Transcript: Bryan Jacoutot: Bitcoin's Timestamp Is the Last Proof of Truth

Unidentified speaker [0:07] You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. Let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be.

Marty Bent [0:34] Probably should be. Brian Jacotot, welcome to the show, sir.

Bryan Jacoutot [0:40] Thank you very much for having me, Marty. I've been a longtime listener, first-time joiner of the show, so I really appreciate you having me on.

Marty Bent [0:47] Well, I appreciate you coming on and appreciate the work that you're doing behind the scenes. As I was describing or explaining before we hit record here. You're working at the intersection of one of my favorite niche topics within Bitcoin, which is using the blockchain, the time chain, Bitcoin's timekeeping aspects to prove that certain digital artifacts existed at a certain point in time in a certain state. And so I think that's what we're going to cover today. So if you're interested, To learn about how Bitcoin can help prove that things existed at a certain point in time, particularly as we barrel into the future of AI, SI, whatever we're calling it these days, I think you definitely want to stick around for this conversation. But before we get into the comment that yourself and Rafael Cordon put into the United States court system, just a little background. How'd you become passionate about this and what was the aha moment for you?

Bryan Jacoutot [1:52] Well, I've been in Bitcoin for a while. It's probably been— we're getting close to 10 years now. I think I jumped in right around the very top of that bull market in 2017 and learned some hard lessons along the way. I also started much more distributed in terms of what my interests were in the space. It was more crypto. And I think I got in on the basis of Ethereum, actually, because as a lawyer, the smart contract— I remember the smart contracts were a huge thing back then. And so that was just my natural kind of entry point. But I started trying to incorporate into my practice as well, because I do general commercial litigation, but I wanted to focus more in that blockchain space.

Bryan Jacoutot [1:52] And so when I started going down the rabbit hole, so to speak, and really trying to learn how the technology works from a first principles basis, so I could explain it to my colleagues and get them to join me in this great revolution and everything. I realized that Bitcoin was different, that it wasn't just the MySpace to everyone else's Facebook and now Instagram and all that, TikTok, that there were foundational things that set it apart, including the fair launch, trying to do that very careful balancing of incentives and disincentives for updating Bitcoin's blockchain truthfully with a group of people who have no real connection to one another.

Bryan Jacoutot [1:52] And I realized that that didn't necessarily scale into everything the way a lot of the other crypto space was trying to push it. So I then just went straight into Bitcoin and essentially tried to fold that into my practice. And so for a few years, it was just that, right? It was just looking for Bitcoin clients. stacking sats, all that fun stuff. And then I came across the video put out by Carlos's team about the Guatemalan elections and how they used Bitcoin to help certify and verify the authenticity of those elections. And being a skeptic, as someone, again, who went into the blockchain space to revolutionize everything, and then realizing there wasn't necessarily a whole lot of air there with a lot of those projects, I was very skeptical of what Simple Proof was saying.

Bryan Jacoutot [1:52] So I looked into it though, and Carlos was gracious enough to disabuse me of my original skepticism. And he was one of those things that's great is I think Bitcoiners get a, especially Bitcoin maximalists, get a reputation for being very toxic and not approachable. And Carlos was very much the opposite. And so I learned a little bit more about what he was doing. And then I asked him, hey, can I help? How can we work together? And so we started working at about ways to essentially introduce his tech and what he's working on into the American election systems, into American companies and things like that.

Bryan Jacoutot [1:52] And so that's what we've been doing. And of late, we've focused too on the litigation side of things and the courtroom side of things, because we realize that there's great potential for this technology there. As artificial intelligence kind of gets more ubiquitous and deepfakes get a lot better, we realize that there's some use case here. And I don't want to go too much into it because I know we're going to talk about it as we go. But yeah, so that's how I got connected with this project. And now we're just trying to incorporate into all these different areas where we realize that finding the digital truth is really, really important and it's getting more and more difficult to ascertain or to discern for the average Joe.

Bryan Jacoutot [1:52] So yeah, that's how it all started.

Marty Bent [5:22] Yeah, I think taking a step back, and Carlos has been on the show a couple of times now at this point and has Explained how Simple Proof and the Open Timestamps protocol works. But for those who are listening now who may not have heard those episodes, maybe that's a good place to start is leaning into what Simple Proof was able to do for the Guatemalan elections and then in Screven County, Georgia during the 2024 election cycle. Let's just hone in on those use cases and explain how things are working on the backend technically with Bitcoin.

Bryan Jacoutot [5:58] Yeah. And I'll always definitely defer to Carlos and his team on the super technical side of things. I'm obviously on the more legal side and the practical application side, but in serving that role, I've got to understand the technology at a basic level. And so essentially, it is an offering that's built on top of Peter Todd's Open Timestamps Protocol, which is something that I think was introduced, I want to say around 2016. been even a little earlier than that, but it basically allows you to append to any Bitcoin transaction, any arbitrary digital data in the form of a hash. So the same way that SHA-256 underpins Bitcoin's cryptography and blockchain, it also underpins this service offering as well.

Bryan Jacoutot [5:58] And when you send a Bitcoin transaction, you're sending a cryptographic transaction and putting that into a block. And then that block is getting a proof of work attached to it. And then another cryptographic nonce is attached on the end of that. And then you're linking your blocks through that protocol. And this just does the same thing, but instead of sending 6 Bitcoin to John on December 3rd, it takes any sort of digital file and reduces it down to a cryptographic hexadecimal hash, which is something where I think we're pretty familiar with. They look a lot like a Bitcoin address. And that serves as basically a timestamp of that digital file that it existed in a certain way at that point in time.

