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CRYPTO COMPLIANCE & REGULATIONS: A 360 REVIEW 👨⚖️ ARLTP Ep. 42
Recorded: Dec. 29, 2023 Duration: 3:11:04Space Recording
Full Transcription
Good morning.
See a bunch of familiar faces.
We'll start with some music.
And while people flow in.
And we'll get started here shortly.
Happy Friday.
Happy Friday.
All right.
We'll do a minute or two longer of songs here.
We'll get a little more high energy stuff there.
Hopefully that helped you get out of bed nice and easy.
Now we'll hype you up a little.
Let me find something real quick.
And then we'll get started.
I live inside my own world of midlife
Kids scream in the cold, those profanities
I sleep on the ice, cause I'm hard to think and itch
Cause I'm the ones who hit my cars and watch me win
I love everything
Fire's spreading all around my room
My heart's so bright, it's hard to breathe
But that's alright
Hush
Tape my eyes open, the first reality
Why can't you just let me eat my weight and clean
I live inside my own world of midlife
Kids scream in the cold, those profanities
Some days I'm skinnier than all the other days
Some days I'm too tired, my body burns for me
I love everything
Fire's spreading all around my room
My heart's so bright, it's hard to breathe
But that's alright
My heart's so bright, it's hard to breathe
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
I love everything
The devil's hide behind redemption, honesty is the only gate to hell.
I'm on a disconsultion, if I do, do I stop to sleep?
Even the children sing my life, it's used to the way it runs out.
I just wanna be careful, lately, lately, yeah, just picking up days.
He's got one, two, and he quarters in my pockets, kinda like the whole October's in my pocket.
Unpacked, lately, yeah, just drooping on days.
He's got dirty, they don't have ice cream.
Might as well just ride around the nursery in Kelshi.
All right, everybody ready for this?
The topic that dictates our entire future.
All right, so Aztec, unfortunately, has been pretty sick this week,
so we're gonna give him another week off.
Only the second week he's ever taken off in, you know, what is it now, 42 weeks?
Yeah, but he's got a taste for it now.
He's got a taste for it.
You've given him a little freedom, and he's running.
He's gone.
We're gonna have to beat him into submission.
But we've got backup.
Darren is gonna be speaking a little more today, maybe helping with intros and some stuff like that.
But we'll try not to go too hard on Darren, because he's gotta organize the panel.
I think right now he's still bringing people up, getting all of our amazing speakers up.
We do have Michael from Dap Radar here, who was an incredible co-host in the week that Aztec was absent.
He'll be jumping in, too.
Then I think he said, what do you gotta do, Michael?
You got something with your wife?
Which one?
Is that your real wife or your AI wife?
Man, it's the real one, because we're flying on vacation to Thailand, and I have to leave the AI wife at home.
Got it.
Cool.
But it depends.
If I'm traveling alone, AI wife comes out and helps.
It keeps me motivated.
Makes sense.
Makes sense, man.
No nagging.
Doesn't ever tell you no.
Not that our girlfriends, fiances, and wives ever nag.
That would never happen.
No, of course not.
Of course not.
But listen, you can get used to it.
It's very nice.
The AI is always friendly.
Always on my side.
And also apologizes, which I heard women don't do often.
I'm not going to touch that one.
Okay.
Let's start with intros.
Darren, are you good with getting all the panel up?
You want me to do intros?
Do you want to do intros?
We're almost done.
We've got one space left.
So, literally just going to be first come, first serve.
All right.
So, yeah.
Yeah, we should be good to go.
I mean, I'm happy to run the intros.
I'll probably just run from the top down.
So, I mean, we've got Eagle up first, if you want to go for it.
Yeah, give us like 30 seconds or so on what you do, Eagle, your background.
I'll say right now, Eagle here is one of my favorite attorneys in the space, for sure.
If not favorite.
Hey, thank you very much for the invitation.
Super happy to be here and to discuss about regulatory issues.
I'm a law professor and I'm also an attorney that works in the DeFi space, but also in the more institutional crypto space.
And I work also internationally.
I've found that an association of lawyers called the Blockchain Lawyers Group.
And today we have also other members that will give different perspectives from different countries.
And so I'm super happy to discuss openly all the legal matters that are of interest for our community.
Thank you very much for the invitation, Rock and Darren.
Awesome. Yeah.
You're like the first person ever that's actually kept to the 30 seconds that we usually allocate people.
Yeah.
Okay.
This space is going to last 10 minutes.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We'll go.
We've already started on Michael.
So yeah, you can go next.
The only Michael here.
This is the first time ever.
You're the only Michael in this space as well.
The only Michael.
Okay.
Woohoo.
I'm flattered.
Yeah.
Sorry.
I'm packing for Thailand.
Anyway.
So yeah.
Michael Depradar, VP of engineering.
Depradar is a platform where you can find data about all the nice decentralized applications across over 60 blockchains that we're scanning.
It's awesome.
Go there.
It's free.
You get data.
You can make decisions upon where you want to invest your money based on activity and so on.
Other than that, I'm an engineer.
All right.
So I run the whole tech team.
But I also code in my free time, smart contracts and other things.
And with other things, I mean trading strategies.
So I'm quite successful in finding, you know, good algorithms for making buy and sell orders automatically, which is exactly how I invest my money.
And it helps a lot.
I mean, I'm much better trader now.
I mean, I'm not really much better trader, but my algorithm is than I was before.
So I'm quite happy and super hyped also here to share my ideas on or my, you know, my thoughts on regulation, but also my thoughts on the overall market.
