even worse than that is that DACAID allows EU countries to share that data with each other.
So, for example, we bought Bitcoin. We're incorporated in France.
So we share this data with the French tax authority.
But then the French tax authority shares this data with the German tax authority, with the Dutch tax authority or whatever.
So what it in effect creates is a big fucking list of crypto users and how much Bitcoin they're buying and how much Bitcoin they're selling.
every single year. And that is what I would say a very big rupture compared to the system of KYC
that we've had before. And I'm going to go off on a little tangent here, but we've already had a
globalist institution force national governments essentially to implement these KYC regimes,
and that is the FETF, the Financial Action Task Force. So the Financial Action Task Force
was the, and I believe that is the IMF
that is like the head of the FETF.
Might be the BIS, I think.
It's, you know, it's part of the club,
like the BIS, IMF, the OECD, the G20.
It's always coming from somewhere in Europe.
And basically like, so the FETF came up
with this thing called the travel rule
and they basically came up with these guidelines.
And what they essentially told every country in the world
is like, you have to implement KYC AML
on crypto in your country.
Otherwise, you will be considered to be a bad actor
and you're going to get on what's called
the AMF's gray list or black list.
If you are on the FETF's black list or gray list,
then things don't go really well for you.
There's a lot of penalties for a country
not to implement FETF rules.
They're not obliged to,
but they're flagged as a, let's say, non-cooperative state.
So it's not the first time that this has happened.
But the thing about KYC AML, the way that it's been going on like today, it's it's not as bad as people think.
OK, I'll give you an example. Most people think that every time you buy Bitcoin on an exchange, it's like automatically reported to their government.
And that's not true. The point of KYC AML that we have now is basically, OK, if there is something suspicious,
like if one of your clients looks like he's financing terrorism because he's on a sanctions list or something,
or if it looks like he's laundering money,
you report certain types of behavior
that are suspicious.
And you keep the data internally
so that if there is a police investigation
and they come to you with a warrant,
then you have the data on hand.
And that's not something that happens a lot.
You know what I mean?
It's not like a frequent thing.
We don't get the FBI knocking on our door
asking for data.
Something like, I don't know,
bull Bitcoin, we get that once a year or something.
thing. So yeah, KYC is bad, but it's not like we're streaming the data to the government in
real time. The vast majority, like 99% of clients, their data just never leaves full Bitcoin.
What DACA does is a complete shift because now the government requires us to send all of the data,
regardless of whether you're like a pleb or you're a whale, whether you're sketchy or not sketchy,
all of the data gets sent to the government.
And that's a massive problem, of course.
And it's a big shift.
It's a big change.
If you thought that KYC was bad before,
now it's way worse.
And there's multiple reasons why that would be a problem.
Well, first of all, just philosophically speaking,
you can have a problem with the government
just creating a list of people and their assets,
just generally,
because who knows what they're going to do
with that information.
So just philosophically speaking, that's just bad. But where it becomes really bad is in places like France, where we are based, where the cybersecurity of the government is so awful that you have, and I'm not kidding, like something like a million user records that are leaked every single month.
every four or five weeks, you have a top tier institution, whether that's the tax authority
or government agency or a big insurance firm where all of the user records are leaked.
And not only are they leaked, but in France specifically, there has been convicted
civil servants that were selling crypto users information to criminal gangs so that these
gangs could identify victims to kidnap, torture, and extort for crypto ransoms. So this is not a
conspiracy theory. Those people have been caught and convicted recently. So you have government
bureaucrats which are collecting data on crypto users and selling that data to the mafia. And what
is the result? The result is France, where again, we are based. Bull Bitcoin in Europe is the
Crypto Kidnapping Capital of the World.
This year in 2026, we expect about 150 to 180 crypto users to be kidnapped.
Last year was like something like 80 or something like that.
If you look at just like the Q1 2026 kidnapping data,
it's something like once every two and a half days on average,
a crypto user gets kidnapped.
And I know personally, I want to say maybe four or five people,
who had had either their daughter kidnapped.
There's a famous person that I know
whose daughter got kidnapped.
Their wife got kidnapped.
They got kidnapped.
There's, you know, very famous stories.
So essentially what we as an exchange
have been forced to become
is an agent of the EU's mass surveillance program.
And if this database,
this mega global honeypot database of all crypto users in Europe is leaked,
it will be catastrophic to the extent where I'm very confident
that someone is likely to die as a result.
Someone is definitely going to get kidnapped as a result,
but people will be murdered as a result.
So running an exchange, you have to do some kind of compromise.
when you're a fiat regulated entity for multiple reasons.
You know, bull Bitcoin does have KYC.
We're not a no KYC business.
And the reason why we do this compromise
is because for Bitcoin to succeed in its mission
to eliminate fiat currency,
you need Bitcoin to be a highly sellable
and highly liquid asset.
You need Bitcoin to be used for commodities trading,
by merchants, for payroll, for remittance.
You need millions and millions of Bitcoin holders to use Bitcoin on a day to day basis.
And in order for that to happen, you need brokers, you need trading order book platforms.
You can't achieve like a global revolution on just like a purely peer to peer exchange basis and like meet someone in a parking lot with a bunch of cash.
Like you need exchanges to achieve this level of liquidity and sellability and market penetration.
so we've done you know compromises by implementing kyc but we believe that uh this new regime the
decade regime is a line that we cannot cross there's a certain there's a certain level at
which we have to say no we have to uh make a stand and we have to refuse to see any more territory if
we don't refuse this global database of bitcorners um then the message that we're sending to these
globalists is is very clear uh is that they can do anything right like what's what's worse than
collecting what's worse than put it up than putting all the corners on a list and having all
of their wealth like in a centralized database which is accessible by 27 bureaucracies across
European Union. I mean, it's pretty much as bad as it can get in terms of privacy.
So we've decided to fight back.
The I mean not only is it incredibly invasive to privacy but by sharing it with 27 other agencies I mean you just expanding the attack surface dramatically
And especially in the world that we're living in now with AI emerging and being able to attack critical systems rather trivially.
It seems like we should be going in the opposite direction, try to collect the least amount of data as possible to protect end users and individuals and their lives.
and the lives of our loved ones at the end of the day.
And I think this has obviously been a massive topic on this podcast
for the last nine years, which is the encroachment of KYC AML.
And I'm very happy that you and your team are drawing the line
and saying, no, we're not ceding any more ground.
What does that look like?
How big is this fight going to get, do you think?
I think this is going to be possibly one of the biggest tax law cases
in Europe. So what we're doing is
we are challenging
the implementation of
DAC8 in France at the French government.
So we actually did this,
we started doing this in February
where we first did our legal challenge.
We decided not to
talk about it until
recently because
we were in the process of applying for
a MECA license in Europe and
we didn't want to
attract too much
I guess, anger from the French state.
So as soon as we got our Mika license, we started to talk about it.
So we're challenging the national implementation of DAC-8 in France under three principles.
One of them is proportionality.
So basically, the concept of creating this pan-European global database of crypto users
is completely disproportional to the objective of the French government to evade tax evasions.
In other words, they already have the tools in place to do all their investigations.
They don't need this new set of tools.
It's not necessary.