Bryan Jacoutot [5:58] So you've got kind of 2 things being verified here. You've got one, that the digital file contains the contents that make that hash, and then 2, that it occurred in block 900,000 or whatever. So you have a time aspect and you've got a content aspect. And what Carlos and his team did in Guatemala is essentially take the election records, the physical election records, they get reduced down into digital form, and then they're passed along for reporting purposes and things like that. And they started hashing the digital version as soon as it was reduced from the physical version. So essentially, once you got it to a certain point, there's obviously elements of fraud that could happen prior to that reduction to digital form.

Bryan Jacoutot [5:58] But once it's hashed, that is now unalterable for all intents and purposes, once it's hashed into Bitcoin's blockchain. So So anything that happens after that point, you can be sure is the truth, or, and if you have any questions about whether someone altered it later, you can just go back and compare hashes. And so if there's been any alteration, then that hash will not match up. And so he did that with the Guatemalan elections, which I thought was very interesting. And so then he started working with Screven County, and that's where a little bit, I get a little bit more involved. So I'm here in Atlanta, Georgia.

Bryan Jacoutot [5:58] Gremlin County, I think in 2024, did kind of a basic— at the end of the 2024 elections, they certified the election result, which gets posted to Facebook and social media and all that. They sign it, the election supervisor signs it, and that's it. But what they also did was they certified, they hashed and digital timestamped the election result as well, so putting it into the Bitcoin blockchain. So in 2024, this was probably less of a problem, although still in 2024, the gen AI is pretty good even at that point. But once it's out into the internet, on social media, what have you, people can tamper with it.

Bryan Jacoutot [5:58] People can mess with it. People can make it look like you wrote something that you didn't write in, or they can delete things that were in there. And so the idea was essentially that Stacy Scott, who was the election supervisor down there in Screven County, was able to— once she certified it and posted it, she was able to freeze it, freeze that digital information in time. creating a hash and putting it into Bitcoin's blockchain. And so she got essentially an extra layer of security for her certification that other counties don't have. Now, 2024 obviously went, I think, very well, pretty smoothly in terms of the election processes, but it's not always going to be that way.

Bryan Jacoutot [5:58] And we're hitting another election in 2026 here in I want to say it's about a month away, or actually early voting starts, I believe, tomorrow here in Georgia. So it's going to be a tight one again. The whole control of the Senate and the House is in the balance. A lot of governorships are in the balance. So we are going to be in tight, tight, tight territory. And what we did here in Georgia to kind of build on what we did in Screven County is— In Georgia, we're allowed to do what's called drop box surveillance for our mail-in drop box ballots. So when you request an absentee ballot in Georgia, you can fill it out, mail it in, or you can fill it out and bring it to your polling location.

Bryan Jacoutot [5:58] And there's a little drop box kind of just out there, and folks are able during voting hours to just go in and drop it off, and that kind of alleviates any potential problems with the United States Postal Service. And these, these drop boxes are required to be monitored 24/7, or at least when they're operational. So if you, if you take them out, You put them behind a locked room, then you don't have to monitor them. But if they're operational, then they have to be monitored. And so it's either gotta have a physical person there watching it, or you can use surveillance video. And a recent state election board rule says that you can livestream that surveillance video.

Bryan Jacoutot [5:58] I think that's a pretty decent rule, pretty well-intentioned rule in that, you know, you wanna increase transparency and auditability around the elections. You wanna show your people, hey, you know, nothing's going on in front of these drop boxes. We're gonna livestream it, right? We're gonna record it for you. And you can take a look yourself. The problem is now with the sophistication, increasing sophistication of generative AI, is that those dropbox surveillance video recordings become a potential liability, and they may end up actually honestly kind of doing the thing that they don't want to do, what they're trying to prevent, in that folks can capture the livestream, run it through a gen AI program to make it look like something nefarious is going on.

Bryan Jacoutot [5:58] Maybe it looks like there's ballot box stuffing going on. Maybe it looks like there's voter intimidation. You can have someone standing out there and you can literally put someone in there who's just looking intimidating, and it'll look pretty convincing. I mean, it's shocking how good these programs have got. And so what this guards against by what we did in Screvenge County is we take the video in real time and hash it into Bitcoin's blockchain using the simple proof method, using the Open Timestamps Protocol. And so you have definitive proof of what the video looked like at essentially like 1 or 2 seconds delayed from when it actually was captured, which is pretty nice because once these surveillance recordings are finalized and they're eventually subject to the Open Records Act here in Georgia, which means anyone can access them, and once you access them, you can give them to whoever you want.

Bryan Jacoutot [5:58] There's an organization right now that just makes them available for folks who want them. And again, I don't think anyone's doing anything wrong here, but the potential for someone to do something wrong is very apparent because then they can take that, alter it, make it look like something bad happened. And if you have a tight election, which we're probably gonna have here in Georgia, you can really sow seeds of distrust, mistrust, and just generally have the population question what is otherwise a fair election, and it'll look really convincing. But what Screven County has And unfortunately, right now, the rest of Georgia does not, is they have presumptively valid evidence in the form of their timestamp of what the actual video looks like.

