Hey and welcome to unlimited Hangout. I'm your host Whitney Webb. If you are closely following the rollout of the global biometric surveillance slavery state under the guise of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, you may have noticed that many of the powers building and promoting the system have a
soft spot for digital currency. Many digital currencies but currently existing and in the works are being used to build the infrastructure for complete centralized control in the eradication of privacy, specifically financial privacy. Hence the war on cash and the lesser discussed war on encryption and bid to label privacy focused cryptocurrencies, is national security threats, and drivers of so called cybercrime.
Many of the most predatory pilots of the Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies which are routinely tested on refugees, stateless people, and other incredibly vulnerable populations involve linking digital ID in some sort of digital currency or token as to be detailed and unlimited hangouts next installment of our sustainable development goals
series. The UN specifically links mandatory digital ID globally to financial inclusion and argues that digital currencies are necessary in order for so called Sustainable
Development to advance. While the pitfalls and dangers of digital currencies are more apparent than ever, there is a cultural rift among those who at least once upon a time saw certain technologies and developments under this umbrella like blockchain and Bitcoin as a potential exit ramp from the road towards centralized tyranny and control by building a
permanently decentralized monetary system. Bitcoin specifically allegedly anyway was created in response to the 2008 economic crisis and the corrupting influence of central banks and the criminal activity of commercial banks. While some Bitcoiners have fought to uphold these values, many powerful actors in the Bitcoin space and the broader cryptocurrency sphere are undermining this ethnos are building systems that completely oppose the original impulse that led to bitcoins
creation. Among those of us who oppose the rollout of the for AR System and the mass implementation of the biometric surveillance state. Is it still possible to work with digital currencies and oppose the increasing push to digitalize everything is a decentralized digital existence still feasible or increasingly becoming a pipe dream? Joining me today to discuss these issues and more is Mark Goodwin. Mark is the
director of editorial for print at Bitcoin magazine. He is also the author of several pieces about misguided and even nefarious efforts to centralize Bitcoin, and the author of the upcoming book entitled The Bitcoin dollar. Welcome to unlimited hangout. Mark, thanks for being here today.
Thank you, Andy. It's an honor to be here. I'm very excited to talk about all these things.
Well, there is definitely no shortage of things to talk about. Here, that's for sure. And, you know, we have a lot to get into. With that being said, these days, there are several mainstream and academic articles that deal with what they term crypto colonialism, or rather cryptocurrency being used to entrench and deepen Neo colonialism and neoliberalism,
etc. So a lot of these articles. One example we'll have in the show notes is the article blockchain humanitarianism, and crypto colonialism which was published last year in the patterns journal. Another example is an article from 2021, which is from Vice a publication I'm usually not a fan of but this article did bring up some important issues but also conflated things they probably shouldn't have completed. So this article is entitled crypto colonialist use the most
vulnerable people in the world as guinea pigs. And I'll just read a quick excerpt here. So quote, UK nonprofit Oxfam in partnership with an Australian Financial app has developed an eyebrow raising solution for Vanuatu, which is a Pacific Island at this specific ocean, I guess. It's there's a disaster relief payment system that runs on blockchain and cryptocurrencies, so that when other systems go down, people
can still pay for essentials. Quote, the idea was that as soon as the disaster event happened, they can switch on this economy explained Pete howelsen, a senior lecturer at Northumbria University, who studies cryptocurrency and blockchain in an interview, when the situation becomes less dire, the system can be shut down, but it's not the money wanting people who control the system. It's just someone at Oxfam that decides when the disaster is over, and people lose their economic
sovereignty. Continuing on, it goes on to say Oxfam Oxfam's blockchain intervention in Vanuatu is part of a broad trend and charity and aid work toward innovation and solution ism the belief that every social problem has a technological solution via programs based on blockchain and cryptocurrencies. non government organizations and aid agencies have said that the shift from dollars to Bitcoin will enable a more efficient transparent
charity system. But along with as these technologies bring surveillance and political pressures, undermine local sovereignty and create resource allocation controls on recipients. So I'll stop there. But in this article, they conflate, you know, this Oxfam program and similar programs like the absolutely horrible and are Willian building blocks program of the World Food Program and the UN. And so they conflate those with a variety of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin
related projects. And there's also a conflation of all cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin. So first, do you think that conflation is wrong? And why? And second, how might some people who see crypto Bitcoin etc, as a means of escaping central bank control, enabling the same kind of control grid currently being pursued by central banks?
Yeah, phenomenal question. Um, I definitely, I see Bitcoin and the extended cryptocurrency spaces, very separate things, in terms of like, you know, what, what we can actually use them as, as tools, like I think Bitcoin is, is a very powerful tool in the right hands and used in the right way, and not perverted away from its actual core, you know, decentralized property. And a lot of these other coins are just simply not decentralized in any way. So, you know, Bitcoin really works.
You know, because it's, it's, it's consensus is held up, you know, by node runners that the cost of running a node is very cheap, it's internet and electricity costs, and, you know, maybe a few 100 gigabytes of hard drive space, very minimal computation, whereas you get into some of these, like, Aetherium. And, and, you know, I think we'll talk about Cardano and some of these other ones later, and they have a much bigger you know, entrance fee basically to participate in the
system. Whereas Bitcoin, you can literally just download core and sync a node on on like an old, an old laptop, totally fine. So, there's a huge separation, I think of just from that, you know, what the Bitcoin Blockchain is, and how it's actually, you know, decentralized consensus across
the world. Really, a lot of these secondary alternative currencies are really kind of like a perversion or like a bastardization of what Satoshi Nakamoto brought to us in a way to not, you know, neuter the state's ability to debt pardon, like Bitcoin does, but rather, like encourages the state, right, you know, Blockchain is, is just a technology and like
any other technology can be used for freedom. And, you know, it's wonderful freedom tech, you know, when applied within Bitcoin, but then you look at some of these alternative chains, and it's like, they're running, you know, Petro dollars, basically, in the form of stable coins. And they're creating, you know, a completely transparent ledger. For the, the transfer of Yeah, of like, state issued debt, basically.
Surveillance probably too, right. Oh, because, you know, it's a publicly available ledger. So, I mean, yeah, I mean, surely we're a lot of this goes to including CBDCs. Right.
100% Yeah, I mean, Bitcoin, I like to, I like to say that it's a transparency technology. I think a lot of people sort of mistake it for a privacy technology, kind of, because of some of its original use cases, you know, being you know, kind of a black market money. You know, and it's early days, and its first happening cycle when it was, you know, inflating it, you know, 50% of all Bitcoin ever issued were in those first
four years. And so we're seeing a lot of it come out, it's a fast money, you want to spend it quickly, until the havening, you know, reduces this issuance. So we saw a lot of people using it for drugs, a lot of people using it for I'm sure horrible, horrible things as well. I'm sure it was used. You know, for a lot of the things that I'm sure we'll get into with with Yeah, but so it's actually and, of course, absolutely 100% 100% I mean, no, no, no currency uses more or supports more crime than
the dollar. It's not even close. And I actually believe we just had Elizabeth Warren come out and make some ridiculous comparison or or something about how cryptocurrency is funding the fentanyl market. Which is just ridiculous. It's like I don't go after the
after the Sacklers. Or
cause the crisis. Yeah, exactly. Or the giant influx of, of fentanyl from, you know, like from the CPC. It's like it's coming into into our borders. We know that. I think to blame this on. Blockchain is ridiculous. So I guess long and short. Yes, there's a false you know, connection between these alternative currencies that are designed to enrich the privileged few that are around the proverbial money printer, or like if it's a staking system or whatever, you know, this
issuance of currency. You know, we're just recreating central banking, basically with much more, you know, ability to surveil, and to control and to blacklist to like destroy, you know, unsanctioned transactions, or wallets that have used mixers or any of these privacy technologies. A lot of these other changes allow that to happen. So yeah, I think there's a huge false connection there. And then the second part of the question was remind me again,
how might some people who see crypto and Bitcoin and so on as a means of escaping central bank control might, how might they be enabling the same kind of control grid currently being pursued by central banks? And, you know, other actors?
Totally. So yeah, Bitcoin is a is an is an open ledger. And it's a permissionless database. Really, at the end of the day, the way that you like make a transaction is you imbue data that can be, you know, publicly published, but can't be modified. There's actually no decryption or encryption used. And publicly, within Bitcoin, it's all publicly key cryptography. So everything is open, every transaction is out
there, it's in the world. And the base layer, the database itself, you know, every 10 minutes, there's a, you know, a few megabyte blocks that gets produced by the network that can contain any information that anyone wants to imbue into it. Obviously, generally, these are financial transactions, and innately anything on Bitcoin is a financial transaction, because it requires a fee to get in the block, but it's an open database. And now we have people building. You know, there's this
group. Again, not to try to burn too many Bitcoin bridges here, but there's a very popular group within the Bitcoin space lightning labs, they were one of the very, very beginning, you know, propagators, I guess, of the idea of the Lightning Network, which is this scaling mechanism that goes on top of Bitcoin that basically allows you to share, you know, a UT EXO, which is an unspent transaction output, which are
kind of like the denominations of Bitcoin, like the bills. And so they've been working on this project now for a few years. That was called Tarot. And now it's called taproot asset protocol, because they got sued actually, for using someone else's name. But what basically the point of the system is to be able to imbue other assets in natively into the Bitcoin base layer. And the main one that they're looking to do, of
course, is Petro dollars or stable coins. And there's this kind of whole general sort of consensus within Bitcoin that I, you know, violently disagree with, and a lot of people just cheer it on of how, you know, hey, let's not, you know, Michael sailor was quoted at Pacific Bitcoin last year as saying, you know, let's not be martyrs, let's not fight the
system. You know, let's adopt the dollars and dollars being on lightning, you know, via this, this Tarot asset protocol is going to be like $10 trillion industry, and you know, we're all gonna make a bunch of money and numbers are gonna go up, and, you know, this is gonna be so great, we'll be able to give, you know, the Global South, basically access to dollars, and it's this virtue signaling thing will give 3 billion people the ability to use Bitcoin, and then they kind of mumble the dollar
part of it. And it's like, are we really like, is really the point of Bitcoin here to globalize the dollar and put it on faster rails increase the monetary velocity of the dollar? And in my opinion, obviously, it's not I mean, the whole point of Bitcoin is to neuter the state's ability to debt part
and, and to print money. And to issue these these treasuries and now Bitcoiners, you know, at the highest level, these are the best paid people that the smartest devs are kind of going to this, this, you know, this group of people, and they're literally putting dollars on the base layer. And
so really quick, though, isn't another motive behind bitcoin, supposed to be bypassing central banks, but also banks in general?
Um, well, that's kind of a big thing. That's a bit of a confusion within this space as well. I mean, I think the the actual blockchain like Bitcoin is like blockchain in general, is a pretty lossy technology. Like it's pretty clunky. It's very expensive, you know, to to basically to use this very small growing database that has a limited amount of transactions that can be, you know, in a in a set block every 10 minutes or so. So there's actually absolutely limitations to how
many People Bitcoin can serve on the base layer. And there are mathematical limitations to how many people can actually own, you know, self custody Bitcoin, on the main on the main chain, we got 8 billion people or whatever, and we wouldn't be able to have 8 billion UTX O's. So we do have to create systems and scaling solutions that work within Bitcoin. And I think some of those things will end up kind of looking like Bitcoin banks.
And how Finney who is, you know, kind of considered, you know, he was the first person to receive Bitcoin from Satoshi, and kind of considered, you know, very likely to be a part of the Satoshi team that created Bitcoin. And he has a bunch of quotes at the very beginning of Bitcoin in like 2010. Even earlier saying that, you know, I think the future of Bitcoin is
Bitcoin back banks. And, and I think a big part of Bitcoins, misunderstanding is that it's not really prepared to replace the dollar unnecessarily as a medium of exchange, but it can replace US Treasuries, as this government issued, you know, reserve asset, like the dollar isn't really the reserve currency of the world, or it's not the reserve asset of the world. It's really US Treasuries. And Bitcoin can
replace that. And we can still have, I mean, trust is, trust is still an important part of being a human being, you know, I mean, you can't create a lot of these financial situations, mortgages and some credit and debt creation, like without, you know, trust. And I think people think that technology will sort of replace all human trust. And that's just not really
necessarily possible. So like, Yeah, we're gonna have to have solutions where there are custodial moments, you know, hopefully, for a very short period of time to kind of limit
the ability for someone to be debased. But yeah, it takes away, you know, fully fractionally reserved, you know, kind of the system that we have set up right now, and US banking, it's ridiculous, Caitlin long out of Wyoming just tried to do a bank, that would be, you know, kind of considered a narrow Bank, which, you know, would have a one to one reserve. And the Federal Reserve didn't give it federal reserve status, because if one bank went narrow, it would mess up every other
fractional reserve bank in the whole system. So I think there will be trust, there will be Bitcoin banks in the future, but they can be created by Bitcoiners, they can be created by you know, Freedom forward, people that are going to, you know, okay not use this as a way to just surveil your, your economics, your economic activity, we can actually build these mints that are used blind signatures that are very, very,
very private. And, and we can hopefully, take away, you know, the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury's ability, you know, to fund all of these crazy projects blow up the debt limit, and then anytime it comes up, oh, shit, you know, time to pay the piper, they can just issue more debt and sell it to, you know, all across the world, to Japan, to the Bahamas, to China. Those are
kind of the three biggest ones. Right? And I don't think Bitcoin destroys the bank as a general concept, but it definitely limits.