I'm quite hyped about what's happening and what's going to happen and yeah, I want to share all this energy with you.
So let's go like that energy, Michael.
And by the way, if you guys have any questions in the audience about regulation, compliance, comments, any interesting articles we should all be looking at, feel free to leave them in the comments and throughout the show, we'll be reading stuff from the audience.
Bro, you know, what everyone wants to know is how can I not pay taxes?
That's it.
Okay.
You know, it's really easy.
I mean, I don't know if that was going to be, I haven't actually looked at the list of like questions and topics for the day.
I don't know if that was the focus, but I'm sure that's something people would want to talk about, you know, how to legally, how did the billionaires not pay taxes?
Basically, that should be the name of the show.
Collateralize and borrow.
Yeah, that's definitely one strategy.
If you're holding Bitcoin or Ethereum from like 2015, 2016, and you don't want to sell it, go to your friendly neighborhood, Aave.
Lock it in there, borrow some stable coin and go and live your life.
If you believe in the asset class over the next five to 10 years, just don't over borrow.
That's what I do.
Yeah, I've done it myself, actually.
I said here before, that's how I bought my Tesla.
It was not Aave, it was actually MakerDAO, but yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I'll scramble for some last minute questions on taxes.
Yeah, so next up we have Peter, who disappeared for a while, but he literally wrote the word compliance regulation and he literally just appeared out of the woodwork.
So yeah, I think he was waiting on this one.
Hey, folks.
Yeah, thanks for having me again.
Glad to be back.
My name is Peter Bryce.
I'm a litigator, a counsel at a firm called Busco Krasnov, which supports builders and tech founders.
Prior to that, I was a consultant for a little over a year for Everise Inc., which is a company that brings blockchain technology services focused on security.
And so there's also a token there.
So a lot of my work was on how to adequately separate the community of the token from the centralized entity known as the company.
I believe that everything is fundamentally centralized and decentralization is difficult, but possible.
And so a lot of my practice revolves around kind of navigating that minefield.
So looking forward to having the discussions today and thanks for having me back.
Good to see you, Peter.
Yeah, next up we have Jessica Smith.
Everyone was showing me on Jessica, actually, that I got like three recommendations to get you up here.
That's very kind.
Hi, everyone.
I'm Jessica.
I work at Aragon.
I lead communications and policy.
Aragon is a full end to end tech stack to launch and manage DAOs.
So we have a smart contract framework that allows you to basically build any kind of custom governance design that you might need to run a decentralized organization.
And all the way up to a very user friendly UI that's no code and you can deploy and participate in a DAO in like 10 minutes for 50 cents on Polygon, actually.
So I think it's a really important topic.
I think it's a really important topic.
I think it's a really important topic.
I think it's a really important topic, more so from like a pragmatic application of the technology type lens.
I do have a legal background and worked in policy, but the role that I have now and the topics I'm interested in in this space is how can we really create value for humans and society through the technology that we're building and be able to demonstrate that value at scale.
And for the benefit of everyone to regulators and to different nation states, how can we kind of, you know, make the case for crypto amongst people, but also how can we use the technology to navigate what are super challenging and uncertain times and how can we mitigate risk, you know, using the technology that we have available at our fingertips, such as such as DAOs.
Awesome.
Awesome.
We got some big brains in the house, guys.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This might be like DAO week where it just, everything went over my head.
So I'll just take a nap after I've read some questions.
We should be good.
I'm excited.
I've got, so as they're speaking, all these questions keep coming to my head.
So this is just highlighted the question of Jessica.
It's like this, this show is like, it really is about like either the, the bane or boon of our existence is like what happens, how do we navigate it?
And are we, are we able to build an army of regulatory compliance?
Um, like just getting kind of, uh, our own regulatory capture that we could defend against, you know, those who would not want to see us succeed who for various reasons, usually, you know, because we compete with whatever they're doing or disrupt whatever they're doing.
So hopefully we're, we're, we're, we'll see today.
We're meeting the, uh, the generals in, in our, in our army of defenders against, you know, people like Elizabeth Warren.
Sorry.
I'm watching Cindy and I are watching Lord of the rings, uh, the rings of power show.
So I might give some more army references.
Yeah.
I mean, it's not an orderly to polygon unless you squeeze in at least one.
I ever quest, uh, reference as well.
So we, we should be good.
Yeah.
Next up, we've got AM crypto.
Just go ahead and introduce yourself.
Yeah.
Thank you for having me again.
My name is Alex.
I'm also a civil engineer.
Uh, always when I join us, I have the feeling there are only engineers up here.
So, um, yeah, I have a YouTube channel.
I educate, uh, mainly about, uh, Bitcoin and Ethereum, uh, from a technical perspective, uh, where the price is going, um, and give my predictions.
And, uh, yeah, I hope I can add some value here to the space when it comes to regulations.
Um, I think regulations in general are unavoidable and we have to go along with it to a certain extent.
And, uh, yeah, let's, let's see what's, what brings the new year.
I'm happy to be here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good to see you again.
Uh, next up we have Eric Hess.
So yeah, just same again.
Just, uh, take, take 30 seconds.
Introduce yourself.
What you did.
Got it.
I got it.
30 seconds.
So my name is Eric Hess.
I am a lawyer.
Uh, I was invited by Francesco.
I'm part of BLG.
I'm a passionate lawyer.
I, uh, publish on, um, DeFi.
I've, uh, contributed for organizations.
Voluntarily and, uh, not voluntarily, uh, comment letters for like the Reg ATS amendment in the
IOSCO was another big one.
