So now we know that it's there in writing that Epstein was funding this, while the Bitcoin Foundation, which imploded, was run by Brock Pierce, who was Jeffrey Epstein's advisor on crypto since 2011. So this gets more intertwined than I could have ever imagined. And as we'll continue to discuss, it even gets worse from there. You're listening to the Corbett report.
Welcome back, friends. Welcome back to The Corbett Report. It is February of 2026, and today I have a very important report for those who might be thinking that they are suspicious of all of the attention and coverage that the Epstein files are gaining in the establishment media. If the establishment media is talking about it, it must be a psyop and distraction, right?
Well, it might be a distraction of sorts. That is a distraction from some of the really scandalous, truly amazing information that we have uncovered in these Epstein files. And specifically, I'm not talking about the more prurient and more sensational headline grabbing types of scandals. I'm talking about a scandal that you may not have heard about, but is probably one of the more important revelations from the Epstein files so far.
It is contained in a very extensive, very well-documented article that is now up on brownstone.org. It is called The Hijacking of Bitcoin, and it is by today's guest, Aaron Day. So, Aaron, thank you very much for joining us today on The Corbett Report. Thank you for having me on. All right, let's get into this article, which starts by saying the original vision for Bitcoin was simple. Peer-to-peer digital cash, free from banks and government.
However, this article argues that this vision was deliberately hijacked as Bitcoin is now pushed as digital gold, a scarce asset for Wall Street with slow and expensive transactions for everyday use. All right. Well, Aaron, my audience may or may not be familiar with the ins and outs of the development of Bitcoin in the crypto space. So just to get everybody on board, perhaps we can start with just some basic information. You start by talking about the 2015 to 2017 block size fight.
So can you tell us what was the original Satoshi Nakamoto white paper vision for Bitcoin? What were the block size wars about? And how did that subvert that original vision? Sure. Well, I'd like to start by taking a step back even before that, which is to go back to 2008 when we had the financial collapse, well, the global financial collapse, but certainly a lot of it was centered in the United States.
And, you know, at this point in time, the banks were bailed out to the tune of billions of dollars, 10 million plus people lost their homes. And so there was actually a bit of unity coming out of the financial collapse and the bailout where you had the Tea Party on the right and you had the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was manufactured.
But nevertheless, you had the right and the left unified in their lack of support and lack of confidence in the traditional banking system for that at that moment in time. Bitcoin was essentially launched a year later. And the idea and the promise behind Bitcoin and what was written about in what's called the Bitcoin white paper was that, you know, the first time for the first time we had this idea of having peer to peer digital cash.
You had a cryptocurrency that could be used as an alternative to central banks, as an alternative to commercial banks. This was a form of money that was not created by these third parties. That had a fixed supply that was intended to be used as an alternative currency. It was intended to be used as something that you would use to buy groceries or to buy coffee or to do day-to-day transactions.
And it's a global currency, which is really important when you consider that 71% of the planet makes less than $10 per day. So the idea behind this is that you would now have a currency that you could use for day-to-day transactions that would have low transaction fees. And it's something anyone anywhere in the world could use for day-to-day purchases. So that was essentially the starting point. That was what the white paper was about. And that's how people were using Bitcoin in the early days.
I was introduced to Bitcoin in 2012 by a guy named Roger Beer, who was speaking at a conference in my home state of New Hampshire called Liberty Forum. And he talked about what I just talked about, which is that finally we had an opportunity to go around these central banks that foment wars on both sides and so on and so forth. And that got me excited. And so I actually started using it myself in New Hampshire.
In fact, at that point in time, 2012, 2013, there were numerous restaurants and stores in New Hampshire that we're accepting Bitcoin as a payment method. And a lot of people don't understand this at all about the initial use of Bitcoin. Most people, because I've gone, my wife and I have been to 27 US states, four countries talking about technocracy and central banks and what you can do as an alternative. In fact, you had me on the solutions report to talk about that a year or two
ago at this point. And so we were using Bitcoin for that purpose. And by 2017, there were major retailers and organizations accepting Bitcoin directly. You had Overstock.com. Where you can buy everything from furniture to a whole variety of different products. Microsoft accepted Bitcoin directly. Expedia accepted Bitcoin directly. You could actually book your travel and flights. There were Subway sandwich franchises that were taking Bitcoin. It was really hitting mainstream adoption.
And then all of a sudden in 2017. Bitcoin went from being fast and inexpensive to use, in fact, cheaper than using the traditional financial system. If you're using a credit card, for instance, the credit card processing, credit card processor typically charges, you know, 29 cents per transaction plus 3.29% of the transaction. And at that point in time, Bitcoin was better, faster, cheaper money.
