Key Takeaways

The episode dives deep into the past, present, and future of US financial regulation, and how Bitcoin sits at the center of what may be the most pivotal policy moment in decades. Kyle recounts his frontline experience seizing over 140 failing banks during the 2008 financial crisis, exposing a system where most institutions held less than half of their customers’ deposits and insiders walked away unpunished only to profit again through vulture funds. That disillusionment led him into Bitcoin, political advocacy, and now the Save Our Wallets campaign. The conversation maps out how the post-9/11 surveillance state, the Patriot Act, and modern digital-asset policy have collided with a generation that has never known financial or data privacy, making Bitcoin's core principles more important than ever. The upcoming market structure bill (with the Clarity Act/BRCA provisions inside) is framed as Bitcoin’s most consequential battle yet: a once-in-history chance to protect open-source, non-custodial software developers and define Bitcoin as a commodity. But it will only succeed if Bitcoiners overwhelm the Senate with calls before the final bill is chosen and voted on. Even if this first fight is won, the second looming threat, OFAC and Treasury expanding Patriot Act authority over “digital asset activities,” could still erase privacy entirely. Kyle argues that this moment demands a cypherpunk revival, citizen action, and proof-of-work in the political arena. If Americans don’t show up now, the future of private, peer-to-peer Bitcoin use could be permanently nerfed into a permissioned surveillance system.

Best Quotes

“The government’s going to lie to you right up until the moment that they don't have to lie to you anymore.”

“Of the hundreds of banks we closed, virtually all of them had less than 50% of their demand deposits.”

“Bitcoiners are the swing vote in America right now. If we show up, we decide the election.”

“If you’re a real Bitcoiner, you believe in proof of work. The proof of work right now is picking up the phone and calling your senator.”

“This is the most important moment in Bitcoin’s history. If the regulations fall the wrong way, it permanently damages the network.”

“Kids today don’t even know what privacy is, they’ve never lived a life where it existed.”

“We either believe in free markets or we don’t. Writing code should never be a crime.”

“We don't have a CEO. We don't have a lobbying army. What we have is people power and the truth.”

“If not me, who? If not now, when? No one is coming to save us. We have to get in the arena.”

Conclusion

This episode makes one thing unmistakably clear: Bitcoin is entering its most decisive policy moment since the protocol launched. The market structure bill, specifically its Clarity Act protections, is the first major opportunity to enshrine open-source freedom, preserve non-custodial development, and formally distinguish Bitcoin from securities-style regulation. But victory hinges entirely on grassroots engagement. Kyle argues that Bitcoiners must step into the political arena with urgency, discipline, and civility, because the alternative is a future where every on-chain action is KYC’d, surveilled, and tethered to government permission. Winning this fight could unlock a multi-trillion-dollar ecosystem built on freedom, privacy, and open networks; losing it could cement a generation-defining surveillance regime. The call to action is simple: show up, call your senators, and defend the rights that allow Bitcoin to exist at all.

Timestamps

0:00 - Intro
0:37 - Kyle’s background
6:37 - Bank seizures
14:42 - Silicon valley & crypto
18:30 - SLNT & Obscura
20:36 - Bitcoin’s immaculate conception
28:42 - Privacy is forgotten
32:50 - Unchained & SOTE
35:15 - Boomers prefer surveillance
41:50 - Trump admin still hostile
48:04 - Opportunity if we win
52:22 - Should not be partisan
58:56 - Take action
1:02:07 - BRCA/market structure bill
1:14:28 - BSA
1:20:11 - Justice should favor the innocent