Bryan Jacoutot [5:58] So when someone comes in with an altered video, it doesn't matter how convincing it is. If we hash that video file that they have, and that hash does not match the one that's in Bitcoin's blockchain at a certain block, then we know that that was altered after the fact. And so we can use this to allay people's fears almost immediately as to the veracity of the election results, as opposed to having essentially a he said, she said about what the real video is, Grebin County or the state of Georgia saying one thing, manipulated video purveyor saying the other. And then we spend weeks or days or weeks or months litigating what's the real video, whether actually in court or just in the court of public opinion.

Bryan Jacoutot [5:58] And all that time, we've sowed seeds of distrust in our elections So for us, this is like really low-hanging fruit. It's something that everybody can implement pretty cheaply and pretty quickly, and it provides this great barrier against people trying to sow seeds of dissent and sow seeds of questioning in our election results.

Marty Bent [14:23] Yeah, I mean, to your point, it's extremely simple proof. I mean, it's in the name. It's extremely simple, stupid, relatively cheap. But the implications are profound. The ability to, again, prove that something happened at a certain point in time or prove that something was in a certain state at a certain point in time, I think is wildly underappreciated right now. And again, specifically due to the nature of AI, generative AI video specifically, it's going to be impossible To discern real from fake AI videos. It already is getting that way. I mean, I make AI videos. We do generative AI content here at TFTC. We have been doing it for over a year, and just the progress that the video models have made within 14 months is astonishing. And if you project that forward, we're going to get to a point where you literally cannot discern. And so creating environment, particularly around critical functions like elections, where you can have some semblance of truth anchored in the Bitcoin blockchain is extremely valuable.

Bryan Jacoutot [15:40] Yeah, absolutely. And it's this energy and this computing power that makes up Bitcoin's proof of work that's already all out there doing the great work of securing Bitcoin's transactions, why people are comfortable saving their life savings in it, why they're kind comfortable saving their grandkids' inheritance in it. And so it's out there being used already, but we can piggyback on it. And I know we just had our recent hard fork problem with the BIP-110 and the fork that came out of that. I understand the criticism of being careful about not polluting Bitcoin blocks with just arbitrary data. I think there's a real genuine argument for that.

Bryan Jacoutot [15:40] And I'm in support of the general concept of not doing that. And that's why this protocol is great, because you could take any amount of data, it doesn't matter how large it is, and reduce it to a 56-bit or 56-character hexadecimal hash, whatever it is. That's real low weight in terms of data. So you can just do that over and over and over again. And I think everyone would be of the opinion that we're not cluttering Bitcoin's blockchain with JPEGs and things like that.

Marty Bent [16:54] Yeah. And so moving on to the letter or the comments that you, I guess, presented to the United States court system, moving from elections to just trials and cases and using Bitcoin as courtroom evidentiary standard, as a standard to basically prove that evidence existed in a certain state. at a particular point in time, again, seems like another low-hanging fruit. You came out with a thread, you have comments which I can pull up here. We're probably not going to read the whole thing, but Logan, we will— we're definitely not going to read the whole thing, but just flash it on the screen.

Bryan Jacoutot [17:40] That's as brief as I can get as a lawyer. We're worse than ChatGPT when it becomes being voluminous.

Marty Bent [17:45] 11 pages of comments here, but basically saying, hey, in the world of AI, there's going to be a lot of problems in terms of people trying to fake evidence, and we should create the standard around hashing data, digital data into Bitcoin to prove that evidence existed in a certain state at a particular point in time. And you highlight some precedents of a few instances where this has happened already. And I think there was 3 cases, I believe, that you cited in the thread and in the letter as well. Frazier versus Southeast Georgia Health. Was that Mendones versus Cushman Wakefield and one other? But basically a combination of AI-generated video presented as evidence that proved to be fake.

Marty Bent [17:45] Somebody, I guess, in the early 2010s manipulating the clock on their their Windows system to pretend that something— Metadata. Yeah, to manipulate metadata to make it seem like something existed earlier or later than it actually did. And the third's escaping me, but I think these 3 precedents and instances highlight why this is a valuable function and how would hashing this data using a simple proof like tool change the way we operate within the court system, particularly around evidence?

Bryan Jacoutot [19:19] Yeah. So the rules of evidence are drafted on purpose to be a little bit broad. You don't want to draft a new rule every time a new piece of technology comes out because the rules take a long time to make. There's a lot of hoops you got to go through, a lot of procedures and stuff. So you would be constantly playing catch-up and never able to do so because people of technology changing is just dramatic. However, there are certain times when a technology becomes so persistent that you maybe do want to address it directly. I think the idea of a digital hash is one of those, particularly the use of a digital hash into a distributed blockchain like Bitcoin.

Bryan Jacoutot [19:19] So what we're doing is essentially saying, that in general, you can prove that a digital file existed using the basic rules of evidence. You can have these kind of burden-shifting framework where, you know, proponent of the evidence says, this is my piece of digital evidence. Then the opponent says, no, no, no, that's been faked or that's fraudulent. And then you go through this whole kind of back and forth of trying to determine who was right. And you just use your basic rules of evidence and your basic evidentiary burdens. know, in civil court, it's going to be preponderance of the evidence, you know, more likely than not, um, that this evidence is real or fake.

Bryan Jacoutot [19:19] Um, there's a lot of— there's so much energy and resources that goes into that. And, you know, today I, I litigate all the time. I, I very rarely use physical evidence in court, um, if ever. It's always some form of digital evidence. And so going forward, it's only going to be more and more voluminous, the amount of digital evidence we, we're having to deal with. And it's not just when you're physically in court, when you are doing the discovery process. If you've ever had the misfortune of being a part of a lengthy litigation, you would know that the, the kind of most expensive and, and resource-draining is typically the discovery process where everyone's exchanging information, um, with, you know, each side to try to prove their, their claims.