There's also violations of the EU Charter of Human Rights.
I hope I'm not.
My lawyer might be a little pissed at me because I need to be careful about exactly what we're doing.
But we're kind of like breaching the EU Constitution.
And there's a bunch of technical things also that the government did wrong.
So our objective is to repeal the implementation of DAC-8 in France.
which would in effect allow, prevent or exempt bull Bitcoin from complying with this regulation.
At the same time, we also have a, let's call it multi-angle legal strategy.
So we have two more legal recourse that we're preparing that I can't really talk about,
but one of them is about temporarily suspending compliance with this at the same time.
And if we lose at the French court level, we're going to take this to the European Court of Justice, which is kind of like the higher judicial authority in Europe.
And there are precedents. And this is not like a frivolous lawsuit that we're doing for marketing.
Like we have very good chances of winning this because there's like a lot of legal precedents around this.
So if we lose, then we're going to take this to the European Court of Justice.
and DAC-8 is a purely European thing
but I also want to remind the viewers
that this is actually coming to the United States as well
in 2029
I think 2028 or 2029
CARF is coming to the US
CARF is also coming to Canada this year
and pretty much every major developed nation
are going to have their own version of DAC-8
so we're starting with France
as the first opening salvo of this battle
but soon after
we're probably going to be looking at
challenging this
constitutionally in Canada
and hopefully someone in the US
also does a constitutional challenge
in the US although as far as I know
Bull is the only company in the world
it's the only
legal challenge of CARF
anywhere on earth as far as I'm aware of
so our goal
is to, I mean a legal precedent
in Europe doesn't create a legal precedent in the US or in Canada, but ideally, uh, we can motivate
people in their own countries to pursue legal action because politically there's nothing to do.
Like nobody gives a fuck, right? There's no, there's no congressman or there's no parliamentarian
that really and truly, uh, does anything about, you know, even in the US you have like a pro,
a pro-crypto government or something like that.
But even in the US,
there hasn't been a challenge of this concept at all.
So ideally, we motivate people to use the justice system,
the courts, as a method of defending crypto users.
Because, yeah, sure, we can use all sorts of technology.
We can use pay join, coin join, silent payments,
liquid swaps, all that kind of stuff.
We cypherpunks can build the tools,
but it doesn't stop every leakage.
We need to also do this battle on the legal front as well.
yeah i completely agree and i mean timing is of the essence particularly for DAC8
in france it looks like from my research they wanted you to start tracking beginning on january
1st of this year and like the first mandatory report will be january 31st 2027 so we have about
six seven months here before exchanges are expected to hand over this data yeah and even
Even if we lose the constitutional, the core challenge that we're doing now, we have a pretty good strategy of having a bunch of backup plans.
So our goal is to using any and all legal means at our disposal to repeal.
Repealing is the number one goal.
Delaying is the second goal and mitigating, you know, like the plan C is basically negotiating to have something that is less harmful.
but completely repealing is our objective.
And I think we have pretty good chances.
Yeah.
I mean, I think we should dive into the philosophy
of this deeper because I think it's gotten
to an insane point globally
where exchanges, individuals have just been expected
to just completely hand over the data.
The government says, hey, new guideline.
And the thing about FATF too,
It's like a supranational, unelected, bureaucratic institution that sits under the BIS or IMF.
It doesn't matter who it really sits under.
But they're technically not implementing laws.
They get together.
The globalists get together.
They say, hey, here are the guidelines.
And like you said earlier, if a country doesn't adopt the guidelines, Financial Action Task Force comes in and says you're on the blacklist.
And there's just some weird leveraged incentives at play where you have this unelected, supranational, bureaucratic institution that nobody asked for that is dictating basically what we can hold private in our lives in the digital age.
It's completely insane.
And I think France is a good example, but we have plenty of examples across the world of turning exchanges into data honeypots and now extending that further into government agencies, which are notoriously incompetent, turning them into even larger data honeypots and sharing that data amongst each other, which is even more frightening.
and it just gets to the core of like what it means to be human like why why do we need to do all this
and they opine that it's to protect protect you from uh terrorists and child abusers and things
like that and they try to mark you as uh an insensitive uh rube if if you don't go along
with it because you're why why don't you want to do this you support terrorism you support
the trafficking of children? It's like, no, of course not. But there's a better way to do these
things, which is actual law enforcement. I think the proof is in the pudding of 50 years of this
KYC AML regime, which really stems from the Bank Secrecy Act here in the United States,
that these data collection mandates are completely ineffective at stopping crime. And in fact,
to your point earlier, actually put more people in harm's way.
100%. You said many great things I'm going to touch on. The first thing that you mentioned is
it's a little reminiscent of COVID, isn't it? COVID, there was this thing called the WHO,
the World Health Organization, and they can't force countries to do anything. But then you have
all the bureaucrats of every country, which basically get a software update from the WHO.
You know what I mean? They get like a mind download from the WHO and then they cook up some kind of call it emergency or public safety concern where the national elected governments don't actually make rules.
Right. So in covid, it was basically like I don't know who he was in the US, but like the national public health agencies and they start issuing these edicts.
And the technocracy, the bureaucrats, ended up extending the state's power for something that nobody really voted for.
Like nobody voted for COVID lockdowns or for vaccine mandates.
They were arguably popular in some places, but it's certainly not something that came from a representative government.
It came from the bureaucracy, and the international bureaucracy coordinated itself around stuff like the WHO.
show and this is exactly what we see in the national legislature you know there's no protest
on the street from people that want stricter kyc aml regime that exchanges you know that just
it's not something on people's minds at all it's something that's kind of like it's a slow creep
you know you know i mean it's it's like it slowly creeps in through the bureaucracy and um nobody
really knows what's going on until until it's too late um carf and decade itself is presented as a
purely technical thing. When you look at national debates, there's no national debate at, there's no
like congressional debate about CARF. You will not find a congressional debate where you have like
the Democrats and Republicans arguing back and forth about the merits of CARF. No, no, no. It's,
it's, it's like a, it's like a technical change to, you know, the IRS rules. And it's like a
technical change to the French in France. It's just a technical amendment basically. So it kind
of like, um, sneaks under the radar. And then that shit just keeps adding up. It just keeps
adding up over and over and over. Um, and of course you have, you know, you had the public
health stuff, you have the crypto stuff. Of course, at the same time, we also have regulation of
social media under the new public health scare, which is hate speech. Um, and all of that is,
is, is coming in, um, at the same time. And these institutions have a lot of leverage
against crypto businesses and businesses in general.
Because if you're a media,
you need to have a broadcasting license
or something like that.
If you're a crypto exchange,
you need to have a crypto license.
So basically they use the threat
of removing your ability to operate
in a certain country if you don't comply.
So it's kind of like, again,
it's kind of like with the vaccine mandate.
It's kind of like, oh, well,
you don't have to get a COVID vaccine,
but you can't go to the store.
For us, it's basically like,
oh, well, you don't have to do that,
but we don't have to give you a license either.
Let's just say I can see the pressure accelerating.
I can see the soft tyranny
because it's not tyranny in the sense of
a Marxist government lighting you up against the wall
to shoot you and take your stuff. It's a bureaucratic tyranny.