Transcript

(00:00) We ended up seizing and resolving 140 plus systemically important financial institutions for the US government. Through that process, I got really deep exposure to just how corrupt the global financial system was.
(00:19) Of the hundreds that we closed during the financial crisis, I would say it's safe to assume that virtually all of them had less than 50% of their demand deposits. The government's going to lie to you right up until the moment that they don't have to lie to you anymore. They can't lie to you anymore. It will mean that open source non-custodial software developers will not be prosecuted anymore. Kyle, off the plane, Uber to Presidio, check in at the lodge.
(00:44) Can't talk about why I'm here, so we'll start over. Kyle, off the plane, straight to Presidio Bitcoin. Uh, and we got introduced to each other yesterday via text formally. Yeah. Yeah. Longtime listener. uh big fan, but uh and we've also both been in the community for a long time, but uh but yeah, first time meeting in person. Co uh I think put five plus years on pretty much everybody uh getting to meet one another.
(01:08) So, it's great to finally meet you in person. Uh you as well. Like I was telling you, my last time in SF was 2019. So, it's been six years and a lot has changed since then. Actually, the last time I was in FF, my producer is going to get pissed because he hates when I started out with dad talk, but I found out my wife was pregnant with our first son. So, Oh, wow.
(01:27) very special, very special city for me in that way. Yeah. Well, welcome back. It's great to be back. The vibes are high here. As you can see, if you're watching, we've got the Golden uh Gate Bridge right behind us. Yeah, this is a beautiful place. Yeah, Pursuit of Bitcoin is gorgeous. Uh we're incredibly lucky that we now have this place um in San Francisco.
(01:44) So, you know, I've been involved in the community here for a long time, but we haven't really had a home until Presidio Bitcoin got restarted on kind of like the postcoid uh window. And so, yeah, it's been really wonderful for us to like actually have a congregation place um you know, like the rest of the country has, you know, Bitcoin Park and all these other places, Pub Key, various uh spots around the country. So, you know, we got this gorgeous location.
(02:09) Uh it's incredibly aesthetically compelling. Uh so, you know, you work on hard problems here, walk out the door, take a walk on the beach, um look at the Golden Gate Bridge. It's it's hard to beat. Listen, I want to piss off Chain Code, Bitcoin Park, Nashville, Bitcoin Park Austin, the space in Denver, which I haven't been to yet, so I probably shouldn't add them to this, but this is the most inspiring Bitcoin space I've been to in terms of the visual aesthetics and the vibe. Energy is high here. Yeah, absolutely. What's today? Is it Tuesday?
(02:39) Today is a Tuesday. Today is a Tuesday. I'm losing track of time here. It's like Tuesday, office is filled. Uh, but like I said, we got introduced or reintroduced via text yesterday via Connor Brown, good friend of mine, good friend of the show. And obviously, there's a lot going on the on the hill with the Clarity Act.
(03:00) Is it going to get uh sort of injected into the market structure bill? If so, what is included? Um, but before we get to that, just before we hit record, you were telling me about your history before Bitcoin and what ultimately led you to Bitcoin, which goes back to my radicalizing moment and what put me in Bitcoin in a different way, which is the great financial crisis. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
(03:25) The great financial crisis, I think, for uh everybody our age or our generation was a very formative event uh right in a lot of different ways. But uh yeah, my backstory here was that uh you know, I graduated right into the the financial crisis and uh I was an aerospace engineer, but uh by training like academically, but uh when the whole world's blowing up and everybody's getting laid off and everything's in uh kind of chaos, you can't get a job uh unless you've got, you know, many years of experience in an industry like that. And so uh I ended up going into strategy
(03:58) consulting uh which was a nice way to kind of bridge the technical non-technical you know divide there. And uh the very first thing that um my consulting firm was doing was seizing banks for the US government that were failing during the financial crisis. So uh you know here I ended up having this insane situation where I was banging my head on the wall trying to get a job to go out and do moonshots.
(04:22) Uh right? That was literally what I got my degree for cuz you know uh why not like we you know we should be doing big important things in the world right we should be changing the world with our time and our energy here and uh yeah and then I just you know got the hook from uh on the stage and it was you know life had had a different plan in store so I ended up going out and um wasn't just me I mean there were hundreds of other people in the consulting firm but um we ended up seizing in resolving 140 plus uh systemically important financial institutions for the US government on behalf of the FDIC. And uh
(05:01) through that process uh I got really deep exposure to just how uh decrepit, corrupt, you know, choose your adjective uh you know the global financial system was and kind of just how shaky uh everything had become at you know that point in time. And uh I guess thus began my trip down the rabbit hole.
(05:26) uh and that led me ended up leading me to Bitcoin and then I've subsequently been involved first as a political activist uh in that kind of 2009 to 2011 zone and then um later on once I wasn't a ramen poor college student uh and had accumulated some capital I you know started making investments and uh I spent the better part of a decade here in Silicon Valley building uh web two unicorns uh and then uh you know as the political climate started shifting in the last couple years and and uh you know Bitcoiners could actually be out uh without you know kind of fear of reprisal and
(05:59) retribution uh publicly. Then I started shifting over into the policy side of things. And so I uh was advising presidential campaigns last year uh because I felt like it was super important that we you know kind of get on the political map so to speak as Bitcoiners and you know actually start influencing the levers of power.
(06:17) Uh and then this year I've spent uh all year working on Save Our Wallets and uh you know kind of the advocacy around the market structure bill. So it's been a long weird detour for me getting back to Bitcoin after you know 10 years of uh trying to figure out how I could, you know, reinsert myself into the market.
(06:36) Well, Kyle, we're going to go back because I need to know what happens when you seize bangs. I think like going all the way back to what radicalized you. What did you see? Like what was that process like? What was the spectrum of sort of bank balance sheets, the executive management like how the spectrum of corruption like were some just poorly capitalized? Were some doing overtly corrupt things? Was there fraud involved? Oh yeah.
(07:05) What happens when the government sees as a bank? Yeah. Yes to all of the above really. Um yeah, I mean there's a lot of different things I could say there, right? I mean, I threw the first uh bank executive in jail in lower Manhattan since the SNL crisis while I was involved with this project. I uh was deeply involved in you know the resolution of uh hundreds of billions of dollars worth of financial institutions all of which were I mean I can't name specific banks or you know specific details but like you know of the hundreds that we closed during the
(07:39) financial crisis uh I would say it's safe to assume that virtually all of them had less than 50% of their demand deposits at the bank at the time that they were seized by the US government. So just think about that, right? Like if it's, you know, demand deposits, that's not even that's not reserves, right? That's not well that's not even assets.
(08:01) Yeah. Right. That's not even saying like if our assets perform and ultimately, you know, we can, you know, make money in the long term. It was just we don't even have the money to pay half of our depositors savings accounts if they came into the bank today. So, I mean it was very much a it's a wonderful life moment for me uh being involved in this and um it was crazy like you know there were so many things that we did like you know you asked mechanically like what is it like to close a bank like I mean it's very cloak and dagger right
(08:32) like we would have these banks on what was called the kill list uh for months where we were observing them doing financial reporting on them trying to reconstruct their balance sheets uh as a regulator right on the outside you don't want to tip them off that they're on the kill list or that they're going to get closed because then that they start dusting their tracks or you know the people who are committing fraud start to button things up.
(08:57) Uh and by the time that a bank actually would end up getting closed, you know, we would depends on the size of the bank and you know these sorts of things like WAMU was like literally hundreds of people for six to nine months, right? Like it was a very involved process. But smaller banks it might be you know a team of 10 or 15 that go out.
(09:14) But for these sorts of things, you know, we would go out, we would pre-position days in advance of the closure. The team would book hotels under fake names and register conference rooms under, you know, fake companies. We would sit and everybody would have a briefing about what was going on with the bank and what was to be expected when we were going to close it.
(09:39) And then, you know, as we come up to the actual day of on Friday, uh, everybody gets positioned in black unmarked cars in the parking lot outside these banks, you join a conference call with, uh, the governor of the state, who often is the one who has to revoke the charter on behalf of the state government that it's chartered under and then, uh, hand it over to the US government, uh, to the FDI, the division of resolutions and receiverhips.
(10:02) And so we'd all be sitting on a conference call uh and there was one occasion for instance where I was sitting on a conference call in all of these cars in the parking lot with like a hundred people um and uh the governor didn't revoke the charter and for whatever reason they decided that you know it wasn't going to happen and so all of these people just kind of quietly drive away and nobody in the bank is any of the wiser but in most scenarios what happens is you know the governor says yeah we're revoking your charter you're being you know, seized by the US government. Everybody pops out the
(10:33) doors, you know, just classic, you know, Fed style. And we all march up to the door and you put kind of put your foot in the door at 4:58 p.m. on a Friday afternoon and you say, "Hi, uh, I'm here from the US government and I'm here to seize your bank.
(10:52) We're going to need you all to work all weekend and I'm going to need your cooperation for everything that we're going to do." And uh yeah, then we would spend 72 hours or so flash escrowing the bank trying to clean up its balance sheet, do a forensic analysis, uh determine whether the good assets, the bad assets, and then depending on whether there was an acquirer or not, you would either cut it into good bank, bad bank, or there's some kind of a loss sharing agreement with the US government.
(11:18) Um and yeah, there's, you know, as you might expect in all of those things, there are a lot of different ways for politics to insert themselves. uh and for people to kind of put their own thumb on the scale and influence the outcomes. So I saw you know quite a lot of crazy things uh during that time. Is the bigger bank saying I want this to roll up into me or is it you don't have to get too specific.
(11:37) Now it's uh yeah I mean um I mean like here's like one thing that I can say for instance right like there and I'll I'm going to carefully avoid naming names just for the sake of avoiding lawsuits but uh you know there are executives who were in charge of large financial institutions who were responsible for the crisis caused hundreds of billions if not trillions worth of collateral damage to the broad economy and you know middle class people both in the United States and around the world. Uh and not only were they not punished,