Bryan Jacoutot [19:19] And so if we're— and it's essentially all electronic now. There's very little physical evidence changing hands. People are just handing over zip drives and things like that, or links to portals, and then boom, you're off to go look at a million documents. So it's hard to— number one, it's hard to discern which of those are real and which of those aren't. So it would be great to have a, you know, just being able to sort of presumptively say our business practice, let's say, has us timestamp every contract that we enter into with a supplier every time we sign into it. We do the DocuSign, and then boom, we digitally timestamp our signed document into Bitcoin.

Bryan Jacoutot [19:19] That would be great to have to point to if you're in a business dispute and someone puts forward a contract that doesn't have a digital timestamp. You can immediately say, whoa, this is suspect. We're going to have to, number one, take a look at it. And if it looks like someone on the other side of this was messing with figures, messing with numbers, we have a great piece of evidence to now give to the court to allow the court to make a pretty quick decision as to whether this is authentic or not. But assuming we don't have that, the process is crazy expensive. For example, you go to discovery, you change documents over, someone challenges one of the documents on the basis that it's been altered or is fraudulent.

Bryan Jacoutot [19:19] Then what will typically happen is you have to have a hearing before a judge. The judge will assess the challenge and say, all right, I'm going to need some briefs on the relevant state of the law surrounding this issue. So everyone goes back, writes their briefs, gives them to the judge, judge considers them. Then judge says, okay, let's have some targeted discovery to see whether this other piece of discovery is authentic. So you got to go through a whole new set of targeted discovery. Then maybe you have to bring a couple experts in to assess the viability of the evidence. Then maybe you have a hearing and you finally decide, maybe get to resolution at that point.

Bryan Jacoutot [19:19] What I just described is months and months of time. It is hundreds of thousands of dollars at times, getting experts in, lawyers in, all that. They're charging hourly, they're charging hundreds of dollars an hour. It gets crazy expensive. And then after you have your resolution from the court, there's a possibility of appeal, right? Like someone could always appeal the judge's order. So then you go all the way up and you do that. As I said, it gets incredibly expensive. So if we have, on the other hand, if we have something like a digital timestamp associated with the contract or the piece of evidence, it's just part of the normal course of business of these operations, let's say, because everything has to kind of— this is all— none of this is post hoc, right?

Bryan Jacoutot [19:19] This is all pre-challenge or pre-issue. But if you have implemented this process in your business or in whatever it is that you're doing, under our proposed rule, the courts will then be able to say, if someone presents a digital timestamp on Bitcoin saying, hey, look, here's our contract, here's the hash of our contract, and then you look into block 900,000, you say, here's the hash of our contract when we signed it, and those hashes match up, Then the court's able, under our proposed standard, to do what's to consider it a rebuttable presumption of authenticity, meaning basically the timestamp matching the document that we have here suggests that the document is what it was when they say it was.

Bryan Jacoutot [19:19] Now it's a rebuttable presumption, right? So that means that the other side is still free to try to challenge it. But you may have just cut off an entire you know that whole thing I just explained. You may have just cut off. 90% of that or 80% of that, um, just because you implemented in your business this, this common practice of timestamping. Um, now technically, there's, there's ways to do this now with the existing rules of evidence, but you still have to bring in like a qualified person or potentially an expert to verify the timestamp, and you sort of explain to the court how Bitcoin works, all that.

Bryan Jacoutot [19:19] Um, what we're hoping for is to kind of really reduce expenses by just getting a rebuttable presumption embedded in the rule. And again, of course, it's not bulletproof. So that's why the other side can always challenge it and they're more than welcome to. But we think this will very significantly cut down on costs and streamline litigation. Whereas AI in general is really making litigation a lot more complex. Obviously, you have these evidentiary problems, but you're also getting pro se litigants going to ChatGPT and filing lawsuits according to what ChatGPT says it should do in ways that they never would before. They're writing these massive briefs, they're having ChatGPT write the massive briefs and going to court as a pro se litigant, which is really cluttering resources.

Bryan Jacoutot [19:19] So this is actually one way to kind of pull that back a little bit, and it just uses Bitcoin to do it.

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Bryan Jacoutot [28:47] Yeah, I mean, it's a very good question. I don't really know what the point is, except to the point where it's paralyzed, right? If the system becomes truly paralyzed because we're getting too many pro se litigants filing too many briefs and motions and all that in cases, then I think what'll likely happen is judges will be forced to be much more stringent with sanctioning certain sort of frivolous lawsuits. And unfortunately, I think there's going to have to be a lot of people who get sanctioned for, you know, maybe they weren't wanting to do the wrong thing, but it was just, it was just, you know, voluminous and they kept filing motion after motion.

Bryan Jacoutot [28:47] I mean, it can be considered essentially harassment at a certain point, and judges are going to have to police that. They have the inherent authority to police their own dockets. And so they can, I think they'll be lenient for pro se litigants because you do want to balance, obviously there are worthy pro se litigants, who don't want to hire an attorney, who want to go in and prosecute their claims, which they have a right to do. But I also see judges after a while saying, okay, if you're going to bring a claim, you've got to back up what you're saying. And if it is, you can give me one bad brief, but if you give me another one with these hallucinations or just improper statements of law, all that, you can get sanctions and having the claim thrown out, prejudice so you can't bring it elsewhere again, and maybe even monetary sanctions to start to deter people from filing some of these claims.