I didn't, I didn't mean kill off the banks, I mean, as to what you can, like, in theory, right? Bypass the banks, by paying people in something, you know, the dollar,
right, totally. And then this peer to peer way, you know, it doesn't rely on any intermediaries. You know, whereas if you're, if you're using his owl or a fucking Venmo, or whatever, or Google Pay or whatever, it's, you know, you're entirely up to the whim of the the payment channels, whereas in Bitcoin Yeah, I mean, that is its value proposition is that you can send trustless transactions in an adversarial environment. And they will be processed immutably. I mean,
that is the value prop of Bitcoin. So it definitely, it definitely messes with the state's ability to debt pardon. Unless, you know, Bitcoiners all come together and get this weird social consensus that, no, we need to put Petro dollars on the base layer, we need to support these companies like a tether or a USD see these huge stable coin providers, tethers up to like $80 billion. They're now coming out, you know, because interest rates are so high now. They're like making oodles of money. I
mean, it's ridiculous. You know, they're making five and a quarter percent on on billions of dollars of these papers that they're holding. And now they're buying Bitcoin with it. Now they're doing other things because they're making so much money. And so this group, yeah, I mean, they're incredibly influential in the Bitcoin space. And they're very connected to a lot of kind of strange things that have
happened, you know, there was a big BitFenix hack. Maybe like eight years ago or so that it was like a, like just under 200,000 Bitcoin were stolen. And this is the same people that do
the tether issuance. It's all the same ownership. And, you know, of course they then did, they issued some shit coin token to kind of make up the last that they that, you know this Leo security and sold a bunch of it and then it ended up being that the person that hacked the Bitcoin was keeping it in like a Google Drive the keys in a Google Drive and it was these like Two Gen Z kids. This this woman kind of infamously Razzle Khan who was like this, like, Instagram rapper, mumble rapper,
totally ridiculous, all this crazy iconography. And she had all the Bitcoin in her, you know, just like saved in a Google Doc. And so of course, the DOJ seizes it. Now the DOJ has all that Bitcoin. And these are the same people that are, you know, issuing dollars, they're, they're propagating the
ideas of putting dollars on the base layer. And they're incredibly influential, just like in the in the, you know, the spoken space of Bitcoin, you know, there's spaces running all day, there's big influencers, that a lot of them are paid for, by, you know, the stable coin, and I have a lot of issues with it. I mean, there's a lot of really nice people, of course, you know, in the space that, you know, I'm not trying to say everybody's a bad person or anything like that. I love a lot
of those people. But also, you know, there's there's an issue here, of dollar rising Bitcoin and continuing to propagate, you know, the biggest us, you know, the biggest terrorist organization in the world is the US government. And if we continue to buy debt and do this weird orange washing thing that we're doing, yeah, it's, it's absurd. I think it's very against the, you know, like, what are we doing here? Like, why are we doing this?
Well, if your dollar rising Bitcoin, then instead of Bitcoin being something that, you know, challenges, the central banks, you're giving the Federal Reserve, you're allowing it to continue to have the power it has, which was absolutely, the problems of that was supposed to be the motive behind bitcoins creation. Right. To Yeah, it became.
So absolutely, I mean, I think there's, there's a, there's a good thread that, you know, Bitcoin was created, very, very likely, you know, directly out of the 2008 crisis, you know, in in the first block, there's a note to a UK Times article that's like the chancellor on the brink of second bailout for the banks. And Bitcoin was was launched, you know, it was announced Halloween of 2008, and was
launched at the start of Oh, nine. And you could argue, and I think a lot of people do relatively successfully, that perhaps Bitcoin, you know, was coming out of, you know, the US government or the US intelligence as a way to create a neutral base asset for the debasement, the economic debasement that was coming via the printing that had to happen when, you know, all these CDOs and the whole real estate market
imploded in the great financial crisis. And so, I kind of proposed this theory that the this idea of like the Bitcoin dollar, which is an analogue to the petro dollar, so, the idea that, you know, when Nixon did the gold shock, or took us off, the Nixon shock, took us off the gold standard in 71, you know, we immediately, you know, invaded, invaded the Middle East and started setting up basically a financial monopoly on the ins and outs of petrol and oil as a means to sort of control both
industrializing nations, but also, hey, we need to print money. We want credit expansion, but we want to have a guaranteed buyer to be able to buy up our debt. So they created a monopoly on the ins and outs of, you know, you had to use US dollars to buy this energy commodity, that's oil. So if you wanted to industrialize, you got to buy dollars, so we can print dollars all day, and we know we have a guaranteed buyer, right?
And now you have the powers that be moving to this post oil world are right pushing us that way. So obviously they need a new financial system. Right, but doesn't involve the petro dollar and so where do you see those actors? Seeing what benefit would they reap from this Bitcoin dollar you talk about?
Yeah, totally. I mean, to me, it's, I think it's the exact
same mechanism. You know, you want your money, your your money standard to be tied to energy, because you want it to be hard to source you don't want it to be something you know, like literally you can go print the dollar on trees or whatever you want it to be something that if you want to create more credit, you know, if there's a cost it's you know, expenditure to be able to extract that energy commodity, that's what by metal standards are the gold standard really isn't energy standard,
you still have to get the gold out of the ground, and that requires energy. Right? Exactly. And oils exactly the same way. And so bitcoin is an energy standard, requires, you know, its issuance requires a significant amount of energy to be able to submit enough cryptographic hashes to you know, have a chance of winning by Basically a, you know, a lottery every 10 minutes to see if you can, you can produce the
block and get the rewards. And so we've sort of recreated that exact same mechanism over the Bitcoin energy commodity system, where we've, and I say we obviously like America, I have nothing to do with it, I want this all to burn down. But you know, America has basically set up a monopoly on the ins and
outs of Bitcoin purchasing and selling. And, you know, well over 95 I think it's even it's closer to like, 97 98% of all Bitcoin pairs, and trades and volume are in US dollar denominated, you know, tokens, whether it's actually literally US dollars, or these, like, stable coins that we're talking about? And, I mean, literally, it's called tether, right? I
mean, it's like tethering itself the dollar to Bitcoin. So you create, the main difference with Bitcoin is that there's a cap supply, and its issuance is asymptotically, approaching zero, and then eventually actually does round down to zero. You know, in the after the 33rd, having or in the 33rd epoch, after the 32nd happening, there's no more Bitcoin being produced that will be around like 2140 or so. And so there's a cap supply on the actual growth and supply of Bitcoin. So
it's demand it's very demand inelastic. So if demand is super, super high, and you're on a gold standard, you know, gold, four axes, you know, you can send, you know, three more people to the mind, to mind gold, you can extract it out more, because, you know, you can actually get more of the gold out because it's worth more me and you will be panning for gold in our backyard and selling, you know, our chains and whatever,
because it's worth a bajillion dollars. And, and then you'll see, you know, the supply will increase, because demand is so high, there's so much more supply that hits the market Bitcoin, it doesn't do that, it doesn't matter how many people are trying to find the next block, it's always going to produce the same amount of bitcoin. And so it is this very unique, you know, we've never had a monetary system that has a capped, you know, supply, I mean, it has a finite amount
that can ever be produced that's never existed before. That's a state change of money in a very significant way. And, you know, that's, that's a phenomenal thing for monetary growth, in general. And that's why I am so interested in Bitcoin, because I understand that, you know, hey, this is a state change. And if we use this moment, and we seize this opportunity to get some, basically, this kind of like real estate, in the future economy of the world, you know, that we should see pretty
significant increase of wealth? And how do we use that? What are the things that we're going to, you know, a lot of us that have been in Bitcoin for a while, have made some money? And it's like, what are we doing here? Are we just going to go relax, and let it be completely dollarized and just, you know, let the global south just get, you know, kind of blacklisted and all these stupid, you know, stablecoin, like, there's this whole thing of like banking the unbanked, and it's like, you're
just charging them a fee to use your bank account? Do you still have counterparty risk? You know, we saw some of these banks that hold paper for these stable coin companies go under, in the last six months? And you know, is that really giving this this virtue service to the global south that, you know, we just, you know, we've created a mechanism for them to get robbed by US banks. I mean, it's a joke.
Yeah, that's my stop, for sure. And I do want to talk about what you just said, this whole idea of banking the unbanked and I know that at the recent Bitcoin Conference, which you and I both spoke s, there were was talk of that as like a good thing, banking the unbanked and that that phrase really concerns me, because it's what the UN and a lot of the, the BIS and the European Central Bank and these guys, even the Federal
Reserve, say that exact same thing, right? And what you're talking about is, you know, how Bitcoin is being dollarized, and enabling those same actors to really continue to engage in bad monetary policy and, you know, which translates into a lot of predatory behavior specifically directed at the Global South. I mean, it seems like a total mess here, especially for those of us that are looking to build parallel systems to resist,
right, this push to centralize control. So I guess my question would be this whole situation we're talking about, who do you think is likely to win out then I guess we're talking about essentially a cultural rift in Bitcoin and some people have, I guess, been making compromises with the existing system, not seeing it is all bad and needing to be thrown out. And I guess the big theme of my work is that yes, it does all need to
be thrown out. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, and I'm with you, 100%, which is why I'm so glad that you're engaged. thing with the space because I think we need more people speaking honestly. And truthfully. And it's like, of course, there are good people that work in all these companies and whatever and blah, blah, blah. Sure, of course, but it's
like it's a value judgment. Right? I agree. I agree, people don't realize maybe what they're doing. And they can kind of far from the whole ethos of the, you know, that was originally behind all of this.
We've gotten. So we've gotten so far from the ethos, I think, the the cypherpunks. And this is why, you know, I know I said earlier that it's possible that Bitcoin kind of came out of like US intelligence. And I think it's definitely a possibility that absolutely acknowledge Yeah, of course, of
course. And I have a whole theory we can talk about with John Nash, which, which associates, you know, to ran out of Santa Monica and he was writing papers to the NSA, about encryption and all this, and there's, there's a big
connection there. But I think the the extra opions and the and the Cypherpunk, you know, mailing list, these people that included how Finney and Zabo you know, a lot of these, these, you know, they're basically, you know, anarcho capitalists, you know, coders, I think, a lot of the writing, you know, when I go back and read a lot of that stuff, I mean, I think it really is in the right place. And I think the ethos of sort of early Bitcoin, in my first interactions with it were in
like, 2014. And, you know, I didn't really understand that it was something that like, could go up in value, I really just saw it as a medium of exchange and understand that until a couple years later, but I think the ethos has changed significantly in the last few years. It's like we saw
institutions arrive. You know, we saw the stable coin providers go from being, you know, basically a pet project on top of Bitcoin into being this like dominant share of like, literally dominating the Ethereum network, basically, the dollarization of Ethereum has allowed it to be state captured. And obviously, JP Morgan, you know, has huge hand in that. From the very beginning, they own a lot of crucial
infrastructure and Ethereum. And they dollarized it up so much that the actual native asset, weight on the theory is now more in stable coins than actually in Ethereum. itself. And just
really quick, I just want to add, JPMorgan right run by Jamie Dimon who helped build Citigroup and JP Morgan and Citigroup basically own, they do own the New York Fed, which is the dominant force on the Federal Reserve. So they essentially also dominate the central bank paradigm we're talking about, Sorry, continue.
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I think these are big American banks are, you know, a huge part of, you know, kind of what I'm getting at where it's like, the institutions have arrived, you know, they really came in 2017, when, you know, we first broke, you know, 10k, and then later 20k, and that's when we saw these institutions show up. And a lot of them were kind of talking shit, you know, at the time of, you know, kind of pushing it down, and now they're all like offering services, JP
Morgan has like, jpm coin or whatever. And then, of course, you know, this huge investment in the infrastructure of Aetherium. So, I think the US banking system right now, you know, it has a lot of choices to make, about how they, you know, basically try to parasitically attach themselves to Bitcoin.
And I think that the Bitcoiners in general are losing kind of the social information more, if you will, about, you know, what's actually happening here, lightning labs themselves, again, good people there, but, you know, they're one of their phrases is Bitcoin eyes, the dollar when they're talking about adding, you know, the dollar to the base layer, and it's kind of really the opposite. You're kind of dollar
rising Bitcoin, quite literally. And yeah, you're empowering these bankers, and you brought up the BIS earlier and it's like, you know, Elizabeth Stark of lightning labs did some consultation for the World Economic Forum in 2016. In August, in collaboration with Deloitte, this pete this thing called the future the future of financial infrastructure. Yeah.
And it's she's actually listed as just Lightning Network and like lightning labs, I don't even know if was was set up at the time the lightning white paper had come out, but the Lightning Network hadn't even existed yet. It relied on some blockchain, or rather some big Bitcoin. There was a fork called seg wit that allowed the ability for lightning to exist. So then that didn't actually go live until 2017. So this is a couple years before lightning was even, you know, at at sort of a
workable stage. And now we're seeing you know, Project icebreaker came out of the BIS which is a collaboration with the naugus Bank and the Bank of Israel. And Norway and Sweden, and obviously, the BIS and they created this, this came out in March of this year. And it's basically this idea of how to use domestic you know, retail CBDCs and literally, it uses the
exact same channel mechanism and techniques. Knology that is an essential part of how the Lightning Network works these things called HDL C's, I don't want to get too much into the technical weeds, but literally, you know, we have paper trails of consultation, you know, from the people building these
systems. And now years later, we're actually seeing CBDC systems being being generated that literally use the exact same probabilistic time locked code and settlement structure these payment channels to enable CBDCs you know, and this is this is right out of the BIS. And so, we're seeing, you know, collaboration of banker of bankers, and some of the worst people in the world with like, you know, these Cypher punk Bitcoin thought leaders, and it's like, what are you again,
what are we doing here? Not to keep saying that it's a cop out, but like, what are we doing here? Are we trying to build the Panopticon here? Are we trying to build that alternative?
Well, it's sort of reminds me of, so Yasser Levine's book surveillance Valley, he has a section on the people behind Tor, I guess, Roger? Line, right? And how he was basically collaborating, the people that Tor was supposed to be evading, you know, so I guess he was,
you know, was funded by DARPA wasn't it? Right? I can't remember,
it might have been like, naval intelligence or something like that. I can't, I can't exactly. Remember the specifics, because I read it, you know, several years ago, and I only have so much space in my brain. But he, you know, I mean, he was basically like, letting the Feds know, first when there was a vulnerability in Tor so they could explain it, and all sorts of stuff. And this is a guy that was held up as being a cyber
funk, whatever, you know. Yeah. And it's, he's not right. He's acting like a fed.
Exactly. And now, we have to wake up, I think, in general of like, like, counter dissonance is a very real thing. Oh, sure. It's huge. And it's, it's prolific. And, you know, we're seeing so much of it, whether it's Noam Chomsky, I mean, it's hilarious to me that the Noam Chomsky stuff in the sick way, because it's like, you know, I read Manufacturing Consent, you know, I actually literally serve and doing exactly, it's like,
oh, it's a cookbook, apparently not a warning. You know, it's like, how do
people like Elon Musk and Peter Yeah, right. Elon Musk, for example, you know, being like, Oh, I'm gonna buy Twitter because I'm a free speech absolutist, and then it becomes freedom of speech is not freedom of free speech. And then, you know, it's already taken the step to where they're taking down more posts for the government than before Musk
bought it and whatever. But he has this, you know, very, I guess, like two faced persona, where he has this one, public relations produced face where he's like, Oh, I'm anti
establishment, yada, yada, yada. And then, you know, on the other side, he couldn't be more of an establishment goon you know, 100% I feel Yeah, thing built by government subsidies, and exactly military intelligence contractor and building the everything app, which is going to help house all of your data and be a huge dominant force in the FinTech space going forward. And, and no, and, you know, the brain chip guy, and, and people are like, Oh, this is, you know, some sort of like, Savior
promoting free speech and individualism. Like, no, he's saying that, why are you believing him? And his actions show the opposite? And it seems like there's people doing this, like within the Bitcoin space, that's supposed to be at least, you know, was viewed as being different culturally, yeah, a few years ago. And, you know, it seems like there's a big cultural war within Bitcoin going on, at least if it's gonna fall victim to the same stuff or be an actual challenge to Central Bank tyranny.