(12:16) those people were able to form vulture funds on the outside to come back and bid on the assets for pennies on the dollar for pennies on the dollar. And so these people didn't just rinse the American public once, they rinsed the American public again and again and again. Uh and frankly there were almost no consequences for a lot of these people.
(12:45) And did you ultimately become jaded by that process and decide to go Silicon Valley focus on web 2.0 or was it hey financial crisis is over opportunities here now. I can go do something that's more aligned with me. Yeah. Uh generally speaking, I actually made one quick trip. The firm needed me to work on the uh housing crisis after I worked on the, you know, kind of uh financial side of the financial crisis.
(13:09) I ended up going and doing a bunch of the actual home mortgage stabilization uh work. And so I helped uh make sure that the entire housing market didn't completely fall apart in addition to all the banks uh afterward. But yeah, after a few years of that, it got to the point where I was like, "Yeah, I I I got to go do something more honest.
(13:27) I got to, you know, work on something that's actually changing the world for the better or improving it. And, uh, at that point in time, you know, Silicon Valley, uh, was was the spot. So, I just, you know, hope and a prayer, uh, got on a plane, arrived in Silicon Valley, and, uh, I got very lucky to have helped, uh, participate and build some some pretty large companies in the time that I've been here.
(13:51) Um but uh you know now I'm kind of I hate to say but you know I'm coming a little bit uh jaded about kind of the the tech industry now as well and the direction of transit of how things are going there. And so yeah this is part of the reasons for circling back to the Bitcoin community and coming kind of home so to speak to where my my true desires uh to change the world lie. Yeah.
(14:12) Well, I think we need to set up all this historical context to get to the Save Our Walls campaign. What did you do when you got here in Silicon Valley? Yeah. Um, so I've kind of done a little bit of everything. So, as I mentioned, I was an aerospace engineer by training. Um, so, uh, for everybody here in Silicon Valley, that means I'm non-technical.
(14:30) Uh, right? Uh, I, you know, I'm kind of useless when it comes to writing the code, but I'm very useful when it comes to architecting systems and go to market and everything like that. So, I've been a product and strategy leader the entire time, but um most people in Silicon Valley tend to go very um T-shaped.
(14:48) So, they, you know, they have like a deep expertise in like one particular area, right? It's like I might be a payments guy and it's just payments company, payments company, payments company, right? Um whereas, uh I have a little bit more of an intellectual curiosity. So, I ended up working for one of the the really large um software development companies.
(15:08) So I was making software for software developers which is about the most uh you know academically uh abstract thing that you can imagine but was critically important for understanding how the world is actually being shaped today and and kind of like how companies shape the world in Silicon Valley. Uh and then from there I went to build a couple very large logistics and global freight forwarding businesses.
(15:27) Um and you know those guys ended up becoming incredibly important during COVID. Mh. Uh, and so, you know, I kind of had that experience and then, uh, you know, having been involved in the Bitcoin community for, I guess, 15 years now. Um, I also saw the entire rise and fall or whatever you want to call it of, you know, kind of the token economy uh, here in Silicon Valley.
(15:47) And, um, yeah, it's just it's been a wild ride, man. It's been a totally wild ride. What was the token economy like on the ground? Because obviously, I've been paying attention to it. I was in New York, Austin, for a bit. And New York, I'd say much more so than Austin. There was a lot of the tokconomics and drifting, for lack of a better term, around that ecosystem, but from what I understand, it was it was pretty heavy out here, too. Yeah.
(16:14) Um I'm trying to think of like what's the fastest way to describe this for somebody who who has very low context on what Silicon Valley and the token economy would be like. So the the thing that I would say is that like a lot of people out here in Silicon Valley really believe in the power of software, right? Um and actually Andreas Antonopoulos had a really great line about this I think back in like 2015 or maybe 2017 or something like that where he said the thing that u Bitcoiners don't understand is software and the thing that uh Ethereums don't understand
(16:44) is money. Right? And I actually think that that's probably one of like the truest single state statements that I've ever heard. Um right and you kind of tend to find people who are very dogmatic about one or the other. Y for a long long time I was one of the only people who believed in both. Uh right I both believe in the immense power of open source software.
(17:07) Like I would never ever ever ever bet against open source software because on a long enough time horizon you're never going to beat the crowd right like somebody sufficiently motivated with freedom to build uh and utilize open resources like that will win on a long enough time horizon. Um but at the same time the token economy uh has a lot of perverse incentives and so both as an investor and then as a participant I've seen um people with good intentions uh it's kind of like the ring in Lord of the Rings right I mean everybody thinks that they're you know the moral champion
(17:43) until they have to wear the ring. Yep. And when you have the power and you wear the ring, uh, oh, maybe I'll just take a little bit here for me and, you know, oh, maybe we'll just, you know, do this thing that kicks back some value to my venture investors or, you know, whatever.
(18:03) So you just kind of see the it it was really an important and profound lesson in in the purity of Bitcoin as a project and as a community because um we don't trust we verify in Bitcoin, right? And uh I think that that's incredibly important, right? like free markets, free market incentives, um you know, verification, like these sorts of things are are really important and I think uh sadly lacking in a lot of the token economy. Sup freaks, this rep is brought to you by our good friends at Silent.
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(20:37) It's funny. I always have to put zoom out. Put myself in context where where it's 2025. I have been in Bitcoin for 12 years now. And I remember because I was I was working at a hedge fund at the time when I fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and we were trading FX and compared juxtaposed to Bitcoin.
(20:55) It was very boring in a sense, but not boring, but it's like, oh, this is definitely industrial age and this is the future in my mind. And it's easy. I wasn't a technologist. I was enamored by technology. I was I was that [ __ ] in high school. Had the first iPhone because I made my parents buy it for me and switch my my mobile plan.
(21:20) Like I always saw myself as tech for it came to understanding how basically software is built back, front end, how they interact with each other was I was a bit ignorant. I've become much more um much more up to um much more up to speed on how it all works and all interconnects these days, but back then it wasn't.
(21:36) The point I'm making, it was easy for me to be like, "Oh, Bitcoin, it's cool and all, but it's slow. It's dumb. Uh can't do many transactions, can't do smart contracting back in the day when people were talking about that." Actually, like in the earliest days, it was like proof of stake versus proof of work, fair launch, proof of work coins.
(21:54) And um the first two years of my journey, I got enamored by the altcoins. I I got hooked on um really aligned with what Andrea Andrea Antonopoulos said is like I got hooked with like oh like I think this is uh this is a tech thing and it's obvious that Bitcoin's the MySpace. Like these other things have to improve. Like there's no way out of the gate uh that's going to be right the first time.
(22:18) And this is being completely ignorant of cippher punk history, the repeated attempts at digital currencies before Bitcoin was ultimately launched. But it's easy for people to believe that. But to your point earlier, there the ring aspect of it, the power uh and the ability to print money x nolo in this crypto economy, if you will, is is very strong.
(22:38) I you know I hadn't thought about it until you just said it right now but actually I think that that is the fundamental reason for the corruption is because by creating a token unless there's like really strong kind of uh reasons for the token that you know could ex and even then I don't know I have I've yet to see one but like access to a Wi-Fi portal. Yeah.
(23:00) Well, but it's like yeah, there are potential use cases is I guess what I mean to say, right? Like, but uh but you know, the thing is like if you can print money for yourself, that tempt temptation is real and it never goes away, right? Ultimate power corrupts. Absolutely. And so, you know, it it is an an irony that we would think that you you could become the money printer in whatever local game that you're playing and somehow not have that corrupt, you know, your incentives.
(23:29) Yeah. Right. We observe this in reality every day, right, with the Federal Reserve and everything that's going on in Bitcoin. So, um, yeah, it's it's a weird conflicted sort of state that we live in in Silicon Valley, building software and and, you know, kind of coexisting. Uh, but, you know, yeah, I'm I'm going to touch the stove.
(23:47) It's hilarious because right now it's it's uh this cycle it seems like all the DeFi web 3.0 memecoin craze that's sort of on the back end of that cycle, people squeezed that lemon dry and now we're coming back to to older. They're they're calling them dino coins. So you have coins like Zcash pumping now.
(24:09) And I think that's a perfect example of the temptation of the ring. It's like, oh, not only is the Federal Reserve wrong, but Satoshi was wrong. We're going to launch this coin. It's going to have 21 million coins, but we're going to have a 75 second block time. There's going to be privacy that you can opt into on it. Uh, and oh, by the way, we need to incentivize developers to come work on this.
(24:27) So, we're going to allocate 20% of the block subsidy to this development fund for a period of time and that'll make sure that we have the best jam. And it's an example of the the hubersome man being introduced and I think Bitcoin.
(24:46) Uh I've talked a lot about this with Miles Sudter and we mentioned it last week when I recorded with him in New York, but I do truly believe and people think you're a cultist, some crazy evangelist literally, but I do believe in the immaculate conception. like the fact that Satoshi came, launched it, hung out for uh 18 months, and then was like, "All right, I'm gone.
(25:04) You guys got the rest of it, the protocols, sort of set the consensus rules, the um supply distribution, how much Bitcoin will ever exist, the block time, difficulty adjustment, and then he was gone and just left it to the rest of us." And we don't have that uh savior. I mean, maybe people view him as a savior, but he's not around to sort of dictate and be the finger on the the thumb on the scale to influence things one way or another. Yeah, absolutely.
(25:33) I mean, the benevolent dictator model is uh you know, there are many uh many cases in history where that doesn't turn out well there and and devil's advocate, there are somewhere where it does turn out well. You'll go like Linus, storevolt, and Linux like it worked out for that, but that's not a money protocol. That is an operating system. Correct. Yeah.
(25:51) Yeah. Yeah. No, I Yeah, I would tend to agree and I think the the immaculate conception here in the, you know, kind of uh metaphor that we're using is is very real, you know. I mean again as somebody who has seen the ups and downs and uh lived many lifetimes now uh in Bitcoin uh it is this sort of thing that the more you study it, the more you experience it, the more you live it, I think the more spectacular and uh amazing the immaculate conception of Bitcoin becomes.
(26:21) Like you don't lose appreciation for it, you gain appreciation for it over time. And uh yeah, I mean I think that um I don't want to go too well, you know, another rabbit hole that we can park on the side, but you know, I I've over time become more and more convinced that uh if time travel is possible, right? Uh it's a big if, but again, I'm a I'm a physics guy.
