DAC8 Is a Kidnapping Factory (Francis Pouliot)
Transcript — TFTC
Article: https://www.tftc.io/dac8-kidnapping-factory-francis-pouliot
Transcript page: https://www.tftc.io/dac8-kidnapping-factory-francis-pouliot-transcript
Published: 2026-08-05
Machine transcription, lightly cleaned; may contain errors.
========================================================================

[0:01] Marty Bent: Francis, I'm ashamed to admit it, but it's been seven years since you've been on the show. Welcome back.

[0:06] Francis Pouliot: It has been seven years. Wow, yeah. The last time was in San Francisco, I believe, at the Bitcoin twenty nineteen conference.

[0:12] Marty Bent: Yeah. The first ever Bitcoin conference. I found out I was I was expecting my first child that day, right after we recorded. So I I remember that day vividly. but we progress. Children have been born, raised a little bit since then. Bitcoin has persisted and things are going on. We the Bulls on parade in France. We're gonna start off with what you and your team at Bull Bitcoin have been doing in terms of trying to protect your users' right to privacy, particularly in France, where they've implemented this DAC 8, DAC eight, which stems from from Micah, I believe, the which is very invasive to privacy and obviously France is a hotbed for five dollar venture tax. You guys are on the ground there, obviously serving customers and are having to deal with this up close and personal. So I think we should just start there. What's going on with DAC8, Micah Micah, however you pronounce it, and how oppressive are these governments getting in terms of trying to collect user data.

[1:21] Francis Pouliot: Yeah, so DAC eight is a very interesting piece of legislation, because very few people know about it and it is, in my opinion, the single biggest threat to both the cypherpunk principles of Bitcoin and to the lives of our of our users. So the backstory of DAC eight is that in twenty twenty one, kind of like at the peak of the the COVID tyranny, the G twenty countries had a meeting Probably, I don't know, in Davos or something, you know, one of those globalist hangouts. And they decided during that meeting that Bitcoins posed an existential threat to the ability of governments to finance themselves. and when you look at kind of like the the minutes and you know, announcements of that meeting, they basically decided that tax evaders are going to bankrupt the state with Bitcoin.

[3:42] Francis Pouliot: Like their volumes and their cost of acquisition and their identity, their home address, everything about them to your national government. But what's even worse than that is that DAC eight allows EU countries to share that data with each other. So for example, we and Bull Bitcoin were incorporated in France. So we share this data with the French tax authority. But then the French tax authority shares this data with the German tax authority, with the Dutch tax authority, or whatever. So what it in effect creates is a big Fucking list of crypto users and how much Bitcoin they're buying and how much Bitcoin they're selling every single year.

[4:54] Marty Bent: It might be the BIS, I think. It's mm-hmm.

[5:12] Francis Pouliot: And what they essentially told every country in the world is like you have to implement KYC AML on crypto in your country. Otherwise, you will be considered to be a bad actor, and you're gonna get on what's called the AMF's gray list or blacklist. if you are on the FETF's blacklist or gray list, then things don't go really well for you. there's there's a lot of penalties for a country not to implement FETF rules. They're not obliged to, but they they're flagged as a let's say non-cooperative state. so it's not the first time that this has happened. But the thing about KYC AML, the way that it's been going on like today, it's it's not as bad as people think.

[7:38] Francis Pouliot: so just philosophically speaking, that's just bad. But where it becomes really bad is in places like France, where we are based, where the cybersecurity of the government is so awful that you have, and I'm not kidding, like something like a million user records that are leaked every single month. Every four or five weeks you have a top-tier institution, whether that's the tax authority. Or government agency or a big insurance firm where all of the user records are leaked. And not only are they leaked, but in France specifically, there has been convicted civil servants that were selling crypto users information to criminal gangs so that these gangs could identify victims to kidnap, torture, and extort for crypto ransoms.