But then all of a sudden, as the usage surged, by Q4 2017, you were seeing average transaction fees of $50, $50. And it would take anywhere from 7 to 10 days to actually finalize a transaction. Well, obviously, no business can afford to pay $50 for transaction fees, and no one's going to be willing to wait 7 to 10 days. And so all of a sudden, people stopped using Bitcoin for day-to-day transactions, which we'll get into. The narrative started to shift.
People stopped talking about Bitcoin as peer-to-peer digital cash. And then out of nowhere, people started talking about Bitcoin as being digital gold. They started talking about it as being a store of value, something that you don't spend, something that you just hold on to. And because there are only 21 million Bitcoin, allegedly, that will ever be created, it's even more scarce than gold. And, you know, therefore, you know, you should hold it and never spend it.
And so this this shift happened. And, you know, I kind of the end point of the shift was 2017, but it turns out there was a process building up to that.
Um it from you know kind of 2015 to 2017 and we now know more specifically who the players were and it does involve jeffrey epstein it involves people from traditional finance that were involved in funding and the not only the changes to the system itself but were heavily involved in what i'll call the propaganda to change the public narrative from a digital currency to this store value.
And for people who need more detail and information on that process of the hijacking of Bitcoin and what the block size fight was about, I would highly recommend that they read the book by Roger Veer with Steve Patterson, Hijacking Bitcoin, The Hidden History of BTC. It's at hijackingbitcoin.com. It goes through that history and talks about some of the, well, more of the detail of what you've just mentioned there.
But let's start bringing in the Epstein side of this. And in order to do that, I think we have to start at least setting the pieces on the table here. So perhaps we can start by talking about the early Bitcoin foundation that was running in the early 2010s that funded the core Bitcoin developers, how that collapsed and what that collapse. Well, what came in to fill the vacuum of that collapse?
Yeah. And the way that I actually found out about all of this is I wrote a book a few years back called The Final Countdown. And my interest in this has been several fold. One, you know, as a user of Bitcoin who found Bitcoin to be become unusable by 2017, you know, I've been I've been interested in studying the history of this. But I've also been studying central bank digital currencies.
And so three, three and a half years ago, I was studying what was going on primarily because I was noticing that friends of mine that are at the intersection of crypto and liberty were being targeted by the federal government. And I looked into, well, why is this happening? Why specifically are people that are promoting Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as an alternative to central banks? Why are these people being targeted by the federal government?
And then I discovered that there's a global movement to roll out central bank digital currencies. And the central bank digital currency is a digital form of fiat that can be tracked, programmed, and censored by the government and other third parties. So this is a, if you're interested in freedom and privacy, the last thing you want to see is central bank digital currency rollouts.
And so as I started researching this, I found that there are 134 countries around the world at various stages of developing and rolling out CBDCs. 11 countries have already rolled out CBDCs. And these countries represent 98% of global GDP. So, I mean, this is essentially everyone effectively is actively engaged in working on these CBDCs. Well, then, you know, I started being based in the United States, I started looking at, well, what's going on in the United States?
Where does the United States stand on this? And that's where I found, and most people still to this day don't know this. The Federal Reserve Bank has conducted three successful pilots of central bank digital currencies. There's a project called Project Hamilton, which is a project to replace essentially the dollar. It's a digital version of the dollar. And this project has been going on since I want to say 2018.
They've developed a digital currency that can handle 1.7 million transactions per second, far more than the current capacity of the U.S. Financial system. This has actually been built. This has been tested. There's another called Project CEDAR and a third called Regulated Liability Network. Well, when I was investigating these, what I found was all three of these CBDC pilots came out of MIT.
So it was MIT working with either the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston with this Project Hamilton or working with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with the other two. And at the time, I discovered that Jeffrey Epstein had funded. This group out of MIT that was working on these CBDCs. So in my book and in subsequent articles, I made the point that, well, hey, it looks like Jeffrey Epstein is funding these CBDC pilots.
What I also found is, to your point about the Bitcoin Foundation, so to take a step back, Bitcoin is an open source project. So it's open source code. Anybody can go online and go to the GitHub and you can actually download and review and audit the code. There's no central organization behind Bitcoin. So you have open source developers and people that contribute to the project, but there's no corporate entity funding it.
Well, a lot of people might say, well, hey, this sounds great, but it turns out that open source developers don't develop code for free. There aren't also other white hat actors that are going out there auditing code for free. People work for compensation. This shouldn't be news to anyone. This shouldn't be a surprise. But if you have an open source project, then the project itself is subject to whoever's funding the developers, and the project could go in a direction you don't want it to go.
So what happened is an organization was formed, a nonprofit, that was a nonprofit. Called the bitcoin foundation and it had you know five original people involved with funding it roger veer and some of the uh earlier developers and a lot of people contributed and the idea was that this bitcoin foundation would preserve the integrity of the project and preserve the integrity.