Yeah, I mean, even like Jack Dorsey, right, it's like, he's a very big Bitcoin hero. And, you know, he's put in a bunch of money recently into scaling Bitcoin stuff and into this noster this kind of Twitter sort of alternative, but it's like he this guy ran this fucking spy shop for, you know, a decade. It's like, what are we, what are we kind of doing here? And, and yeah, the musk stuff is kind of ridiculous. And I think
especially like, post, you know, lock downs. I think we're seeing this kind of, like, strange class kind of come up of these, like, people that were, you know, I mean, Elon, you know, during, you know, during all that was very, like, you know, the science is unequivocal, you know,
be invested on cure vac and mRNA technology that Zach COVID vaccine he showed for exactly
like Tesla was literally building that and, and now he's kind of coming out as this like free. Yeah, this free speech, free press. You know, basically anti Vaxxer like influencer guy. And it's something that I've kind of, I'm noticing it now, you know, as someone who kind of lived through the last couple years and you know, dealing with you know, the social choices that You know, by not choosing to do this medical procedure,
you know what I had to kind of deal with? And then seeing, you know, like the majority of the voices now in the space are people that like were vaccinated, were speaking out very, you know, for it, when it was going on. And now it's like, we're kind of seeing this sort of like the new heroes have, you know, this kind of controlled opposition coming up and I look at even like the political candidates that are coming out. I mean, people are literally floating Jamie Dimon now.
Insane, absolutely embarrassing. Oh, my
God. But I mean, he basically does run the country. So he's exactly. publicly run it.
You would be the only politician. I think that if elected president would have less power, you
know, like, yeah, no, debatable. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Actually, as I said that out loud. I was like, actually, that's completely not true. Unfortunately. I wish that was more true. But um, but yeah, I mean, it's, it's absurd. And yeah, he's building this x.com Which is, you know, basically like WeChat, USA. He controls
on WeChat are major investors in Tesla. Yes. saying they're very financially interconnected. Absolute seems important.
Seems very important. And now we're building you know, we're kind of cheering you know, okay, these Evie cars that have kill switches. Start laying. guy this guy back. Yeah, I mean, I have, you know,
Michael Hastings, anyone remember him.
I mean, I have a little flipper zero, which is this little, like, fun kind of hacking tool that you can literally walk down the street and open up, you know, Tesla charging ports and stuff, you know, from the street just walking around. And again, I don't I'm not like, against Eevee in this way. Like, I think there's a lot of stuff in there.
That's, that's really cool and powerful. But like the systems that are being built the infrastructure, the literal colonialism, of, you know, going to these places to strip them of resources. And then, you know, come back and sell them fucking stable coins that are powered on Twitter through Starlink. It's just like that, like, I'm sorry, like, you want to own the libs. So you want to, you know, support Elon Musk. And it's
like, Look at what he's building. Like, What? What? This is one of the scariest combinations of technology itself and your children. Yeah, yeah. It's such a good win. I'm really glad we did that. And, yeah, and it's absolutely absurd. And, and this control, dissonance is fucking everywhere. I mean, like, I somewhat recently found out that like, the Dalai Lama was paid like, $15,000 a month by the CIA from like, the late 50s into like, 1974. And it's like, oh,
well, that's how you get like a pro Vietnam Dalai Lama. You know, it's like, you know, same with Chomsky, kind of with, like, 911 Truth and invading. You know, the Middle East, it was like, Oh, well, we can't You know, I can't condemn it, I can't this and it's just like, okay, these are supposed to be kinda like spiritual. You know, dissonant leaders, you know, of
our time. And it's like, we've just seen this CO option happen so many times, whether it's like the hippies in San Francisco being co opted by the CIA with like, all this ridiculous LSDM culture, Shin, bah, bah, bah, like we've seen, literal,
legitimate human. My point here is legitimate human movements, be co opted in a very short period of time to become like an enslavement or degenerate, or colonial movement, after a very real beautiful, tangible thing happened, you know, post summer love or whatever, you know, spiritual awakening, you know, into kind of what, you know, should be the the Dalai Lama
stuff, and then kind of being this controlled opposition. And I look at those and the reason why I think it's important to talk about them is because it's like, that's happening in Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a state change, it is a powerful thing, I can validate my own transactions, I can send them without any single person in the world. You know, being an intermediary, which is, which is ridiculous. I mean, it's
incredible. But now we have these actors, and, you know, it's like, it's ridiculous to think of something as, as we consider as powerful and as dangerous as Bitcoin to be like, just left alone. It's like, no, they're gonna do everything they can to neuter this technology, and, and, you know, neuter it at worst, and at best co opted in a way that it actually kicks the dollars life and preserves the, you know, the, the imperialism, the Empire of America, you know, and that's just where we're at.
Well, let's talk about some of the stuff that's going on with the US government as it relates to Bitcoin right now. So everyone knows there's this big regulatory push and we can talk about you know, that with stable coins maybe later, but for the purpose of Bitcoin, you know, like what I talked about at the Bitcoin Conference, was the effort to label Bitcoin a national security threat, but not necessarily Bitcoin itself, because as we've been talking about there's very establishment
quote unquote, actors that are very big into Bitcoin. So why would those, you know, controversial actors, I guess, are very close to the establishment actors. be putting money in Bitcoin if it's probably going to be hit with a regulatory Hammer of some capacity. Well, I think they're very interested probably those guys in regulation happening like there was this article in the institutional investor called why the crypto world should embrace the Feds
crackdown. And it talks about how like basically this will make Bitcoin the regulatory crack cracked and will make Bitcoin you know, worth it. And, you know, in my speech, I talked about this effort by the World Economic Forum partnership against cybercrime. Westpac, which includes the FBI and the DOJ and as you mentioned earlier, they have an insane amount of bitcoin that they have seized. Yeah, right, making them essentially a Bitcoin whale that can influence the market. Sure,
right. And they in Westpac, which is you know, they're a part of, they say that Bitcoin and mixers, anything that allows Bitcoin transactions to take place with financial anonymity, or increased financial privacy is what makes it a threat. So that has to be eliminated. But also the value of Bitcoin on I guess I'm telling would be regulated, and not being hunted down by these guys. The value of it is a threat. So it needs to be devalued to stop, quote, unquote, acting as a driver for
cybercrime. So there's a bunch of really crazy stuff going on there, right. And I personally feel amazed that more people aren't wise to that. And the whole idea to sort of paint any sort of privacy enhancing technology, including ones that aren't exclusive to Bitcoin, just like encryption, for example. I mean, Bill Barr, on the Trump administration was on the total Warpath, against encryption, trying to get a backdoor for the the DOJ and the FBI and everything that's
encrypted. You know, not necessarily financial, like messaging and stuff like that, you know, there's this huge effort to secure complete dominance over Cyberspace, while at the same time the same actors are pushing everything and everyone online for everything. Right. And, you know, that's really disturbing. And so, I think, as it relates to Bitcoin, you know, this war going on there is there are these people that I guess have maybe at some level already, like, sold out,
and are going to let Bitcoin be used in this way. And then there are people like yourself, who see it as this off ramp from increased centralized control, but the ways of using Bitcoin, for those purposes are about or, you know, there's an effort to criminalize that. Is there anything you'd like to comment? As it relates to that?
Yeah, I mean, I think just like as a general comment, like, I think there are so many ways that Bitcoin can monetize in a very significant way and enrich you know, the majority of Bitcoin holders, and it actually create a system that's more shitty for everybody that's ever that's ever existed, like, the
issue with the dollar system is not. You know, it's that it's, it is obfuscated, like we don't know, when a lot of these changes are made, we aren't privy to the closed door meetings that they vote on, you know, rate changes, or debt issuance, or any of these things. So I think like, a lot of people I think, are just getting kind of numb to the economic realities of Bitcoin kind of number go up, and
they're just at all costs, they want to see that happen. And the criminality of it is really interesting, because it's like, they're sort of self admitting that it's a powerful technology, while also trying to downplay that. It's only for scammers, and it's it's not important, and it doesn't threaten the dollar, but they're also like, putting out you know, this propaganda that it's like very powerful and used by drug dealers, and
traffickers and cybercrime, and all these things. So it's like, they're kind of like, I don't really understand what their dialectics are here. It seems very confusing. If you're paying attention to both sides of of the purple party. And, yeah, I haven't really thought too much about like the criminalization of Bitcoin, because I don't really necessarily see that I think it's too helpful for the powers that be in a lot of ways to, you know, to sort of champion it in these little
ways, and really control the ins and outs. They don't really have a lot of control over the actual system itself, unless they subsidize mining. And they're able to kind of push towards getting some OFAC compliance like within block construction and transaction construction, which of course, they can
subsidize with dollars, which of course they're doing. We've seen this happen a bunch of times where these big dollar financed operations, these mining operations, publicly traded companies that have mined 1000s of Bitcoin, you know, oh shit, they filed chapter 11 You go to look at the books, the stocks imploded, you know, 199% And they have seven Bitcoin left. And it's like, Well, where did all that Bitcoin go? You know,
how did that How did that even happen? Even like an SPF thing or Aluna like some of these, these big implosions that were, you know, very likely government funded or government participated in businesses. And then you know, when the Piper comes, it's like, there's no Bitcoin left. And so it's like,
well, where's this Bitcoin all going. And you can look at some of it, you can see a lot of it was market sold on by Nance, like 30,000, Bitcoin or market sold on by Nance after like Luna imploded, which was an algorithmic setup, you know, it was something that, you know, could have absolutely been
triggered by a knowing party. So I see, like, so much potential for CO option on the ins and outs and of surveillance and of, you know, sort of, you know, the raising rates, which are crushing tax demand, it's like, well, we're gonna start seeing capital gains tax rates go up, we're gonna see them start going after using this KYC, this know, your customer, stuff, that they've control the onramps, they can really, you know, again, it's an open ledger, they can see everything, I can see
everything, I can go look at, you know, the Ukraine, Bitcoin wallets, and see where money's coming in, I can go look at exchanges, look at the lunar stuff, like I can see all this
stuff, you can kind of piece it all together. And I think that there's so much, you know, ripe opportunity, unfortunately, for like chain analysis, and these these governments sighs, you know, adversaries on the network that they can really put together, you know, so much, they can triangulate so much of your economic activity, if you if you do any sort of public
acknowledgement of a Bitcoin transaction. And, you know, how do you do that, you know, you you create, you know, you add Bitcoin payments to Twitter for a few months or whatever, and you get people, you know, doing that you get, you know, there's so many ways you can kind of socially engineer someone to expose their UTX O's or their Bitcoin holdings, you know, in a public way. People tweet about it all the time. People go to conferences, take pictures, they do this, they talk about how
much they have a talk about a buy. And there's so many ways to kind of, yeah, like, I think we're at the silent like, the very clearly the powers that be are here, they're in Bitcoin. There's a lot of public speakers within Bitcoin that I'm sure are not good faith actors. But I think the majority is sort of silent. And they're kind of just letting Bitcoiners kind of shoot themselves in the foot all over the place, in this confidence that we've already won, and this confidence that everything is
private. And this is a big issue that I've had with like a lot of people in the Bitcoin space talking about privacy and surveillance, like, you know, there's this general assumption that everything on Bitcoin or sorry, everything on lightning is private. And it's just simply not true. If there's any sort of adversary in this open topology network, they can ping your nodes and can really get a very good sense of how much Bitcoin you have, and what you're spending, you know, that you've
locked in a lightning channel. It's very easy, you know, metadata rules, everything around us, you know, I mean, it's just, we know, Vault seven, we know that the NSA is spying on us, we know that they have these hardware and surveillance networks,
and they can frame any anyone they want for cyber attack. And absolutely, well, seven. Yeah,
absolutely. And also, you know, hey, let's Okay, getting back to some of the lockdown stuff, it's like, a lot of people literally were getting tested, and giving their social security numbers to, you know, these ridiculous, you know, health organizations, or people doing 20, threes in mes. And it's like, okay, now all these people have a DNA data, they have DNA data associated with your social security number, and now we have you on Twitter, sending a Bitcoin transaction,
or posting a receipt of you buying Bitcoin. It's like, you can triangulate that stuff so easily frame people so easily. There's so much like, it's such a kind of a dumb space, even though we've matured a lot in the last, you know, 10 something years. But there's so much young activity, I think, you know, the implications, the future implications of like, you know, you shouldn't, you know, you send a tweet out about, oh, I stack this amount I did this, it's like, in five years, that
could be a life changing amount of money. And now you have timestamps of yourself saying all this stuff everywhere. And I think that there's just so much, you know, fruit available to be picked that that I think a lot of that stuff won't really come to fruition for a few years. But when it does, I think people are going to be really surprised at how much information they really leaked. Probably myself included, like to be honest, you know, I mean,
yeah, well, I wasn't saying that, like, you know, they're, I guess what I was trying to say earlier is that I feel like what they're trying to criminalize isn't Bitcoin itself per se? What they're trying to criminalize? Is what would afford Bitcoin transactions increased financial privacy and financial anonymity? Yeah, meaning that Bitcoin would be allowed to exist, but really only in the sort of Bitcoin
dollar paradigm that you're talking about? Yeah, we're really a Bitcoin digital dollar paradigm since that's where dollars going,
right? Yeah. 100% No, and I agree with you, I think that's kind of what I was trying to say of, like, you know, they're
going to allow Bitcoin to exist, allow you to buy it. But you know, you're gonna have to literally scan your face, like, I mean, they're already places that are doing it, there were exchanges that require a live selfie, like a video of you turning your, your, you know, front facing camera on your phone, and taking a 3d, you know, kind of video of your face to be able to withdraw your Bitcoin that already exists. It's just, you know, kind of small, it's not, it's not on any
of the huge, huge, huge exchanges yet. But that's going to continue to happen. I mean, they're gonna get way, way crazier as they are getting more and more desperate. I mean, that's kind of the reality of the economic situation is like, the government can't pay for itself, we pay more money to uphold the debt of the dollar than we do to pay our military. That's sort of a point of no return. And now we need to get
as much capital gains taxes as possible. So you're gonna see some crazy shit, I think.