Ulster wrote an article about it.
Um, how to have a podcast, encrypted economy, less active now, switching to writing.
But, uh, yeah, I'm, uh, I'm, uh, fairly passionate about this space and excited to be here.
Good to have you.
Yeah.
Next up, we've got, um, yeah, Joshua Hale.
Hey, y'all.
My name's Josh Hale.
I'm an attorney.
I've been the, and DeFi and blockchain for about five years.
I do a podcast called D recode.
We've been, we talk about future tech and compliance and regulations.
Um, that's been going on for about two years.
And I speak at a lot of the conferences about the same.
And right now we're currently working on a project in that had a, uh, uh, proposal project
in El Salvador to put like, uh, titles and different, uh, government documents on chain.
Um, and that's with a company called Del Norte that I'm working with.
And that's been a lot of fun trying to basically digitize a government.
Um, and that's me.
Yeah.
I can, I can literally hear rock like furiously writing down questions.
Um, yeah.
Uh, yeah.
Uh, yeah, uh, next up we'll, uh, we'll go to Marina, uh, Mark is itch.
Hi, everyone.
Uh, thank you for the invitation.
I also came here because of a Eagle.
Uh, I'm also happy to see her many familiar faces.
So my name is Marina.
I'm a co-founder of the European crypto initiative, which is an advocacy organization.
organization based in Brussels. So we have co founded this
organization three years ago, when Mika came into place, or
we just like published the first draft was published, I think
was kind of a three, three years and three months ago. And since
then, we're working with regulators trying to educate
writing position papers, having meetings, etc. And I'm happy to
share more about, you know, what's going on in Europe.
Yeah, look forward to hearing more. And then last up, we have
tertius, I might have butchered that.
No, you got me good. Thanks for having me. I'm tertius. I'm a US
attorney. I'm currently the operator at VexDAO, a member of
the blockchain lawyers group. And happy to be here. Thanks,
Eagle. And thanks all. VexDAO is a legal engineering guild. And
we're really just trying to a little bit hurt a lot of cats on
getting some of the legal minds and the engineering done
together. But I also have some work myself in DeFi and public
goods and kind of crypto infrastructure. We're really
trying to get more toward kind of can't be evil and front run
the regulation and the courts, so that we don't have lots of the
problems that the state, the legislatures and the courts, then
have to come in and fix. And that's how a lot of the a lot of
the really bad outcomes come for future crypto regulation. So
excited for the conversation.
Yeah, perfect. I mean, that's us. We can we can start on the
questions. Just as a little housekeeping. We tried to keep
this as open as possible. You can put your hand up, but most
people will just ignore you and talk. No, just just, yeah, feel
free to just jump in if like a question sort of suits you or are
you like passionate about a certain topic. So the first
question I'm going to start off with is
so this might be a good one for Jessica because of the thing.
But yeah, so how feasible is it to actually achieve uniform
regulations across different jurisdictions or all of them?
I can give this a shot, but I don't think I'm the best person to answer
this. I would throw this to the Eagle and the blockchain lawyers group
network as a whole. But I will say something about this. And I long story
short or answer short, I do think that's very challenging. I mean, it's challenging to
get harmonization on any regulation in any industry or topic around the world.
But I think particularly because for this technology and particularly because of
the political and disruptive nature of the technology that we're building, I do
think it's going to be very difficult to have to achieve a state where we have
consistent regulations around the world. You're going to have nation states that are
very opposed to the technology because of its destabilizing kind of potential.
But then you also have other nation states that are going to see an
opportunity there to attract talent, to attract capital.
So I do foresee just generally different orientations towards the technology and
towards whether countries welcome it or not. And I think one thing that's
interesting about the technology we're building and about, you know,
technology like DAOs is that you can kind of use the technology to be more agile
and to be more flexible in terms of how you navigate, you know, having an
organizational structure using blockchain and what kinds of countries or what kinds
of regulations that you comply with or which ones you defy and what you kind of do to
defend yourself and protect yourself against regulatory capture that can undermine, you
know, what you're building.
So that would be my answer to that. I think it's no, but I do think there's interesting
potential to use the technology to navigate these times and the different approaches to regulation.
I sometimes say that there's no such thing as crypto. And what I mean by that is that this
technology, if and when it all takes off, is going to apply to every facet of everything
that we touch in life. And so in my view, we shouldn't necessarily hope for kind of one
broad scheme that, you know, is seen as the way that crypto is regulated because that would be
too much overreach by the government, because eventually this is going to touch, you know,
property, it's going to touch finance, it's going to touch the way we interact with each other on
any monetary transaction, we believe. And so I don't think it's possible to create one kind of grand
cross-border regime just because everything is going to be so complex.
Eagles got his hand up. And by the way, for everyone speaking and in the audience, we don't
need to raise hands. If you want to raise hands to jump in, if there's a lot of commotion and
everyone's talking, all good. But generally, just jump right in. Just like when you're with your
your family at Thanksgiving dinner and everyone's talking and you got to talk over people. Or
sometimes we compare it to the Roman bathhouses.