[9:52] Francis Pouliot: If this database, this like mega global honeypot database of all crypto users in Europe is leaked, it will be catastrophic to the extent where I'm very confident that like someone is likely to die as a result. Someone is definitely gonna get kidnapped as a result, but people will be murdered as a result. R running an exchange, you have to do some kind of compromise. when you're a fiat regulated entity for multiple reasons. you know, bull bitcoin does have KYC. We're not a no KYC business. And the reason why we do this compromise is because for Bitcoin to succeed in its mission to eliminate fiat currency, you need Bitcoin to be a highly sellable and highly liquid asset.

[12:19] Marty Bent: The I mean, not only is it incredibly invasive to privacy, but by sharing it with twenty seven other agencies, I mean you're just expanding the attack surface dramatically. And especially in the world that we're living in now with AI emerging and being able to attack critical systems rather trivially, it seems like we should be going in the opposite direction, try to collect the least amount of data as possible to protect end users and individuals and their lives and the lives of their l loved ones at the end of the day. And I think this has obviously been a massive topic on this podcast for the last nine years, which is the encroachment of KYC AML. And I'm very happy that you and your team are drawing the line and saying, No, we're not seeding any more ground. what is what does that look like? How how big is this fight gonna get, do you think?

[13:12] Francis Pouliot: I think this is gonna be possibly one of the biggest tax law cases in Europe. So what we're doing is we are challenging the implementation of DACAID in France at the French government. So we actually did this, we started doing this in February, where we we first did our legal challenge. we decided not to talk about it until recently because we were in the process of applying for a Meek license in Europe and We didn't want to, you know, attract too much too much I guess anger from from the French state. So as soon as we got our Mika license, we started to to talk about it.

[15:39] Francis Pouliot: DAC 8 is a is a purely European thing, but I also want to remind the viewers that this is actually coming to the United States as well in 2029. I think 2028 or 2029. CARF is coming to the US. Carf is also coming to Canada this year. and pretty much every kind of like major developed nation are gonna have their own version of DAC 8. so we're starting with France as the first opening salvo of this battle. But soon after, we're probably gonna be looking at challenging challenging this constitutionally in Canada. And hopefully someone in the US also does a constitution constitutional challenge in the US.

[17:29] Marty Bent: Yeah, I completely agree. And I mean timing is of the essence, particularly for DACAID in France. It looks like from my research, they wanted you to start tracking beginning on January first of this year and like the first mandatory report will be January thirty first, twenty twenty seven. So we have about six, seven months here before exchanges are expected to hand over this data.

[17:55] Francis Pouliot: Yeah, and even if we lose the constitution the constitutional ch the the core challenge that we're doing now, we we have a pretty good strategy of having a bunch of backup plans. So our our goal is to using any and all legal means at our disposal to repeal. R re repealing is the number one goal. Delaying is the second goal, and mitigating, you know, nigga like the the plan C is basically negotiating to have something that is less harmful. But complete completely repealing is is our objective, and I think we have pretty good chances.

[18:31] Marty Bent: Yeah. I mean I think we should dive into like the philosophy of this like deeper because I I mean I I think it's gotten to an ex insane point globally where exchanges, individuals have just been ex expected to just completely hand over the data. The government says, Hey, new guideline. And the thing about FATF too, it's like a supranational, unelected, bureaucratic institution that it sits under the BIS or IMF, doesn't matter who it really sits under, but they're technically not implementing laws. They get together, the globalists get together, they say, Hey, here are the guidelines. And like you said earlier, if a country doesn't adopt the guidelines, Financial Action Task Force comes in and says you're on the blacklist.

[20:52] Marty Bent: in fact, to to your point earlier, actually put more people in harm's way.

[20:57] Francis Pouliot: You you said many great things I'm I'm gonna touch on. The first thing that you mentioned is it's a little reminiscent of COVID, isn't it? Right. So there's this COVID, there was this thing called the WHO, the World Health Organization, and they don't they can't force countries to do anything. But then you have all the bureaucrats of every country which basically get a software update from the WHO. You know what I mean? they get they get like a mind download from the WHO. And then they cook up some kind of, let's call it emergency or public safety concern, where the national elected governments don't actually make rules, right?