Yeah, well, it's really ramping up already. Like in May, you had the FBI, I think they seize the domains of maybe like eight crypto exchanges, they said weren't doing the Know Your Customer stuff enough. They were affording anonymous, you know, like giving, giving their users and unlimited and privacy and exchanging crypto for for other currencies, right. So you know, they're already going after the ones that aren't complying with
this. And you know, living in Chile, there's not a lot of crypto here, but the only crypto exchange here does require you right to like, upload your face, and all this stuff. So I mean, there is a big push for all of that. And it's definitely definitely unsettling to say the least. So I guess, what do you think you someone you know, someone with the values that you have, if bitcoin is sort of turned into that? What do you continue to hold and use it?
Yeah, I would. Because I still think at its at its core, you know, what it offers is a financial economic system, that even if it's completely perverted on the ins and outs, and the on ramps and off ramps, by, you know, you know, basically all the actors were trying to neuter now, the fact that the it is a disinflationary monetary policy, and eventually, a deflationary monetary policy is still a state change, even if it is entirely used, which is a very possible end game for
Bitcoin is that it is used as a reserve asset in between central banks, and that the actual price of a main chain Bitcoin transaction priced in Bitcoin is we'll be more than like, you know, a day's wage of minimum wage, like That's entirely possible that we may just price out, you know, your general citizens of being able to participate on the base layer because of the monetization of Bitcoin but what it still does is it still limits the the economic growth and the debt
pardoning special privilege from the state even if they control the ins and outs, even if they're big, you know, Bitcoin rising the dollar or dollar rising the Bitcoin you know, it's still limits their ability and limits the the nefarious ability between central banks to basically to have false reserves, right, it's, it's still an auditable system. So even if it is very co opted, and the ins and outs are very dollarized it still is an economic state change that I
still support. I would probably be significantly less interested in the Bitcoin space, I probably would be looking at, you know, other kinds of privacy tools and other things, not not alternative currencies. I don't really think there's any real value and any other cryptocurrency outside of Bitcoin, I really, truly believe that. So yeah, I think I would be like less excited about it. But I think economically like I think that thesis is still intact, that it is the state
change and it is a net good for the economy. But you know, it's again, it's a tool and tools can be used to enslave people and they can be used to free people. So I really hope that it doesn't go to that. And I'm obviously you know, burning bridges, you're trying to get the Bitcoin or community to wake the fuck up and realize that it's actually probably about as likely as not likely, it's about 5050 right now that that's kind of the outcome. I really think that and yeah,
well, I think it's worth burning the bridges per Personally, I agree is, you know, important.
It's Wait,
why? Why would you want to have something that you've invested a lot of time and money and be used to build a slavery system? And then, you know, then you're sort of locked into supporting that slavery system unless you want to lose all the time and money you put into it, right? Yeah.
Yeah, no, true. Yeah, it's like, to me, Bitcoin is a means to an end. And without that, and kind of being, you know, and it's not just to make a bunch of money, like, I don't really care. That's kind of happened to a degree. And it's completely unfulfilling, and I don't really care. It's like, this is about
our kids, kids. And, you know, like, it's about future stuff. I don't even really intend to touch any of my bitcoin really, at all, other than to build communities and systems and, you know, magazines and printing presses and, you know, broadcast studio equipment and all the things I've kind of built, or want to build. You know, yeah, it's this is about freedom of the human race. And I think we've been enslaved for an
exceptionally long time. They've perverted our history, they perverted our you know, they propagandized our ability to connect with with each other in different parts of the world. And Bitcoin can, like exacerbate all that, or can really can really limit all that. So yeah, I really hope I agree, I agree, burn the bridges, why would I want to be bridge to these
people anyway? And, yeah, it's like this is this is really important that we get this right, especially, you know, within, you know, the, there's only a few percent of Bitcoin even left to be issued, you know, the majority of the Bitcoin is owned and held by people. And it has to be distributed, it's not an economic system that can just rely on yield. Or rely on interest rates, it's like you have to spend it if you want to, you know, use it, which is,
which is great. So we're in this rare moment in this first, you know, 20 years of Bitcoin, where you know, 99% of it, of all Bitcoin will be issued. And these are the important moments where we actually can make decisions and limit people, and push back on the counter dissonance and push back on this dollarization and not just recreate JP Morgan, Bitcoin, and have these absolute freaks continue to run our lives, you know, we actually have an ability to kind of, you know, we
get a shot at the beasts neck here. And if we fuck it up, it's entirely on us. And I really hope that that doesn't happen, I think there are enough really smart people in Bitcoin, that have the time and the talent to build alternative scaling situations. And to deal with some of these privacy things. We have some incredible stuff coming out using E cash, which
was this invention by David chomh. In the 80s, like 8283, he had this paper about using blind signatures to create near perfect privacy are entirely perfect privacy within a mint. And now we can use Bitcoin to sort of as the reserve acid for
these mints. And we can whip them up in 30 seconds. And we you know, that we can create our own banks and these private mints, you know, at a whim, and we can kind of create this decentralized Whack a Mole where it's like, okay, you, you've identified that this person is a dissonant and is an enemy of the state. Well, you can whack them, but there's three more that will pop up when you do that. And that's just a reality of kind of
what we have to do. We have to think really selflessly and realize that, you know, we have a chance and we can't let it go. And we need to spend our money and put our words where our mouth is, or whatever that phrase is. And do something about it while we still have a fucking chance. And if we continue to let Bitcoin be dollarized, you know, we've given up our one chance and not only have we given up our one
chance, we've extended the life of the dollar, probably. And that's why I've been Yeah, screeching about this Bitcoin dollar thing, because and I wrote this book, because we know we've seen, you know, stablecoin coders get killed. We've seen them tweet out about how Israeli and US intelligence are setting
me up. And you know, this guy Nikolai. Micheline was then found, you know, drowned in the Puerto Rican waters with all of his clothes on, you know, a few days after maker Dow, which was his creation voted as a community to put a, you know, a billion dollars into Coinbase of USDC. It's like, there's this wonderful Julian Assange piece that he wrote in 2006 called conspiracies governance, which is in the gatekeepers issue that, you know, you're in this Bitcoin magazine issue. And he
talks about sort of identifying the conspiracy. And the way that you do it is you just put pins up all across the map of what you're kind of looking at, and then you take twine and you attach all the points and you kind of just, you don't
necessarily know how they're connected. But you just look at this kind of map that you've created and when you look at the Bitcoin space right now out and you look at the kind of like hit Galeon dialectics of what we're doing here, it's like there's this huge push towards KYC stablecoin embraced payment networks and in exchanges, and even from like the privacy people, like these, they're they're recommending KYC exchanges and stable coins. And, you know, it's, it's just
ridiculous. So, yeah, that was a bit of a rant there, but
no, I think it was, I think it was important. So really quick, I just want to say, you know, for the audience, really, you already know, this mark, I don't publicly endorse or shit on Bitcoin, because I don't think it's my responsibility to use my platform to tell people where to put their money, I think that's a really personal and individual decision. But at the same time, you know, I do see Bitcoiners as at least Bitcoiners, like yourself, attempting to use it to build
some sort of parallel system. So what's being, you know, what we're being herded into? And obviously, a parallel system like that is necessary. So there's a lot of people well, not a lot, but I mean, you know, there are people right that shit on you know, anyone involved in any sort of digital, anything is
inherently implicit, and building the for IR. And, you know, I know people, you know, who are trying to create some sort of decentralized tech, whether it's like getting people on some sort of D Googled Android thing if they decide to continue using a smartphone or trying to get people off of apple and Windows operating systems onto the onto Linux and all of that. But it's, you know, I think in the near future, we're going to be faced with increasingly difficult choices
about how much we enable the systems. So like, for me, personally, you know, if bitcoin becomes completely a tool of Central Bank's I don't really want anything to do with it, I mean, I understand why you're saying that, because of the technology and how you feel about it, and all of that, that that's within it, but you know, I don't really plan to you know, use those on an off ramps controlled or that enable this
same kind of behavior that bitcoins supposed to stop. So, you know, I would just probably do nothing with Bitcoin, it would just sit there, you know, because I enable those on and off ramps. Right.
So yeah, I agree with you, I think it's, it's important that when, you know, we, you know, there's a great great Bitcoin, who I think is very, very smart and talks about a lot of these morning's beauty on who is he runs as TECHO. And his kind of idea is, you know, he has this concept of ethical Bitcoin. And again, ethical is obviously a word that gets perverted to get people to do bullshit all the time. But that said, it's like, there are alternatives, there are decentralized alternatives.
There are exchanges that don't require those things. There are peer to peer exchanges, go to your local meetup, go find a miner, give them cash, buy bitcoin directly, you know, there's a lot of alternative ways that just circumnavigate the, the, the, you know, kind of corruption of the ins and outs of Bitcoin. And those are the things that we need to use, we need to reject any of the systems that are using if you're using a system that supports stable coins, you're supporting
a system that is buying government debt. So what are you doing? And so I don't use any of those, you know, I've sort of converted a lot of my thinking and actions, you know, away from that, you know, as like, as I got more hip to what was really going on, and it's like, ya know, we have to stand up and not, like, promote these services that are perpetuating, you know, getting the greatest terrorist organization in the
world. And so yeah, I agree with you. i It's tough. I, I so badly don't want to imagine a world where that happens that sometimes it's hard for me to think about what I would do if it did happen, because I'm so so desperately fighting to make sure that that doesn't happen. Yeah, but of course, yeah, there's an opposite. There's definitely a possibility in the future where I think that, you know, Bitcoin has sort of failed. Its its its mission of of kind of neutering state
power. It is possible, at least for a short to medium term, that that could happen in our lifetime. I still really much definitely think so that no matter what, you know, Bitcoin is a multi 100 year experiment, probably about 1000 years. Something like that. It doesn't really scale planetary ly, so I don't see any of that shit going on, but or interplanetary, I
should say. But I think regardless, it's state change of money is so important that it is a net positive for humanity, even if it's completely corrupted and used in a lot of ways until the state power can actually be perverted away. I hope that's not naive of me but I really do think economically it is exceptionally important regardless. But yeah, I mean, shit. It's an open ledger and it's run by the some you No, not Ron, but, you know, some of the biggest influencers in the
entire space are some of the spookiest people. And yeah, there's there's a whole bunch of ways, like we're seeing politicians jumping out now and hitching themselves to it. And you know, it's becoming one of the biggest brands in the world. And you know, a bunch of bad people are going to use it a Bitcoin has to be for enemies. Otherwise, it absolutely can't be for friends, you know, and we have to fight for the death for
that ability for anyone to be able to use it. Because if anyone is becomes a gatekeeper of who or who can't make a transaction on Bitcoin, the entire thing has failed. So unfortunately, we sort of have to kind of like, like, yeah, central banks are going to be able to use this and JP Morgan is gonna be able to use this and Jamie Dimon will probably store a bunch of his money in Bitcoin. And, you know, there's a lot of likelihood that, you know, the Maxwell Epstein, you know, sort
of blackmail group was like using Bitcoin. There's a there's a great conspiracy that, you know, Maxwell was a very big power mod on on Reddit, and was running our news and a bunch of other things under this user user Maxwell Hill, the last thing she posted about, or this user posted about which she stopped posting the day that she was arrested and hasn't posted
since. And it was the number one voted person on Reddit until that day, posted about Bitcoin, it was like the last thing that they posted about so you know, there's a lot of connections with Bitcoin to a lot of shitty things. And that's sort of, unfortunately, an endorsement in a really weird way of like, how powerful this technology is. We just need to make sure right, we wake up and don't let it just, you know, get completely corrupted.
Well, on that last point, right. So the the justification for regulating Bitcoin in the sense of taking away financial privacy is to stop money laundering and all of this stuff. But of course, these guys like you just talked about, are very big into money laundering. So, you know, they're probably the ones using it for that more than regular people that are just,
I mean, Jamie Dimon or JP Morgan saying anything about the criminality of Bitcoin is ridiculous when like they got caught like with like, you know, millions of dollars of cocaine on their, on their, you know, their own boat of theirs. a shipping container, you know, it's like, you know, they're they're literally banking, sex trafficked, like known sex
traffickers. And then obviously buying up consent and all the other ridiculous things they're doing so it's, it's completely ridiculous for literally literal criminals, and criminals, supporters and enablers to come out and shit on Bitcoin as a technology that enables criminality. It's just like,
Sure, of course it does. But cash does that way more so and there's probably no one more important to the infrastructure and safety of the US dollar, probably then Jamie Dimon, you know, I mean, like, he really kind of runs the show and a lot of ways. And so yeah, I think it's a total falsehood, while also having, you know, an extreme element of of truth in this weird kind of endorsement of the technology. But obviously, when compared to the dollar, it's just a joke. All right,
so we've talked a lot about Bitcoin, and you brought up stable coins a lot. So I want to talk about that a little bit. Because in the course of our conversation thus far, you've explained a lot about Bitcoin and blockchain and what those terms are maybe for people that don't necessarily know a lot about it. But maybe people know a little bit less about stable coins. So why don't you if you're cool to touch on, you know, sort of what stable coins are? Why and why you see them as
problematic. And then I want to bring up some of the some weird stuff tied up with stable coins. Yeah, brain about it.
Yeah, totally, totally. I mean, that stablecoin Rabbit Hole is really intense, because it really connects like the worst of, of, of all the things we hate about our current system, with like, ridiculous technology that just exacerbates a bunch of issues that we have. So yeah, basically long and short, a stable coin. You know, first off, the name is just
ridiculous. There's nothing stable about it at all. But the reason why they're called stable coins is because as opposed to and again, this is sort of, you know, this is dialectics here, as opposed to Bitcoin, which is very volatile, and can lose 80% of its value in a year and yada yada, which, of course, is all true. But over long timeframes, I mean, it's the fastest growing asset ever. So it was they were kind of created, as this, you know, directly, you know, parallel to the Bitcoin system
as a way to give dollar access. All kinds of, you know, you might have heard of the Euro dollar system, which basically was a system of dollars that were, you know, created and exchanged entirely outside of the Federal Reserve System that were kind of set up with this interest rate, this LIBOR London Interbank overnight rate. There was a whole bunch of banks in Europe, I think like 12 or 11 banks. plus the one US Bank,
which was JP Morgan, of course. And they were the ones kind of being able to control this Eurodollar market and it was really out of the purview of the Federal Reserve System. So, one of the reasons why you raise interest rates, which we have raised interest rates so much as you know, you want to your you can think of it as the higher the interest rate, the more interest there is in being in that system, because we're basically bribing you with yield to keep your money and keep your
value in our system and buy our debt. So the US government, you know, started jacking up interest rates as a way to kind of combat this offshore dollar market that was outside of the purview of the Fed. And so stable coins are basically the, you know, the technological evolution of the Eurodollar market which allowed but this time you know, controlled by entities potentially that are within the kind of dollar coalition are kind of like the US Cabal.