Bryan Jacoutot [28:47] I don't think we're there yet, but I could see that happening. And I've already read cases where some of these litigants were not only using AI to file the claims, but they were using AI to kind of alter evidence a little bit more in their favor. And so that's a quick sanction, right? That one got kicked and dismissed with prejudice. But nevertheless, cluttered the court's docket for quite a while, and it kept them from doing other meritorious cases. And eventually, that balancing is going to have to— we're going to have to find the right balance there because you don't want to deny someone their day in court.

Bryan Jacoutot [28:47] But if you are allowing everyone to kind of abuse the system with AI, then you are effectively denying someone their day in court, just someone on the other side who's not using AI.

Marty Bent [30:58] For the case that was dismissed with prejudice, how did they use AI to manipulate evidence?

Bryan Jacoutot [31:04] It's mentioned, I believe, in the comment. It might've been the one that escaped you, but I think they tried to alter the 8-second video clip and it was found out and eventually it got dismissed and dismissed with prejudice. So that means whatever the underlying claims were there, even if you had a good case, you can't bring it later. So it is in, I believe it's in the comment though. So I don't know the exact citation.

Marty Bent [31:32] And getting back to implementation details of what would be necessary to have this actually make sense and be viable at scale, I mean, you said it can't be post hoc, it's got to be pre hoc. And so with that in mind, there's got to be practices and sort of business flows at individual businesses and then personal flows when you're signing particular contracts to make sure that you're hashing this on the go. And so the idea isn't that you want to present a case or you have a case brought against you and then you start using this to prove that something existed. At that point, it's almost too late. So there needs to be sort of widespread adoption and normalization of doing this hashing into the protocol now so that in the future, if something happens, you can say, well, actually I had this data hashed in the chain. Here's what it looked like when I hashed it.

Bryan Jacoutot [32:30] Yeah. And I think it's a great way for Bitcoin companies to lead the way, selling what we buy or buying what we sell. Excuse me. It's a pretty low-hanging fruit option. It's not intensive for the operators to do, and it doesn't cost a heck of a lot either. So you could implement it at scale across your organization, and the potential headaches that it saves you down the road are very real. And we've obviously discussed a few possibilities. But even avoiding, you know, those are litigation possibilities, but even avoiding it altogether, even if there's a reasonable disagreement among parties and someone thinks they have the most recent contract and they just don't.

Bryan Jacoutot [32:30] And if the business ends of that dispute can work that out on the front end being like, look, let's go compare it, right? Let's go see. I know you got an email that was this version, but let's go see what we hashed. And you just avoid an entire litigation that nobody really wants to be in. So there's a lot of economic incentive to do so, I think.

Marty Bent [33:35] Yeah, I completely agree. And so what are the next steps? Obviously, you presented the comments. What's the process from here on out to make sure that you can use this as a rebuttal? And then where else could something like the comments that you and Rafael put together be presented? Is it state by state, county by county? Does it have to happen at the federal level? How does this all work?

Bryan Jacoutot [34:01] Yeah. So at the federal level, the next step is the committee's considering it. I think at the moment they have a meeting in a few days where they will publicly discuss what their agenda is for amending the rules, if anything. That committee is just like a subcommittee of a larger committee of the Judicial Conference. And if it gets enough weight behind it, enough support, eventually it can be implemented by the Supreme Court, the United States Supreme Court, putting them into the Federal Rules of Evidence. And it can— that's how you amend the rules. You can also put it into a comment to kind of explain things.

Bryan Jacoutot [34:01] So it doesn't necessarily have to amend the rule itself if it's a comment kind of adding to an existing rule. maybe helping explain that this is one way you could satisfy this rule, that would be helpful too. It's a little bit less, I think, burdensome to try to get that off the ground. On the state level though, you can also go state by state because every state has their own rules of evidence as well. And I think it's probably a little bit more accessible for folks to try to do at the state level. Your representatives in the individual committees are a little bit more responsive, I think.

Bryan Jacoutot [34:01] Although I will say the federal committee has been extremely responsive to us. They've been, they're reading it. We were able to go back and forth with them about, hey, we're thinking about doing this, and they kind of told us how they'd like to see it presented to them. So kudos to the federal committee for that. But yeah, state level, same thing. It doesn't go down to the county level. The rules of evidence are state by state or federal. And I think if we can even get one state to change theirs along these lines, then all of a sudden you've got a nice laboratory for the federal government to observe, see how it works in practice.

Bryan Jacoutot [34:01] And that might be maybe if this doesn't pan out this time, that might be the next logical step is to really focus in on a single state to get them to adopt this standard and just show everybody how it works and that it works. And in a lot of ways, what we're doing with Screven County on the election side. Got a great election supervisor there who's a big Bitcoiner, big believer in Bitcoin, and also a big believer in fair elections. So we're using her county to show that this stuff is workable, it's efficient, it's not going to drain anybody's budget. And Screven County is a relatively rural county.

Bryan Jacoutot [34:01] It's not like it's Fulton where you have this huge IT department. And the idea being essentially, if we can implement it there, we can implement it in any county.

Marty Bent [36:32] What's the response within Georgia been to the Screven County example of using this?