Of the white paper um there's a whole sort of history which by the way should be written and researched on its own separately. I guarantee you there's a multi-part series on the internal dynamics of what happened with the Bitcoin Foundation. But before I get into kind of where the Bitcoin Foundation broke down and how this ties into Jeffrey Epstein, I want to talk about a character named Brock Pierce.
Now, Brock Pierce is somebody that I've encountered. I encountered him first about 26, 27 years ago. And I didn't even know who he was at the time. I didn't even connect the dots until 2015. And without going into my own story and background, I'll give you the quick version of it. I started a technology company in 1995.
And I was in the process of taking this company public. And we hired an investment bank, this firm called Lazard Frere, which is a really niche boutique investment bank out of New York City, but they usually only work on really high end deals. And so it was a big deal that they were working on, you know, our IPO as a kind of early technology company. But they had another company ahead of us that they were in the process of taking public called Digital Entertainment Network, den.
And I encourage you to research on your own everything involved in this company. But the punchline is the company never went public and ended up filing for bankruptcy because all of the founders, including Brock Pierce, had to flee the United States to. Because they were being charged with, you know, sex trafficking, or I don't know if it was sex trafficking, but there were underage boys, and it was a whole big scandal. And so basically, all of the founders left.
Brock Pierce had previously been a child star, he was in the movie Mighty Ducks. And so he was actually brought in as a really young CEO to be the face of the project. And I, you know, I don't want to say anything defamatory about him that he was necessarily leading the charge on, you know, the other illegal activities. But the other two founders, I believe, were found guilty and were in hiding. Everybody went to Spain.
Needless to say that their IPO didn't happen. And this actually impacted me directly because it actually shut the IPO window because the taint surrounding this project. And so I didn't know anything about it. I didn't pay attention. I couldn't have told you it was Brock Pierce then. But it resurfaced that then all of a sudden, the same guy, the same Brock Pierce, ended up becoming the chair of the Bitcoin Foundation.
And I thought that was weird, just based on his background. I'm like, why is this guy the chair of the Bitcoin Foundation? But we later find in the Epstein files that Brock Pierce went to Little St. James Island to an event hosted by Jeffrey Epstein in 2011. I believe it was called a MindShift conference. A whole bunch of people from diverse technical areas were kind of sharing ideas and brainstorming and networking.
And coming out of that 2011 event, essentially, Brock Pierce began advising Jeffrey Epstein on all matters related to cryptocurrency. And I will tell you, no one knew this. I mean, I've been involved in crypto since 2010. I know people that have been involved in crypto since 20, excuse me, I was involved in 2012. I know people that have been involved since 2010. No one knew that Jeffrey Epstein had any involvement at all.
Even the article that I wrote suggesting that he was involved in CBDCs, I only found one article where Jeffrey Epstein was ever interviewed talking about Bitcoin, and it was in a publication called NexaWeb from 2017.
So the only article we ever have from Jeffrey Epstein is in 2017 where he discusses the fact that he believes that Bitcoin is not a currency the peer-to-peer digital cash is outlined in the white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto but rather he thinks it's a store of value and I thought it was very bizarre like why is the only article this guy ever has on this topic him talking about this narrative shift.
It didn't make any sense to me, but I suggested in an article that, hey, maybe he was involved in not only funding MIT and these CBDCs, but then this other part where. The Bitcoin Foundation, as I mentioned, is this nonprofit that's funding these developers where Brock Pierce is the chair. In 2015, that organization implodes. They have a whole series of internal issues, financial issues.
Some of the people on the board had issues with the government involving cryptocurrency exchanges and money laundering and so on and so forth. And so it just so happens, as Bitcoin is making this shift from digital cash to digital gold, the funding of the developers went from the Bitcoin Foundation, headed by Brock Pierce, to MIT. MIT started to take over the funding of these developers.
And i suggested that Epstein might be involved and we now know from the Epstein files that not only was he involved but in an email from Joi Ito who is the head of MIT to Jeffrey Epstein uh you know exchange uh Epstein's money was explicitly earmarked to fund these developers and they even name the developers there's uh Gavin Andresen there's uh Wladimir van der Laan or something like that, and a guy by the name of Cory Fields.
So now we know that it's there in writing that Epstein was funding this, while the Bitcoin Foundation, which imploded, was run by Brock Pierce, who was Jeffrey Epstein's advisor on crypto since 2011. So this gets more intertwined than I could have ever imagined. And as we'll continue to discuss, it even gets worse from there. It does. And you've already painted a quite an incredible picture there.
And for people who need to see the evidence, obviously, Broc, my video editor, will be showing this on the screen, the specific email exchanges that you're talking about. But of course, they're all contained in this voluminous article that we're discussing here. So we've set the table and now we have a sense of some of the players that are on this table. How do things develop from the point that we have MIT starting to fund,
literally fund, the core developers of Bitcoin? How does the change take place and what other organizations and people are involved in it? Well, there's another step that actually happened before MIT took over the funding of the developers. And this involves the company Blockstream that you'd mentioned. And Roger Ver's book and Steve Patterson's book, Hijacking Bitcoin, goes into this in some detail. But I do want to explain a little bit about what Blockstream is and how all this fits in.