The best way to conceive of this is actually
with Alexandre de Tocqueville,
which is a French author,
but wrote about the American system of government.
And he has this very nice passage,
this book called Democracy in America,
where he specifically talks about this.
And he says,
tyranny is not going to look like
you think it's going to look like.
It's not going to be this military government,
which is coming into your house
and kicking down your door and chaining you up.
it's going to be a ever-growing set of small rules which turn you into basically a docile sheep
and then when you're in the exchange business like i am and you're very regulated i can i can
see those as adding up so at some point at some point you just got to say no right at some point we just got to say no And you got to establish in your mind a line that you will not cross And that specific one is the one that we just decided like no we not crossing this one
What's up, Freaks?
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So freaks, this work was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey.
Guys, things happen, things get lost.
You need to replace your phone, life happens, and BitKey has been designed with this in mind.
So if you're looking for the easiest way to secure your Bitcoin off the exchange, go get a BitKey. It doesn't come with any seed phrases. There's no single point of failure. It's a two or three multi-sig. You have your device. You have the mobile app and block stores a key in the server. So you have collaborative multi-sig there. On top of that, the new BitKey has a screen so you can actually see and verify what you're approving. You can look at transactions, addresses, account changes. The difference between trusting and knowing has been built into the new BitKey with the screen.
They've changed code delegation and other advanced features like inheritance, recovery.
If you're looking to get your Bitcoin off exchange, you haven't done so.
You're looking for the easiest way to do that.
Go get a BitKey.
You can use our code today, TFTC, to get 10% off the new BitKey.
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I mean, and even here in the States, all the conversations around the Clarity Act and whether it will or will not get passed, I think odds are above 50% now that it will.
And everybody's cheering it on.
I think like the Coinbases and the stablecoin issuers of the world and those who want to issue tokens, real world asset tokens are cheerleading it.
But if you read the bill, it extends the Patriot Act.
And some of the words, some of the wording is such that you could squint and see how they would try to say like, OK, open source wallet developers, you need to have some KYC, AML compliance.
Like when somebody downloads your software, we need to know who's downloading a blue wallet or a bull wallet, whatever it may be.
And everybody's cheering it on.
And it's, I think, from the crypto industry outside of Bitcoin, it's mainly driven by greed, the one to be able to go out and basically stand up their casinos without having to worry about the government coming in and slamming the book at them for securities law.
But they're sneaking all these KYC AML provisions into the act.
And then on top of that, it expands the Patriot Act, which I wholeheartedly believe should be repealed.
And it's another example of what you just described, the slow creep of new rules and regulations where it's like, hey, I just want to be able to go about my life, make money, save it in the currency that I deem to be suitable for me and my family.
And that's all I want to do.
It's none of your business.
I should be able to make money, save it, and secure it without the government being in my business.
And I'm very happy that you are standing up and beginning to beat the drum.
Like, no, we need to draw a line in the sand as an industry here.
Because I think, particularly from the American perspective, there's not enough people doing that.
In fact, they're cheerleading the shackles to be approved by the government right now.
I'm not an expert in the Clarity Act, but of course, like every person, I follow American politics because the Canadian politics don't matter at all.
You know, the only politics that really matter is the U.S. and maybe the EU.
But I haven't seen anything coming from the U.S. that actually makes it easier or better or less restrictive for me or my users.
Like imagine that bull Bitcoin was to go to the United States, like launch to the US.
I haven't seen anything in the Clarity Act that makes my life as a business easier or that makes my users safer.
And I think Bitcoin has reached a certain place where you can't just ban Bitcoin, right?
You can't just attack Bitcoin head on because there's just too much money involved.
There's just too many important and influential people that have exposure to the Bitcoin price.
not that are self-custodied and that are cypherpunks,
but that have exposure to the Bitcoin price.
So you can't just say something like,
oh, the miners, we're going to shut you off
or owning Bitcoin is illegal or anything like that.
So you have to allow and facilitate
institutional adoption of Bitcoin and stable coins
with stuff like the Genius Act and the Clarity Act.
But that doesn't mean that you have to make it easier
to self-custody and make privacy.
legal again. So what I'm concerned is that the pro-Bitcoin or pro-crypto political narrative
is focused more exclusively on stuff that you mentioned, like securities violations and
banks being able to do some accounting tricks with Bitcoin that they couldn't do before,
or people being able to issue stablecoins in the United States as long as they buy the treasury
bonds with the fiat. I see the stablecoin as being kind of like the new petrodollar.
you can issue your stable coins
as long as you're buying
our treasury bonds with it, you're fine.
But if you issue stable coins
outside of the US in a non-US bank
and you don't store in treasuries, you're fucked.
Kind of like they did with the petrodollar.
You guys can
dig for oil in your
Middle Eastern country as long as you sell it for US dollars.
So it is definitely a concern
And there's really never been
Kind of like a cypherpunk political party
Or political movement
So it has to happen at the court level
I believe
Even if it's easy to blackbill
For example, even with COVID
A lot of constitutional courts
Validated the vaccine mandates, for example
So you say, OK, well, the Supreme Court will save us if it's really bad.
It's not always true, but it is a lever that we have.
It's the only lever that we have, basically.
Either we go fully unregulated, which is an option.
Some crypto companies, some Bitcoin companies might say, you know what, fuck you.
I'm not complying and I'm going to go fully unregulated.
But then that is a noble move.
It definitely is a noble move, but you have to assess, okay, well, if I do that, what impact am I going to actually have if I'm basically on the run?
For example, you're not good to anyone if you're in jail and your service is shut down.
That's the thing.
And you're also not good to anyone if your service is so cypherpunk, you know, like BISC, for example, like decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace.
I mean, it's fucking sweet.
I mean, it's fully unregulated.
It's fully decentralized.
But you're not going to achieve that.
There's like a critical mass of Bitcoiners that we need.
And like, we don't need mass adoption.
By the way, we don't need all the normies to get into Bitcoin to have a socioeconomic and sociopolitical change.
We do need a certain critical mass of people.
I like to think it's like 3%.
I think 3% is the number.
Why 3%?
It's because of the meme with the American Revolution where you only had 3% of the population in the U.S. that were actively involved in the U.S. uprising against the British.
I don't know if this is true or not.
It's just a meme.
But anyway, I think you need like 3% of the population to become sovereign individuals and like fully opt out, like withdraw their consent from monetary debasement and withdraw their consent from the fiat system.
But 3% of the population is still a fucking lot of people.
It's like, my math is probably wrong, but I think it's like 300 million people or something worldwide.
Yeah, it's like a quarter of a billion.
Yeah.
Right. Yeah, exactly.
So you do need a critical mass of people.
And in order to reach that critical mass of people, you have to remain inside the Overton
window, so to speak, at least something.
And basically, I think the best that we can do as a regulated exchange is be within the
Overton window where we can operate legally, but be so far at the extreme of the Overton
window that we can slightly nudge it and push it.
with these kinds of things.
There's all sorts of things that,
you know, in Canada,
we've been very highly successful at that,
by the way.
Not necessarily publicized
because we don't want to publicize
every victory that we have
against the states in terms of privacy
because also we don't want to,
you know, rub it in their face.