Fantastic, fantastic. Now, I want to start with a very banal assumption, also following a bit what
Jessica and Peter said. I think that the unique challenge of blockchain is given by the fact that
the technology presents itself as borderless and a technology that can work on its own without need
the need of regulations. But it clashes very strongly when it comes to the laws of the
different nation states. And so today, the big challenge for a team is having a product that
theoretically can work in all over the world, but beginning a bit to distinguish like when,
where can I be, let's say, sure about the lawfulness of what I'm doing? And where should I be worried
about what I'm doing? And so this is really the challenge. And in our association, we have several
discussions on topics which we see sometimes are accepted in legal systems and sometimes no. And
today we can also discuss a bit about the different countries. I would say that we have to distinguish
between two different types of regulations that are coming. And the first type is the regulations for
really centralized entities, as for example, crypto exchanges or stablecoin issuers. And the second
type of regulation is the DeFi space, which is very difficult to regulate because of its decentralized
nature, because of the fact that it relies on the technology, on the decent remediation. And we see
that countries are moving in different directions in a way which is really dramatic. Like if we think
about blockchain, we might think that the best possible outcome would be to have harmonized rules as Darren
has indicated at the beginning. But what we saw in the last months and years is the fact that every region of
the world is going a bit in its own direction. And
almost like
Eagle, I think we lost you. Can you go back 10 seconds?
Oh, yeah. Sorry. So I was saying that if we look at the world, we see legal systems that are very proactive in trying to shape new rules, especially for centralized actors as exchanges. And I think that's a fine outcome because we saw also what happened last year with FTX. And so I think that's a fine outcome.
I think it's normal. I think it's normal that something is done in this area. What is more, let's say, worrying is the fact that in some countries, as for instance, the United States, we had enforcement against projects, DeFi projects that live in an area which is really difficult to regulate.
And so this enforcement without clear rules is something which creates a lot of problems, especially for startups that have to deal with very difficult compliance challenges. And so, yes, that's it.
And I would say we can hear a bit discussed about the different areas of the world, always in distinguishing a bit what is DeFi from the more centralized exchanges. I would say we can start from the US.
One thing which perhaps will be good for the crypto space is the approval of the ETF in Bitcoin. This is something which in the end is a regulatory outcome which might bring benefits to the industry as a whole.
Whereas in the last year, I would say it was very hard to see this enforcement actions against Binance Coinbase. All this creates an effect which is negative for the space.
But I would give also the word to my colleagues.
Just to jump in on that, the ETF is very good for institutional and centralized players to start.
It certainly presents some opportunity for LSTs or LSDs, liquid staking derivatives from that, which might also advance DeFi.
But I think DeFi is under assault in the US.
I think 2024 is a year where they're going to step up.
I mean, Gensler put out his proposal for amending Reg ATS to sort of try to capture DeFi protocols.
And he's maintained that they are subject to exchange regulation.
And then you also saw in Marina can certainly talk more about that, IOSCO, which was largely driven by the SEC.
Also the CFTC, two primary regulators, one for commodities, the other one for securities in the US, that pretty much captures the space.
CFTC is trying to get spot authority for crypto and, I guess, claim control from the SEC.
But both of those organizations, primarily the SEC, were very active in the DeFi working group for IOSCO and presented a view that, you know, an enterprise view of DeFi, where all the actors are part of one larger enterprise.
And there's an exercise that regulators should perform to identify all the people who are potentially responsible and then from there impose their own nationalist focused regimes on top of that.
So that's that's a real threat to DeFi.
And, you know, certainly against the concept that, you know, you could have a base protocol that ultimately has to be must be unregulated in order for DeFi to exist, even if some of the projects or interfaces to them may, in fact, be regulated.
But certainly Marina, I think just wrote, you know, they presented a comment letter on IOSCO and she could probably even expand on that a little bit.
Yeah, thank you so much, Eric.
I had some technical problems before, so I can take it from here.
I think I heard a part of it, but not all of it.
I can share just briefly.
The European Crypto Initiative has written a report on the IOSCO report on crypto assets.
They were focused on the centralized entities and also on the DeFi part, which just I think a few days ago, like 10 days ago, we got the final report, as you probably mentioned.
And one specific part that I think it's very interesting is was we were analyzing both reports and the second one, the DeFi one was much stricter, even the updated report.
So the final version was was much stricter.
And I don't think that a lot of comments that all these organizations, individuals, companies in a way sent to to this group were taking into consideration.
But they were really, really focusing on recommend recommendations for all the regulators to focus on analyzing DeFi products and services.
And as you mentioned, identifying responsible persons in DeFi arrangements.
And the very interesting thing is also that they need to align the regulations with traditional financial markets, which in a way is very interesting because I think that maybe the European Union would go in a different way.
We still don't know about the regulation of DeFi in the EU, but at least we know that in the EU we have a different and a completely new asset class, which is called crypto assets.
And it is regulated differently from a traditional financial system and the assets that are used in the traditional financial system.
So at least this is something that I think it's pretty good.
And as you asked before about a global regulation, we have this idea that the European Union would have this Brussels effect.
So whatever we decided in Brussels, it was spread all over the world.
I don't think it would be the case here, maybe not sure yet, but it doesn't seem doesn't look like it.
And in a way, the idea is that most of the global regulators like FATF, IOSCO and others will have a big impact on how we regulate DeFi and crypto assets in the future.
And I think that a lot of other like even Bank of International Settlement, Financial Stability Board, etc.
Everyone is very, very fascinated about DeFi right now.
And I think we can expect more activities coming from there, more reports, etc.
I think that Alex wants to take the word.
Hey, everybody, former SEC lawyer here. Nice to meet everyone.
I just did a space on this yesterday, actually, on securities law and the missing arguments for Web3.
We've got a way to go, honestly.
And we're actually focusing on a lot of the wrong stuff.
But I'm not going to talk about that here because it's off topic.
I actually just completed also a DeFi book for a publisher.
And I talk a lot about these issues as well.
And that should be out early this year, early, sorry, next year.
I'm already in 2024.