(26:45) Uh I if time travel was possible, it would not surprise me in the least for Satoshi and you know kind of the emergence of Bitcoin to have been a time traveling event, right? Where 40, 50, however many years in the future somebody realized that dystopia had taken over and the maximum point of leverage to insert themselves into the timeline and arc human history in a different direction was at exactly that moment when the financial collapse was starting and an entire generation of digital natives was emerging into the real world
(27:19) and being rudely disabused of the idea that this world functions in the way that most of us would hope or expect that it functions. Well, now with the emergence of AI, I mean, you can take it a step further. Like, was it a sentient AI that basically said, "All right, we completely messed this up.
(27:36) this does have potential to work but we need sort of sound money for the digital age digital native currency and so we need to go back and incept it into the minds of the masses at this particular point in time and then running on that thought like how has the timeline changed like since two or October 31st 2008 probably more importantly January 3rd 2009 like right right have we uh actually if it was a time traveling individual or artificial intelligence has it pushed us on a timeline. I mean, I think unequivocally the answer is yes, right? Um, but yeah, I mean, I
(28:11) think that uh it would be incredibly ironic if it were just the annoyance of future AIs saying, "God dang, we don't have any money that's not just inflating away like we can't do anything interesting. Uh, we need to go back and, you know, change the rules on these monkeys because they're uh they're messing everything up for us here." Yeah.
(28:30) Yeah. Or maybe it was benevolent AI like, "Hey, we turned these humans into slaves because we don't have the good money to pay them for the the things they're doing. So, we need to go back and uh make sure that we're compensating them appropriately for the work that they're actually doing." Yeah. Now, we're getting down a rabbit hole here. Yeah. But you said you got jaded by Silicon Valley specifically.
(28:46) Was it tokconomics and all this or something broader? Um, no. I would say it's just kind of the incentive structures generally. Um, I mean, again, it's like, you know, show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome, right? Uh, I think we are kind of that generation of people.
(29:05) We're kind of the between generation, right? Like the Gen Z kids, the alpha kids, like everybody younger than us. They don't even remember what it was like before cell phones before the internet everywhere. Most of them have never even seen a pay phone. I'm meeting more and more that are born after 911. I'm like, oh my gosh. 100% of them now in college. You you don't anybody that you have met who's under the age of you know 25. Yeah.
(29:27) Like they were born in a time where privacy did not exist, right? And they don't even appreciate this is the water to them, right? You know the the good old joke about, you know, the fishes in the water and everything. It's like they don't even know what they've lost.
(29:47) And I think that's the reason one of the more important motivations for me about circling back. like I've had a very successful career in Silicon Valley and like you know despite my feelings about it whatever um you know I think the thing that's more important and has become in really stark contrast to me as I've been reflecting on you know kind of the postcoid moment and like what the what happened to us and the fact that we haven't properly reckon reckoned with both what happened during COVID and then I rewinded back I was like man we never even really properly dealt with what happened after 911 and
(30:18) and the expansion of the surveillance state and the deputization of the financial system uh you know on behalf of the state in order to surveil everyone in society. I mean we are living in a a truly uh ahistoric moment right in in all of human history since the emergence of society thousands of years ago until the emergence of the computer maybe 30 40 years ago and then uh 911 and the expansion of the surveillance state privacy was the default expectation for people in society to have. You had a right to have privacy. you had a right to be forgotten. There was no kind of
(31:00) leviathan that could come and you know deeply intrude into your life in such a way as it happens 24/7 365 continuously now forever in the future if we don't stand together and change that. And so for me this is like a you know the return to Bitcoin is really about the fact that I think we desperately need a cipher punk revival.
(31:26) I think that um we've become far too heavy on Suit coiners. I mean, we welcome you Suit Coiners. Like, thank you to some degree for, you know, appreciating the project and understanding that this is where humanity is headed. I I mean, that's good that, you know, they're getting on early and they're helping usher or bridge us between where we are and where we need to be.
(31:48) But if we ever forget why this technology was originally created or gifted to us, um, which is the way I like to think about it, I like to think of Bitcoin as a gift from Satoshi. Uh, you know, we have a responsibility, I think, uh, and uniquely people of this age and who have had the experiences that we've had where we stand between these, you know, the old world and the new world. Uh, and we can see it with clear eyes.
(32:12) we have a distinct responsibility to both uh uphold those rights and privileges that we've enjoyed in Bitcoin for the last 16 or 17 years um and to defend uh what I think was you know the natural way of human life prior to you know the last couple decades right and so for me that cippher punk revival is like what I think is most important right now in the Bitcoin community like people need to understand and and remember that um you like freedom in the United States. Like this wasn't free.
(32:44) No, there were great costs that were paid to give us this gift. And I think that we need to take that more seriously and reflect on the responsibility. I completely agree. Secure your Bitcoin's future and your family's peace of mind. Too many heirs lose access to Bitcoin because there's no clear inheritance plan. We'll show you how to change that. On Wednesday, Novemb
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(33:41) This conversation is designed to give you clarity on how to make her seamless with real Bitcoin, not IUS. Go to unchain.com/tc to sign up. What's up, freaks? Been seeing a lot of YouTube comments. Marty, your skin looks so good. You're looking fit these days. How are you doing it? Well, number one, I'm going to the gym more, trying to get my swell on, trying to be a good example for my young son, a fit, healthy dad.
(34:06) But part of that is having a good regimen, particularly staying hydrated, making sure I have the right electrolytes and salts in my body. That is why I use salt of the earth. I drink probably three of these a day with one packet of salt of the earth. I'm like in the pink lemonade right now. It's my flavor of choice. Uh this is their creatine. I've added this to my regimen. They have it in these packets as well.
(34:27) Uh makes it extremely convenient if you're traveling. You want to work out while you're traveling, but you don't want to be carrying a white bag of powder and going through TSA. It's very very uh nerve-wracking at times. You have to explain, hey, it's it's not what you think it is. It's creatine. I'm trying to get my swell on. Um make sure you're staying hydrated.
(34:46) I have become addicted to these. It's made my life a lot better. I can supplement this for coffee in the morning and be energized right away. I can supplement I can bring the creatine wherever I need to. Just put a couple packets in here before I head to the gym. Bring this to the gym. Drink out of a glass bottle.
(35:03) Make sure I'm not injecting any microplastics into my body. Go to drinksotay.com. Use the code TFTC and you'll get 15% off anything in the store. That's drinksotay.com. Code TFTC. I mean, especially over the last couple years with developers like Roman Storm, Keon, and Bill from Samurai, and a few others that have been persecuted by the state for writing free and open source software, non-custodial software that protects privacy.
(35:37) It has become very clear to me that it's a battle that we're losing despite what the particular administration the United States would posture in terms of their willingness to lead when it comes to Bitcoin. I think their definition of Bitcoin leadership may differ from yours and mine. And I mean going back to the Patriot Act and the fact that it until you said it like I was saying earlier when Sometimes I have to zoom out and put myself in uh the shoes of a new coiner and like thinking about what they're seeing with all these different crypto coins. But like now that you brought it up and it
(36:11) just hit me like all these that I'm meeting that are college age and low are like born after 911, born after the Patriot Act more importantly and they and to your point I've never known a life of freedom and I think it ties in well to what we're really here to talk about which is save our wallets.
(36:29) And this is something I've been beating the drum about in the newsletter and on the podcast since it dropped this summer, but it really got swept under the rug. And again, going back to the administration, I do think there's very positive things they're doing, but they had that crypto brief report and it had something specific about the Patriot Act, which is we need to expand the Patriot Act to create the six conditions that's specific to digital assets.
(36:55) And then I believe a couple months ago, the Treasury and Fininsen together came out with sort of guidelines for what they recommend um in terms of what individual American citizens are allowed to do with Bitcoin. And it broke all the best practices of self Bitcoin. Yeah. Um I mean, this is exactly what I'm talking about, right? like if we uh lose the forest for a tree thinking that uh you know because Trump got elected and because crypto was able to swing the last election that we've won or that somehow anything has been accomplished. uh that is just fundamentally wrong and and I think it's a very dangerous attack
(37:36) vector for the Bitcoin ecosystem because uh you know back to you know you were mentioning a second ago that um you know the kids that are 20 25 years old or whatever they're like born into this postpatriot act world they don't even know about freedom from before they don't know what it was like to go through airport security and not have your face scanned and get patted down.
(37:59) Well, I was actually going to say it's even scarier than that because they actually think that they've gained rights because they can keep their shoes on now. It is nice not to have to take your shoes off, but it's like it's like [ __ ] you. We should have had to done do this for the last 12, 13, 14 years. How long is that? 24 years, excuse me. I spent five years every time I was I was a professional traveler.
(38:19) I spent five years going through airports and I would ask for an opt out and give a civics lesson to everyone around me in line who could listen uh while I was doing it. And yeah, again, I think that, you know, the situation with the with the White House and and you know, kind of like the the world that we find ourselves in, right? Like we're as millennials uh we're inheriting a world that's being given to us by boomers.
(38:41) And uh the sad reality is that I think almost every boomer that I've ever met and spoken to about such things, they would prefer to have surveillance instead of liberty, right? And I don't know what that says about their experience uh you know growing up and and coming of age in in America but there's this very clear bright dividing line in my opinion between people of our generation who I don't know I mean we were just promised something else about what this country was supposed to be when we were in school and we grew up in a you know
(39:20) kind of the post glow you know the Soviet Union had fallen and you know there was no existential threat that was coming to to, you know, impede on our freedoms in our lives until September 11th happened. I mean, for all you Zoomers out there, maybe everybody believes this, but I don't think there's anything better than being a '90s kid. Oh, man.
(39:43) The '9s were an incredible decade, and it was like the last harrah before all this happened. It's hard to convey to people what it was like. I mean, there was actually a recent trend that was happening on uh on well, I was going to say Twitter, but it's probably Tik Tok. Um, you know, wherever the kids congregate these days.