But there's been multiple instances
where the government was like,
give me all this data.
And we're just like, no.
What do you mean?
This is the privacy.
We have the Privacy Act in Canada.
We have a very strong privacy.
like this is a privacy act like you're not allowed to ask me for this data and then uh then they just
kind of like back off um so people would be surprised how efficient uh it can be just to
just say no to a government and see what happens um it's kind of like again like you know you walk
into a restaurant with you know the covid mandate you know what happens if you just say no no i'm
not wearing a fucking mask i'm just gonna go sit down many times it just works you know people
don't actually bother you they just expect you to comply um so that's kind of like the philosophy
that we've tried to build.
And it's a little bit of a business risk
for us to do that.
But at the same time,
I mean, everything we're doing is legal and lawful
and it's legitimate.
And it's kind of like,
in the US, you guys know about that.
Like if you don't exercise your rights,
you lose them.
I mean, that's why Americans are so,
I mean, I'm not American, I don't know,
but I mean, I have a lot of American friends
and a lot of Americans that I know
are so adamant about exercising the Second Amendment
just very visibly in public
because they know that if you don't exercise it,
it just goes away.
The same thing with free speech.
If you don't exercise it, then it just goes away.
And if you start to comply a tiny bit at a time,
eventually your rights are gone.
Yeah.
That's funny.
I'm having flashbacks to an instance where I did this.
I got funneled into a DUI checkpoint in Missouri
in 2012, 2013.
And the cop was like, I'm going to need you to get out.
We need to breathalyze you.
It's a DUI checkpoint.
I was like, no, you can't do that.
And he was pissed that I knew my rights and said no.
And he made me do a field sobriety test passed.
It was not driving drunk, but it was that little pushback,
knowing your rights and to your point.
I think in the industry, we need more people to say no to the government.
Not only in our industry, I think just broadly speaking,
people need to develop the intestinal fortitude to know when to say no to the government. Like
you're trying to infringe on the rights of us as a company and our clients, and we're not going to
stand for it. And I think many people would be surprised at how effective that can be. And again,
thank God you're doing this. And I think it's important to highlight too. I know it's been
seven years since you've been on the show and for anybody listening, I think it'd be
worthwhile to talk about how you've designed your business, like the whole stack. And like,
I think you guys are talking about like working around the edges and within the Overton window,
as close to the edge as possible. I think the way you've designed your exchange, how
your users buy Bitcoin, they get sent to self-custody, how they sell Bitcoin, the
ability to do swaps with liquid and liquid tether I think from a design and architecture perspective the way you built your business particularly the tech stack is aligned with Cypherprunk principles
as closely as possible while operating in the fiat system.
Exactly.
And we actually kind of try to conceptualize this
inside the business with a chart,
with literally a chart of,
speed and on the top axis is like speed and skill and mass adoption.
And the other axis is a compromise.
So we try to do the least amount of compromise possible and see where we hit the ceiling.
Right. Because because there's a point where if you don't do any compromise ever,
then you can you can hit a ceiling.
So basically we have this like level again, always like a line where we don't cross.
an example of that is for example with the ball wallet you know i wanted to build and this is
completely unrelated to like an exchange but it's the same kind of philosophy where we wanted to
build um the most cypherpunk wallets but at the same time be usable on a mobile phone um and uh
you know the examples that i like to use is something like sparrow or wasabi which are in
my opinion, the gold standard of like full cypherpunk software, which is reproducible.
It's not always open source, but it's reproducible and you can do Utexo selection and you can
do this and that and like you can connect your hardware wallets and you're fully in
control.
And both of them are really usable software.
Like Wasabi is easy to use-ish, you know, Sparrow is easy to use, like a boomer can use
Sparrow.
It's not that hard.
So we wanted to build something that's very similar for mobile.
But the problem that we reached was when we tried to integrate Lightning.
When we tried to integrate Lightning,
and we initially tried to do something that's kind of like the Phoenix wallet,
which is a purely...
Phoenix is also doing its own set of compromises.
So it's not with the LSP, with just-in-time channels
and the backup system and stuff like that.
But when we tried to implement Lightning in the bull wallet, we realized that the absence of any kind of compromise just really did actually, we did hit a ceiling where we couldn't create a usable product that was satisfying my criteria, which is that I can orange pill a taxi driver and he can leave, I can tip him on my way out of the taxi within a few, you know, within a minute or two, and then he can be on board to Bitcoin.
And so we compromised with Liquid. Liquid was the first big compromise that I decided to make. And it was very conscious and it was a very hard decision to do, which is like, I'm going to compromise on pure, full self-sovereignty and use this other network, which is not as trustless as Lightning.
But there were other compromises that we could have made that I think would have been worse.
And I don't want to get, this is not like a tech, I guess, episode.
This is more like a political episode.
But, you know, eCash, I thought was too much of a big compromise.
Even Spark was too much of a big compromise.
You know, there's other technologies like ARK, which are, they have different trade-offs.
But anyway, so it's about setting up your ceiling of like no compromise.
And then once you really hit that ceiling, once you really hit the limit, then you can say,
okay, we really cannot reach our goal without compromising here. We've tried every single
thing that we can and we cannot, then you can kind of like raise the compromise limit a little bit
and see, okay, if I compromise like a little bit, what, what, um, what returns do I get on this
compromise? Like you have to think of return on compromise. That's the new business metric.
Okay. Fuck return on investment. It's return on compromise for every unit of compromise that I
make, how much units of success am I getting? And that's the way that you have to conceive your
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I mean, talking about the tech stack, I know you said it's not a tech episode,
it's more political, but I think they intertwine, particularly now with all this legislation that's
coming across the world to really cattle herd Bitcoiners into this digital panopticon. I've
been saying this a lot in the last year it is incredibly frustrating because if allowed to i
think builders like yourself and others out there could re-architect the global monetary and banking
system with a new tech stack that is much more efficient in way uh is far superior to the
incumbent financial system and monetary system that exists like we have the potential to build
true sci-fi, cypherpunk, monetary and banking rails.
And we're just being confined to this compromise matrix that you described because of the insane
regulations and the thirst for control by the governments and the supranational unelected
bureaucrats of the world.
Yeah.
And there's so many technologies that people think that Bitcoin is like old tech and it's
not good for privacy.
and you should use Zcash instead.
You've got the suits that are pushing for Zcash
and then you've got the Jason Bourne style
hardcore cypherpunks pushing for Monero
and then you've got the retards pushing for Ethereum
and so on.
But there's a lot of technologies in Bitcoin.
If I was to design it from scratch,
I don't think that privacy would be that much of an issue.
And for whatever reason,
people are afraid to use Bitcoin privacy technologies in their stack because somehow
they think the government is going to be upset at them. There are cases in Europe
where a bunch of exchanges decided to drop the Lightning Network. And who knows why in truth,
but I suspect that it was because they believe that Lightning was not necessarily compatible with
like the travel rule or KYC AML laws, which I think is complete bullshit. Like
when we got our Mika license, we still kept Lightning and we still kept Liquid.
We still kept PayJoin and all those kinds of technologies.
And then I'm sure the government, they ask questions about,
what is this PayJoin thing?
And we're like, don't look at that.