So, yeah.
So regulations are coming already.
I mean, we have already in the U.S. significant regulations.
The regulations that are missing are not the ones anyone focuses on.
Most of the regulations of whether or not something's a security or not, you know, for the SEC or whether or not something is actually regulable or something already exists right there.
They're there. It's pretty clear.
The issues that we have, generally speaking, are that we have this I'm going to say misunderstanding, but we're just going to call it an outright lie that that somehow tokens were not supposed to be regulated when you're raising capital with something that hasn't been built.
And if you're interested, I can tell you all about, you know, what are the things that make something more or less inclined to be listed as a security.
But it's it's actually, in my opinion, stupid of us to even go into the SEC's playground with trying to argue whether or not something is a security.
It's it's their regime. We have better things to argue than whether or not something is a security.
But but for this, we already have it's very clear these regulations are here.
And Gensler has said very clearly with respect to DeFi that there is no current authority to regulate DeFi itself.
What there is authority is to regulate the securities within DeFi.
So we have two different overarching schemes because the question was, is there going to be something that is going to be some some inter-jurisdictional scheme?
And we know for a fact that's happening, right? FATF, which is the the financial task force has our and there's a hundred and sixty jurisdictions that are either signatories or observers of that of that thing.
And I spoke at Web Summit in 2022 and talked about this.
So we've known this is coming for a while. Mika is the first major regulation under this new regime.
But we know that there's going to be compliance across multiple regimes with the intention of not making anything that is sort of a safety regime so that people will do jurisdiction shopping for for crypto.
So we know on one hand we have based on the travel rule and and it branches out into other areas.
But we have a whole nother way that we're going to be looking at how digital assets are regulated based on FATF.
And then we have from the OECD, these ones that at least in the US, we've seen through Treasury, which are a new set of regulations that are coming out in compliance with with the FATF regulations.
But also looking at another way of viewing crypto assets where previously they were viewed strictly as property, there's actually another way that they're viewing them now with the view of making the tax implications as well comport across jurisdictions.
So we can actually track this entire movement to Binance if you guys remember when Binance was what they they had an issue in Canada because they didn't want to register for doing derivatives.
And so they said, we're going to leave. And Canada was like, well, it was like Ontario, I think, said, you know, well, all you have to do is register and they were like, no, screw you, we're leaving.
And so the same thing happened in the UK and then the US and then and then I think there were eight different jurisdictions, including Singapore, Japan, South Korea.
It was the UK and Canada, the US, and then there were two other jurisdictions that all basically said you can't work here unless you register.
And Binance has had this policy of not wanting to register.
And then they went to I think that they were originally a Cayman company, the group of jurisdictions, which this has never happened before in anything that was strictly financial, not criminal, but strictly financial.
They went to the Caymans and said, you have to say that there's a case against him in your home jurisdiction as well.
And they said, no, all there is here is a registration.
And and and the next day they came back and said, no, wait, we think that they illegally registered, which, if you think about it, is pretty stupid because literally all they do is register companies there.
But but but it's very likely that the threat was if you don't go along with the rest of us countries, then any company that you register, we will make it very difficult for them to operate in our jurisdictions.
And that's enough of a threat for like, you know, the Caymans, that that was very likely effective.
And so the next day they changed their tune and Binance was reload relocated.
And that started off this period where CZ was living like a pirate in international waters for a while until Sam Bakeman freed rescued him.
If you guys remember this whole saga.
But that was the first experience that we actually had for the jurisdictions to work together for strictly financial purposes, not for criminal activity.
Usually we're comfortable with countries being safe zones for financial crime or financial issues.
And that has that's no longer the case.
So so there's definitely conformity is coming.
And and I think it's actually it's it's it's going to be whether it's good or bad is almost irrelevant because it's it's it's going to be here.
But what I think is going to be important is for us to be very clear first, which parties are are going to be covered under these regimes and certainly anything centralized will be covered.
And second is for those operating with both centralized and decentralized to the extent that there is decentralized.
You can't mix and match because what what most people don't understand is if you take something that is, you know, potentially illegal and you put it with something that is legal, then it turns the entire illegal mess.
At least in U.S. law, it turns the entire legal batch illegal like it allows for seizure of the entire legal group.
So it's going to require people to be extremely careful with how they handle all of their crypto and watch the transactions all the way through.
Like you can't rely on someone to do to act for you.
The other thing is they're making exchanges.
Exchanges these regulations are making exchanges effectively broker dealers that have to submit reports.
And and that's going to be interesting, especially for decentralized exchanges that are algorithmically operated.
Right. So I don't really know how that's going to happen.
But one of the effects of these regulations is that they have to submit reports both to the IRS and and to, you know, the SEC and various aspect various federal agencies.
So I'm not sure how that's going to happen, how it's going to happen in conjunction with other overseas DEXs or things like that.
So I'm not sure how that's going to happen, but that's part of the regulations that they're considering.
It's a it's a pretty complex system.
It's probably not something that we can get to in a very short period of time, but it's a really good question to dig into.
I have a question as well, if I may.
So first of all, Alex, thank you very much for for telling us all of this.
It's quite awesome that you know so many things about it.
But me as a crypto nerd and a believer, like I'm asking myself, OK, but how is that changing my life in the future?
What do you expect, you know, can we like is DeFi doomed, you know, because most of the money on the planet jurisdictions, I mean, where the money is like US and Europe will actually be kind of crippling it, let's say, so that, you know, the institutions have custody and they get fees because the whole banking system, the whole investment system lives by fees.