So Blockstream is a company that was started by a few early Bitcoin core developers. And the basic idea behind Blockstream is this. What they did was, and we haven't really talked about the block size, but the original idea behind Bitcoin was for it to be peer-to-peer digital cash. And Satoshi Nakamoto discussed in these online discussion forums the idea that from the very beginning of Bitcoin, it was intended to compete with Visa and MasterCard.
Satoshi talked about the idea that Bitcoin should, in the fairly early days, be able to handle 25,000 transactions per second and that it should be able to get even faster over time as computers get faster, as bandwidth increases, so on and so forth. He was looking at Metcalfe's law and some of these other things that apply to technology, which is that, you know, this still holds to this day, technology tends to get cheaper and faster.
And so he was saying, well, hey, 25,000 transactions per second now, but this thing should scale to do millions of transactions per second.
And so the way bitcoin works is you have what are called miners but i'll try to simplify how this works you have math you have computers all around the world that are trying to solve very complex, math problems that are very expensive in terms of computational power to solve these math problems, and the computer that solves the math problem first gets to add the the transactions from In this 10 minute interval, so there are every 10 minutes,
a new math puzzle is solved and new transactions are added to the blockchain. So it's an immutable ledger. And every 10 minutes, there are new blocks of transactions being added to the blockchain. And the way that it was structured was at the very beginning, every 10 minutes, if you solve this math problem, you would get initially 50 Bitcoin. For solving the math puzzle, plus whatever transaction fees happen to occur in that block of transactions.
And then every four years, this reward that started out as 50 would be a reward. So after four years, the miners would receive 25 Bitcoin for each block that was solved. And then four years after that, 12 and a half, et cetera. And you keep on doing this halving until at some point at the end, 21 million Bitcoin had been created. And that was the fixed cap.
Well, why was this structure put in place? The structure was put in place as an incentive early on, while there weren't a lot of transactions and transaction fees, it was an incentive for miners to secure the network and to have a lot of different computers competing to solve these math problems so that you didn't have the concentration of the network in the hands of a small group of people. This was the economic system of Bitcoin.
And so there was a one mega, the original design had no limit to the size of the blocks. So in other words, the original idea was, well, yeah, we should be able to process 25,000 transactions per second. These blocks were expected to become large and the miners were expected to be computers that were in big data centers.
This was, you know, again, Satoshi talked about this at length, but early on as they were testing the network, you know, as you're testing these kinds of systems and you're trying to work out the kinks, they put in a one megabyte limit just for testing purposes. Well, that one megabyte limit, you can only put about the equivalent of seven transactions per second worth of data into a block.
So this was initially done as a test. And then this is why we discuss in the hijacking part of this, a whole bunch of people then decided, well, we're going to make that one megabyte cap permanent. And they put a whole bunch of argumentation around it. The network needs to be decentralized, so on and so forth. And so we're going to cap, we're going to throttle Bitcoin so that it can only
do seven transactions per second. But we're going to build what are called second layer solutions on top of Bitcoin. To be able to handle more transactions and to make it feel actual peer to peer digital cash. And so this company Blockstream was formed to be a second layer solution, a for profit company that would benefit and in fact would only be viable if Bitcoin was throttled at seven transactions per second.
So does this make sense so far? Hopefully I'm I know a lot of it makes sense to me, but I've been following this for a long time for people who who need more information on this. Of course, they can see the Hijacking Bitcoin article and the Hijacking Bitcoin book that we talked about before. But yes, long story short, there are people who want to keep the blocks small. And those are the people working for companies like Blockstream that,
oh, by the way, happen to have Tyse Epstein. So let's get into that. So there's that. So there's the company Blockstream that personally benefits from the blocks being small. And Blockstream as a corporation, and we knew this from hijacking Bitcoin and from publicly available information, had, let's just say, the kind of investors that the port of Bitcoin was to actually get rid of these kinds of companies in traditional finance.
One of the big investors was a guy named DeCastries, who was the CEO of AXA, a big European company. He also happened to be the chair of the Bilderberg Group. So you had all of these companies investing in Blockstream that were part of traditional finance, the thing that Bitcoin was there to disintermediate, to get out of financial transactions. Well, what we found in these Epstein files is that Epstein actually invested in Blockstream.
Before the collapse of the Bitcoin Foundation and before he funded the developers who cemented the changes that Blockstream benefited from. This was absolutely bombshell information for everyone. No one knew this. This was not something that was widely known at all. And in fact, the CEO of Blockstream from the emails apparently visited Epstein's island, as did others involved with Blockstream. And nobody had any idea that this was going on.