It's not illegal.
It's a transaction batching.
It's collaborative transaction batching and it helps you save on fees.
And there's a side effect that it improves privacy.
Same thing with Lightning and same thing with Liquid.
and all you have to do is say,
like, no, you have to defend those technologies
as being, like, purely valid,
and you have to also defend the user against...
That's kind of, like, the argument
that we're using in France.
It's like, let's reframe this as
from bad people trying to finance terrorism
to people trying not to get kidnapped,
and that's a very successful reframing,
and, you know, to your point, like,
if KYC was not mandated legally,
I would still probably do some.
We would still probably do some voluntarily.
A good example of that is in Costa Rica.
In Costa Rica, there is no KYC rules.
Bitcoin is entirely unregulated in Costa Rica.
There's no legislation at all
forcing us to do any type of KYC.
But we do enhance due diligence
And we do KYC some people in Costa Rica because I don't want to have, you know, I'm not a fan of Islamic terrorism killing my people in Europe.
I don't want to deal with, as a business, I do not want to deal with Islamic terrorists.
I do not want to deal with, there is child trafficking.
That is a thing.
And some of them might use Bitcoin.
I don't think they do use Bitcoin in reality, but some probably do.
there's probably some instances of that where Bitcoin is used. I don't want to deal with that.
I don't want to deal with cartels that smuggle fentanyl and decimate my civilization. And I also
certainly do not want to deal with scammers that steal money from old people with a bunch of crypto
scams. So there is a point where even as a business that's not mandated to do KYC, I would still
probably do some of it, especially for fraud and especially to protect elderly people from
getting scammed. But that's a purely voluntary business decision. Another thing where the
industry has been super cucked, very cucked, is chain analysis. So chain analysis, at the same
time, is a big threat to privacy, but at the same time as well, is a fucking scam. It's a pure LARP.
the amount of false positive that you get on chain analysis is surreal
we get a bunch of requests from a bunch of law enforcements and a bunch of
governments and a bunch of people all the time at Bull Bickhorn that are like hey
our chain analysis has identified that this transaction belongs to you
and we look and it's like no it's not us so chain analysis just
completely sucks and I don't think provides
and it's not legally mandated chain analysis was never legally mandated
in any country that I'm aware of,
what you have to do as an exchange
is to make sure that sanctioned entities
are not using your company.
But what you can do is,
and that's what we do, for example,
we don't use a third-party chain analysis service.
We download the list of addresses
and we check internally to see
if one of those sanctioned entities
is dealing with us.
You don't have to send all of your data
to third-party chain analysis companies.
And I guarantee you that all the exchanges
are doing that.
Every single Bitcoin address
that's ever been used on,
let's say, almost all of the exchanges,
except the select few that are kind of like,
well,
bull is not the only one,
but there's like,
I don't know,
maybe two or three or four worldwide that I know that have like the same
approach.
So you don't have to use chain analysis to be compliant,
but then the industry kind of like had this desire to be over
compliant and to show the banks that we're doing as much as we want.
So we created,
not we,
they created this kind of like meme around chain analysis that in order to
be a good crypto citizen,
then you have to have this $100,000 a year subscription to the
analysis software company, and you have to send every single address that you have.
And that's a big problem. That's also one of the reasons why a lot of the
exchanges, they don't support, they force address
reuse. They're forcing address reuse because it makes their chain analysis easier.
And what that does is that not only that fucks with everybody's
privacy, but it also exposes these addresses to quantum risks.
Because if you reuse an address, you've revealed the public key when you spend it.
that exposes a new level of quantum risk.
So this kind of like,
it's not only that people are not fighting back,
the industry is not fighting back,
but the industry is proactively cucking itself
in order to try to dispel the myth of the shadiness.
You know, it's like they have like an inferiority complex.
Like, no, you know, we're not sketchy.
Like, we're just like you guys.
We're just like Wall Street.
We're just like banks.
We want to play by the rules.
So we're going to invent these industry-wide rules.
And the thing about chain analysis, it's an interesting rule.
Again, that was fully created by exchanges, not by governments.
The requirements use chain analysis.
And now, like eight years later, if you're an exchange that doesn't, you know, and if you're applying for a partnership with a bank, they're going to be like, which chain analysis provider do you use?
And if you say no, then they're immediately going to flag you as sketchy because we've created this expectation of compliance, which was not required at all.
And then eventually this custom, so this is like an industry custom, customs tend to become law.
So, you know, currently chain analysis by third parties, like even with Mika, which is really hardcore European regulation,
they do not actually legally mandate chain analysis.
But if you don't have a chain analysis subscription,
you have to go above and beyond to demonstrate that you're still doing that.
So yeah, the industry has been cucking itself pretty badly.
And of course, it creates a moat, right?
And like Boll, if I was to start Boll Bitcoin today,
there's zero chance that I would be able to succeed.
Zero chance.
because the moat of compliance is so big.
Like Mika, I don't know how much it costs us,
but I don't know.
There's all sorts of costs,
but probably close to a million dollars
just to get the Mika license.
And it took like two years.
And at some point we had like six people
working like full time on this for many, many months.
The cost of compliance is huge.
And the level of, you know, yeah, it's really huge.
And then when I've launched Bull Bitcoin,
I launched Bitcoin like a classic American startup, like in my garage, basically, with no funding, just like hustling with one person and then two and then three.
And then that's kind of like how we were able to, I believe, be so successful is because of the lack of funding.
We had to be very, very, very careful about A, not spending too much money and B, treating the customers correctly.
Because if you're massively funded, you don't really need customers to like you.
you just need to raise the next round.
Whereas if you're self-funded,
if the customers don't like your product,
then you're fucked
because they're your number one source of funding.
But with all the regulation that you had,
if I was to start today,
it would not be possible.
Of course, the reason why we can afford
to spend a fucking million dollars on this license
is because we were early, essentially,
because we did that 10 years ago.
But if I was to start today,
I wouldn't be able to do that.
So these companies have obviously a massive interest in creating this moat.
To give you an example, like in Europe, there was about 4,000 something crypto companies in Europe.
And about 260 got a license.
I make a license in Europe.
So it's like about 90% of all crypto companies just got kicked out of Europe.
And a week ago, right?
And it went live July 1st.
Yeah, a week ago.
Even Binance didn't make it.
If Binance can't make it.
Well, you know, also Binance is, you know, it's Binance.
But even Binance didn't make it.
And pretty much all the crypto companies, we made it at the last minute.
And it was a close call.
Strike got it.
The deadline was July 1st.
We got it on June 2nd, 22nd.
Strike got it on July 28th or something, three days before the deadline was over.
And if you didn't get it before the deadline, you were essentially fucked.
And yeah, so there's tons of little brokers.
And that's how BullBitcoin started in Europe, actually.
was this broker, this Bitcoin-only cypherpunk brokerage
from France called Leonod.
And they've been operating since like 2018.
And they were like your local Bitcoin broker.
And they came to me and they're like,
dude, there's zero chance that we're ever going to be able to get Mika.
So either we sell you the business or we're just going to close shop.
So I acquired this brokerage in order to get a long regulatory story.
but I acquired this brokerage.