[23:24] Francis Pouliot: You have the crypto stuff. Of course, at the same time, we also have regulation of social media under the new public health scare, which is hate speech. and all of that is is is coming in at the same time. And these institutions have a lot of leverage against crypto businesses and businesses in general, like because you know, like if you're a media, you need to have a broadcasting license or something like that. If you're a crypto exchange, you need to have a crypto license. So basically they use the threat. Of removing your ability to operate in a certain country if you don't comply. So it's kind of like again, it's kind of like with the vaccine mandate.

[25:36] Marty Bent: Yeah. I mean and even here in the States, th all the conversations around the Clarity Act and whether it will or will not get passed, I think odds are above fifty percent now that it will and everybody's cheering it on. I think like the Coinbases and the stablecoin issuers of the world and those who want to issue tokens, real world asset tokens, are cheerleading it. But if you if you read if you read the bill, it extends the the Patriot Act and some of the words some of the wording is such that you could squint and see how they would try to say, like, okay, open source wallet developers, you need to have some KYC AML compliance, like when somebody downloads your software, you need to we need to know who's downloading a blue wallet or a bull wallet, whatever it may be.

[27:42] Francis Pouliot: I'm not an expert in the Clarity Act, but of course, like every person, I follow American politics because it's the Canadian Canadian politics don't matter at all. You know, the only politics that really matter is is the US and maybe the EU. But I haven't seen anything coming from the US that actually makes it easier or better. Or less restrictive for me or my users. Like imagine that bull Bitcoin was to go to the United States, like launch to the US. I I haven't seen anything in the Clarity Act that makes my life as a business easier or that makes my users safer. And I think b Bitcoin has reached a certain place where you can't just ban Bitcoin, right?

[29:37] Marty Bent: Mm-hmm.

[29:58] Francis Pouliot: Dick for oil in your in your Middle Eastern country, as long as you sell it for US dollars. so so it it is definitely a concern. and there's really never been kind of like a cyberpunk political party or political movement. so it has to it has to happen at the court level, I I believe. you know. E even even if it it's it's easy to blackbill. for example, even with COVID, like a lot of constitutional courts validated the vaccine mandates, for example. So in y you say, okay, well, the the the Supreme Court will save us if it's really bad. It's not always true. but it is it is a lever that that we have.

[32:14] Francis Pouliot: Like withdraw their consent from monetary debasement and withdraw their consent from from the fiat system. But three percent of the population is still a fucking lot of people. It's like my math is probably wrong, but I think it's like 300 million people or something worldwide. right, yeah, exactly. So so you you do need a critical mass of of people. And in order to reach that critical mass of people, you have to remain inside the overton window, so to speak.

[32:27] Marty Bent: Yeah, it's like a quarter of a billion. Yeah.

[32:43] Francis Pouliot: at least something. And basically I think the best that we can do as a regulated exchange is be within the the win the overton window where we we can operate legally, but be so far at the extreme of the overton window that we can slightly nudge it and push it with these kinds of things. there's all sorts of things that you know in Canada we've been very highly successful at that by the way. not necessarily publicize because we don't want to publicize every victory that we have against the state in terms of privacy because also we don't want to, you know, rub it in their face.

[34:48] Marty Bent: Yeah. No, it's funny with the I'm having flashbacks to an instance where I did this. I got I got funneled into a DUI checkpoint in Missouri in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, and the cop was like, I'm gonna need you to get out, we need to breathlise you. it's a DUI checkpoint. I was like, No, you can't do that And he was pissed that I knew my rights and said no and he made me do a field sobriety test passed, was not driving drunk, but it was that little like push back knowing your rights. And to your point, I think in the industry, we need more people to say no to the government.

[36:35] Francis Pouliot: Ex exactly. And I have we we actu we actually kind of like try to conceptualize this inside the business with a chart, with literally a chart of Speed and on the top axis is like speed and skill and mass adoption. And the other axis is compromise. So we we try to do the least amount of compromise possible and see where we hit the ceiling. Right? Because there's a point where if you don't do any compromise ever, then you can't you can hit a ceiling. So basically we have this like level, again, always like a line where we don't cross. An example of that is, for example, with the bull wallet, you know, I wanted to build, and this is completely unrelated to like an exchange, but it's the same kind of philosophy where we wanted to build the most cypherpunk wallet, but at the same time be usable on on a mobile phone.