Oh, definitely. Yeah,
I mean, of course, and there's you know, there's a reason why all these you know, banks and, and stable coin providers are all you know, kind of you know stationed in in this Bermuda Triangle Bahamas Island area which we just continually see so much of you know, this shady shit constantly happening yeah, yeah, yeah. Like like the state is really like this ocean state thing and they live on all these islands and they avert you know, kind of, you know, the law of the land with this like
maritime Admiralty bullshit. And they all have, you know, their own laws island by island. I'm sure there's trafficking and just ridiculousness going on there. And you know, of course, yeah, that's why we see SPF, you know, creating FTX. In the Bahamas, the first cbdc in the world was launched in the Bahamas, the sand dollar, which was tied to the Bahamas, and reserve currency, which is actually just pegged to the US dollar anyway, so the first US dollar cbdc was actually in the
Bahamas. So yeah, we're seeing all this shit. But basically, again, long and short. It's it's a, it's a tokenized representation of $1 that is able to be exchanged one to one theoretically, for paper money, or, you know, US dollar credits in a bank account, via the issuer. So the two biggest ones are tether, which again, is that bit for next connected? You know, they were connected with Brock Pierce. And the last one,
maybe, in my opinion, we'll just say that, yes, very shady. Fellas
say that, yeah. also connected with Eos, which was another huge affinity scam that was the largest Bitcoin scam of all time. That was about 190 Something Bitcoins, 290,000 bitcoins stolen, you know, with all these false promises of this, like alternative, you know, smart contract enabled, you know, same bullshit as Cardano a theory, you know, of
all these things. And, you know, of course, you know, they were all, you know, they were banked and based out of, you know, the Bahamas, they got a tiny slap on the wrist, I think it was like 520 $5 million, or something was like the fine, but they got, you know, billions and billions. So, yeah, absolutely absurd. It's the system and this technology that, you know, is being orange washed and sort of virtue signaling as being very
systemically important to the adoption of Bitcoin. By allowing, you know, third world countries, basically like Indonesia, and Africa, and, you know, budgets and the South Asian sees, and it's kind of viewed as this way to onboard people to Bitcoin, because it's like, oh, this big, bad Fiat, you know, like, Venezuelan inflation is so high, Argentinian inflation is so high, it would be, you know, such a beautiful thing for them to be able to use the dollar, I
really wish these people had dollar access, it would be such a better technological tool than what they're using. So it's become this totally ridiculous way to dollarized the world. And it's seen as both an alternative to people that dislike Bitcoin, because it's not government issued. You know, there's a lot of people that are like, only governments are supposed to be able to issue money and Bitcoin isn't a state money, but stable
coins are, it's like, well, that's just the status quo. But yeah, so we're still depends
on how people view money, I guess at the end of the day, that distinction.
Yeah, totally, totally. And so we've seen basically a Cambrian explosion of quote, unquote, innovation, and stuff in the stable coin space. Probably most, infamously, in my opinion with the Facebook's Libra, which was this idea of making a basket of currencies that then you could pay, you know, through Facebook, Facebook pay, and so it was just kind of
like not a one to one stable coin, where it was just $1. And you could exchange it for $1. But it was it was going to be a basket of currencies, I'm sure would have included the euro, probably the pound, and then maybe the yen. And basically, when that came out, you know, the Congress and most US government officials kind of came out and were like, Oh, this
is gonna threaten the dollar, this is really bad. And kind of feign this, like, you know, this, this, this disagreement with, with Facebook pushing this the system and saying that it was going to undermine the dollar, but when in reality, it was going to dollarized the world so quickly, and where to
put billions of people onto the dollar system overnight. And China actually realize this, and China, you know, had a complete knee jerk reaction to the Libra presentation, basically, and they launched their cbdc Like imminently after the Libra, you know, announcement, the Libra obviously ended up kind of, you know, changed names became DM and ended up kind of getting shuttered. That guy that was running DM Marcus something.
These now runs light Spark, which is a Lightning Network, you know, program, we're seeing a lot of former stable coin errs and dollar people kind of getting into the, you know, the lightning space, all of a sudden as lightning is about to embrace stable coins, believe it or not. So yeah, basically urine. Yeah, I know. And keep burning bridges, baby. So yeah, it's a technology that is supposed to sort of paint this idea of stability. And this idea of, you know, this is a safe place to be
in direct opposition to Bitcoin, which is very speculative. But it's a bunch of bullshit. I mean, it's it's a centralized issuance, you're you're relying on the audit of a bank, and of a service provider to not take advantage of the literal money printer that you've given them. You know, tether has the ability
to print tokens. And they're very loosely audited and monitored in any sort of regulatory way, being, you know, sort of pushed off shore entirely from us regulations to now being in kind of this nebulous, stateless, I don't actually even know literally, what, where they are, at the moment. But they're out of the purview of the US dollar system
legally, anyway. But yeah, it's it was it's basically this affinity scam to create consent for dollarization of the world and to create this kind of virtue signaling for technologists and freedom fighters and all this to start supporting the dollarization of the globe, while just really all they're doing is making the government richer, making a select few bankers and stable coin issuers richer and really hurting the world and really globalizing the dollar with a
super high monetary velocity, you know, these things can be exchanged incredibly quickly. And they are bearer instruments technically, in that if you just have them in your wallet, you know, you you can go spend them at different exchanges and all this, but they rely on you shitty rails, they rely on Aetherium rails, they rely on Cardano rails or Tron rails all of these rails have these just really poorly constructed or banker constructed alternative blockchains Yeah. And so money
is going up to just the worst people. And it's being done under this. This guise, as, you know, being this, you know, humanitarian effort, and it's like, spreading the dollar across the world is not humanitarian, my friends.
Well, it's even it's even more than the humanity problematic humanitarian aspect goes far beyond just the stablecoin level, right? Like, I'd like to get to talking about Cardano and some of these digital ID efforts, for example, under the guise of, you know, decent liberating Ethiopian
schoolchildren, it's not exactly what's going on over there. But really quick before I get there, I do want to mention a few things so for people that don't know right, to other disturbing I think oh, there's a lot of stuff that unsettles me about
it. And then there's you know, Brock Pierce. I think revolver news had an interesting compilation of information about him including Epstein connections and weird ties to creepy pedo stuff definitely worth taking a look at that if you're not aware, but he
also former Disney actor was in was a childhood asthma in just two Yes, yeah,
yeah. So Epstein stuff more fool. Yeah, so anyway, definitely some weird stuff there. But as far as I'm aware, I think he stepped away officially from an association with tether several years ago. But nevertheless, tether reserves are held at Deltec a Bahamian bank that's probably also well known for holding a lot of FTX accounts, including
their shady hast accounts. And then the head of Deltec John shallow pain, very involved in Farmington State Bank, which was part of the FTX stuff that Ed Berger and I did a piece about on a limited hangout that I'd recommend you check out if you want more information on that, because they turned this tiny rural nothing bank basically in rural Washington state into Moonstone bank, and it teamed up with the guy who created the Bahamian original cbdc, that you mentioned a bit ago, and some
weird stuff definitely going on there. And including with the Federal Reserve, which somehow immediately approved Moonstone. And when it shouldn't, it does and all sorts of weird things
going on there for sure. So and of course Deltec hopefully we'll have a report out on that soon and unlimited Hangout, or at least in the next couple of months, because it's a real high of going over its history before John shallow been very much Rockefeller centric, tied up with, you know, of course, David Rockefeller ran Chase Manhattan Bank, very big part of the deep state, quote, unquote, that's now been folded in, of course,
to JP Morgan Chase. And basically, Dell Tech was a big part of that and even has connections to stuff like the 1973 coup in Chile brought Pinochet to power and all sorts of weird stuff. There which, you know, the right David Rockefeller also had a hand in that type of stuff. But basically, this horrible Neo colonialist paradigm has for a long time been enabled by this particular Bahamian bank tied to both FTX and tether that unsettles me, and then talking
about USDC. So circle, is, uh, I guess the issue where they're right, and there's been a lot going on with them as it relates to some of this weird stuff that's happened since the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. And they had to move where some of their reserves were kept around. And after all of the dust more or less settled on that phase of the current banking crisis, circle decided to park their reserves that they needed to move around with being why Mellon, and boy, it comes up
in one nation under blackmail several times. Probably guess why. So essentially, it seems to me like stable coins are basically being utilized for very unsettling purposes by the same actors that I chronicle in my book is basically enabling everything from sex trafficking, to money laundering, arms trafficking, the worst stuff, you can imagine the wholesale looting of wealth in the developing world, but also in the developed world, including in the United States, you know,
enabling the same type of behavior. I find it very unsettling. So just wanted to make that point about stable coins.
It's unreal. I mean, literally four days after the SPF, they filed chapter 11 on 1111 fancily enough on November 11. And four days after being why Mellon and a dozen other banking institutions came out to start the it was the announcement of the digital dollar pilot program with the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, which was a 12 week. Yeah. So that was immediately after, which was also the very next day Apple Pay announced that they were allowing circle integration
and letting you use USDC payments there. Yeah, I mean, it's the spookiest shit. I mean, being one being why Mellon was literally founded by Alexander Hamilton, one of the oldest, most important banks in the world are certainly in the after the American experiment. And I think it has something like a fifth it has, like, its hands on, like a fifth of all assets,
like in the world. It's just totally ridiculous. And yeah, they hold the paper for, for us DC, which, you know, Brian Armstrong, the CEO of of Coinbase, came out and said that it's the de facto, you know, CBDC, and I think that's a huge, that's kind of a big part of, of my thesis is that the retail
cbdc is kind of a red herring. And it's really about, you know, I think the government doesn't, doesn't necessarily want, you know, to directly issue money to, you know, to citizens, because they actually reserve more restriction rights by, you know, sort of keeping it in the private, you know, sector and, you know, we've seen that with Facebook, we've seen that with some of these other with, you know, these too big to fail kind
of American institutions. You know, they they're not directly, you know, affiliated with the US government, but they, you know, their staff is filled with with government intelligence, their budget is filled with, you know, you know, contracts from the US government. And I think we're going to continue To see that kind of play out that the cbdc I think the Fed now which again launches in a month, it's like it launches in July, as sort of
this inter banking network. And that's actually I think, in many ways, a lot more dangerous than a cbdc. Retail facing one anyway. And that just
enables financial surveillance. Let's just CBDCs right. Well,
the thing is, is kind of, I mean, but also like, can we really be even more of a surveillance hell than we are in now. And I don't mean that as a challenge. Anyone listening? Like, please don't, please don't make this worse. But like, we are in kind of a surveillance hell, I mean, anything you do on your phone, on a smartphone on Apple Pay and all this shit, it's completely surveilled. Totally, totally. Yeah. And, and, but fed now kind of, it's this entire banking operation
thing. And it basically like nationalizes, the US banking system even more, and brings it on shores, all of this euro dollar, all of this, you know, sort of shenanigans going on it. It's basically paying everybody this this much higher rate, you know, of overnight, overnight banking, and it's crashing dollar demand outside of the United States and bringing it back in, which is, you know, that's what you know, the bankers want?
Well, yeah, I think that's part of the impulse behind this whole talk about banking the unbanked at the end of the day, too, you know, we want all of the money in our system, particularly our new system we're building so we have to essentially in the quote, unquote, informal economy, and bring it in, you know, into our system so that we can control
and surveil it more closely. And I think that's why you're also seeing like, in the US, with the IRS being like every transaction over $600, I mean, it'll keep going down, because they want everything in the system at the end of the day,
so the US will basically create these synthetic kind of treasury reserve asset back back things that they can use fed now to kind of, you know, do these overnight, you know, security, reverse repo swaps, and then the actual retail, you know, forward facing, like the things that we'll all use, hopefully not you and I, but, you know, the majority of Americans and folks will use this, you know, they'll use stable coins, you know, they'll use USDC, they'll use tether they'll use JP Morgan
dollar coin, they'll use Bank of America coin, like these things are all coming in massive ways. We need to issue a lot of money to be able to service our debt. But the US government doesn't issue dollars directly they issue these these Treasury reserves. So they can sell these treasuries to stable coin providers like tether, and tether has become one of the largest net buyers of, of treasuries, these short term bonds from the US government, and they're making so much money
like hands over fist. And I don't think that's going to stop I think that's going to increase like crazy, I think we're going to see way more stable coins, way more banker coins, because we've already digitalized the dollar. I mean, like your Bank of America, you know, balances a digital dollar, you know, I mean, so little of it is actually physical, or backed in any way. And I think we'll just see that continuing to happen.
And these sort of retail facing stable coins will in fact, be, you know, the, the CBDC, you know, and now we're gonna see, you know, kind of maybe control this and instead of coming out and saying, Let's ban the US government from directly issuing CBDCs, hurray, hurray, we won. But meanwhile, they're promoting, you know, stable coin usage in the private sector as if it's this win. And it's like, no, no, no, the private banking
sector of the US government is the shareholders of the Fed. And they are the people that are, you know, basically enabling the imperialism and colonialism of the United States government. These are the people we don't want to support these people.
Yeah, I definitely agree with them, we do not want to support them. So I want to run something by you. That's a little bit interest well on seemingly but I think might illuminate some of the funny business going on with stable
coins. So the UN for example. So I talked earlier, briefly about the World Food Programs, building blocks program, which was basically like Syrian refugees, okay, you want food from the UN and the World Food Programme, handover, your biometrics scan your irises, you'll have to pay with iris scans to get access to food? And obviously they can't say no, because even though it's voluntary, okay, I'll voluntarily starve or voluntarily hold over my
biometrics to be able to feed myself in a war zone, right? Not exactly voluntary. So the humans doing stuff like that they're backing something I wrote about a few years ago, which is under the ID 2020. Alliance, the push for digital ID that's basically created by gates and the Rockefeller philanthropies to force digital ID on the entire world under the guise of fulfilling Sustainable Development Goal target 16.