And I can tell you, I've had many, many people
reach out to BullBitcoin to be like,
we're closing shop in Europe.
We can't afford to comply.
Do you want to buy us out?
And of course, like, I can't, I don't want to.
So it's kind of like all the small good guys
are getting closed down and only the big guys,
very few of the small good guys are able to
to remain in operation.
So it sucks.
It sucks because, of course, all the Coinbases and Binances and Kraken and all these guys have nothing against them.
But they obviously have a vested interest in the regulation because they have the bandwidth and they have the funding and they have the weight, the political capital to remain in operation.
So they want these moats.
Whether they subconsciously want to expel their competition or not is another thing.
But, you know, deep down, I'm sure the Coinbase likes regulation.
You know, finance likes regulation, except when they get kicked out of Europe.
But they usually like regulation.
Yeah, they probably don't mind their competition getting taken behind the woodshed.
I don't think they share the same.
Yeah, I don't I don't think they share the same free market.
Ideas as we do.
But they're they're liberating the liberating finance and money on the Internet.
That's what Coinbase is doing.
They're bringing freedom money to everybody.
They're they're democratizing finance.
That's what I heard, yeah.
With USDC and prediction markets and gambling.
Democratizing gambling is more like it.
Yeah, it's disgusting.
On the point of chain surveillance too,
I know we talked about it, you mentioned it a while ago,
but I wanted to bring it up.
Roman Sterlingov's in jail.
There's been plenty of people pointed out that chain analysis,
their analysis of what they deemed to be him buying that domain was completely wrong.
And still, he's in jail.
The defense said, hey, can we audit chain analysis their systems to make sure that they actually did this right?
And they said, no, it's a black box. You don't get access to it. It's proprietary.
That is one of the biggest travesties. It is very dangerous.
And I can confirm and guarantee that trend analysis reports are being used to get warrants and also to convict people.
And there are false positives.
So this is like the equivalent of using 1970s fingerprint technology to convict somebody of a crime based on probability heuristics, which are completely bogus.
I have some personal stories that I will share eventually.
I don't want this to be the scenario, but I can guarantee you that false positives are very bad.
People are getting arrested with false positive chain analysis.
And it's frightening because judges will take a chain analysis report at face value
and consider it to be as damning as DNA fingerprint on the gun,
like the video camera.
Like, chain analysis will come up with this report, say,
okay Roman Chernoff is the guy that was operating the Bitcoin fog because of this PDF that I have which proves that it him The judge will see that and be like that is the same thing
It has the same weight as a fingerprint on the gun.
And there's like video camera with like 93% facial recognition.
And the DNA was on the victim.
They really believe that this evidence is like flawless.
Whereas I can guarantee you that it's fucking retarded because it's so retarded.
And even there's a brilliant report by Peter Todd where I don't know how this wasn't like major news, but Peter Todd in his report on chain analysis and Wasabi points out that he was at a dinner with one of the founders of chain analysis or like a VP of chain analysis or something.
he was drunk right and he was loose lips
he was drunk and he was bragging
that their shit is fucking phony as hell
it's complete LARP
it's just it's a warrant factory
you want a warrant on anybody
on earth just go to
Chain Analysis and you know
they'll find a way to link his Bitcoin
to some crime and then
they meet you at the airport
and they fucking cuff you
and then
you know and then you have to hire your own counter
Chain Analysis and then it becomes
a battle of experts. Yeah, it's frightening. That's part of
the reason why I'm so interested in technologies like Pajoin, for example, because one of
the foundational heuristics of chain analysis is the common
input ownership heuristic. There's a lot of
false assumptions that chain analysis makes.
Some of it is about identifying change and some of it is about
fingerprinting and stuff like that. But the worst one, I think, is
chain analysis makes the assumption that every input in a transaction belongs to the same person.
And from this heuristic, they build their analysis.
So part of the reason why I'm so involved in building and promoting PayJoin
is that on a massive scale, if enough people use PayJoin,
and what PayJoin does is it breaks this heuristic.
Like in a pay join transaction, the inputs don't belong to the same person.
Some of them belong to the recipient and some of them belong to the sender.
So if a sizable percentage of transactions on the network are pay join, then at a legal level, we can actually legally challenge chain analysis as evidence.
and there's a legal principle in U.S. case law,
which I think that would be probably the next legal battle
that I want to do is to challenge the legality of chain analysis
to be like, hey, it is based on faulty evidence.
And if that's the case,
then not only can it not be used for a warrant,
but people that were convicted,
it should be retried because the evidence was not good.
Kind of like, I think this is a common thing
where 30 years later,
now that the DNA evidence is better,
we realize that the previous DNA evidence
was not good.
So that's probably the next...
And again, we need to be using the courts
for our advantage.
Cypherpunks write code,
but cypherpunks also use the legal system.
We don't really have a choice.
I really do believe that.
I've had many discussions with cypherpunks
and they also tell me
yes, this is a key cypherpunk principle
is to, you know, Hal Finney and Adam Back
with the arms exports kind of thing that they did.
Like, we need to, there we go.
That's what happens always in the background.
Hell yeah.
Yeah, so cypherpunks use the law to their advantage.
And they also fight legal battles.
And I also want to make a distinction
between political battles and legal battles.
I think political battles are not fully obsolete.
They're mostly obsolete.
But thank God we still have some kind of legal system where the courts are presumably at least making a half-assed attempt to protect the rights of the individuals.
And we should leverage that to the maximum.
Completely agree.
What's the current state of pay joint adoption?
Obviously, you guys have implemented it and what you're doing at BullBitcoin.
I think there's a couple others maybe, but are you talking to any?
Because I think if you get exchanges like BullBitcoin, we need a few others to do it.
And that's a good jumping off point to get towards that critical mass that you described earlier.
So when we integrated PageLine, it was kind of like the reckless thing to do.
It was very early alpha level technology.
and there was a few other companies
that did it at the same time as us.
There's Cake, Cake Wallet,
a shitcoin wallet, but we love them anyway.
And Sparrow and Blue.
But all of us were kind of like
on incompatible versions of Payjoin
because either the technology was shifting so much
that there was like breaking change
or we were using different Payjoin protocols.
Like Blue was using Samurai's Payjoin protocol
and Sparrow was using, I think, also Samurai's PayJoin protocol,
whereas we were using BIP77.
Anyway, technical stuff.
But the PayJoin project, which is supported by private companies,
but also a lot of nonprofits,
has reached a level where we have what's called PayJoin version 1,
where the protocol is stable.
So BOL has it, but we're on version 0.23 or something.
Anyway, long story short.
Bull is upgrading to the latest version.
Everybody's doing that.
Cake is also upgraded to the latest version.
So Cake and Bull are going to be compatible.
And in terms of exchanges, I think that...
So technically, Bull, this is kind of like breaking news,
but PayJoin was only in the wallet.
It was not in the exchange.
So we've just managed to put it in the exchange.
It is currently in the exchange now.
It hasn't been announced.
And it's kind of like hidden from the general public.