[38:46] Francis Pouliot: The absence of any kind of compromise just really did actually we did we did hit a ceiling where we we couldn't create a usable product that was satisfying my criteria, which is that I can orange pill a taxi driver and he can leave, I can tip him on my way out of the taxi within a few, you know, within a minute or two, and then he can be onboarded to Bitcoin. So we compromise with Liquid. Liquid was the first big kind of like compromise that I decided to make, and it was very conscious and it was it was very hard. Decision to do, which is like, I'm gonna compromise on pure full self sovereignty and use this other network, which is not as trustless as Lightning.

[40:15] Marty Bent: Ha ha ha. Yeah. Well, I mean, talking about the Tech Sack, I you said it's not a tech episode, it's more political, but I think they intertwine, particularly now with all the this legislation that's coming across the world to really cattle herd Bitcoiners into this digital panopticon. I've been saying this a lot in the last year. It is incredibly frustrating because if allowed to, I think builders like yourself and others out there could rearchitect the global monetary and banking system with a new tech stack that is much more efficient and way is far superior to the incumbent financial system and monetary system that exists there. Like we have the potential to build true sci-fi cypherpunk mon monetary and banking routes and we're just being confined to this compromise matrix that you described because of the insane regulations and the The the thirst for control by by the governments and the supranational unelected bureaucrats of the world.

[41:31] Francis Pouliot: Yeah, and there's there's so many technologies that you know pe people think that Bitcoin is like old tech and it's not good for privacy and you know you should use Zcash instead. you've you've you've got the like the suits that are pushing for for Zcash, and then you've got like the Jason Bourne style, you know, hardcore cypherpunks pushing for Monero, and then you've got the retards pushing for Ethereum and so on, you know. but

[41:42] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[41:56] Francis Pouliot: There's a lot of technologies in Bitcoin. You know, you know, if I was to design it from scratch, like I don't think that privacy would be that much of an issue. and for whatever reason, people are afraid to use Bitcoin privacy technologies in their stack because somehow they think the government is going to be upset at them. There's there are cases in Europe where a bunch of exchanges decided to drop the Lightning Network. And who knows why, for in truth, but I suspect that. It was because they believed that Lightning was not necessarily compatible with like the travel rule or KYC AML laws, which I think is complete bullshit.

[42:52] Marty Bent: Sufficient transaction batching.

[42:54] Francis Pouliot: It's it's it's collaborative tran transaction batching and it helps you save on fees. And there's a like a side effect that it you know imp improves privacy. same thing with lightning and same thing with liquid. and all you have to do is say, like, no, you have to you have to like def defend those technologies as being like purely valid. And you have to also defend the user against that that's kind of like the argument that we're using in France. It's like let's reframe this as From bad people trying to finance terrorism to people trying not to get kidnapped. And that's a very successful reframing.

[45:21] Francis Pouliot: is a fucking scam. It's a pure LARP. the amount of false positive that you get on chain analysis is surreal. we get a bunch of requests from a bunch of law enforcements and bunch of governments and bunch of people all the time at Bull Bitcoin that are like, hey, our chain analysis is identified that this transaction belongs to you. And we look and it's like no it's not us. So chain analysis just just completely sucks. And I don't think provides and it's not legally mandated. Chain analysis was never legally mandated in any country that I'm aware of. What you have to do as an exchange is to make sure that sanctioned entities are not using your company.

[47:49] Francis Pouliot: So we're gonna invent these industry-wide rules. And the thing about like chain analysis, it's an interesting rule. again, that was that was fully created by exchanges, not by governments. The the the the requirement to use chain analysis. And now, like eight years later, if you're an exchange that doesn't, you know, and if you're applying for a partnership with a bank, they're gonna be like, which chain analysis provider do you use? And if you say no, then they're immediately gonna flag you as sketchy. Because we've created this expectation of compliance, which was not required at all. And then and then eventually this this this custom, so this is like an industry custom, customs tend to become law.