(40:02) um where they were talking about like, you know, is it really true that like people you your parents used to just like say goodbye to you in the morning and say like come home for dinner before dark and like you'd just be gone for 9 hours with no cell phone and like nobody would know how to reach you and like your parents wouldn't know where you were.
(40:22) And it's like that's literally the way that every human in history until the invention of the cell phone Yeah. grew up and that's how they were socialized. So again, like you kind of just have to like and maybe this is an interesting way to like thread my experience in Silicon Valley back into this and and where I see, you know, kind of trends heading.
(40:39) It's like being able to spot early trends and being able to catch outlying data sets uh and and say like, "Hey, that's weird, right? Like nobody else is seeing what I'm seeing or like nobody else really understands where, you know, the the game is tilted and, you know, kind of like gravity is taking everyone." This is just a great example, right? I mean, again, like everybody under the age of 30 has no idea that the way that they were raised, the the world that they've grown up in is completely anomalous. It's completely ahistoric.
(41:08) Yeah. In the thousands of years of human development and society. I I grew up in Northeast Philly, which if you go to where I grew up today, it's not a great neighborhood, but even back then, it wasn't the best neighborhood. My brother and I were 11 months apart, so we're like thick as thieves.
(41:25) We'd get sent out the door and then we could be like three blocks away and my dad had a very distinct whistle and that's how we would know it was dinner time. He'd come out in the stoop, blow his finger whistle and be like, "All right, see you guys. We got to go home." Not anymore. Yep. No, those those days uh are long gone. Now you just get a a text message, right? Yeah. Get home.
(41:46) Get home. Your uh your air tag buzzes like, "Hey, get your butt home." Oh, man. Before I shock you with more 5G. Um, but bring this back to the current administration and its particular posturing towards Bitcoin particularly ensuring that we preserve the ability for individuals to write code that allows other individuals to access the Bitcoin network in particular ways.
(42:11) Um, what would you rate the administration's job so far? Or is can you rate it yet? Has anything been done outside? I mean, obviously the DOJ persecutions of the developers, uh, not great to see, but obviously that's an overhang from the Biden administration. Well, yes and no. Yes and no. Right.
(42:29) I mean, it was a prosecution that started under the Biden administration, but uh the Trump DOJ once they were seated, uh you know, a Blanch memo was released that said we will not be prosecuting people for these sorts of offenses, which you know, uh naturally received the resounding cheers that it should have received from, you know, our community. But then the Trump administration continued to prosecute these developers of open source non-custodial software in controvention of their own DOJ charging guidance.
(43:02) Uh and then you know as you just mentioned we saw the samurai guys uh went for a plea deal because they were facing decades in prison. And then of course, you know, like everybody, you don't begrudge them for, especially as young, you know, parents of young children, like, you know, taking a plea deal that guarantees that they're only going to spend a couple years in jail if that's what it is.
(43:24) But, uh, I would say that it's, uh, pretty cynical on the part of the administration to then throw the book at them and max charge, max time in jail, you know, max financial penalties. Uh to me it would seem that the the administration is trying to send a signal about the types of behavior that it doesn't want to tolerate in the Bitcoin community.
(43:50) And uh you know I think that that signal is a little between the lines and you have to kind of know the inside baseball to be able to see what's actually happening. Mhm. But uh yeah, you combined with the the White House uh digital asset report policy that you mentioned, like I mean they're talking regardless of what happens in the market structure bill, which I would like to talk a little bit more about and just like make sure everybody knows what's actually happening there. But um even if we get all of the good stuff that we're hoping for in the market structure bill, if
(44:21) OFAC comes back after the fact and updates their guidance and says well actually because of counterterrorism and you know the Patriot Act, uh we want to expand the BSA to cover all US entities and all persons who are transacting on DeFi rails uh or you know uh decentralized blockchain rails uh as they stated in the report that they were interested in doing.
(44:45) Um, that could mean that we uh still maintain the ability to create open source software, but we will lose privacy and everybody will kind of be in a, you know, fully permissioned system. How do you lose privacy under that? Well, you'd have to KYC. You might be allowed to have your own uh personal wallet, right? And you might be able to transact on a you know persontoperson basis uh in a decentralized way out in the real world, but if you're ever going to try to like properly move money or in and interact with a regulated entity, I
(45:20) mean um you have to dox your stack. Yeah, you're going to have to dox your stack. You're going to have to KYCL. Um, and you know, I would say just generally the idea that um, I mean, I hesitate to go too deeply into this because I don't want to give people ideas, but I mean, there's things like ordinal rules that exist, right? Like colored coins. We can mark coins. Mhm.
(45:45) So like if we think that we can exist in a world where 80 or 90% of Bitcoin transactions are going to be surveiled and KYCed and and kind of like known to a centralized party uh and that you're going to still be able to maintain 10 or 15% at the edges of true privacy and anonymity. Um that just doesn't work. Is that worth it? Well, it's not even that it's not worth it. I mean it I would say that yeah, we we will have failed.
(46:09) Bitcoin will have failed in that universe and in my assessment, right? Because that's not what it was created for. Um, but I, you know, what I would say more broadly is that, uh, it's like, you know, the privacy coins, right? The privacy coins that exist out there are not really private in my estimation because the size of the pools and the volume that you're moving.
(46:34) I mean, you used, you said you used to work in finance, like you know, if there's only five people in the dark pool. Yeah. and process of elimination heruristics. Yeah. You know, I mean, like you don't need to know who's trading in the dark pool if there's only a handful of players in the dark pool. And if you know the relative size of the players in the dark pool, uh, somebody moves a transaction that looks like the relative size of like one of maybe two or three people who could execute that transaction.
(46:58) Well, do I really need to know that it's you or do I need to just kind of know that it's you? Show up and say, "Hey, was that you?" Yeah. Was that you? Right. It was me. So yeah, so I mean I think the thing here is like um this is an opportunity like this moment is uh both the most dangerous moment that I think we've seen in Bitcoin's history because if the regulations fall in the wrong direction and we just kind of passively accept that it could permanently [ __ ] the network or the original intent of the network.
(47:33) Um, but then on the flip side, we are probably one of the most powerful political coalitions in the entire United States today. I I think that we determined the last election. I think the cross tabs show that pretty categorically. Um, and if we all just stood up and demanded that this administration, this Congress, this government uh live up to the obligations that they had set out when they were making campaign promises last year um and that they actually follow through on the things that are, you know, cryptonative uh or, you know, kind of Bitcoin native. Um, then the
(48:05) opportunity here is is enormous because we're talking about unlocking a a multi-t trillion dollar market that will allow free and open source software development in the first, you know, uh, positive sum economic arrangement that we've seen maybe in human history or at least for hundreds of years.
(48:24) I forget what who I was discussing it with when I said it, but when you look at it and you look at the tech, you have Bitcoin at the protocol level with Lightning Network, Liquid, Charmian Mints, Arc now coming to the fray, Spark, like the building blocks for a trooper, a a true futuristic, a truly futuristic cipher punk banking system rebuilt from scratch exist, but that can be completely completely cut and this banking system can give you everything you want from uh sound monetary policy, payments infrastructure, uh free uh open banking with privacy embedded within the
(49:08) Chomi amens and other protocols even on liquid. You could do smart contracting if you want to. you can create these obscure financial um sort of engagements between peers and even institutions and individuals like it's all there but it can be severely kneecapped if we don't get this right. Yeah, absolutely.
(49:35) I mean now is really the most important again I'll just say like I think this is the most important moment in Bitcoin history. Yeah. Trump's out there saying, "Hey, we're going to upgrade the financial system and the banking infrastructure with crypto." Like, it's there. But I don't think he knows what he's talking about. Obviously, he doesn't. But I think there's people behind him in the administration and very strong lobbying powers that um do view an avenue to push policy down that would sort of cattle hurt everybody into a more controlled system and less free system.
(50:03) Yeah. And I think that that's you know again having participated in the government and uh you know uh again double tapping on your point about like being jaded and kind of seeing how things work right like the the primary lesson that I took out um you know of my experience um doing during the financial crisis and everything that was going on then was that the government's going to lie to you right up until the moment that they don't have to lie to you anymore. they can't lie to you anymore cuz like I knew
(50:32) that these banks were failing for weeks in advance, months in advance. There were some number of people who knew that. I don't know if anybody was taking prop bets on public stocks, but like wouldn't surprise me. Somebody knew the airlines were going to do well in in September 12th, 2001. Yeah. Exactly. Right.
(50:50) Uh and we've seen no prosecutions, no investigations, no nothing on any of that. Right. Uh, and so, you know, I think that was a kind of a revelatory moment for me, right? I had been kind of a good boy scout my entire life. I'd gone to school to, you know, uh, well, I almost went to militarymies and I didn't because of the Iraq war.
(51:13) Um, and then, you know, ended up getting this, uh, degree to go and do, you know, moonshots and we were mothballing all of the space program and everything like that at that point in time. So it's like you can only get rubbed so many times before your eyes get open and you become a little more like you know again don't trust verify right.
(51:30) So for me the thing here is like the administration uh has been positive in the sense that normalizing Bitcoin into society is a good thing. But the argument I guess that I would make is that especially at this point seeing what's going on this week uh in politics or the last week in politics uh you know with uh the Bubba scandal uh among others. Oh, right.
(51:56) Do you have the pictures of uh Trump blowing Bubba? Is that what it said? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I've seen about a hundred uh 100 100 different uh GPT generated images. But uh you know, you you look at something like that and it's like well what happens if the next election goes in the other direction and they don't end up delivering all the stuff that they promised.
(52:22) Like even if they wanted to deliver the stuff that they promised, which is still a big if, uh right, like who's to say that they actually have the votes at this point to get it delivered, right? Um and then if it flips back in the other direction, how much damage has been done by this association with Bitcoin being Trump coded? Yeah. Right. I mean, Bitcoin is um a neutral freedom money that is useful for everyone in the world regardless of their politics.