It's like an experimental feature.
but bull is now um the exchange now has page on allowing people to buy and sell bitcoin with
page on um and i believe that a bunch of a bunch of others maybe two or three that i know of
that are either exchanges or swap providers um are swap providers would be would be massive like
companies like bolts like you know if they were to integrate page on that would be massive
um so it's unfortunately the adoption is low adoption of page on is low um but think about
it like this, like if the bull wallet and the bull exchange talk to each other and both have
page on and transactions are page on by default, like every single
transaction between a bull wallet user in the exchange is going to be page on by default.
So just that is going to create tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands of page on transactions. If you add bolts to that,
everybody that does a swap with bolts from the bull wallet, that's going to be another
page on. And if you add cake to that, anybody that sends
going to be growing. And then of course, there's Sparrow and then there's Wasabi as well.
So it's low right now, but I think it's just because the technology was early. PayJoin is
really complicated. It's not that simple. And of course, the other big one is silent payments.
I'm insanely bullish on silent payments. When Sparrow introduced it, people were like,
oh, well, it doesn't really do much. It doesn't solve chain analysis. Yeah, it solves the address
reuse problem and
address reuse is
the number one cause of Bitcoin privacy
issues because so many
people reuse addresses
that kind of like
the chain analysis companies can cluster
a bunch of entities because
if a lot of people are really bad
at their privacy, like you
who are good at your privacy, you stand out
essentially.
So other people
reusing addresses is bad for them, but it's also
bad for us.
and part of the reason why people reuse addresses
is because we like to have a reusable payment code.
You don't want to have to,
let's say for your mining pool rewards,
you don't want to be,
every time you get a payout,
you don't want to be putting a new address or something
or if you're DCAing or something,
you don't want to have to put a new address
or there's tons of reason if you have a donation,
the Pirate Bay on their website has a static Bitcoin Everybody that using a donation address puts a static donation address So silent payment really solves that And that something that we been working on There was a pull request that was just opened today
Finally, after one year of R&D, we actually literally opened the silent payments pull request in the bull wallet this morning.
And we're also bringing it to the exchange as well.
So that, again, like the user of the bull wallet would only give one address to bull forever.
It's going to be a silent payment address,
and we will just generate new addresses on the fly.
So there are tools, and there are technologies.
There's Liquid, there's eCash,
which is a bigger rabbit hole to talk about,
but Liquid, Swaps, Lightning, PayJoin, SilentPayments.
There's other experimental technologies.
There's another one that I'm looking at now
called OctoJoin by this guy called Floppy.
Very interesting transactional tool.
And people are building awesome software.
That's also one of the really nice effects of Vibe coding and the AI software revolution is that it reduces the asymmetry of power between the state and the individual because the state has enormous power for surveillance.
And we as individuals, we don't have like 7,000 engineers and a data center to protect ourselves.
like the NSA has, you know?
But now that we have Vibe coding,
we can build self-defense tools very cheaply.
So one of the best examples that I know is this,
these guys, they have something called Am I Exposed?
And it's an open source chain analysis
that you can run yourself
and you can see what the chain analysis companies
know about you by replicating.
And of course, if you look at the software repository,
it's not slop, it's pretty cool,
but you can tell like this is white coded stuff.
You know what I mean?
Like the,
the,
the capital required to build this kind of software,
like five years ago,
this would have been like a $5 million,
you know,
VC race to build this kind of software.
I need,
you know,
you need a runway for like three,
four years with like,
you know,
seven,
eight engineers and like,
you know,
a product manager and that kind of stuff.
Now you can just build these tools yourself.
So,
so yeah,
I'm pretty excited.
Like even the stuff that we've been doing with the wallet,
like,
Of course, as a wallet developer, you can't Vibecode a wallet.
That's asking for trouble.
But you can do a lot of testing and you can save a lot of time.
So the pace of progress that we have at Cypherpunks,
and again, you can't do slop with cryptography.
It's very dangerous.
But it is 100% true that we are accelerating way faster than the state,
than the bureaucrats.
So I'm very bullish on that because it's kind of like...
you know, drone tech or, um, you know, 3d printing or, you know, look at 3d printing now,
like it's fucking insane what you can do with 3d printing. Uh, look at, so, you know, right now,
I think we're still at the liberator level of, uh, AI, you know, like the first 3d printed gun,
but in two years, I mean, sovereign individuals are going to be able to do a lot of damage,
so to speak, like, you know, metaphorical damage. Um, anyway, I'm, I'm kind of rambling,
But I'm not bearish on the state of the cypherpunk movement, even though I am very concerned, for sure, because I'm probably less concerned than a lot of people, but I'm probably more accurately concerned than a lot of people because being inside the industry as a regulated entity, I can see the tag vectors.
I'm not as concerned because I also know that there's methods of resistance that are being employed.
so I am worried
but I'm also bullish
I'm also bullish on the cypherpunk principles
of Bitcoin
a lot of people are blackpilled about like
Sailor and BlackRock and whatever
Bitcoin has been co-opted
and whatnot like the cypherpunk dream is dead
and blah blah blah
and that's just because the ratio of
noise to signal
is like higher
the ratio of noise to signal is higher
because the absolute amount of
like garbage slop in Bitcoin, like NGU, Bitcoin Treasury Company,
Wall Street financialization of Bitcoin,
is increasing more than the cypherpunk base.
So the institutional narrative and the anti-cypherpunk narrative of Bitcoin
is increasing faster than the cypherpunk.
But who cares?
What matters is the absolute amount of cypherpunks working on Bitcoin.
I don't care about the ratio of cypherpunk to non-cypherpunk in Bitcoin.
I don't care about that.
I care about the absolute number of cypherpunks in Bitcoin.
And being in this space, and of course, there are like Signal chat groups and, you know, Telegram groups where I talk with a lot of privacy devs and we meet in person at conferences and we work on technology collectively.
And I've never been so stoked, by the way, like all the wallet developers are.
I mean, I wouldn't say we're all friends, but a lot of us are friends.
I talk with the cake guys. I talked with the Sparrow guy about silent payments.
I talk with Breeze. I talk with these guys. We talk all the time.
I talk with Aqua. And most of us are on the same page
when it comes to privacy tech.
I love to hear that.
I'm happy you said that because I agree. There's a lot of blackpilling out there.
But similar to you, I mean, I don't have as much inside knowledge in terms of the attack.
I think I understand them pretty well, but you see it day in and day out.
And obviously you're talking to these wallet developers.
I talk to a lot of the privacy tech people too.
But just again, to reiterate, the vibe coding unlock is real.
And when it comes to blackpilling, yes, the noise is way louder.
And yes, you may not agree with what Michael Saylor is doing.
you may think it's going to end in cataclysm.
It doesn't matter if you can run a node,
if you can create a private public key pair,
if you can use tools like PayJoin,
Silent Payments,
and use Bitcoin the way in which you want to,
which I hope is in a sovereign and private fashion.
It's never been easier.
It's only going to get easier.
It has never been this easy.
And people who said that Bitcoin was better 10 years ago,
shut the fuck up.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
No idea whatsoever.
Running a node, like, dude, like,
I have my, right here.
Well, you know, I don't want to dox my location, so I'm not going to turn my camera, but I have my start nine right here next to my Starlink.
Just like connect, connecting a self custodial wallet to your own Electrum using silent payments and pay join on your phone, doing swaps like like it's nothing like you can do that like with a few clicks.