So in other words, to simplify this, Epstein invests in Blockstream, a company that benefits from Bitcoin being throttled. And then seven or eight months later, fortuitously, the company that had been funding the Bitcoin core developers, which was chaired by Epstein's advisor, Brock Pierce, collapses. And then he ends up funding the MIT developers that cement the seven transactions per second and one megabyte block size. Just absolutely fascinating information.
But it gets even more bizarre as we go through this. Because remember, my first foray into this was, hey, it looks like, why is Epstein funding these CBDC pilots? So there are a lot of people claiming that the second layer solutions for Bitcoin would enable it to be peer to peer digital cash as opposed to just, you know, following the original design.
But what you find is if you're going to now change the narrative for Bitcoin and you're going to call it digital gold, you're going to call it a store of value. Well, in order to be a store of value. It needs to either maintain its price or go up in price. Otherwise, people will not view it as a store of value. Well, we're going to go back now to the same guy, Brock Pierce.
Brock Pierce was a co-founder of a company called Tether, which you may have heard of, which is a very popular company even today and a very large company now. Tether is a stablecoin. A stablecoin is a digital token that essentially represents fiat, where one token, one USDT token equals $1. And in theory, how this is supposed to work is in order for this token, this tether, to maintain its peg, there need to be assets backing it that are equal to or greater than $1 worth of value.
Well, it turns out that during this time period in 2017, when the narrative shift happens, a University of Texas study found that over 50% of the price appreciation from Bitcoin in 2017 was due to Tether being printed and used to buy Bitcoin.
But it was separately found from two different actions, one from the CFTC and one from the state of New York, that Tether was, in fact, not fully backed and that the CFTC found, I believe, that there were really only 26, 27 cents worth of assets backing one dollar's worth of Tether. In other words, they were printing Tether out of thin air. And claiming it was backed by fiat, which is also money that's printed out of thin air, but it wasn't.
And then they were using that to pump the price of Bitcoin, which is what created the whole store of value narrative to begin with. So in other words, what I'm suggesting is the whole idea that Bitcoin is a good store of value is a fabrication based on this fake tether printing that, you know, Brock Pierce was the co-founder of that company, while also the guy responsible for handing over the development of the funding of the development of Bitcoin and hobbling it to MIT through Jeffrey Epstein.
So it's just remarkable how all of these pieces are fitting together. More and more remarkable because it isn't just Brock Pierce connection. There's other connections to this stable coin space that present themselves in the Epstein files. Like, oh, who's been in the news recently for his Epstein connections? Oh, Howard Lutnick, who denied having extensive Epstein ties. Turns out he does have some Epstein ties. Let's talk about Howard Lutnick.
Yeah, Howard Lutnick is a very fascinating character in all of this. And I've actually been writing about Lutnick for a while. And this story is also, to me, when I look at this, this is a level of corruption that's far beyond, say, for instance, Nancy Pelosi engaging in insider trading. Howard Lutnick is, and where people may have just become familiar with Howard Lutnick is, you know, he had to testify recently on his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Howard Lutnick is Jeffrey Epstein's next door neighbor in New York. And, and it turns out, it looks like he might've purchased his house from a trust created by Epstein, which is bizarre in and of itself. And I'm not going to, you know, the fact that, you know, Epstein and, and Lutnick have, you know, nine and 11 are the addresses on the street that they share together in New York City that, you know, I'm not going to go, I don't know anything about where to draw conclusions with that.
But when Lutnick was testifying for his position as U.S. Commerce Secretary, he claimed that, you know, he'd only met Epstein once in 2006 in New York and was absolutely disgusted by him and had nothing to do with him. This was what he was saying as he was going through his confirmation process. And we now know from the Epstein files that that's not exactly true. We know that, in fact, Epstein donated, I think it was $50,000 to a fundraiser in Lutnick's name.
Lutnick visited Epstein's island with his family. They were business partners together. So Lutnick completely lied about his relationship and then even when he was grilled on it he's like well you know. The extent of my relationship is whatever it is that's in these documents. We already know that he lied before, and so I'm sure there's even more to it than that. But I had separately written, before even knowing the Epstein connection,
about Lutnick's involvement with Tether. Now, this is a fascinating story. I mean, I've been around politics for a long time, and no one heard about Howard Lutnick. Howard Lutnick was not a major player in Republican politics. In fact, he was a major fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2016. So this is not a guy that is known for his role in Republican politics.
So I'm going to walk through the timeline here. So before the election, a few years before the election, Howard Lutnick, his firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, invested $600 million in Tether. They were the largest at that point ever outside investor in Tether. And part of the terms of this agreement were that in exchange for this investment, Cantor Fitzgerald would essentially get the exclusive contract to manage all of the United States treasuries backing Tether.