Bryan Jacoutot [36:39] I think it is consistently, wow, that's really interesting, but I'm too busy to implement it right now. Every county or state-level operator that I've worked with has instinctively known that that's extremely interesting and there's a great use case, but it's really about them. We're trying to make it as easy as possible for them to— we don't want them to alter their lives at all. And it's really, I think, again, having it continue to work in Screamin' County will create the window of opportunity for us to finally get it on a statewide basis. And to be honest, the discussions that I've been having lately indicate that that moment's getting much closer.

Bryan Jacoutot [36:39] I think people are ready to— there's just, in Georgia, there's so much discussion, as elsewhere, there's so much discussion around election security. It is one of the hottest issues. I mean, we're still a swing state right now. And although we, I don't know if we're as much of a swing state as we were, but the map's changing a little bit. But nevertheless, everybody's interested in election security. And I just hope that we're able to get it at a statewide level before there's an issue rather than after there's an issue. Because as we discussed, this is a You got to be— this is a preparatory measure.

Bryan Jacoutot [36:39] It's not really a reactive measure. So, you know, I think we're getting there. It's just about, it's just about kind of continuing to bang the drum, tick-tock, next block for this as well. Georgia has also a part-time legislature, so they're only in session 40 days a year. And those 40 days are just hectic. Everything has to be done. Yeah, everything has to be done in those 40 days. And it's hard to get your foot in the door. But we've been hanging around, I think, just long enough that I do believe we'll be able to get something done at a statewide level as long as we continue doing what we're doing.

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Marty Bent [38:31] Now find sovereign health and sovereign healthcare. Yeah. To your point about being preparatory and not reactive, I think the Guatemala election's a great example. Like they were prepared and they were actually able to prove that the incumbent was trying to manipulate records after the fact.

Bryan Jacoutot [41:35] Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating and I guarantee you, like, with generative AI getting to where it is, there will be at the end of this election some someone will use gen AI in a way that is targeted to undermine confidence in the elections. And you know, I think eventually, once that's happened, folks will realize that this is a clear and present problem, and hopefully they'll be they'll have enough to that'll give them enough to to implement this, and we'll be ready to go, right? Because we've been we've been trying to tell them for a while, and. The nice thing is that Scranton County, we've been able to pilot it and show that it works. And next thing is just doing it at scale.

Marty Bent [42:14] Yeah. I mean, you got my mind racing too, doing it at scale. It's like you just go to DocuSign or SignNow or one of these companies and say, hey, I'll pay $5 extra a month for you to automatically broadcast a transaction that hashes the contract that I sign into Bitcoin's blockchain.

Bryan Jacoutot [42:37] Yep. It can be that simple, that automated. I mean, it's— what does Satoshi say in the white paper? The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. So is this.

Marty Bent [42:51] Yeah. It's a beautiful thing. So what would you say to anybody out there is like agreeing, yes, we should do this, what can they do? Like, what are the easy things that they can do? Pick up, pick up the phone, write an email reaching out to representatives, or should they reach out to the, the state court system? How do you— more people get this on more radars of courtrooms across the country?

Bryan Jacoutot [43:18] Yeah, I think there's, you know, a couple things. You can obviously reach out to, to me or anyone at, you know, I think anyone at Civil Proof would, would want to help you wherever you are. So if you want to say, I want to get this implemented in my state or in my county, obviously you want to talk to your elections officials, but I think you should talk to us so we could all coordinate together. A lot of these election officials are somewhat challenging to get a hold of. So we've been working on that for a while, so we're getting pretty good at it. And so we would love to be able to help you with that.

Bryan Jacoutot [43:18] But really it's about doing it in your local jurisdiction. If you happen to be a lawyer, that is interested in this, maybe talk to your, you know, talk to your bar association or folks that work on the rules of evidence in your state and kind of, you know, bridge it to them. And I guarantee it'll take more than one touch, right? Like, 'cause most people go, oh, that's interesting, I'll think about that, and they go about their day. But, you know, if you're persistent and, you know, you're able to do it in your own locality, again, all it takes is just a couple of, one really, one of these taking off where something that was kind of a quirky side project becomes just part and parcel to the process, you know, down the road.

Marty Bent [44:22] Yeah. Beyond the intersection of the law and hashing digital records into Bitcoin's blockchain via open timestamps, what's your broad view on just the status of the law as it pertains to Bitcoin privacy, custody rights? I saw that you were tweeting about the CFTC. basically allowing non-custodial CoinJoin implementations to operate without having to get a money service provider license. What's the state of Bitcoin in the eyes of the United States government right now in your mind?

Bryan Jacoutot [45:05] Well, it's a lot better than it was, I don't know, 5 years ago. I think that one of the things I was tweeting about was the FinCEN rule where they had originally published part of these agencies, they're all creatures of the— they're kind of like hybrid creatures of the legislature and creatures of the executive branch. So when they have this dual power to both make rules and regulations and also enforce them, so that's problematic under our Constitution for separations of powers reasons. So when they change their regulatory scheme to include other things, they have to do what's called a notice of proposed rulemaking where they Say here's the rules we're thinking about promulgating as an agency.

Bryan Jacoutot [45:05] Let the public comment on it and say you know basically either support it or say something that you don't like about it. And it's kind of a long process. So then you know they promulgate the rule, they do like a ninety-day public comment period, and then they take it under advisement essentially and either issue a rule or retract the rule. This time the FinCEN was did an NPRM on what they called structured transactions, which was basically just reusing— or not reusing wallet addresses, just doing a fresh address every time, which is pretty much Bitcoin 101 at this point. You don't want to be putting everything into the same Bitcoin address.