Like people have absolutely no idea how bad it was like 10 years ago.
So, and, you know, everybody that says that Bitcoin is, that it's not advancing or it's not progressing or that the cypherpunk dream is dead is selling you something.
They could be just uneducated, but I think most of them know, but they're selling you something else.
They're selling you either a shitcoin or a financial product, basically.
Zcash. Zcash. Get the Zcash. Bitcoin's dead. Get the Zcash.
Of course. And like, for example, you know, self-custody. So there's there's like, you know, two major components to making Bitcoin better. It's privacy and self-custody. Right. And of course, you can't have privacy without self-custody by definition. So.
So that's why we work so much on self-custody.
I see it as the foundation of everything else.
Every property that makes Bitcoin valuable as money,
so the things that are on the sales pitch,
when you sell Bitcoin, censorship resistance,
it's this, it's that, you can't change the rules,
it's immutable, it's trustless, it's private.
All of these features of Bitcoin
that are on Michael Ciro's pitch deck
stem from the fact that you can self-custody it.
If you can't self-custody it,
then all those features kind of like disappear.
And the second one, the second layer is privacy.
And like, there are problems with self-custody,
but there's a lot of entrepreneurs.
You know, back in the day, you know,
there a certain type of individual which is again today liberated with AI because they can do stuff now that they couldn before but when you see a problem I see a business and I see
I see a marketing campaign
I see
a new feature
and I see a new market
that's what I see when I see a problem
and I'm not the only one like there's tons of people
that are like call it
cypherpunk entrepreneurs
so of course
self-custody is a massive problem
we've built tools for example
the main thing that I think
that I'm the most proud of
in the last couple of years
is our backup protocol called
Recoverable
it's not fancy
it's not really well known out there
but it's a very clever way
to create
an encrypted backup
that is safe for the cloud
using a key server protocol.
Anyway, so it's this tool in the Bull wallet
where you can do a backup in like 30 seconds
and it's very secure.
It's very, very secure.
It's not as secure as like 12 seed in a plate,
but it makes self-custody like extremely, extremely simple.
Kind of like the stuff that we did with,
you know, one of the things that Aqua and Bull
came up with this at the same time, by the way,
none of us were first.
it's actually a
I think I was first but
Aqua also thinks they were first
I agree to disagree but Aqua and Bull
came up with the same idea at the same time
which was
I think a consequence of the
first spam attack in 2023
where we realized that
you know a
mobile wallet where you manage channels
on your phone kind of like
Phoenix does not work if
the network fees are 150
Satoshis per byte
it just doesn't work because you need to open too many channels and it locks up too much liquidity
anyway um so that idea of like having what's called a graduated wallet so bull and aqua were
the first two graduated wallets and that's like where you have like a liquid or e-cash or
fediment or i don't know like a spark or something and it's using swaps to communicate with the
lightning network um so i'm really proud of those tools and then of course there's multiple other
things that we need to work on, like inheritance. Inheritance is the next big step to solving
self-custody. But again, these are problems that are being worked on. So if someone is selling you,
because the people who are selling you away from Cypherpunk Bitcoin, they're selling you,
it's not private, so use Zcash. And you can't self-custody your coins. It's not safe for you
to do that. You're not ready to do that. So buy my stonk. So I want to make sure that these people
run out of arguments. And also the argument like, well, you can't spend your Bitcoin anywhere. We've
solved that too. That was like one of the first things that I tried to solve when I was starting
out as an entrepreneur in 2013. Where can you spend your Bitcoin? Well, that's why we started
Bills, which then became BullBitcoin. That's already been solved with companies like BitRefill,
like Bitcoin Jungle, all these things. You can spend your Bitcoin. This is not a serious argument.
And, you know, with, of course, with Square in the United States, like, you can't have a serious debate with someone who's like, well, you can't spend your Bitcoin.
Shut the fuck up, man.
There's like, look at this map.
Like, I can buy Bitcoin.
We can walk down the street in any American city right now.
And I will probably find within a few minutes a shop that accepts Bitcoin because of the work of the cypherpunks.
Like, you know, I wouldn't say that Square is necessarily cypherpunk, but, you know, close enough.
Like they're, they're, they're, they're pretty good in terms of, of, uh, of doing things the right way within their, you know, they have a different box cause they're, you know, publicly traded company and it's a massive, you know, global empire now.
Um, but they've done it pretty well.
So anyway, just a lot of words to say that I'm very bullish.
That's it.
I am as well.
Um, as it pertains to DACA, the legal battles and, and honestly, all the cypherpunk tech that we've been talking about for the last.
portion of this conversation. What calls to action do you have for anybody out there?
How can we help on the legal front?
Well, by the time this episode is released, we have a website called DAC8.com. I did buy the
domain just to rub it in their face. So DAC8.com is a website which basically shows all the arguments
for repealing DACA8 and explains our legal strategy.
So I would say go on DACA8.com and educate yourself about what that is.
I don't really have that much of a call to action
because when we decided to fight this legally,
we decided not to do an industry group and not to do a crowdfund
and not to do a big thing.
Just because of the overhead of doing those things,
we're just like, fuck it, we're going to pay the lawyers ourselves
and we're going to do it ourselves.
So we don't have a donation page and we don't really have any real way for people to help us.
We have one partner in this lawsuit, which is another crypto exchange in France, the only other crypto company that I talked to that was willing or had the balls to do it.
So there's no donation page. There's no sign up. There's no newsletter. Unfortunately, I wish I had a better CTA.
I would just say, just use the wallet.
Just use the bull wallet.
That makes me happy.
And leave a nice review on the Play Store.
That's the best thing you can do for me
is to leave a nice review on the Play Store
or on the website because I read all of them
and it just makes it...
It boosts the morale of the bull team.
It really, really does.
We actually do read all the reviews.
So just do that.
Download the wallet and leave us a review
and you can say that you've contributed
to our mission that way.
we'll link to that in the show notes so you can go download and use it
highly recommend it Francis
there's not many of you out there and there's only one of you
out there there's only one of you out there and I'm very glad that you exist because I think
what you're doing what you have done for over a decade now at this point has been
extremely impactful for Bitcoin and very important for
the ability of individuals to use Bitcoin in a
sovereign fashion and
Particularly in this era of Bitcoin, a lot of what you do is overshadowed by the orange ties and the suits.
And I think it's important to remind people that the cypherpunk dream of Bitcoin is nowhere near dead.
In fact, it's more alive than ever because of people like you.
So I just honestly, earnestly thank you for all the work and the commitment that you put into this.
Well, I appreciate that you appreciate.
and it's a nice space to be in
because even though it's really hard to do what we do
the community which exists
there is such a thing as a Bitcoin community
people who say that the Bitcoin community is not real are stupid
the community is very supportive of what we do
and we really appreciate that
we appreciate that people appreciate
and that's what we feed on
so it's a great space to be building it
It's hard, but there's nothing else on earth that I would rather do.
So thanks to the viewers, everybody that comments on Twitter and everybody that says good things about us online.
We really highly appreciate that and makes it all worth it.
Thanks, guys.
All right. Peace and love, Freaks.
All right.
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Okay.
Thank you.