Now, I know this gets a little bit complicated, but I want to walk back a few steps. So remember, I told you that Tether was found to not have reserves. Now, there was no requirement that Tether be backed by U.S. Treasuries. There's no regulation prior to this Genius Act, which I'm sure we'll get into. There was no requirement that you had to back your stablecoin by U.S. Treasuries. You could, for instance, back it by gold, silver, Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies,
you know, whatever. Just so long as you had adequate backing, there was no rule or regulation. So Lutnick gets involved to manage treasuries. Now, did Tether even have treasuries? I want to point out at this point, which, by the way, to this day is still true. Tether has never passed an audit. They have never successfully passed an audit. And they've actually gotten to the point now where they can't even get an audit firm to work with them.
So, you know, these big audit firms that work with publicly traded companies all the time apparently don't want to work with this company that has a now a multi hundred billion dollar market cap. That's kind of a red flag in and of itself. So Lutnick makes this investment. With the contingency that he gets to manage these treasuries, then all of a sudden he gets involved in Republican politics. Now, remember, he's a big fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
He goes from that to being the chair of Donald Trump's transition team. This is a massive position. The head of the transition team is responsible for vetting all of the cabinet, so is involved directly in recruiting and vetting every person at the level of the cabinet. So how you go from not being in the Republican Party politics and supporting Hillary Clinton to that role is something that needs to be investigated, because that's very, very bizarre.
But what's worse than that is, originally, Lutnick was trying to engineer and put himself up for treasury secretary. He was actually trying to position himself. There was a big kind of debate about this. We now end up with this guy, Scott Bezant, who is an advisor to George Soros, which is a whole other separate bizarre situation. He ended up getting the treasury position, but there was a whole bunch of infighting and everything back and forth because Lutnick wanted the job.
Well, think about this. Lutnick just cut a deal with his company to manage the treasuries for Tether. And then he wanted to become the Treasury Secretary. I think that was even found to be a little bit too blatantly corrupt. And so instead, Lutnick ended up as Commerce Secretary. But what he did was worked closely with this guy named Bo Hines. Bo Hines was brought in to be an advisor to Trump on crypto matters.
And Lutnick, working with Bo Hines and others, drafted something called the Genius Act. Now, I've spoken a lot about the Genius Act, and a lot of people don't understand what the Genius Act is or what the implications are. As I mentioned, I was fighting CBDCs. I continue to fight CBDCs, and Trump came out and said, well, we're not going to have a CBDC. And he signed an executive order saying there's going to be no CBDC. So now people think that that issue is dead.
But in essence, what we have instead is something much worse. We've passed something called the Genius Act, which I'm saying is a backdoor CVDC. What this legislation says is if you are a private stablecoin issuer, a regulated stablecoin issuer, one, you have to follow all of the financial surveillance that comes out of Congress currently, the Bank Secrecy Act, know your customer laws, all of that.
You have to comply with all of that. So, in other words, your stable coins can be tracked and frozen and are now under the control of Congress. But on top of that, you now have to back your stable coins only with U.S. treasuries. This is a massive windfall. The biggest beneficiary of the Genius Act is Howard Lutnick, because his firm manages all of those treasuries and gets all of the fees for managing all of those treasuries.
So, I mean, your audience is probably familiar with, you know, the Federal Reserve and the creature from Jekyll Island and the fact that the way our monetary system works going all the way back to 1910 is, you know, a shadowy group of bankers got together. And basically, we now have this system where, you know, we issue money based on debt. We don't even know who owns the Federal Reserve, so on and so forth.
Well, Howard Lutnick one-upped this. So essentially now one of the largest players for the digital dollar, his firm is managing all of the treasuries. He's almost like leapfrogged the Federal Reserve. It's just it's breathtaking how, how bizarre this is and how corrupted it is on its face. I mean, it's just the fact that this, this is this is going on. Well, now we know. I suspect this. I haven't been able to prove this yet.
But, you know, I have to think that somehow Pierce and Epstein were involved in bringing Lutnick into this because, you know, there are emails. And I actually also believe that it's likely that Epstein was involved in Tether as well, because we know that through Brock Pierce, Epstein invested in Circle, which is U.S. USDC, well, I mean, what's the likelihood that Epstein's not going to get a chance to invest in the very project that his crypto advisor has started, right?
I mean, and in fact, there are emails back and forth where Brock Pierce is asking Epstein to introduce Larry Summers to Tether. So clearly there's communication back and forth where Epstein's involved with Tether. Epstein's involved at the level of, at the very beginning, trying to get Larry Summers involved. And I will point out, since this is timely today, I just saw in the news that Larry Summers has resigned from Harvard, where I believe he was the president, based on his extensive.