Bryan Jacoutot [45:05] It compromises privacy, particularly if you interface with a KYC exchange. So it's not even mixing. This is just basic good practice for Bitcoiners. But FinCEN was targeting it and was thinking— was looking to classify it as a form of CVC, you know, convertible virtual currency mixing, which would have put you on the same playing field as, as, you know, samurai and things like that for just not reusing an address. That was extremely dangerous. That came out, I think, during the Biden administration. I want to say it was '21, '22. It got tabled for a little bit, then was re-put out again. I want to say possibly under the Trump administration.

Bryan Jacoutot [45:05] They got the notice and comment period. Coin Center did a great job filing a comment. Other folks did a very good job filing comments saying, hey, this is this is way too much. And they just the one the thing that I was tweeting about was the was I think FinCEN retracting that that rule. So that regulation is not going to be in effect. And I think it's a huge win that number one, it shows that these agencies are not just They're willing to listen to folks who comment. That means that taking the time to comment on these things, while it is a bit arduous, could be expensive too if you engage a law firm, which I mean, Coin Center is a nonprofit, so they engage a lot of lawyers and law firms and things.

Bryan Jacoutot [45:05] But it's worth it. You can actually change the regulation, change the future way that the United States government views your use of Bitcoin. personally. And that's also part of— that's why we filed this comment. A lot of people might think it's shouting into the void. A lot of people might think it'll get overlooked or not even considered at all, but you never know. You might just change the rules of evidence and make things really easy on folks going forward. So I think it's just great that the government is interfacing with Bitcoin in this way. Obviously, it's not perfect. There's a lot of things that You know, I don't necessarily agree with.

Bryan Jacoutot [45:05] I don't think you know you should be prosecuting mixers at all in any in any event. But you know, it's it's good to see that they are willing to make adjustments and kind of backtrack on on bad ideas when they're presented with new information. So it's great it's great reason for us to continue to do things like submitting this comment here or submitting comments on proposed rules. It's not sexy, right? It's not gonna typically doesn't make headlines, but it does the sort of grunt work. of making sure that your politicians and your bureaucrats are still somewhat considering the common person in what they do on a day-to-day basis.

Marty Bent [49:00] What are some of the low-hanging fruits or some of the biggest wins that we could get from the legal perspective that we still haven't won yet?

Bryan Jacoutot [49:12] I think the The Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act is a pretty good low-hanging fruit thing that we should be able to get. It keeps getting added into these laws. I think it was part of the Clarity Act, and so it didn't get passed, but that's because it was plugged into a much broader kind of market structure bill that ultimately failed. But it was great protection for developers of blockchain software. Application software and things like that, basically saying that, that, you know, as long as you're not, you know, custodying things and you can, you can, you can write code and not have to worry about getting in trouble for the most part, which I think is a reasonable thing because writing code is, is really just like speaking in a lot of ways.

Bryan Jacoutot [49:12] And we have the First Amendment here. It protects one's right to speak, to speak even, you know, unfavorably. And so I think that that should be embedded in our way we approach code as well. And I think the the BRCA. Yeah, BRCA was one way to do that. And then I think it has, in and of itself, it has probably broad consensus, but it got kind of intertwined with the Clarity Act. So I think if we could just do a freestanding bill just with that one provision, that'd be great. It'd be a great way to just, you know, get a small win for the, for the industry and get Congress thinking about this as more than just, you know, oh, is it a security or is it not a security?

Bryan Jacoutot [49:12] developer, shadowy code, super coders, all that stuff, and just do some kind of basic good legislation and policymaking. And that's what I think we should try to target first, probably, at least from a statutory perspective. On the regulatory side, you know, there's, there's, there's probably, you know, SEC and CFTC are now kind of joining together to issue regulations. So I'm sure that will require a lot of a lot of analysis and people looking at that as well to make sure that that looks good too.

Marty Bent [51:10] Chances of repealing the Bank Secrecy Act, what do you think?

Bryan Jacoutot [51:14] Not high at this moment. I'll settle for maybe let's take the USA Patriot Act out and we'll just leave the old Bank Secrecy Act pre-9/11 and keep your privacy a little bit better. But yeah, the Bank Secrecy Act is a big old— it's been a thorn in the side of privacy advocates, I think, for quite a while. And, you know, Patriot Act built on that. And, you know, we've just been getting, you know, kind of death by a thousand cuts in terms of privacy land. The Fourth Amendment, I'm not sure how much it really does at this point because we've endured so much, so much, you know, kind of periodic incursions into our relative levels of privacy that I don't even know if we understand what our parents' parents knew and took for granted as privacy.

Marty Bent [52:04] I mean, I would take an inflation adjustment alone just on the minimums that trigger a suspicious activity report. That would be—

Bryan Jacoutot [52:13] Yeah. I mean, yeah. The fact that we're using, I think, figures from 1971, I think 1973 is insane. I mean, it's pulling in everybody. Yeah.