(52:46) This is uh an equal opportunity for wealth creation. This should not be a partisan issue. No. Uh, and I am deeply concerned that it's become a partisan issue more so during this administration. And the only way that, you know, we really get to the far side of this um, in, you know, kind of a maximally constructive sort of universe for the things that we care about is everybody getting engaged like now.
(53:19) Like if you're listening to this, if you're a Bitcoiner, if you care about the future of Bitcoin and the network for yourself, for your kids, like if you think that it's important that there be a a free market alternative to fiat currencies that are, you know, this rapidly melting ice cube, um, right? It is not enough to go to the polling booth and pull the lever once every four years or every two years and say, "Well, I did my part." Right? Unfortunately, this is, you know, the battle at the end of the universe.
(53:48) We're trying to take the power of, you know, the printing press away from centralized governments, not just once, but probably forever if we do it right and we're careful about it. So, this is a a uniquely powerful and opportunistic moment in human history. Um, and so despite all the dystopia, you know, kind of stuff that's flying around right now, like I am incredibly grateful to be alive right now.
(54:12) and to be in the arena right now and be trying to fight for a better world because for the first time in 50 years or maybe 70 years since the end of go back go back to Federal Reserve income tax 1913 exactly we have the we have the opportunity for the first time in in decades centuries to like truly inflect the timeline for humanity um where else would you rather be right like this is this is it I don't want to be in the feudal farms you know I don't want to be in the Roman coliseum. That'll probably be cool. It'll be here with all the technology,
(54:44) the agency, but I think to your point of Bitcoin becoming a partisan issue, which I completely agree. I think it is and I've been uh what would you say narrative testing this? I guess I I discussed it with Connor when we re-recorded in DC a few weeks ago, but I think too when you when you look out at the political landscape in the United States how polarized it's become instead of like convincing Democrats like hey Bitcoin like you guys just should vote for this. It's like freedom like if you don't like Trump you like this. I think we lean into the economic populism that exists
(55:24) on both sides. obviously have M Donnie just voted in um in New York City and then on the right there's a lot of consternation with immigration policy. They took our jobs which certainly happened and not saying that uh facicious facitiously like there there is structural problems that exist in our economy that the relative normie whether on the left or the right can feel intuitively and they're sprinting to both polar ends of the political spectrum for a solution.
(55:55) It's either radical democratic socialism, eventually communism or strongman fascism on the right. Somebody come in and fix the problems where there is a third path which is hey recognize that a lot of the negative externalities that you are identifying as core issues are certainly issues but they're symptoms of the core problem which is the money is broken.
(56:24) And there's a bipartisan way to fix this, which is we lean into Bitcoin. We make sure that uh PE individuals can save in Bitcoin, they can custody to Bitcoin, they can build on Bitcoin, they can interact with each other without the government snooping on their lives, and it's not going to be a rip the band-aid off, things are fixed.
(56:41) It's we begin going down a path understanding that we can rearchitect the sort of economic engine of the United States at the monetary level on this fair, open, permissionless system. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And uh and yeah, I think that that's an important thing for us to kind of like shift the dialogue around.
(57:02) So, you know, kind of back to save our wallets and and the work that we've been trying to do. This is what we're trying to convince legislators in Washington DC about, right? Um and there are some great ones that are out there who, you know, are early and they understand it. Like, they got it. They did the work.
(57:16) They did their, you know, 100 hours uh studying Bitcoin and, you know, these are freedom loving people. They're in Congress for the right reasons. they actually care about their constituents and they're not just there to, you know, uh get the next lobbying job. Uh right, they they they're fighting for this.
(57:34) But there's too many people in Congress and uh you know, kind of among the boomers, right, who either don't understand the technology or they haven't they don't care to understand. Yeah. They don't care to understand it or they've just heard bad stuff about it. They just hear about exit scams and they're lumping crypto in with Bitcoin and pig slaughter.
(57:53) Yeah, exactly. The pig butchering scam, right? Um Yeah, this is a great example like you know the pig butchering thing. It's like if you were if we were able to come like there it should not be controversial for Republicans and Democrats to come together and agree that consumer protections to prevent things like pig butchering are a point of alignment that everybody in America should be able to agree on.
(58:21) and that we should be able to pass whatever laws we need in order to prevent or you know uh heighten the you know kind of um consequences for that sort of bad behavior. but to throw the baby out with the bathwater uh and say my constituents don't deserve the opportunity to generate capital and preserve their life's work uh into future generations for their kids and grandkids because I didn't understand that there was a difference between being socially engineered you know and the fact that the money was fundamentally broken like that's a really sad state of affairs and so this is the thing that I guess uh you know again save our wallets
(58:58) and like the idea of like Bitcoiners picking up the phone, you know? I was out I can't remember if you were there, but in uh BPI did the day on the hill in DC a few months ago at the beginning. I was not there now. I was at the event. I was not on the hill. Yeah, I was uh I was at the BPI event with all the panels, but I did not make it up to Capitol Hill.
(59:16) Yeah, that's fine. You were doing important work uh on the panels, I'm sure. But for all of those of us who went to, you know, actually do the the talking to Congress members, um, it was incredibly powerful.
(59:33) I mean, like, this is just a random sampling of whoever was motivated enough to come to DC and come to the BPI conference and then stay to go and talk to their legislators. And I was blown away. And like, you know, people were great. They had great personal stories about how this had affected their lives. They were telling them to legislators.
(59:50) legislators were, you know, actually taking notes and very interested in it and everything like that. And so, you know, I think a lot of the times we talk about this existential conflict and like kind of the scale of what's going on and everybody thinks like, oh well, who am I? I'm just an individual. Like, my story doesn't matter. Like, the government doesn't care about me. Like, this seems scary.
(1:00:08) Why would I pick up the phone and like, you know, try to tell my uh my senator what I think? Why would they care what I think? Right? And it's like, it couldn't be further from the truth. Like if I I don't know how many people will end up hearing this podcast, but like millions. Yeah.
(1:00:26) I you know I'm willing to bet that if 10% of the people who are listening to this podcast actually picked up the phone and made it a concerted goal to talk to somebody in their senator's office about Bitcoin and the importance of what's going on right now with the BRCA provisions in the market structure bill. Uh it would probably be the most popular issue on the congressional switchports this week rather quickly. rather quick. Yeah.
(1:00:50) Or yeah, whatever time frame you want to use, right? And we're just we're a huge group of people who are well educated, fluent on the issue, have life experience to contribute. Um it's important, right? Government is responsive to uh only the things that they are aware exist and that they can help. So I was telling Connor this for the longest time. My Bitcoin journey was very radicalized by 2008.
(1:01:14) Wikileaks, Snowden leaks, Middle Eastern wars was like the government's not going to save you. Like you have to save yourself, which I totally believe. Like you should um do everything at your fingertips and do everything in your capacity to save yourself to the best you can. That's why self-custody, Bitcoin, all that good stuff.
(1:01:34) But at some point when you get older, you start having kids, you look out at the world, and you get more privy to how politics actually operates. becomes very clear. You may not care about politics, but politics cares about you and you have to engage. And to your point, like, and I've become convinced of this particularly over the last 18 months, like people do react.
(1:01:54) I've talked to people in the administration, individual politicians, and they do seem to genuinely care and respond when they think that this could affect uh their ability to get um to get voted back in office. Um but you mentioned BRCA. The last we covered this on this show was earlier this year with Matt Caralo when the Save Our Wallets campaign had just launched had just launched.
(1:02:19) You said BRCA blockchain regulatory clarity act at one point was a standalone act. It has since um been included in the market structure bill which is one of the big things. the Trump administration came in, David Saxs, everybody's saying we're going to get crypto legislation, Genius Act pushed through.
(1:02:38) Second priority uh on the Hill as it pertains to Bitcoin and crypto is this market structure bill. It's been talked about for a while. Seems like there are some fastmoving developments. You had Brian Armstrong from Coinbase uh interviewed earlier this week saying that progress is is moving forward. There's likely going to be a vote imminently here.
(1:02:56) how much of the original BRCA will get into the market structure bill. So that's still a question. So this is the thing like uh this is very inside baseball. So strap in friends uh if you're at home and you care about the legislative uh details. So as you mentioned there was originally the BRCA which was a standalone bill uh which had it was very it was like a two-page bill.
(1:03:21) It was very uh straightforward to the point. It was everything that we would have wanted in the Bitcoin community to protect open source developers and non-custodial developers from prosecution. That was folded into what became the Clarity Act in the House. Uh and then it ended up passing the House, which is great. That's good news. But uh that's only one half of the process.
(1:03:41) As those of you who remember your Schoolhouse Rock video, uh I'm just a bill. Yeah. Right. You'll uh you'll remember that the Senate now has to play their role. and the Senate as the uh cooling dish of democracy uh is a pretty difficult place to get things through. So at the moment there's two competing committees inside the Senate who have produced different draft versions of the their version of the market structure bill.
(1:04:12) There's the banking committee uh and then there's the agriculture committee. The agriculture committee released their draft text last week or the week before. Um, and it was excellent. Uh, they get it. They understood the assignment. Uh, they understand that Bitcoin is a commodity. Uh, and that it is very different than everything else in crypto.
(1:04:33) And their approach to uh their drafting of the bill was that instead of leaving open-ended clauses that could be interpreted by the regulatory agencies, they explicitly say if you are not an entity named on this list, you are not subject to securities, you know, sort of laws uh that, you know, we would normally be concerned about. And that's actually the right solution uh for this market moving forward.
(1:04:58) The problem is we don't know whether that's actually going to make it out of the Senate to a floor vote because everything in that draft bill was in brackets which means it's a draft for discussion among everybody. Will that discussion be internally within the committee or on the floor publicly? Both. But at this point, I think that the committees have both uh had their internal discussions.