Involvement and inclusion in the Epstein files. I mean, again, there's three million pages. I there is it's going to take months, if not years, for people to crowdsource and put together all the pieces on this. I've just focused my part on cryptocurrency and CBDCs and stable coins. And it's just absolutely breathtaking. So now, you know, I'm going all over the map, but that Bohinds comes in as a crypto advisor. Bo Hines and Lutnick and others pushed this genius act,
which Lutnick's firm is the biggest beneficiary of. And then 10 days after the Genius Act passes, Bohinds leaves as Trump's crypto advisor and becomes the CEO of USA Tether, the USA subsidiary of Tether. Now, look, we are all familiar with revolving doors in government. I mean, this is very common in Wall Street and certainly in pharma where you'll see somebody from the FDA who then goes on to become an advisor. But even usually there's kind of an understanding of, hey, we should at least
wait six to 12 months. This guy left after 10 days. And so now Tether is one of the first official government-sanctioned stablecoins, right? In the world, and Howard Lutnick is the biggest financial beneficiary. All of this, and Tether has never passed an audit. I actually, before the election, I was trying to get to Trump through people that are his advisors telling him, I think that Tether could be the big short 2.0.
And now, based on the government involvement and the overlap of people in the administration, I think this thing is going to be too big to fail, because when you study the history of Tether and the people involved, I mean, the people that are involved with founding this were involved with, you know, alleged Ponzi schemes prior to their involvement with Tether.
There's nothing about this that looks legit for this to essentially become like the main shining example of crypto innovation and so forth coming out of the U.S. There's one other reason that the government was so eager to pass the Genius Act. As you probably know, the U.S. has now 38, almost $39 trillion in debt. And no one wants to buy U.S. debt anymore. Japan is not in a position to be able to buy U.S. debt. China is selling U.S. debt.
And, you know, certainly Congress isn't going to do something like balance the budget. We're continuing to have $1.5 trillion deficits every year. So how are they going to fund that? Well, by requiring these stable coins, which by the way, are popular, let me tell you how popular stable coins are in the last 12 months. Globally, stable coins were used in $33 trillion worth of financial transactions, that's actually greater than Visa.
And at the rate that it's growing, by 2030, it will be $120 $20 trillion, which is more than Visa, MasterCard, and direct deposit combined. So this is a really popular solution all around the world. And now, because of that popularity, by requiring these stable coins to be backed by treasuries, our Treasury Secretary Besant initially said he believes we'll be able to sell $2 trillion worth of treasuries. In other words, we'll be able to fund $2 trillion in additional government debt.
And he's since expanded that to now $3 trillion. So what we get out of the Genius Act is a backdoor CBDC that funds at least $3 trillion in additional debt where our commerce secretary's firm is the biggest beneficiary. It's just mind boggling. It is overwhelming. And I hope, I truly hope people at least sense, at least have the sense to understand that this is monumental, truly world changing information about what is going on on the monetary scale right now.
And most people unfortunately will not because this is highfalutin economic sort of stuff, whatever. All I know is my stable coin will help invest for my retirement or something along those lines. But again, the scale of what has just taken place, hey, crypto decentralized, fight the man. It's against the central banks. We can go around. We don't need them. Disintermediate the banks. Yay.
Two stable coins backed by treasuries. That maneuver that has taken place that most people don't even understand, don't know, don't care is incredible. And the fact that Epstein's fingerprints are on every part of this is itself incredible. Just to tie the little bow on the Epstein-Lutnick 9-11 reference, whatever that might mean, it just so happens Lutnick is another one of those lucky people who happened to miss 9-11 because, of course.
Cantor Fitzgerald in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, but he wasn't there on 9-11 because he was taking his son to kindergarten that day, so he missed 9-11. His brother did die along with several hundred other Cantor Fitzgerald employees that day, but Howard escaped and went on to become Howard Lutnick. Well, interesting part of that story. But again, there's so much information that we've already gone through today, so much more detail in the article itself.
So I will direct people to it. But I think you sum up with a very good summary here. You say Epstein funded the MIT devs who killed Bitcoin as cash. Brock Pierce ran the Bitcoin Foundation into the ground, opened the door for Epstein's money, brokered Epstein's Coinbase stake, which we didn't even get into, sat in Epstein's mansion pitching Bitcoin to Larry Summers, co-founded Tether, and kept emailing Epstein until 2018. Tether then printed unbacked dollars to pump Bitcoin 50% in 2017.
Howard Lutnick, who lied about cutting ties with Epstein, took over management of Tether's $130 billion plus treasury reserves before he even joined the Trump transition. He pushed for Treasury Secretary, missed, landed at Commerce, installed his ally Bo Hines as White House crypto advisor, had Hines run through the Genius Act, then watched Hines quit the White House and immediately become CEO of Tether's U.S. subsidiary.
Just an incredible amount of information. And you sum up with every single player is connected. Every single move was coordinated.
The Genius Act entrenches the exact loopholes tether has lived on this is not big short 2.0 this is big short 2.0 on steroids pre-planned and run by the same network that already owns the outcome just an incredible amount of information and detail here so once again i'll exhort people to watch uh to read this article but i guess the real question here aaron is what should we do with this information.