[50:06] Francis Pouliot: whereas if you're self-funded, like if the customers don't like your product, then you're fucked because they're your number one source of funding. but like with all the regulation that you had to if I was to start today, it would not be possible. Of course, like the reason why we can afford to spend a fucking million dollars on this license is because through the b because we were early, essentially, because we did that 10 years ago. But if I was to start today, I wouldn't be able to do that. So these companies have obviously a massive interest in creating this smote. to give you an example, like in Europe there was about four thousand something crypto companies in Europe and about two hundred and sixty got a license. I make a license in Europe. So it's like about ninety percent of all crypto companies just got kicked out of Europe. And

[50:50] Marty Bent: A week ago, right? It went live July first.

[50:53] Francis Pouliot: Yeah, a week ago. Even Binance didn't make it. If Binance can't make it, well, you know, also Binance is, you know, it's Binance. But even Binance didn't make it. And pretty much all the crypto companies, we made it like at the last minute. and it it was a close call. you know, Strike got it. The deadline was like June July 1st. We got it on June 2nd, 22nd. Strike got it on like July 28th or something, like three days before the deadline was over. And then if you didn't get it before the deadline, you were essentially fucked. and yeah, so there's tons of little brokers.

[53:01] Marty Bent: Yeah, they probably don't mind their competition getting taken behind the woodshed and forced to shut down.

[53:05] Francis Pouliot: I don't think they share the same yeah, I don't sh I I don't think they share the same free market ideas as as we do.

[53:14] Marty Bent: But they're they're liberating they're liberating finance and money on the internet. That's what Coinbase is doing. They're bringing freedom money to everybody.

[53:24] Francis Pouliot: They're they're democratizing finance. That's that's what I heard, yeah. with with USDC and prediction markets and gambling and democratizing gambling is more like it, but yeah.

[53:34] Marty Bent: Well Yeah, it's disgusting. on the point of chain surveillance too, I I know we talked about it you you mentioned it a while ago, but I wanted to bring it up. Like Roman Sterlingov's in jail and it's like there's been plenty of people pointed out that like chain analysis, their analysis of what they deemed to be him buying that domain was completely wrong. And still he's in jail. The defense said, Hey, can we audit chain analysis? their systems to make sure that they actually did this right and they said no, it's a black box. You don't get access to it. It's proprietary.

[54:11] Francis Pouliot: That is one of the biggest travesties. It is very it is very dangerous. And I can I can confirm and guarantee that chain analysis reports are being used to get warrants and also to convict people and there are false positives. So this is like the equivalent of using 1970s fingerprint technology to convict somebody of a crime based on probability heuristics which are completely bogus. I have some personal stories that I will I will share eventually. I don't want this to be the the scenario, but I have I can guarantee you that false positives are are very bad. People are getting arrested with false positive chain analysis, and it's fright- it's frightening because judges will take a chain analysis report at face value and consider it to be as damning as DNA fingerprint on the gun, like the video camera.

[56:15] Francis Pouliot: one of the founders of chain analysis or like a VP of chain analysis or something.

[56:19] Marty Bent: He was drunk, right? And he was g loose lips.

[56:22] Francis Pouliot: He was drunk and he was bragging that their shit is fucking phony as hell. It's complete LARP. it's just it it's a warrant factory. You wanna you want a warrant on anybody in on earth? Just go to chain analysis and you know, they'll find a way to link his Bitcoin to some crime. And then they meet you at the airport and they fucking cuff you. And then you know, and then you have to hire your own counter chain analysis and then it and then it becomes a battle of experts. yeah, it's it's it's frightening. That's part of the reason why I'm so interested in technologies like page oin, for example, because one of the foundational heuristics of chain analysis is the common input ownership heuristic.

[58:49] Francis Pouliot: We don't really we don't really have the choice. I I really do believe that. I've had many discussions with cypherpunks, and they they also tell me like yes, this is is this is a key cypherpunk principle is to is to, you know, I you know you know, Hal Finney and like Adam back, we you know, with the arms export kind of thing that they did, like like we need we need to we need to there we go. Cypherpunks, yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah, so cypherpunks use the law.

[59:12] Marty Bent: That's why I have this. Always in the background.