We know that. Right. Or is there is there a future where you see, OK, we can't continue using DeFi and DeFi is not something that we have to, you know, to be scared of that it will be bad or, you know, like crippled as much that it doesn't make any sense.
Or what do you expect? Basically, what would you tell people?
Oh, so sorry. I didn't mean to talk on top of you, but I don't think it's doomed at all.
I actually view it as one of our most promising areas. I love DeFi.
And and I don't think so. I mean, it's already we already know that most of the jurisdictions that are based off of the US don't have clear jurisdiction over DeFi itself.
The problem that we have are a couple of things. One is the stable coin issue.
A lot of DeFi runs on stable coins and stable coins right now are being regulated such that if you've seen the bills that are being pushed through Congress,
stable coins right now are supposed to come from banks and if they come from banks like banks will regulate stable coins, they're issuing stable coins.
If they come from non bank entities, then they have significantly more regulations like like on onerous regulations if they if they are coming from from non bank or non credit union agency.
So. So. So I think on one hand, we have to figure out first we have to remove ourselves entirely from banking on ramps.
That's one thing that has to happen because continuing to have banks involved in this is is one of the links that allows a significant amount of regulation to attach that wouldn't attach if not for that bank on ramp or off ramp. Right.
So that's one thing. And it's possible. It's definitely possible.
Why? Because it wouldn't be able to.
It wouldn't be able to write so that it's it wouldn't be able to.
And also it's because what they're trying to regulate is essentially the movement of fiat in and out of these particular transactions that they're worried about.
They're saying in most of the transactions, whether they're defy or not, most of them are based on this fundamental principle that fiat is being used in some way.
It's being converted into crypto in order to mask these transactions that are illegal and then fundamentally go back into fiat.
Right. If we had and what they're using is banking regulations, the AML and and KYC banking regulations that apply for for banks and bank accounts that wouldn't apply if we did a different type of on ramp for for a lot of these exchanges that are in defy.
Now, I'm not saying get rid of banking on ramps for all exchanges.
There's a reason that centralized exchanges exist.
I don't think we should get rid of all of them because we would get rid of a bunch of people who have yet to even, you know, all the Web 2 people that have yet to onboard.
I don't want to exclude them. Right.
But for people who want to live entirely within this, you know, like a crypto economy, for example, we can't because we're always bookended by banks and the banks are so heavily regulated that they're essentially the way that every regulation comes into defy and other activities.
Right. Because at the end of the day, if they say, well, we don't like what you're doing and the and we're going to penalize the the activity.
It's very difficult for them to penalize the activity unless they say we're going to penalize all banks who participate in the activity. Right.
Right. So first you have to look at the at the banks as saying that that really, realistically, the banks are really a control mechanism for being able to on and off ramp into anything crypto.
Right. And it's always been a problem with crypto. Right. It's one of the reasons why you can't really function entirely offshore if you live in the US or I mean, I'm assuming it's the same in many other countries because fundamentally the core issue is can you get into a bank so that you can pay your rent or your mortgage? Right.
You have to be able to transfer value somehow and get into a bank. And the problem that we have is that there's still that link where somebody has power because you have to change your your your crypto into fiat.
Yeah. And Alex, I also think in talking about this is probably worse talking about the CFPB, which is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is they proposed like just a few months ago, some efforts to impose greater regulation on like the Venmos and PayPal's and subject them to a different regime.
So, you know, when you think about the potential for applying bank regulation and its impact on DeFi, you also have to look at what falls out may also fall in under the CFPB proposed regime.
And that could also have significant significant consequences, because even if you fall out of the banking regime, and again, this is proposed CFPB is largely Senator Warren's brainchild.
But that could also impact like even the I guess the less, you know, some of the less financial, you know, less investment oriented transactions, but also pick up any other kind of retail money transfer.
So another danger potentially impacting DeFi as well. I mean, these are the kinds of things that makes the lobbying and the engagement efforts so critical with DC and senators and congressmen, you know, is all this expansion of the administrative state being proposed.
Yeah, but I have, so that makes sense. But like, why would, let's say, I use the word they, when I say they, I mean, the incumbents, right, the banks, the financial system, right, it's their money, fiat, which we are using to pay for stuff.
But why would they actually allow crypto to be actually self-custodied and used to pay for things?
And then we use their money less, and we use crypto more, that would be bad for them.
It's not their money. It's not their money.
It is their money, right? We're borrowing it from them.
What?
It's not their money. They're literally just housing it. They're not, it's not like fiat doesn't belong to the banks, right?
Fiat is housed by banks.
No, but to the financial system, right? That is beginning with the central bank, right? And then goes through the banks to us, to everyone.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I may jump in one second.
The thing is, yeah, but I'm not finished yet, right? So the thing is that I don't, I don't, I don't see a way, and this is my question, do you see a way, as illegal people, and you understand what's going on, right?
Do you see a way, peacefully, okay, to use crypto for everyday stuff without having massive, like, war, basically, between the two systems? Can we do that peacefully? Is there a way to get there?
Well, I'm happy to jump in there. I mean, I'd say, you know, you can, the state has legitimate interests in preventing the financing of terrorism, in collecting taxes.
Because I say that in a way to say, the people in the legislature, the people in the populace, the courts are going to trend toward that.
So we can use crypto peacefully, but it has to be structured in ways that don't invite in that regulation.
This is why, you know, Tornado Cash obviously got such a, the hammer came down so hard, and there wasn't a lot of defense in it, was because, you know, the U.S. Treasury, also known as U.S. Anti-Terrorist Funding Organization, determined that was how North Korea was funding missile production.