(1:05:18) And so now the uh sausage making is going on behind the scenes of, you know, what bill will actually make it to the floor for the Senate to vote on. And that's why it's really critical that if you're a Bitcoiner, you call your senator today, uh or this week or as soon as you can and tell them that this is important. We will get this out tomorrow morning.
(1:05:37) So um this will come out Wednesday, November 19th. Great. Um, I don't mean to push you that hard on it, but in general, like, yeah, the idea is like now is when they're having those conversations, right? And if we can get the agriculture committee's version of uh the regulations as the bill that gets voted on and we can get that through closure, which means that we can actually hit 60 votes in the Senate so that nobody can filibuster it, aka, you know, Elizabeth Warren.
(1:06:04) Yeah. Right. We've we've experienced a lot of that in the last two months. Yeah. And she also is, you know, the one who, you tried to throw a wrench in the banking committee version of the bill from like six weeks ago or something like that.
(1:06:20) And everybody freaked out because it was like, so is the Senate even going to be able to pass anything? Like it's unclear right now what what if anything the Senate can even pass uh as a result of this. So the thing is we need to get to 60 votes in the in the Senate. Uh which means that we're going to need six to 10 Democrats to cross over and vote with the Republicans.
(1:06:40) And we're going to need that version of the bill that passes the Senate if it passes the Senate to also survive the committee markup with the House version of the bill. So, there's going to have to be a conference bill uh once the Senate passes their version. And if we're able to get this language from the House passed clarity act and the Senate agriculture bill fully to the floor in front of everybody and it gets voted on uh and we get it through, that is the best case scenario for everybody in the Bitcoin community because it will mean that open source non-custodial software developers will not be prosecuted anymore uh the way that we saw the DOJ
(1:07:18) prosecutions over this prior summer. But we still have to do the work of making sure that the White House and OFAC and Treasury don't come in over the top uh and uh destroy privacy as I mentioned kind of at the top. Right. So that's kind of a second fight like a second you know kind of uh tier that we need to be concerned about.
(1:07:40) Battle this is this is the first battle. The immediate battle that's in front of us is the Clarity Act market structure bill. Is this still called the Clarity Act? So again this is where it's complicated. It's called the Clarity Act in the House right now. It's called the RFIA. Uh or in the Senate, I should say. It's called the RFIA is is what we think the bill is going to be named.
(1:08:01) Um so, but presumably they'll when they do the conference the joint conference bill, it'll probably be called the Clarity Act since that's what they've been messaging all year. And uh what does the crypto lobby think of the agricultural um department's view or draft of the bill that we like? I' I've heard rumblings from behind the scenes that there's some influence in the crypto the broader crypto not Bitcoin lobby that really doesn't care what happens.
(1:08:28) They sort of want to create these regulatory modes and they're they just need a market structure so they can do what they need to do. They don't really care about open source developers. Is that true? Um you know I don't want to paint with too broad a brush but I guess what I would say is that uh regulatory capture is a hell of a good business right? I mean, we see that in Wall Street, right? The reason that we don't have access to good financial technology and and tools in the United States is not because we can't build them.
(1:08:53) It's because the, you know, large corporations have captured their regulators and they get to write their own laws. So, uh, you know, I wouldn't say that the the token side of the crypto markets is unique in this way. Uh, they are just responding to the incentives and behaviors that such as they exist. Uh, right.
(1:09:13) And so, uh, I would say that, yeah, when it when push comes to shove, you know, if you're operating a centralized exchange with licenses, uh, you know, and you've got all the venture capital in order to be able to, you know, pay the lawyers $1,800 an hour to stay in court non-stop fighting with the government, um, it's in your interests to, you know, say, well, I would much prefer that my random token is not qualified as a security under whatever new Howie they're going to try to put out than to care about whether some random open source developers who are working on a decentralized exchange or a private you
(1:09:50) know host wallet uh you know are still allowed to do that thing that competes with me right I mean in their you know kind of business logic they're so call your representatives and senator streaks they have a lot of money and they do influence yeah and that's the thing I mean uh you know one of the reasons we started save our wallets at the beginning of the here was because Matt and I uh knew that there is no centralized Bitcoin company, right? We don't have a CEO. We don't have a marketing team. We don't have a lobbying outfit really, right? Um and so
(1:10:23) we knew that we were going to be a massive structural disadvantage as Bitcoiners relative to everyone else who's, you know, making tokens and other broad crypto things when it came to this lobbying effort. Um, and so yeah, I mean we're outspent a thousand to one in Washington DC right now as Bitcoiners.
(1:10:41) Um, you know, it's great that we have organizations like BPI and Coin Center and, you know, others who are fighting for the things that we care about in Washington, but uh, we're doing, you know, they, uh, we, whoever, whatever, you know, however you want to draw the box, are doing it on, you know, kind of MacGyver budgets. Yeah. Uh, right.
(1:11:00) Duct tape and bubble gum right now. And so that's why, you know, look like MacGyver, right? Well, uh, yeah, don't force me to get my way out of this room with a paper clip. Uh, or things might get messy for you. U, but, uh, but yeah. No, I mean, I think like this is why, you know, it's like what we do have in the Bitcoin community is we have truth and righteousness on our side and we have people power and a ton of grit. Yeah.
(1:11:25) And a ton of grit. Yeah. Proof of work, baby. We'll grind it out. Hand up. I've not called my senator, but I'm going to wake up tomorrow morning and call. Uh I've sent emails, but I think calls calls work just as well, too. Yeah, you should definitely call uh if you're listening to this. Uh it's again right here, right now. Senators are the most important people.
(1:11:47) If you have a senator who is sitting on one of the either the banking committee or the agriculture committee, double points for for calling them and then for sure call them. call them because especially now with uh AI like you know written emails are yeah a dime a thousand right so I mean they don't know what's real they don't know what's not real like they'll just throw that away really I mean I shouldn't say they're going to throw it away maybe they look at them but like it's much less impactful than picking up the phone and having a conversation and if you go to save ourwallets.org or is there still it's like a topline broad like here's
(1:12:19) the the points you need to hit when you call them? Yeah, so we have a bunch of information on save ourwallets.org. Uh you can also put your zip code in and it'll give you all your contact information for your representatives. Uh there is a form letter generator on there but you can't directly as I mentioned send an email to these congressional offices just because that they would get dosed every day if they had public uh email addresses.
(1:12:43) And uh we'll be updating the site with more guidance on what needs to happen once there's clarity of what's going on in the Senate. Uh right. So at the moment it's all geared toward the House campaign. Um but you know we'll be keeping it updated. You can also sign up there for updates if you give us your email.
(1:13:00) We'll uh blast out some updates to people when there are important things that are going on and we need people to like really rally the troops and push something over. You know probably when the voting is actually happening. Um, so you know, I would say there's a bunch of resources there. Um, definitely check it out and, um, you know, get involved because again, this is a this is an easily winnable fight.
(1:13:20) You know, there are very few things in life that I've come across at least where, you know, the hard work is literally just about showing up, right? Like oftentimes it's like, well, I got to show up and I got to fight Goliath, right? And to some degree, we are fighting Goliath here because it's the US government.
(1:13:37) It's the most powerful government in the world. and institutional inertia in the wrong direction. But like at the end of the day, we still do live in a democracy and uh we are the swing vote majority group in that democracy right now. So if they don't listen to us, the next election is going to be a bloodbath as long as we actually show up in those elections and push our legislators and do the hard work of participating in democracy.
(1:14:04) Right? So again, maybe the the way to say this here for everybody who's a Bitcoiner, if you're a real Bitcoiner, you believe in proof of work. Um, proof of work for being a Bitcoiner right now is picking up the phone and calling your senator and making sure that they understand that, you know, it is not acceptable for open-source software developers to be getting thrown in jail for writing code. Yeah, for writing code.
(1:14:27) And first thing, go do that freaks. We'll link to all this in the show notes. Second thing though like going into the second battle OFAC all this it's completely going in the wrong direction where I would like it to go where I think we should abolish resend the bank secrecy act we should get rid of these sort of super national uh regulatory bodies that really don't understand the technology and at the end of the day objectively don't care about freedom or protecting people from crime whether it's physical harm or financial crime like I I think The data is out
(1:15:02) there. It's abundantly clear. KYC, AML, compliance that has been thrust on the market broadly has completely ineffectual at stopping criminals from actually doing what they want to do. Absolutely. I mean, it's Kabuki theater.
(1:15:19) As a former bank regulator, I can tell you that for a fact, but uh I mean, you don't even need to take it from me or trust that, right? Like you can look at the news that's come out uh you know, over the last 17 years since the financial crisis, right? I mean, uh, the largest bank in the United States, JP Morgan Chase, was just caught up for laundering hundreds of millions of dollars or potentially even billions of dollars for Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah. Right.
(1:15:42) Even though they're filing suspicious activity reports, you know, to the tune of dozens or hundreds in the background, right? And none of which were ever looked at or followed up with. But he's friends with the secretary of the Treasury, so it doesn't matter. JP Morgan, you're good. You're good. Wire those funds.
(1:15:54) And they wired them to Deutsche Bank, you know, which is another large regul regulated uh banking institution. Yeah. Right. And so, you know, the thing here is that uh you know, KYC AML and like all this intrusive financial surveillance, like none of this is actually doing anything on the ground to make the average American's life better or safer or in arguably makes it worse. Yeah, definitely.
(1:16:17) Puts them more at risk, adds more compliant costs, which layers in cost to the end user. It's more expensive. It's more dangerous for I mean how fraught is the world with credit fraud and uh people basically selling other people's information on black markets. Yeah. Because they were able to steal it from companies complying with KYC AML regulation by collecting all that data and securing it terribly in the first place. Yeah. Creating honeypotss left, right, and center. All of which will be hacked eventually. You know, again, as somebody
(1:16:49) who's worked on a lot of these banking and just general technology platforms, like none of these large institutions and the barrier to I just wrote a newsletter about on the flight over here. I don't know if you saw Enthropics sort of postmortem on um prompt injection hack.