[59:19] Francis Pouliot: To their advantage. And they also fight legal battles. And I I also want to make a distinction between political battles and legal battles. I think political battles are are not fully obsolete. They're mostly obsolete, but thank God we still have some kind of legal system where the courts are presumably at least making a half assed attempt to protect the rights of the individuals, and we should leverage that to the maximum.

[59:46] Marty Bent: Completely agree. What what's the current state of page one adoption? Obviously you guys have implemented it and what you're doing at Bull Bitcoin. I think there's a couple others maybe, but are you talking to any 'cause I I think if you get exchanges like Bull Bitcoin, we need a few others to do it and that's a good a good jumping off point to get towards that critical mass that you described earlier.

[1:00:13] Francis Pouliot: So when we integrated PageOin, it was kind of like the reckless thing to do. It was very early alpha level technology. And there was a few other companies that did it at the same time as us. There's Cake, Cake Wallet, a a shitcoin wallet, but we love them anyway. and Sparrow and Blue. But all of us were kind of like on incompatible versions of PageOin, because either The technology was shifting so much that there was like breaking change, or we were using different pageoin protocols, like Blue was using Samurai's pageoin protocol, and Sparrow was using, I think, also Samurai's PageOin protocol, whereas we were using BIP77, anyway, technical stuff.

[1:02:59] Francis Pouliot: And of course, the other big one is silent payments. I'm insanely bullish on silent payments. you know, when Sparrow introduced it, people were like, well, it doesn't really do much. it doesn't solve chain analysis. Yeah, it solves the address reuse problem. And address reuse is the number one cause of Bitcoin privacy issues because so many people reuse addresses that it's kind of like the chain analysis companies can cluster a bunch of entities because If if a lot of people are really bad at their privacy, like you who are good at your privacy, you stand out, essentially. so other people reusing addresses is bad for them, but it's also bad for us.

[1:05:11] Francis Pouliot: reduces the asymmetry of of of power between the state and the individual because the state has enormous power for surveillance and and we as individuals we don't have like seven thousand engineers and a data center to protect ourselves like the NSA has, you know? But now that we have vibe coding, we can build self-defense tools very cheaply. So one of the best examples that I know is this these guys They have something called MIX I'm I Exposed. And it's an open source chain analysis that you can run yourself and you can see what the chain analysis companies know about you by replicating. So and of course, like if you look at the software repository, it's not slop, like it's it's pretty cool, but you can tell like this is vibe coded stuff, you know what I mean?

[1:07:36] Francis Pouliot: But I'm probably more accurately concerned than a lot of people because I being inside the industry as a regulated entity, I can see the tag vectors. I'm not as concerned because I also know that there's methods of resistance that are being employed. so I am worried, but I'm also bullish. I'm also bullish on the cipherpunk principles of Bitcoin. a lot of people are are blackpilled about like Sailor and BlackRock and whatever. Bitcoin has been co-opted and whatnot, like the cypherpunk dream is dead and blah, blah, blah. And and that's just because the ratio of noise to signal is like higher, right? The ratio of of noise to signal is higher because the absolute amount of like garbage slop in Bitcoin, like NGU, Bitcoin Treasury Company, you know, Wall Street financialization of Bitcoin is increasing more than the cypherpunk base. So

[1:08:17] Marty Bent: Mm-hmm.

[1:08:35] Francis Pouliot: The the institutional narrative and like the anti-cypherpunk narrative of Bitcoin is increasing faster than the cypherpunk, but who cares? Like what matters is the absolute amount of cyberpunks working on Bitcoin. I don't care about the ratio of cypherpunk to non-cypherpunk in Bitcoin. I care about that. I I care about the absolute number of cypherpunks in Bitcoin. And being in this space, and of course, there are like signal chat groups and you know telegram groups where the I talk with a lot of privacy devs and we meet in person at conferences and we work on technology collectively. And I've never been so stoked, by the way.

[1:09:34] Marty Bent: I love to hear that. And that's I'm happy you said that because I I agree there's a lot of black pilling out there. But similar to you, I mean I'm I don't have as much inside knowledge in terms of the attack. I I think I understand them pretty well, but you see it day in and day out. And obviously you're talking to these wallet developers. I talk to a lot of the privacy tech people too. But just again to reiterate the vibe coding unlock is real and When it comes to black pilling, yes, the noise is way louder and yes, you may not agree with what Michael Saylor is doing.