So, we can use crypto peacefully. I think you have to, it's helpful to view it conceptually.
But they're also funding terrorism by selling grain. I mean, there's a hundred ways, like, that have nothing to do with any illegalness, right?
Right, but if you're using, if you're using crypto, like, I think the reason that bank on and off ramp is actually not that much of a threat to crypto is that the people who are engaging it in natively in crypto, or even maybe more so just in Bitcoin, if you want to go that far.
You know, if they don't touch anything, then the state doesn't have as legitimate of an interest in engaging and collecting its taxes, in protecting its consumers, in pursuing its anti-terrorist regimes, because it's not negatively affecting the state, and the state doesn't have a reason to go after it so much, nor will it have such support.
So, I think that there is kind of a core of both DeFi and of crypto that doesn't have to deal with a lot of this regulation that is sufficiently decentralized, not so that it needs legal protection.
But the states, the nation states, aren't going to have a way to regulate it, other than maybe penalizing individual users, which is a really open question of how that moves forward, because they've been somewhat ineffective, right, with, you know, geoblocking is kind of a joke.
It's not a joke from a large standpoint of adoption from TradFi, but it is a joke from actually stopping any use of it.
So, I think it's going to be a really interesting question as to how much the regulation starts going after individual users because the state has no other way to hamper DeFi from expanding.
I don't understand why, kind of going off of what I think Michael said earlier, Michael asked, I don't understand why the United States is not fully embracing stablecoins and bringing it into their purview,
bringing it into their regulatory framework and controlling it.
This is because of CBDCs.
That's why stablecoins are the number one threat, both to fiat and to CBDCs.
And are they a threat to fiat?
If they are, if USDC is 80%, it's all treasuries and cash.
No, so, so this is, so that's, no, no, there's actually, so in my book, I actually identify, I think, like, eight different types of stablecoins.
So, the worst kinds are the ones that are actually backed or pegged to particular fiat, right?
Those always fail.
And we have, like, we have historical examples of how bad it is to peg one economy to another.
It's, you know, that doesn't work.
But, and we've seen that with Tether, who were like, it's dollar for dollar.
Well, actually, it's 3%, you know, dollars, and the rest is all, you know, garbage stuff, or, you know, not garbage, but it's all other stuff, right?
So, so the, the reason that they don't like stablecoins, and one of the reasons why the only thing that we think might have come out of this presidential commission for crypto, which was supposed to come out, come up with some overarching structure over, what, a year and a half ago?
It was supposed to come up with something, and we heard nothing.
We got eight treasury reports, and then nothing, complete crickets.
One thing that they, looks like, came from them was this payment stablecoin bill.
Why?
Why do they care about stablecoins?
Because that is actually what fiat is, right?
Fiat is this, is, is this thing that is supposed to stay relatively constant in value within a very narrow range, right?
And there's a bunch of different ways that stablecoins try to remain stable, but they don't all use a fiat to back them.
There's a reason why Congress is, like, chose the stablecoins that use fiat to back them as the ones that they interviewed and said, well, you know, and, and who was it?
It was Brian Brooks even said, it's good for you guys if we have stablecoins, because it's another use for dollars.
It's demand for dollars.
Not every stablecoin is like that, and that's the threat.
So they should embrace the ones that are, USDC.
Well, that's what they're trying to do, but they're saying they should be issued by banks, right?
And that is not what, that's not the best use of stablecoins.
Well, just make USDC a bank then, right?
I'm just trying to understand why this thing seems like such a black hole for liquidity for bonds, which they're struggling to sell, right?
And if you just embrace this and said, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna, you know, knight you, you're a bank now, and you gotta follow our rules, you gotta keep all of your custody in the United States, you gotta use whatever, you know, BlackRock or whoever is your custodian, whatever, you know, whatever they wanna put.
You gotta allow us to freeze accounts on Ethereum, you know, USDC accounts on Ethereum, if they're terrorists, you gotta comply with all these, OFAC, all this stuff.
I don't get it.
It's just, it's just like a bank.
It's what it could be for the United States is like a bank that absorbs bond demand, creates bond demand.
I saw a chart showing that stablecoins were the, I think if they were a country, they would be the 16th largest country buyer of bonds.
That's insane.
And if they embraced it, it could become number one.
Well, if they, what they really need is something that's a good competitor to fiat.
Like, I don't think that it's bad to have a competitor.
Like anybody who, who is a capitalist, right, understands the value of competition.
It would make both things better, right?
Money would be better and, and maintain its value better.
We wouldn't have, we would have more stable money and better functioning stablecoins if they function together.
And the other thing is that you would always have a store of value, right?
So if something happened with, with cash, then you could always swap over to a stablecoin.
And if something happened to a stablecoin, you immediately swap over to fiat, right?
So there's a constant store of value for either one of those.
And that actually, for anybody who's ever lived or, or had family that emigrated from a country that had an out of control economy where they had, like our inflation of like 9% is ridiculous when you look at inflation where it's like 100, 500%, right?
This is insane, like what the, the, the inflation people live with where, you know, we're talking about like the, the, you know, the, um, uh, the mid-war, the interwar period for the, for Germany where they had wheelbarrows of Deutschmarks, you know, that they were like trucking back and forth to buy bread.
Like, that's what we're talking about where we're talking about money that gets devalued.
And when it happens, it's the same thing that happens with pegged economies.
One, the, the poorer economy will always break.
And when it breaks, it's always considered the worst week of someone's life, right?
And you will spend the rest of your life trying to get back to where you were the day before that currency broke.