Target nine is about legal aid. Identity for all yada yada. So basically, for example, stateless people in the border with Thailand and my Mr. The Karen people. An agency that was involved in the UN sex for food scandal was allowed access to
children. And it was the same theme of handover your biometrics, and we'll issue you you know, wallets with all this information about you tracking you from birth to death, including not just like, you know, your identity credentials, quote, unquote, but all your medical history and your education history and all of that, and tied up with your
biometrics. And if you want aid, right, or access to the only hospital these people have access to, which is run by, you know, partners of this initiative, you have to surrender that, you know, it's it's very messed up. So the UN is pushing a lot of this stuff. But in August of last year, one part of the UN at least was calling for halting the use of stable coins and cryptocurrency in general, including Bitcoin in
developing countries. But then a few months later, in December, the UN started dispersing aid to Ukrainian refugees in the form of USDC. So and then, of course, I'm sure you and maybe some people in the audience are aware of the weird stuff going on with FTX and crypto donations to Ukraine. So what do you make of these policy contradictions from the UN?
I mean, it's just, I mean, it's just another sort of notch on the belt of just the, you know, ridiculousness of of sort of these huge infrastructural infrastructure, you know, entities in our world governance. Yeah, it's absolutely ridiculous. I think to be on one hand, you know, shitting, on the capabilities of Bitcoin, you know, on one side of the mouth, and then the other side of the mouth being like, oh, no, it's essential for, you know, buying drones for the
Ukraine. And by I mean, like, I poked around on a lot of those websites, and was kind of looking and I looked at a lot of wallets and was doing some research with my friend, little elites about, you know, a lot of this stuff. And I mean, it's absurd. The amount of money that was going through the lack of communication, the different the discrepancies between the numbers announced and what was actually, you know, apparent on
the blockchain. And, yeah, I mean, it's just, it's such a great example of like, you know, like, the, just the hip hip hypocrisy of the purple party, I think, for Biden, you know, to be and Warren and kind of the unit
party, like red and blue together, right. Yeah, exactly. That's, I
mean, yeah. I mean, when you look into the, and I'll get back to some of the Ukraine stuff, but you look at the purple party of the financial system. You know, it's the Federal Reserve Chair is sort of the, you know, the person is the one and I'm sure they're, you know, blackmailed and whatever compromised like anyone else, but every single Fed chair, from 1979, through now, with the exception of one Yellen, who's obviously now the Treasury Secretary, was nominated by one
political party and re nominated by the other. So Paul Volcker, wealth Chairman from Ben Bernanke, 87. So he was Carter nominated, and then re nominated by Reagan, Greenspan, from 87 to 2006. He did it four times he was Reagan, then bush, and Clinton, then Bush, Jr. and then Bernanke, which was bush and then Obama, and then power was Trump, and then Biden. And it's like, Okay, we have this huge ideological difference, apparently, between Trump and Biden and voting for Biden and
saving democracy, and Trump is destroying the world. And yet they can re nominate the exact same person who's, you know, kind of arguably most important in controlling the interest rates of the dollar system. It's,
the bankers run both parties. So it's really not that surprising once once you do that, you know, yeah. And then
and you look into the, you know, the connections of FTX with all these huge bankers as as you just expressed their own you know, right before they collapsed, they talked about SPF was on a podcast like a couple of days before they collapsed about talking about wanting to start a stable coin. And so you're seeing you know, a lot of these Yeah, this there's this use case of okay, well, we can distribute money to the Ukraine. And Bitcoin magazine actually has a Ukraine like department.
We have a print magazine in the Ukraine, which is very interesting. I don't know a ton about it. But they have been using Yeah, cryptocurrency Bitcoin and the stable coins as a way to, you know, I guess on paper support and protect citizens and sort of in this this war effort, and then maybe potentially, below below paper, you know, maybe money laundering They are using this technology in a way to. Yeah, I mean, it's just absurd how much money has gone into the Ukraine with this
technology? And yeah, it's completely absurd. I can't even articulate a thought of of how hypocritical it is to be passing legislation attempting to, you know, regulate this as like a dangerous technology. And then on the other side being, you know, virtue signaling, you know, with blue and, and yellow flags about how good you know, the stable coins are for the Ukraine. It's, it's totally absurd. And,
yeah, consider the fact that, like, we already know, at least now, right, that provably I think it was Seymour Hersh, saying that a lot of money that was destined for Ukraine was used by the Ukrainian government was Alinsky types. For you know, ill gotten gains and that a lot of the money sent over there,
there's no paper trail, so no one really knows. So like, Ukraine is the conflict that comes after the US is pulled out of Afghanistan and right, you mentioned Julian Assange earlier, he talked a lot about how the usefulness of Afghanistan to these particular powers, right, yeah, as it relates to things like money laundering, you know, it wasn't just that the money was squandered in Afghanistan, it was intentionally lost, because there's a black budget thing
that goes on. And, you know, this is all wrapped up in terms of US monetary policy. And as well, because you basically have this standard FASEB 56, where the government has one set of books, and they publish another set of books publicly, that's a lie. And they don't have to tell you it's a lie. So no one actually knows where money money is going. Right. So this is
doing that. With Ukraine. It's this giant money sink, and they're using, including the UN, not just the US government, or not just FTX, which was tied up with like the Democratic Party, for example. But the UN itself is also using USDC. Right? Yeah, it gets lost. Oh, yeah. But they claim it's not gonna get lost or being misused. But for some, you know, it's just,
and this is where Bitcoin I think, is a state change. Because, you know, you can't, you can't really have two books, you know, you can have a shitty exchange running a running a bucket shop, that's, you know, doing ridiculous reserve
violations and commingling user funds all i FTX, of course. But, you know, you, you can't you don't have as much opportunity to obfuscate, you know, shitty accounting, which is like, Yeah, I mean, how much of our current state of the world is downstream from, you know, the US going off the gold standard Vietnam War is kind of that seems sort of technique of like, you know, this Afghanistan, Assange theory of, you know, like, this war was meant to just kind of be basically a money pit. And a
laundering opportunity. And then, you know, are, obviously, military colonialism within the Middle East was kind of directly connected to oil. And then we see these, like, color revolutions happening, like we saw, like the CIA and the coup involved in Ukraine is I mean, it's very, that's clear. That's something that happens seven, eight years ago, something like
that. Yeah. And then we also saw, you know, like, what happened with the Iranian British Petroleum Company, and that sort of, you know, we were basically lying to, you know, BP used to be IBP. And there was a, there was a coup there against the Shah, I believe, and sort of this idea of, you know, they were charging them basically telling them that the the oil entity was losing money, and Iran was paying taxes, because they were losing money, the
overthrow of masa deck. Yeah. installed the Shah.
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Exactly. And then he came back after he nationalized, the oil fields. So we're seeing like color revolutions and sort of CO option of, of, you know, lesser democracies in the US, I and we even saw that in Central America. And now we're seeing, you know, like El Salvador and some of this Central and South American countries that are part of these, like 66 dollarized countries in the world. You
know, what, where was the US involvement in in that? And I think so when we look at Ukraine, you kind of have to look at the total picture, learn from history and be like, Okay, well, this is sort of the playbook that the US does, unfortunately. And obviously, you know, I'm not like, supportive of a national country, you know, crossing a border with military action, of course, but it's like, you look at, you know, the sort of big picture and it's like, it's just stinks to high hell for sure.
Yeah, but I think the involvement of so much like weird crypto stuff and Ukraine sort of signals to me that you'd like in the past, you know, a lot of invasions and military action were based around Petrodollar politics. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And now it seems like it's about we're entering a different phase where it's a little different, you know,
Bitcoin dollar politics may be, you know, I mean, it could be a direct sort of parallel to kind of Afghanistan or Iraq involvement. Is it now? Sorry, go ahead. No, no, no, no. And I think it's strange that we just pulled out you know, this Bitcoin dollar thesis kind of came in 2020. And March 2020, when we saw everything implode, we saw oil go negative. In markets, it's like I, you know, I lived my entire life, it's
like the US goes and invades countries to go steal oil. And now we're, you know, it's trading negatives in the future market. And right before that happened, you know, obviously, this was the COVID lock downs, which so much of it was, you know, government and, you know, big institutional, you know, control over government kind of pushing for this big lockdown. So we see a global lockdown, like two months before bitcoins
issuance in May of 2020, we had another happening. And it was the first time that the relative issuance of Bitcoin was actually below 2% relative issuance. So for the first time ever, Bitcoin was actually issuing less than the rate of inflation of the dollar, and wrath less than the rate of gold coming out of the ground, which an extraction rate is about 2% a year. So we have this like mathematical moment happening in Bitcoin, two months
before this thing is about to occur. We see a collapse, total collapse of all markets, dollar goes down, Dixie goes down, stocks go down, gold goes down, oil goes down. You don't nothing's supposed to all move down at once at the same time, you know, like that's, that's a sign of manipulation, like, where's the money actually going to be going into nothing? And then, you know, we see Bitcoin crash to $3,000. And then over the next 12 months at 20x, and it was over $60,000. A year
later. And so, what also happened during that moment, you know, we just disappeared and left Afghanistan and left a bunch of shit there. And then, you know, the Ukraine stuff starts right after, you know, the COVID and forced lockdowns, which now we're learning, you know, we're kind of this catastrophic failure of public health. And I
think it the same people that we're talking about got a lot of wins out of the lock downs, it was catastrophic for regular people. Yeah, but you look at someone like Jeff Bezos, and how much market share Amazon gained, for example, how many
billionaires came out of the COVID lock downs? Yeah. And how it pushed forward a lot of these pre COVID agendas to make everything, push everything to the digital sphere, make telehealth ubiquitous, make more people shop online, shut down in person shopping, and all the stuff that I've you know, was coming from people like Eric Schmidt, of Google, and this National Security Commission, he was leading, you know, they were talking about before COVID and stuff to beat China, they said,
right, but obviously, you know, more about their ambitions really? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of crazy moving parts to all of that. I mean, I definitely think it's, it's important to think about how things have changed, because I feel like a lot of independent media, and it's something that really bothers me, is still very much trapped and looking at the
world through the lens of the petrodollar. And that game has obviously moved on, because we even have the US and the Biden administration, for example, openly pushing for this post oil economy, the net zero stuff, which is being developed really by the bankers that have captured control of the UN, you could argue they really ran it the whole time, because of Rockefeller influence with the founding un and all of that. And
I tend to lean toward that theory, really. But even if you don't think the UN operated responsibly, or whatever, before, it's very clear now that they've been captured by bankers, and that these are the ones creating quote unquote, sustainable development. Right, right. Yeah. And you look at Bernie and Mike Bloomberg, leading that just insane. So, you know, I just don't Yeah, I think especially Oh, go ahead.
Just what the the energy thing that you're talking about there, I think it's so it's so crucial to the Bitcoin dollar kind of ideas that, you know, now we're coming out, you know, we saw the Biden administration attempt to do this 30% tax on Bitcoin mining. I mean, the state control over energy production has a huge huge effect on bitcoins success, because its energy usage is directly related to its decentralization and its ability to sort of, you know, process
sensorless transactions. And so, you know, we're seeing, you know, the state control locked down on energy sources on battery production. We're seeing like a Tesla nationalization, basically of, of minerals and battery Technology. You know, it's a software company as well, of course, with its driving shit, no one's going to catch up to them there. But the energy stuff is so important. And now we're seeing, you know, yeah,
this kind of, we're greenwashing. You know, state control over over money now via this, like green virtue thing. Sorry. So there's
no, I think that's a great addition. So I think part of what we're seeing, too, in terms of this move away from the petrodollar, and again, I would really wish people independent media stop acting like it's still 2019. Because we're definitely world by now, yeah, well, I think people will get really comfortable with that sort of analysis. And you don't really like to, I don't know. I mean, it requires a lot of revisioning of your worldview. And I had to sort of go through
that, too. Because I wrote a lot about Petrodollar politics back when I worked at MIT Press, and obviously things, you know, like we're talking about, have changed quite a bit. So um, I think, though, you know, this idea of technocracy is important to look at because their energy is the currency and people are
allotted a certain amount of energy that they can use. And so there's this idea of introducing, I guess, scarcity, at least for the masses in terms of how much your energy quota and you're only allowed to engage in certain amounts of economic activity based on how much energy that consumes, right? Yeah. And this is basically what the net zero
paradigm is moving towards. But the question is, how do we get from where we are now to there, I don't necessarily think it's going to be like from one to the other straight off, there's going to be some sort of gradualism. And you see so much to with the whole like Bitcoin discussion and energy usage stuff and energy usage as it relates to digital currencies, I think somewhere in there, you're gonna have this gradualism style approach that takes us from where we are now to that
technocracy paradigm. And it's Yeah, I think you are kind of onto something here about what the plan is, but I don't necessarily have all the, you know, steps of that mapped out and know for sure, but it seems to me like that's probably, you know, somewhere in the in the right ballpark, for sure.