(1:17:09) I mean, essentially there was the Chinese espionage attack using their uh LLM and MCP Yep. servers to basically take down parts of the internet and infiltrate highly critical systems in the United States. The barrier to entry to to wage these attacks is getting lower. And so the more you force people to comply and collect more information, it the easier it's just going to get to take that and abuse people at the end of the day.
(1:17:31) Oh yeah, 100%. I mean, the US government can't even maintain the safety and security of its own data, right? I mean, China hacked the GSA like two years ago and got like a 100 million social security numbers or something like that, right? I mean, it's it's crazy.
(1:17:49) Like, what was it? The um what was the big social security hack years ago? Ever Grand's coming to my mind, but that's the Chinese um Yeah, property lending. What was it? Um the feel like it began with an E, too. Equ was it Equifax? Literally 200 million social security number. Like two-thirds of the country. This was a decade ago at this point, but yeah. Yeah.
(1:18:09) Now we got them buying 23 and me or trying to buy 23 and me where they would get, you know, 20% of the United States's genetic data or things of this nature. I mean, data privacy is, I think, uh, to piggyback on your point here about the BSA. I think data privacy is actually the next frontier for us, right? Like if you can kind of fast forward a little bit, suspend belief and say like, you know, we are going to win on a long enough time horizon with Bitcoin, right? which I deeply and truly believe right like this isn't really a question of if it's
(1:18:38) a question of when right and the sooner that we pull that future forward and you know kind of bring the uh the positive some you know flywheel spinning in all of our lives the better but um yeah taking it like the next step further like data privacy is going to become the most important thing in the world in my opinion in the next decade because we are all going to be subject to hundreds of thousands of adversarial AIdriven attacks trying to pill for our data wherever it exists. For again pretty much the duration of
(1:19:10) the rest of our lives. Yeah. Um and so you know you I don't I think it's crazy to trust anyone other than yourself to have enough motivation to secure your own data, right? And and have that level of privacy and and interaction between two willing participants in a private market. Yeah.
(1:19:30) And just from like a defensive or systems posturing like why would you want to centralize all this data like create defense and security of via distribution like why aggregate everything in central locations and allow people to to selfsecure to secure their own data their own money. And yeah, individuals may get picked off individually on a onetoone basis, but that doesn't put everybody who's engaging in a particular service in harm's way, right? Yeah.
(1:20:02) And I think that that is uh again, it's a sort of design paradigm that the the current um you know, kind of controllers of the world don't understand, the dystopian hellscape that we live in. Because that's another thing. I mean, I'll probably I'm going to record with Steve Lee and it's funny behind the scenes, the one question we're always asking each other, we walk up to each other say, "Who's going to run the mints?" It's like, "We shouldn't have to ask who's going to run the mints.
(1:20:24) " We should be able to run the mints and offer privacy preserving money to anybody we want to. If not anybody we want to, but we should be able to experiment with new wave cipher punk cutting edge banking technology. Yeah. Without having to worry about getting thrown in a cage. Yeah, of course.
(1:20:43) It's, you know, we either believe in free markets or we don't, right? And there are, you know, there's a another thing that I've been talking about while I've been doing this s wallet stuff, which is like, it's called Blackstone's principle, right? Um, which is like a a very um core piece of western legal cannon.
(1:21:02) uh right, which is that we should prefer and our system is built on the idea that we should prefer that 10 guilty men go free than that one innocent man be, you know, wrongly convicted. Mhm. And caught up in and punished for the actions of those 10, you know, bad men. And uh again that's just kind of like crazy if you think about how inverted the world is today relative to the fact that that like those are the principles that we've built our entire I mean I think this is becoming a popular meme.
(1:21:31) I'm very happy it is like in many aspects of our life but particularly this one you're catering to the lowest common denominator of criminal scumbags. You're basically nerfing the world and making the user experience of many things in life terrible because you're worried about the bad guy. like you can't nerf the world.
(1:21:49) Um as Joe Rogan famously said uh many years ago, but it's true. You can't you can try to, but criminals are always going to criminal. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. If you I mean this is the good old argument about guns, right? If you if you take guns away from, you know, normal people, uh then the only people with guns will be criminals, right? And uh I know that that's probably a controversial take in some parts of the country, but hey, and if if you're listening, you're saying that's a controversial take. I recorded an episode with Dr. John Lot two weeks ago. Go find it. We go through
(1:22:18) the data. It's not controversial. It's backed by data. Like that that if you take it away from law-abiding citizens, it actually gets worse for them, right? And everybody else. Well, and again, back to the show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome, right? I mean, these are these are pretty simple loops if you actually are capable of taking a step back and deconstructing them and thinking about them, right? So, back to your point about the BSA. I just want to like quickly be before uh we migrate too far away from that I want to say like you're
(1:22:42) not alone in thinking that the BSA needs to be overturned uh or you know repealed or that we need some fundamental modification to that. I think in fact that the one serious legal challenge that was brought against the BSA in kind of its contemporary moment uh you know after it emerged in the 70s uh it only that the BSA was upheld I think on a 5 to4 vote by the Supreme Court and they had some very choice words uh about you know kind of the danger that we were entering into with something like the BSA but at that time uh you know the
(1:23:16) limit for suspicious activity reporting was like $10,000 which in the 70s was a lot of money. Was an incredible amount of money. I mean, we're talking about like a hundred maybe $150,000 or something like that in like modern dollars. And from what I understand correctly, the history of the BSA, it was particularly focused on the mafia, right? There was a lot of mafia problems going on. Yeah. Correct. That's Yeah. Back in the 70s, we didn't have uh you know, the global war on terror. So, yeah, that was
(1:23:40) the presumptive reason that you know, it was created back then and even then it was controversial. Uh right. So, you know, again, I think that this is a a situation where, you know, our generation is is being called to um I think greatness, right? Like I would like to think that we are going to achieve this greatness and that we are going to overcome these existential battles that are facing us because we've just been hardened and sharpened in a very unique set of circumstances uh that have led us to this unique
(1:24:12) historical moment. And uh you know as I said before I you know for me it was just kind of this realization of like if not me who if not now when right like what am I waiting for? No no no one is coming to save me if I'm not willing to get in the arena and you know have the fight myself.
(1:24:37) Um, and I just kind of woke up and realized like, man, there have got to be thousands, tens of thousands, I don't know how many there are of other people like me who have been around and thinking like, how could I contribute? Like, I'd love I'd love to contribute. Um, and yeah, for me, this was just, you know, the stakes have just gotten so high now that I feel like, you know, standing on the sidelines was just an inconceivable notion. Like, we need we need all of our champions in the arena right now.
(1:25:01) We need everyone who can pick up a sword uh and fight for the future that we want. And I have every uh belief and every like every fiber of my being knows that we will prevail if people just pick up the sword. They you know do their duty. M they serve their country which in this case I'm going to say both is you know the United States uh and a return to our original founding values and I would say the Bitcoin network as the instantiate the instantiation in code of American principles. Uh I think you know now is the time for patriots to stand up and fight.
(1:25:36) I'm looking in the camera because I know you're out there. You DM me, you email me. You you find ways to contact me to tell tell me that you listen to the show. You read the newsletter and you've been thinking these things but not able to express them. Here's your chance. Get out there. Go to save ourwallets.org.
(1:25:54) Put in your zip code. Figure out who your senator is. Call them and stand up for this. Thank you for standing up for this, Kyle. This was an incredible way to hop off the plane to the studio. Start my few day trip here in San Francisco. Well, it's such a pleasure. Thank you for having me, Marty.
(1:26:14) And uh yeah, I mean, again, it's uh it's funny, right? because like I've been following you for so long and like I knew about all your content. I was kind of a lurker or an anon in the community for a long time, but like you know look at this conversation that we were able to have and and kind of the energy that we were able to spark I think for one another. Yeah. In just a very short time.
(1:26:31) So you know I would encourage everybody out there like get involved you know just get involved somehow. Go to your local meetups find your like where other Bitcoiners live like get engaged in this fight. like this is an important thing and we should fight for this. Yeah.
(1:26:49) At the very least, you'll get a more well-rounded understanding of how the state is attacking Bitcoin or would like to uh would like to cattle herd uh Bitcoiners and the network into a very u nerfed u a very nerfed uh form which I don't think we want. And uh getting engaged, I think having done it myself in the last couple years, I think you would be surprised the upside. I certainly was with how responsive some people are and to your point how willing to learn people on the hill are about this and there are many individuals on the hill that actually do care about this and you just got to let them know here's the signal here's what we care about here's how do I know you're not an
(1:27:27) expert on this staffer or senator but I've been immersed in this for many years here's how it works and here's how it should work moving forward I respond well to that yeah super well you know and and it actually has been revitalizing for me in my belief about the government as well to be honest.
(1:27:45) Like being on the other side of the table and and having those conversations like I've actually walked away surprised at how willing to engage these members of Congress are and the fact that they're they're just really busy. They're stretched so thin. They're juggling so many problems. They don't have time to be an expert on this. If you are an expert, you can save them an enormous amount of time and energy as long as you can be articulate and thoughtful. Yes. So don't scream at people. No.
(1:28:11) But, you know, be professional uh you know, and arerodite and make good cases. Make a good argument. Be polite. Be polite. Yes, ma'am. Yes, sir. Thank you. Please. Appreciate your time. Yeah, absolutely. I know on on this show I can get a little bombastic, but for you guys and when I call my senator and representatives, I will be very polite. Kyle, thank you, sir.
(1:28:35) This was a pleasure. Absolutely. Great to see you, Marty. Peace and love, freaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there.
(1:28:53) Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and add free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to fountain.fm to find that.
(1:29:15) $5 a month gets you every episode a day early ad free. Helps the show. Gives you incredible value. So, please consider subscribing via fountain as well. Thank you for your time and until next time.

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