[1:10:26] Francis Pouliot: It has never been s this easy. And people who said that Bitcoin was better ten years ago, shut the fuck up. You have no idea what you're talking about. No idea whatsoever. running a node like, dude, like I have my where's my start nine? It's right here. Well, you know, I don't want to dox my location, so I'm not gonna turn my camera. But I have my start nine right here next to my Sterlink. just like Connect connecting a self-custodial wallet to your own Electrum, using silent payments and pay join on your phone, doing swaps, like like it's nothing. Like you can do that like with a few clicks.

[1:11:30] Marty Bent: Zcash. Z cash. Getting the Z Cash. Bitcoin's dead. Getting the Z Cash.

[1:11:38] Francis Pouliot: So there's there's like you know two major components to making Bitcoin better. It's privacy and self-custody, right? And of course, you can't have privacy without self-custody by definition. so you need to work like that's why we work so much on self-custody. I see it as the foundation of everything else. Like every property that makes Bitcoin valuable as money, so the things that are on the on the sales pitch, you know, when you sell Bitcoin, censorship resists, it's it's this, it's that, you can't change the rules. it's immutable, it's trustless, it's private. All of these features of Bitcoin that are on Michael Cero's pitch deck stem from the fact that you can self-custody it.

[1:12:49] Francis Pouliot: And I see I see a marketing campaign. I see a new feature. And I see a new market. That's that's what I see when I see a problem. And I'm not the only one. Like there's tons of people that are like call it cypherpunk entrepreneurs. so of course, like like self-custody is is a massive problem. we've built tools, for example, like the the main thing that I that I think that I'm the most the most proud of in the last couple of years is our backup protocol called recoverable. I mean it's not it's not fancy, it's not like really well known out there, but it's a very clever way to create an encrypted backup that is safe for the cloud using a key server protocol anyway.

[1:15:14] Francis Pouliot: It's not private, so use Zcash. And you can't self-custody your coins. It's not safe for you to do that. You're not ready to do that. So buy my stonk. Right? so I want to make sure that these people run out of arguments. And also the the argument, like, well, you can't spend your Bitcoin anywhere. We've solved that too. That was like one of the first things that I tried to solve when I was starting out as an entrepreneur in 2013. It's gonna, where can you spend your Bitcoin? Well, that's why we started Bills, which then became Bull Bitcoin. That's already been solved with companies like BitRefill, like Bitcoin Jungle, all these things.

[1:16:39] Marty Bent: I am as well. as it pertains to DACA, the the legal battles and and honestly all the cypherpunk tech that we've been talking about for last portion of this conversation, what what calls to action do you have for anybody out there? How can we help on the legal front? How what

[1:16:57] Francis Pouliot: com. I did buy the domain just to rub it in their face. com is a website which basically shows all the arguments for repealing DAC8 and explains our legal strategy. com and like educate yourself about what that is. I don't really have that much of a call to action because When we decided to fight this legally, we decided not to do an industry group and not to do a crowdfund and not to do like a big thing. Just because of the overhead of doing those things, we're just like, fuck it, we're gonna pay the lawyers ourselves and we're gonna do it ourselves. so we don't have a donation page, and we don't really have any real way for people to help us.

[1:18:34] Marty Bent: We'll link to that in the show notes so you can go download and use it. Highly recommend it. Francis, there's not many of you out there. There's only one of you out there. There's only one of you out there. And I'm very glad that you exist because I think what you're doing, what you have done for over a decade now at this point has been extremely impactful for Bitcoin and very important for the ability of individuals to use Bitcoin in a in a sovereign fashion. And particularly in this era of Bitcoin, a lot of what you do is overshadowed by by the the orange ties and the suits. And I think it's important to remind people that the cypherpunk dream of Bitcoin is nowhere near dead. In fact it's more alive than ever, because of people like you. So I just honestly, earnestly thank you for for all the work and the commitment that you put into this.

[1:20:14] Marty Bent: Alright, peace and love freaks. Take