I mean, I'm just a dude with an internet connection. You know, it's like that, too. Yeah. You know, yeah, you know, like, I have no idea. It's just, you know, I've learned a lot and just watching, you know, these people kind of operate and like, Yeah, I mean, I don't know, I kind of came at, I've kind of come in a lot of this stuff from a really strange way where, like, I, you know, was kind of a 4chan poster in like, 2016, and kind of, like, got into sort of the red pill kind of conspiracy
stuff through that field. And I thought if it was ridiculous, and I saw a lot of the CO option, like happen, like, I saw, like, the queue, people happen, I saw this stuff sure occur, that was, you know, in my opinion, kind of this direct, you know, kind of controlled opposition to like, actual, like leaks and truth stuff that was coming out of WikiLeaks, you know, Podesta leaks, and all these things, Vault seven, and,
you know, all this shit. And then I got really into bitcoin from just being in the Bay Area, just like people, you know, I worked all these company parties, I was a bartender, you know, up until 2020. And just like, was getting to interact with all these people in these companies, seeing how they act at parties, seeing these things, and just kind of being in the Bay Area for like, this decade, the last decade, and witnessing
everything there. And it's like, I don't know how you can really just like, stand aside and just watch that happen without, you know, picking up something or learning and it's like, again, I don't know, who's really controlling this Cabal, or this dollar coalition or whatever. I mean, it's I think it's impossible to know exactly, but we can see the actors, we can see the like, at least this was meant for it, right? Yeah. Yeah,
for sure. And we can kind of see like, hey, there's a absolute way where they could use Bitcoin to prolong the dollar and globalize the dollar and extend the kind of, you know, we should have probably given up economic hegemony, you know, to China, to India, to, you know, kind of what the BRICS movement is kind of now, you know, probably 10 years ago, or 2008, or whatever,
you know, we probably shouldn't have recovered from that. But we didn't bail out, you know, the citizens we bailed out the banks and, you know, you just look at all this shit. It's like Kamala Harris was the DA in California who should have charged Steve Minuchin. With all of this profiteering off of the collapse, and she decides not to, then he becomes Secretary Treasury prints more money than anyone and now she's the VP. And it's just like, I don't know how you can kind of just look at all
those things and just not see everything. And counter dissonance. That's like, like the Trumps shit. It's just an infuriates me because it's like this no one was more important to like Operation warp speed and lock downs and all the shit that we've had than Trump and yet he's viewed as This like, anti state demigod and
isn't his administration in prison, Julian Assange? Yeah, it's just clown world a lot of Yeah. What are we talking about there? Well, again, there's a lot of cognitive dissonance in this whole, like political Savior rhetoric around Trump, at least with his base. And I've talked a lot about in my work, how there's this cultural priming for people to look for that political savior. So Trump's base thinks I think they found it right. And other people that don't like Trump are
looking for their own version of the Savior. But they're all controlled by the bankers.
in their, in their controlled by their own, well, sorry, our own emotions, they're controlled by their emotions. It's like, I think the Q people are just as dumb as, like the Trump derangement syndrome people like I think they're both dumb. It's like, they're, they're, they're being manipulated by and their consent is being manufactured by, you know, these ridiculous, you know, like Operation Mockingbird
belief stuff. It's no one wants evidence. No one cares about evidence or facts anymore. It's all about belief and your belief in something. You know, your trust in something. I mean, there's all these efforts to rebuild trust, right, since COVID. That's been the big theme of the WEF it's been a big theme of the UN. And trust secures compliance. That's why they're doing it right. Yeah. So they're trying to create all these figures that we trust, so that we will comply with what they
say. So me, you know, maybe it's hard for the West these days to build, you know, trust with Trump's base, right. But you know, you roll out people that are in that sphere, whether it's Trump or Elon Musk, or Peter Thiel or Ron DeSantis or whatever, no one you heard them that way. Yeah.
He feels interesting to where like he kind of caused the bank run on Silicon Valley Bank like that was kind of his baby. He's a huge coiner has come out and
he claims to be a Bitcoin maximalist. But then he goes on stage with Mike Pompeo and says Bitcoin is a Chinese financial weapon to destroy the dollar. So again, it's like Elon Musk, you know, and he doesn't he's like projects this I'm a super libertarian. And then his actions he created the most Liberty destroying CIA front company, probably to ever exist.
Palantir created Facebook, which is, you know, a DARPA cut out basically, and all this other stuff and eighth house Starlink met with Jeffrey Epstein, we know now co invested with him and carbine, which is taking over the emergency services of 911 to build a pre crime control grid. That's not about liberty, Peter. No, I wouldn't. I would urge you to reconsider, at least, you know, well,
but he did write the intro. Exactly. He did write the foreword to the sovereign individual 10th anniversary edition. So he's super based and great, right. All right. Well, maybe he
thinks he's a sovereign individual, because he's on accountable and untouchable, but like people that Palantir is, you know, whose lives they've ruined or will ruin the future? I don't think he sees them as sovereign individuals. You know, I
mean, the guy that the guy that runs the company that sells data to the US government, it's like,
all, all, every US intelligence agency, every US and there's like, 18 of them now. So
it's absurd. Yeah. And I'm sure there's deep state. Yeah. And I'm sure I'm sure there's there's like injure, intelligence fighting. Like, like that's kind of there is factionalism
Most definitely. That's why Epstein was taken down in my opinion. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Interesting. It wasn't because the establishment was mad about sex trafficking. No, no, no. Someone off? Well, I definitely think there was a
factional thing going on. And actually, I think a lot of it has to do with his affiliation with Mohammed bin Salman, who sort of had came to power in this apparent coup in Saudi Arabia deposed John Brennan, former CIA director, John Brennan's golden boy in Saudi Arabia, who was the previous Crown Prince, and then you have, you know, before his arrest and 2019, he was really tied up also allegedly with Tesla and Elon Musk. And Elon Musk is, you know, hangs out with Kushner and
all this stuff. Kushner was hanging out with NBS, there's this weird nexus there. That's sort of in Trump land, right. And then you have John Brennan leading the Russia gate stuff to take down that faction, I think it's pretty clear, in my opinion, at least, that there's definitely something there that's more likely a better explainer of why Epstein was arrested and quote, unquote, suicided. Very useful for a very
long time. And a key part of his usefulness was his connection to what he was doing with JP Morgan, in my opinion, and the collapse of Bear Stearns in 2008. And a bunch of really shady stuff that he was involved in that a lot of people don't really like to talk about when it comes to Epstein talked about before, right. But yeah, Epstein, in that same stuff he was building around the time he was arrested. He was very involved with this guy named Ben Gertz. Oh, who is a scientist?
Trent open transhumanist. And he runs something called Singularity net. And he is one of the top guys at Hanson robotics that produces Sophia the robot right. And Sophia the robot was rolled out and given citizenship by NBS while he was being NBS was being advised by Epstein. So you can sort of see
how that might have some weird connection there. And has a big connection to this card Donald stuff involving Charles Hoskinson that I want to get into, and, yeah, as we wrap up the podcast, sorry, go ahead.
Well, just I think, I mean, I think this is a great into the Cardano stuff, but just the idea of citizenship, I think that is a an angle to all this that is not talked about enough. Where, you know, the elite sort of circumnavigation of KYC. And of a lot of this, you know, these rules are in place, you know, for us, but there's obviously ways to, you know, for elites, basically to circumnavigate this stuff. And this was something that Geoffrey Lubin when he was, you know, he's a co founder of
Ethereum. And when he was explaining the, you know, the you basically how you could buy Ethereum, before it was issued. I mean, he's literally on camera talking about, you know, here's how you avoid, you know, anti money laundering and know your customer regulations, so you can buy as much as possible. We know
JP Morgan has a huge share, and Ethereum. But this idea of citizenship, I think, the connections of it, and how it relates to cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, like, I think you look at like the TerraMar Project, you look at some of the it's like,
I don't know. Yeah, right. Exactly. Or the UN and the Clinton Foundation. Yeah.
And, you know, it was sort of a little bit under this guise of kind of being this like, ocean cleanup thing, but like a huge part of it was about ocean citizenship, and sort of creating this like offshore citizenship
for offshore bankers. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, she's a submarine pilot. What the What is the science shit that they're doing in the, you know, what are they looking for in the Bahamas? Like, who knows? I don't know. I don't want to get into too much of that stuff. But I think this
shorter a cement mixer do his island before he was arrested? And I don't know.
Yeah, yeah. I don't know, either. I don't know what they're looking for building. Do they have a submarine dock underneath there? Who knows. But the citizens ship stuff is super important. Because we're now seeing like, you know, there's this like Indonesian island called Palau, that has all these
blue that has all these connections with Clinton. Biden signed off on their, you know, their, their, basically their support budget from the US and it has this very loose citizenship, you know, passport connection with the US, where basically people could like swim up to this island, get a new passport and then be able to go right into the United States. No
problem. And now we're seeing like, basically places offering this as like a service in the crypto extended crypto space where like, you can go get a citizenship from this little Winky dinky I heard about this in the
conference, and it blew my mind. I was like, someone was telling me about it. Like, oh, yeah, these people I just were talking to you were doing that. And I was like, that's what intelligence agencies do, dude. Yeah.
100%. I mean, it's fair me out. Yeah, I'm with you. And I mean, this is where a lot of my, I don't know, just just poking around and looking at all this stuff. And it's like, you know, there's clearly something going on with like, inter Island sort of citizenship. And I think it's a way that these people are kind of circumnavigating reporting of their finances. And then also, you know, how it relates to trafficking and, and all that,
whether it's drugs, or what else are they circumventing? Right? Exactly. And you start to piece together all that stuff. And it's like Disney cruises, stopping off at little St. James Island for snorkeling, and it's just gets so fucking dark so fast. But but now we're seeing like, NFT citizenship. Yeah, being presented as a way to you know, that then by Nance comes out and says you can use this citizenship as KYC as your KYC
component. Oh, no, that when they're basically offering it as like a service to like, you know, how to, you know, basically, certainly means exactly, yeah, because if it's a financial fee, then none of these laws matter. You know, it's like to the rich, they're nothing. It's like, it's just, it's just part of their budget, you know, like JP Morgan spoofing the metals market, they paid the largest fine in the history of banking. And it was like a fifth of the operating
budget profit of just that one operation. It's
like, or HSBC money laundering for drug cartels and all that stuff. And they get caught. You know, the fines, nothing of what they made. Yeah, totally.
So while I think the citizenship shit is really crazy, and I think the way that IDs are going to work in a blockchain, hyper surveilled model is really interesting, and I think that there are already
seeing it with what you just brought up. It's going to be a little people aren't going to have these loopholes like you just discussed, but the rich Well, yeah, so it's this panopticon. And it looks like we're all included because it's quote unquote inclusive. Right? But rich people can are gonna have all these workarounds and loopholes, and they're setting them up right now.
Yeah. And we're seeing, I think with the Cardano stuff to kind of loop back to that, like, there's this whole affinity scam within that that's using, like institutions of academia as a way to sort of build you know, yeah, affinity, right. And I think we've kind of seen like, academia and like, certainly like technology, academia as like being a very corrupted, like, I think there's a reason why Epstein was so connected to a lot of scientists in the academic world, and I don't
think it's all just eugenics. Or trans. You know, I don't remember
but I think a lot of it was but Oh, of course, of course. I really,
absolutely. But I think a lot of it is sort of like, you know, kind of Manufacturing Consent. For you know, whatever we just went through. I mean, I think academia was a huge part of I got kicked out of college. I went back to school for electrical engineering, and I got kicked out of college. We're not getting back. And I think Akademia was a huge part of it still is, I mean, they're still requiring Well, it's always
been that look at MIT, where Noam Chomsky, for example, was actually in heavily funded. Yeah, it's been it created mitre, one of the shittiest military and intelligence contractors to other exists the MIT and mitre stands for MIT. And it's been a huge part of the military industrial complex, since the military industrial complex, was created. Chomsky, for example, at MIT, when he first started off got a ton of
military funding, right. So I mean, most people at MIT probably get some sort of military funding at some point, even if you're a linguist, right?
I mean, we just saw, I mean, he's way more than a linguist. I mean, he bass. I mean, I know,
I know. I know, basically, in the 50s and 60s, yeah.
But huge part of inventing, you know, the infrastructure for computers. I mean, he's, you could say he's kind of the father of computers and computer systems in this very strange way.
People talk about that a lot. But Epstein knew they ever thought he wanted to meet with rice.
Totally. And then we see this guy that was just, I think he was just opposed last night, James Staley, who was the CEO of Barclays, and JP Morgan. Yeah. And his grandfather was James Ryan Killian, who was the president of MIT from 48 to 59. So and his dad ran a chemicals company and his grandfather was Staley of WT grant, when they went under. So there's just like, it just everywhere you look. It's just like
intergenerational crime families. Yeah. I mean, the people that put Jamie diamond and power essentially, aside from the Wexner crowd were the crown family, which is like the quintessential intergenerational crime family, except for maybe the Pritzker is, which are also a big part of the Epstein story. For sure. I mean, Thomas Pritzker is in the black book is numero uno. Why did Jeffrey Epstein call him that?
years that even mean? Even mean,
right? Why is he number one? I mean, even Wexner didn't get that in the black book. You know, I mean, yeah, weird stuff going on. So not enough people look at these families, but one of the keys. key reasons the Pritzker IRS, for example, had been so successful in what they've done. They were very early on involved in Castle Bank, which was like, one of the most notorious at least at the time, offshore financial banks built by former CIA guy Paul Halliwell, who was a Republican
insider in the Pritzker years. Were all tied up with the Democrats and it was their lawyer, Burton Cantor that helped set up Castle bank with Halliwell. Right. And, you know, all this Republican Democrat dirty money mixing off there in the Caribbean. I mean, based on what we've talked about today, it doesn't really sound that different than then does it?
You know, definitely not. And I think that's, that's such an important part of, I think, you know, maybe it's a good you know, kind of general you know, kind of note to leave on, but sort of this like, the cycles of kind of the Psyops and insanity are compressing like so, like they have to, and now we can see these like, you know, basically like harmonies or fractals, or you know, whatever, like just complete reinventions of, of these mechanisms, like occurring in real time. It's like we're
seeing them happen. And it's like, oh, that's just like, this thing they did, and like, oh, wow, Ukraine is just like Afghanistan. Like just the fact that we can even notice that because it's only been 20 years. I think is like that's very
important. It's like, you know, the node researchers are starting to see you know, this cycle is compressed and we're able to kind of like see how the conspiracy or the coalition or whatever Cabal, whatever the dollar system like how they operate and we will We're learning from it because I have to do it so much quicker. It was like, you know, the, the financial crisis is are now happening every few years, and we're probably going to have another one very shortly. Oh,
yeah. We've lived through it. I mean, I'm not I mean, you know, I'm not old by any means. And I've seen like, three, you know? Yeah, exactly. And it's like, we're, we're noticing, I can only imagine that people that are, you know, 5060, whatever, twice our age that are, you know, what they're noticing if they were really kind of paying attention. So I think as the cycles compress, you know it they get more desperate.