Well, I want to say this. That article I wrote pretty quickly just because of the pace of development and how relevant it is to what's going on. But there's another article that I've written for the Brownson Institute that hasn't been published yet, but it's 12,000 words.
And it goes into the Genius Act, financial regulation and something called the Clarity Act, because I do want to talk about the fact that there's something even worse than the Genius Act on the horizon and people don't understand it at all. People don't even know what's going on. It's called the Clarity Act. Now, if you've heard about the Clarity Act, you will hear it as this is going to provide clear rules of the road for people to be able to buy and sell crypto,
so on and so forth. This is not what it's about. And it's not a bill that's about crypto. It's about creating digital tokens that can be programmed, tracked and censored for everything that we own. So if the Genius Act covers how we pay for things, the Clarity Act adds this surveillance and tracking to everything that we own, our stocks, our 401ks. Commodities, oil, agriculture, eventually real estate. All of it is going to be tokenized.
Larry Fink has talked about this at BlackRock. He said that everything is going to be tokenized. This bill is working its way. It's already passed the House, and it's going through various iterations. But this is how we end up owning nothing.
And not to go into too many details about this, but if you've ever talked about the great taking, there's a whole bunch of legal framework shifts that have happened in the United States since 1994 that essentially make it so that the next time there's a financial collapse. You might think if your broker goes out of business that, well, hey, those are my investments. I'll just point those over to a new broker.
Well, it turns out in all 50 states, they've changed the laws so that, in fact, your economic interest in these investments will go first to the creditors of your broker, which namely will be the four largest banks in the U.S. Once you create digital tokens that represent these contracts. Then when there's a financial collapse, they're going to be able to basically shift everybody's assets with a click of a button. So I wanted to mention that because it's relevant and it's active right now.
And Howard Lutnick's firm is positioned to be a major beneficiary in this as well. So you asked what we can do. We have to absolutely make it public and accessible for everyone to understand how not only corrupt this is, but this tokenization through these two bills is accelerating technocracy. I've been saying that this last election that we had was technocracy with resistance versus technocracy without resistance and technocracy without resistance won. We got backdoor CBDCs.
We have in the United States Real ID, which is a digital ID. We have Palantir connected into federal government databases. We have AI surveillance. You know, technocracy has flourished. I mean, this isn't like a 2030 thing. This is a 2027 thing. So I wanted to mention that. But I don't really believe there are a lot of political solutions for this, which is why what I've been advocating for as a real solution is to exit these systems.
Stop using fiat currency. Do not use government regulated stable coins. Get out of central centralized tokenization. Start using privacy coins. Start using gold. Start using silver. Exit the health care system in the United States, which, you know, my wife and I have launched a it's a free service. We don't make any money off of it. It's a global medical tourism marketplace. But, you know, every minute in the U.S. somebody files for bankruptcy due to
medical bills in the U.S., 75% of those have insurance. The system is a complete scam. Exit that, cancel your insurance, form a trust, and then investigate using medical tourism where you can actually save up to 80% and get better health care outcomes. The real solution to this is for us to take our lives back, to take back our free will, and to build parallel systems. At this point, this is the way. And we can do it, but we really don't have a lot of time.
And I have been, for three and a half years, I've been saying this is it. Technocracy is it Digital currencies This is the platform But it's even happening faster Than I could have ever imagined And it is more corrupt And incestuous Than I could have ever imagined And now for the first time Because of these Epstein files We can actually follow the money And start tracking what's going on.
All right. An incredible amount of information. I'm very much looking forward to that 12,000 word deep dive and hopefully more information yet to come. But for the meantime, we will direct people to brownstone.org for this article that we're talking about today. It's called The Hijacking of Bitcoin.
Everything that we have talked about today will be in the show notes for today's episode at corbettreport.com/epsteinbitcoin for all of the notes and all of the links to everything that we're talking about. I think we're going to leave it there for today. Aaron Day, Thank you very much for this deep dive and for bringing it to our attention. Thank you for having me. Money. It is the economic water in which we live our lives.
Will you tell the American people to whom you lent 2.2 trillion of their dollars? We spend our lives working for it, worrying about it, saving it, spending it, pinching it. So all that information is available in our commercial paper program. And who got the money? But what is it? Where does it come from? How is it created? Who controls it? Tell us who they are. No. 100 years ago, in 1913, the Fed was created. The banking cartel wrote their own rules and regulations.
They're not agencies, you runner. They're persons under FOIA. There is no other agency of government which can overrule actions that we take. Century of Enslavement, the history of the Federal Reserve. Watch the documentary for free and access the transcript at corbettreport.com/federalreserve or support the filmmaker and purchase a DVD copy at newworldnextweek.com.