Marty Bent [52:26] And so really tying this together and bringing it back to the comments and using open timestamps as a way to present evidence in the court system, I mean, you highlighted some of the benefits that it'll provide in terms of the economic efficiency. You're not going back and forth because you're able to quickly prove like, hey, this thing existed at this point in time. Obviously, to election integrity, being able to give the populace assurances that elections, at least to some degree, are legitimate. You can prove that certain things happened, certain votes were cast at certain points in time. But even broader, what do you think this does for society at large if this practice were to be widely implemented across everything? that we do in terms of economic coordination? Obviously, the legal side is very important too, but what types of benefits overall do you think this can provide? Well,

Bryan Jacoutot [53:30] I think it would be phenomenal as we go forward into this increasingly challenging world with generative AI being so sophisticated where it's hard to tell what is real and what isn't. That problem is only going to get more acute. We already— there's a concept called— I think it's called truth decay, where people— not only are people believing that AI videos are real, they're now not believing that real videos are real. So it's causing everyone to question their reality around them, which makes for obvious reasons like potential catastrophe for social interaction and society in general. if people can't tell what's real and what's not real on a day-to-day basis.

Bryan Jacoutot [53:30] Now, I'm not saying that this solves for that, but what I am saying is that the more and more digitized our life is, when coupled with increasing sophistication of generative AI, we're going to need ways to prove digital truth as best we can. And if we can proliferate this into more aspects of our lives, then we're going to have a fighting chance to be able to do that. org website was hacked, the one that the government controls, and they removed provisions of the PDF on the Constitution, or not the PDF, but it was the website from the constitutional text, and people freaked out for a little bit.

Bryan Jacoutot [53:30] It's funny looking at it now, but people freaked out because the official website of the Library of Congress removed provisions of the Constitution and everyone said, oh my gosh, we're losing— we're going to lose liberties and Trump's going to take over, whatever. That's a— that's kind of a silly example, but that's already happening now. So just imagine 3, 5, 7 years out, the level of the ability for generative AI to kind of scrape the internet and pull down certain long-held maxims that were on there and what were once widely known. And then just again, instituting that level of confusion and just the skepticism allowing people or creating situations where people don't trust what they see.

Bryan Jacoutot [53:30] That's a nation-state or an adversarial attacker's dream. How do you want to topple civilization? Get them to question everything around them. Get them to not believe what they see and then believe things that are fake. It's very scary. And so doing things like this will help incorporate truth and give people a fighting chance to to challenge that future order. And I don't want to be too much of a doomer. I'm not saying that's going to happen, but this, I think, is one arrow in the quiver, so to speak, of attacking that future. And I'm sure there will be others, but there's a lot of potential here, and I hope people take it seriously, and I hope that they agree with us and look to implement it in their own day-to-day lives.

Marty Bent [56:24] Yeah. So just think of the Library of Congress, take every document that exists there, which is Hundreds of millions. Yes. Or at this point, and get hashed in Bitcoin so that we know. Obviously, we're going to get a hash of the state of the document when it was hashed into the chain, but that'll, that'll be a good start.

Bryan Jacoutot [56:44] Right. If we start that now, we're looking pretty good. If we start that in 10 or 12 years, I mean, you might, you might be hashing a lot of fake stuff already.

Marty Bent [56:51] Yeah. And it's, uh, It seems like a no-brainer to me. And I think push will come to shove. Hopefully it doesn't need to come to shove and people come to their senses earlier, but the earlier we're doing this, the better. And so thank you for spearheading this issue and making it a point to write briefs, write comments to get out there and actually try to implement this, because I think it's— increasingly not only important but imperative as we barrel towards this generative AI future. And it's thankless work, I'm sure, most times, but I think future historians will look back and be like, oh, those Bitcoiners with this crazy idea of hashing digital data in the blockchain actually helped save our ass here in the future. So— Thank you for doing that.

Bryan Jacoutot [57:47] No problem. No problem. And I do just want to emphasize, while I work with Simple Proof and they do fantastic work implementing the Open Timestamps Protocol, it is an open protocol and anyone can build on top of it and kind of create their own product. So I guarantee you Carlos and Rafa would say, hey, go start your own thing too. And let's all attack this together.

Marty Bent [58:07] Yeah. Final notes, parting thoughts, calls to action. Where should we send people?

Bryan Jacoutot [58:14] If you're looking to get in contact with me, I'm just B. Jacotot or Brian Jacotot on X. And, you know, I've got my, my law firm is Clark Hill. I speak obviously for myself, not for, for them here. But, you know, if you have any legal needs that I can help with, I'm happy to. I'm a commercial litigator, so I do a lot of that. But we're full-service law firm and we have our own Bitcoin and digital assets industry team. So we kind of attack any problem for you from that. And then, yeah, just go check out Simple Proof too. Like, it's, it's, public-facing website. Go play around with it and see if there's any areas that you think it might be a good place to implement, and we'll try to do just that for

Marty Bent [58:53] you. Yeah. It's a beautiful thing. One last parting note I forgot to mention earlier, even these AI companies training the models, they're taking old text, feeding them the trained models, and then deleting or burning the books essentially. It's like, okay guys, just get the books, put them in PDF, hash, prove it was a certain point. Don't delete history on us. I know you guys are in an existential race to bring about AGI, but we got to have these historical documents so that we can understand where we came from at the end of the day.

Bryan Jacoutot [59:25] Yeah. The Library of Alexandria fire was horrible, destroyed all sorts of texts, but it was obviously an accident. Let's just not do it on purpose again here now in 2026. But to the extent that folks are trying to do that, simple proof is one great way to guard against that. We can't guard against burning books, but we can guard against the more kind of nefarious process of surreptitiously altering parts of them and things like that, because that's where things get real bad real quick.

Marty Bent [59:58] Yep. Bryan, keep crushing it, brother. Enjoy TabConf this week.

Bryan Jacoutot [1:00:02] Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate you having me on.

Marty Bent [1:00:04] All right. Peace and love, freaks.

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