II and they're more desperate. What are we going to do about it? Right, right. Before I get to that, which is the last thing I want to talk about. I do want to go back to Cardano. And Charles. Yeah, please. Because I think it's important under the topic of the crypto colonialism stuff, right? So Hoskinson, co founder of Ethereum. And there's several co founders of Ethereum, one of which is Vidovic, Butera and Butyrin. harissa is name who I want to talk about in the
context of this thing. But basically Hoskinson has teamed up with who I mentioned earlier, this transhumanist scientists that was funded by Epstein, they've been Birdsell. So Cardano and singularity net have worked to increasingly fuse their operations and singularity the singularity net is run by Ben girdle. And, okay, around. I think this happened after slightly after the Cardano announced they were going to get
involved with the Ethiopian government. So the conversation which is normally very unpleasant, at least if you're me, thing, you know, outlet to read has an article that it published about this called Ethiopia's blockchain deal as a watershed moment for the technology and for Africa. And it starts off talking about the launch of Bitcoin and then there's this conflation of bitcoin and how everyone doesn't, you know, these are all the negative things that have
come up about Bitcoin. It's been embroiled in these massive controversies, but now blockchain is being used for good and being used a tribute to the social and economic welfare of people in the developing south. That's what it says. And there is this lady's reasoning for this who's African by the way, which is, I mean, what a sell out. She's basically saying that this program by Charles Hoskinson for Ethiopia is going to make everything better for Ethiopian children. Here's how
she describes it. She says, a few companies have begun showcasing blockchain capabilities to various African countries. Unlike most other cryptocurrency blockchains, which focus on private sector use in developed regions like Europe in North America. Their approach has been to target the governments and public institutions in the developing world, obviously, for altruistic reasons. I'm being sarcastic there. Yeah, that's why I'm laughing, listening. But you
know what to take me literally on that. So anyway, she goes on in April, the Ethiopian government confirmed that it had signed a deal to create a national database of student teacher ids using a decentralized digital identity solution. The deal involves providing IDs for 5 million children across 3500 schools, which will be used to store educational records. This is the largest blockchain deal ever to be signed by a government and has been making waves in the
crypto asset industry. And she goes on to talk about how digital ID is going to be promote real financial inclusion for me, but Okay, so you're talking about real financial inclusion, but this is supposed to be blockchain for educational
credential. So obviously, you can see in there that this is part of the broader un backed totally Orwellian digital ID, you know, paradigm where it's your everything, your access to information, your access to medical care, your access to education, your access to money is all going to be based on this
digital ID. And then she goes on to say, This is what makes this promising is that this is the first main blockchain projects are focused on serving the African market with goals that align with the developmental agenda set out under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, as well as the African Union agenda 2063 goals which are basically the African Union equivalent of the SDGs big surprise and so then she goes on to talk about Cardano and how Cardano commission the software
company input output Hong Kong are IO eight i o h k, and a Mergo, which is based in Japan to develop and maintain the Cardano blockchain and that Cardano is technically owned by this Cardano Foundation, a Swiss nonprofit, and the projects are based this you know project is trying to show how the Cardano blockchain and its core technology can be used to benefit African countries. And then it goes on to say this
about what Cardano the project actually is. So in the case Some of the earth Ethiopian deal involving Cardano and IO HK which Charles Hoskinson runs I'm pretty sure yeah. Yeah, he says or it says a Tala prism is being used that project will build digital identity solutions on the Cardano. Blockchain. The idea is to start by granting primary, secondary and university students a digital identity that can track their educational career, and future progress. So every test you fail
in school will be there forever. You know, but this is also part of what I mentioned earlier with the Karen stateless, stateless people in Thailand and Myanmar being built by ID 2020, tying all of that to their vaccination records, their Health Registry from the time they're born on tied to their biometrics tied to their finances. And that's essentially what's what's going on here. But it's being framed as ending crypto colonialism by some of the same outlets that we're talking about crypto
colonialism as being bad. This is supposed to be how to stop it, you know, and it's backed by the UN and all this stuff. But you know, as I just mentioned a second ago, singularity net is fused with this and this particular project, as far as I believe, I think it's singularity net as well is involved with this AI lab that Epstein's philanthropies helped fund into existence. So you have a lot of Epstein stuff there.
And Epstein, and this deposition he gave in 2012 to the US Virgin Islands called Africa, a great place to experiment fertile ground for experimentation. So what do you think he's doing? You think Epstein wasn't a crypto colonialist? He's a
serial financial criminal and sex trafficker. And in his company that was, you know, he was creating at the time of that deposition, he was trying to get funding all these programs for vulnerable use in the US vi to sort of herd them into what he was building, the tech FinTech company he was building which is basically like a coding sweatshop by the sound of it. Right. But allegedly, according to the US Virgin Islands, that company founded after his first arrest was a key part of a sex
trafficking operation. So what else was he trying to get vulnerable kids for from the USPPI? Question mark, question. More questions. So with Ethiopia, and all this stuff going on there, and these people being tied to it and framing themselves as anti crypto colonialist, very disturbing. And also the question arises, because of the people involved, what is all this data being used for from these kids? Right?
Because you have, you know, singularity net, and Ben Gertz will have this tied to Sophia, the robot, which is supposed to be building its AI that controls the robot right off of the data it's trained on. And now they have this sort of ability to access all of this stuff. Well, they say it's decentralized. But how decentralized is it? Really, you know, I mean, a lot of these guys, including stable coins and all this that we've talked about today claim, oh, we're decentralized and so on and so
forth. But that's not exactly always true, right?
Yeah. Not even close to true. Especially Cardano. I mean, no, absolutely not centralized. There. It is very centralized, not decentralized in any way.
Yeah, exactly. And then you have vitiligo you Terran, sorry, if I'm butchering his name, I think Vitalik
booter. In but due to right, well, alright. His name deserves to be
strong and fastest on the wrong syllable. Know how it is. Exactly. Yeah, whatever. I speak two languages. I'm not that bad, whatever. But anyway, he came up with this thing called Soul bound tokens. Are you familiar with that? Yeah, yeah. Where he's basically charting out the same idea of tracking someone you know, their whole life on in these NF T's that you know, are basically the same thing as what Hoskinson is building here in Ethiopia, and called them
soul bound tokens.
I mean, this disturbing ass name. Yeah, yeah. So I think to say the very least, you know, I really wish that more Bitcoiners particularly the ones that actually have the values of original Bitcoin, like you do, would start calling this stuff out more because there's a lot of conflation, like I've talked about in some of these mainstream articles, nice academic articles, but also an alternative media, you know, all Bitcoiners everyone that has is involved in crypto in any way,
they're all the same. Right? Right. Right. But there's a lot of, like we've talked about today, you know, there are some differences. And the question is for Bitcoiners, specifically, but also other people that may be looking to the some of these
technologies as a potential exit ramp. The ability to use that stuff as an X exit ramp has to be fought for and it has to be fought for now, because like you've talked about, a lot of ground is being lost and the battle may eventually be lost to be able to use it that way anyway, and then it's just part of the same system you're supposed to be fighting against. So it's like everything else, you know, going on right now at
some point you have to have red lines. you'd have to say, I'm not gonna cosign that, you know,
it's so messed up too specifically with it being Ethiopia is like, Ethiopia is kind of so beautiful because it was never colonized. Like it actually kind of played all the colonizers against each other. And they would like, take weapons from one side and use it to shoot the other side and then turn like they were never actually colonized, they were kind of the only place in Africa that really wasn't colonized.
And now we're seeing Epstein, Charles Charles, yeah. And this this did shit is so especially on these centralized systems, it's like, you're creating a walled garden and a data depot for that information to get leaked or to get taken. It's like, I mean, it's like, anytime you have a collection of I mean,
even KYC exchanges have to deal with this, too. It's like, I think there was a lawsuit in Illinois, maybe there was a state where that was suing Coinbase for holding all of their data of their, like 3d scans of their faces and whatever on a on a server that got that got compromised. And so all of that data got leaked. That was, quote, unquote, an accident. What these people are building and colonizing, you know, Ethiopia with, it's like that by design. Yeah. And it's really messed up. And
this is what sustainable development means to the UN who again, I've been captured by by bankers reiterate that. So this is a banker design vision, right? Yeah. So you're in Bitcoin to own the bankers? Right. Right. Right, calm or whatever. You What are you doing? Or yeah, and I
would say that, I'd say the majority of Bitcoiners understand that, I think, yeah, and these other, you know, are basically bastardization of what Satoshi did and the creation of centralized banking, I think people realize that with proof of stake that there's like a dilution of holders, you know, like, people can get that, but there's like a next level to, like, people just love to scam and learn about why it's a scam, why the economic, you know, you know, is set against the
citizens and is set to enrich people, they don't really, really get into that at rocket learning, and certainly don't have necessarily an open mind to like the true depths of how disgusting this really is. And I think did decentralized like, a really interesting thing, because I think that there are some really cool use cases with that, if done in a way where they're self hosted and encrypted and posted in a way you can create results.
Most people aren't going to not hold on this type of stuff. That's
totally. Right. Right, exactly. And even some of the decentralized, the biggest one right now that I think people are, there's a whole bunch of stuff that I don't necessarily feel comfortable sharing some of the sources, but there's going to be a lot of movement happening and decentralized standards. And that is sort of what was the project that that was called by. And that was a project that was worked on by this guy, Daniel burgers, super smart. Very nice guy. And now
he's working for block. Jack Dorsey Lee, kind of deep, TBD company. And they're working on a Bitcoin digital ID, that, as far as I know, is about to have some pretty big, you know, the whole thing about digital IDs in the walled garden, it depends on if someone with a huge, huge stake in the identification, you know, sort of coalition, it you need someone to adopt the standard, right? And so things that I've heard from people is
that a very, very, very big, large state operation. Maybe in California is going to be adopting one of these web service standards. Yeah.
Any of that, though, like for me digital ID, if you consider the fact that like the NSA and the CIA and Israel's unit, a 200, GCHQ, in the UK, etc, etc, can probably get into any device you have. Oh, yeah, I don't really, you know, you're just, it's like any sort of digital ID even if you take certain measures, it's probably going to be like a sitting duck for those agencies. So if your goal is to not be surveilled and to be, quote, unquote, ungovernable, I personally, I
don't know if I'm going to get involved with that. But again, you know, people trying to build parallel systems and take back our technology, yada, yada, yada. I mean, if you want to do that, fine. I don't know if that's going to be the solution that's going to get us out of that. You know, I think it's more about community building at the leg level. But, you know, I mean, at least people are, in a sense trying to do something, but I personally, you know, I'm just wary of all digital IDs
period. So Brian put a different coat of paint on it, but I'd you know, I see it as a sitting duck for the bad guys.
I agree 99% Like I definitely agree it anytime you're curve creating, I mean you're creating a an exploitable attack surface anytime you put any of your identification into a computer. I do think like still
do, and even people that are critical of it, you know, just know things.
And I do that too. I mean, I'm not like this perfect, like I'm pretty public, with like, how I operate on social media and whatever. And that's not all good stuff, either. But I do think like there is absolute power within, you know, PGP, and some of these public key cryptography and some of these encryption decryption schemes, like they are very powerful. And they have been attacked by the state, like a lot of this cryptography like, you know, they were sort of viewed as, you
know, munitions basically. And that it was like, militaries, you know, issue that this technology was being released. And so a lot of these OG cypherpunks, like, put it on T shirts, they released it as books, they did all these things to, to, you know, Phil Zimmerman to create PGP as something that could actually be used by people around the world, knowing full well it will also be used by spies, and intelligence agencies, and all these people to operate horrible, horrible thing,
I see what you're saying, democratize the tools, don't just get them in their hands make an example to everyone, if they're going to use it, I can, I can get that right. But at the same time,
I think you're totally right. And I think we should be very wary of all of these systems, including Bitcoin and I, you know, I've basically devoted my life in many ways to Bitcoin, education or journalism, or whatever. And I still think that there's a less than, or more than 0% chance that it was intelligence operation, right, like its creation, but I can still see how the technology and the tools, regardless in a in a freedom way, regardless of its
generation, which I think is very unique to Bitcoin. But obviously, that's why I'm so like, jacked up about how we need to push back on this stuff, because any technology can be co opted so easily. And it is just such a scary, scary world to go into.
Totally. Well, we probably have to end it there. Because this has definitely gone on longer than a lot of my podcasts tend to but I think it was a really important conversation, because a lot of stuff isn't being said, you know, a lot of what you've talked about, and we've talked about today isn't
really being said, especially in the Bitcoin space. So I really hope more people with the same you know, sort of value set that you have in the Bitcoin space do come forward, at the very least to differentiate themselves from people like Charles Hoskinson, because there are people that throw everyone in the same mix. And I don't really think you know, that's fair, knowing people like you and others like you. So I definitely think the more voices that are added, you know, about these issues, the
better off we will be. But you have mentioned a couple times that you have an up coming book about some of what we've discussed today, the Bitcoin dollars, so kit work, when and where, what, what details regarding those things about the book, you know, why don't you let us know that and where people can follow you on social media, etc?
Yeah, totally. So, yeah, the books been finished up for a bit. I literally got a message from the publisher, as I was talking to you right now, so about to have a call to talk about some other things. So hopefully, very soon, I was hoping to have it out in time for the conference, which was a
couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, that wasn't able to happen, but I'm thinking hopefully in the next couple months, certainly by the end of the year, especially because I think just so many of the things within the the thesis are sort
of already playing out. You know, so but a lot of the stuff I've written about is available on Bitcoin magazine.com You can kind of search by author, you can search Mark Goodman and find find me there I've written a lot of stuff on there about digital dollar stable coins, the you know, the the birth of the Bitcoin dollar was kind of my first article for the magazine. And that kind of sets the tone for the thesis. So we'll be publishing with Bitcoin magazine as well, which I'm very excited
about. We are continuing the physical print world, obviously, you know, I run the editorial for the print magazine, which we're very stoked that you've been in now a bunch of times, which is awesome. We hope. Well, we'll be three and Oh, right. Yep. And that's a bunch of times you know, three's a crowd. And you can definitely find us there. stored up Bitcoin
magazine.com. You can follow me on Twitter at Mark Goodwin with an underscore between the W and the AI n. And yeah, I hope to see y'all out on the battlefield, yelling about this stuff because it's super important. And yeah, yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was a blast.
I definitely think it's a battlefield. And I think a lot of people don't see that. I mean, there it is an information war. And I think right now to an extent Bitcoiners are losing that. So I think this is a big, you know, what a lot of what you've shared today, I think is a step in the right direction for the coiners I hope more will come out and show what side they're on because it really is a time for everyone to start picking sides. Are you going to back this banker? This taupe
banker built dystopia? Or are we going to build something different? And you know, it's time to pick the side? Most definitely. And I think the more people that are vocal, the less you're going to see these configurations of the people that are building that with stable coins and cryptocurrency and even with dollarized Bitcoin and then, you know, the people on the side against all of that, I hope. I really hope to see more of that in the not so distant future because who might
who knows how much time we have left? Uh, but not totally censored internet. You know? That's,
I agree. Yeah. Reality.
Alright. Well, thanks so much for joining me today. Mark. Really enjoyed this conversation, probably why it ran really long, but I really enjoyed it. So you know. Thanks again. Thanks for your time. Thanks to everyone listening. And please feel free to share this around and thanks to everyone, as always that supports this podcast and makes it possible. couldn't do this without you and we'll catch you on the next episode. Thanks so much.