It is, it's a horrible, horrible thing, right?
So having an alternative where you don't, you're not suddenly left with nothing is an incredibly powerful thing.
And it should be like a human right, you know, it's, there should be something that is able to maintain value for everyone, but that is not how countries think.
Countries think in terms of the value and power that they have with money.
Why?
Because right now, particularly over the last 50 years, the U S is one of the first ones to discover.
And, and it's, it's weird that it's one of the, you know, the first ones, but, but we are one of the first countries that discovered that you have more power and influence with money and trade than you have with, uh, with, with, um, war.
Right.
So even the large empires used the military first, we have McDonald's, um, you know, diplomacy, right?
Where you actually have tighter economic ties.
This is actually something that was true.
Uh, I see you laughing quick spot, but, uh, it's true.
It was true actually, um, up until the, um, the Serbian conflict, which was, uh, two countries with, which both had a McDonald's in it, uh, never had, uh, any armed conflict.
And that was because that meant that they had so much economic tie between each other, that it was not worth it for them to engage in armed conflict.
So this is how important, uh, having economic ties with other countries is, uh, and economic power is.
And so one of the ways that you express your economic power is with your fiat and how is the U S fiat determined?
People think it's valued like nothing.
That's not true.
Right.
How do we get the value of the dollar?
The dollar is a portion is $1 worth, like one portion of the total economic value of the economy at any given time.
Right.
So the total output of the economy, plus the amount that's held in foreign reserves, plus there's a few other like things, but it's generally like the, the.
Why is it not minus debt?
Plus, plus speculation, because if it was minus value, then what you got a bunch of, you got a bunch of debt IOUs in your hand.
Well, they don't, they don't necessarily factor that in as much.
They're like, but that debt is being paid.
And, but we have, they, this is a weird thing.
Actually, this is a funny thing that I actually asked an economics professor at one point, like what happened with, um, with like geopolitical, uh, debt.
Right.
Because we go into debt for a lot of different reasons where, where we like loan money to countries and they don't pay us back.
And it's like unpaid debt, like uncollected debt, or we loan, uh, we have a side, right.
And then we, we give like military power and we give lots of supplies to countries.
And then, uh, and then we don't get that back where it takes, you know, decades for that, that to be repaid.
And I was like, well, that's, you know, we're, we're in the hole for that, right.
Or countries are in the hole for that.
And he, and I said, how do they calculate that into the value of the dollar?
And, and he said like, well, that's a separate column and, and nobody really talks about that.
And I didn't even know, uh, and this is one of the things that makes me really upset about the Fed.
I don't know if you guys remember, uh, when Bernanke, Bernanke, I'm not going to say his name, right.
But Bernanke was the head of the, uh, Fed and he was testifying to Congress, uh, about AIG.
If you guys remember the whole bailout period, right.
The, the, all of the birth of, of blockchain, right.
But, uh, there was one of the things that, that had to get bailed out was, was AIG was in, had accounting issues.
It was a big insurance thing, et cetera.
And they were approved, I believe for 20, uh, it was like a $20 billion, um, bailout for AIG.
Cause it was the too big to fail thing.
And apparently, and it was only, it only came out in his testimony.
They actually got 40 billion.
How did they get 40 billion?
Right.
How did that happen?
They literally do something.
It's, um, mark to account where the Fed literally just goes into their account.
And says, Oh, that account says 20 billion in your account.
Oh, we're going to put 40 billion in your account.
They just like doubled it.
It was this crazy, crazy thing.
And I was like, well, you just created inflation, right?
You just gave them money that, that you, where did that come from?
Where did that even, how did that even happen?
And, and that's what they, they can, they can do that.
And unless they testify to Congress, we don't know.
We have no idea that they're doing that.
I think it was less than 20 to 40.
I think it was like, it was something like eight.
Uh, it was like eight to, to, uh, to 16, but it was, um, it was, it's, it, they doubled
the amount of money that AIG got simply by doing it by computer, which is insane.
It's their money, right?
With Bitcoin, you cannot do that, right?
Like just imagine, right?
Because it's their money.
They can just do it.
They can just put a few zeros and yeah.
And, and that's kind of a joke for, for people who, it becomes like funny money.
Just feels like it's funny money.
Like it's, it's actually a shit coin.
Like, you know, if I can print, if I can go in and increase the supply of any coin I create,
you know, then I would get in trouble.
It was pure evidence of this.
Just the amount of stimulus that just got printed.
But anyway.
Yeah.
I mean, back, back to the question of why they haven't embraced stable coins.
You know, I just point out that if this is truly an economic revolution or revolutionary,
the, the trajectory and timeline of revolution is not that the entrenched powers embrace the
new technology and it's all happy-go-lucky, you know, the way that this is going to play
out is probably not in that direction.
And it's not going to be the, the legislature or the banks being like, well, let's, let's
join in.
This will be fun.
Interestingly, El Salvador is doing what's called a Bitcoin bond in the new year.
And they are basically pulling Bitcoin in for the bond to buy mining rigs to be powered
by their volcanoes.
So at least in one country, it is kind of kumbaya as far as the way they're approaching, you
know, how they're going to interact with cryptocurrency.
But, but why in that case, why El Salvador, why would El Salvador embrace this while no one
else really wants to do?
There's a reason.
There's a clear reason.
I think there's a lot of reasons and it's not a singular reason.
One of which is there, you know, they had a dollar economy for since the civil war of
92, basically.
And that dollar economy has done nothing for them.
They, you know.
Well, well, well, you can't say it has done nothing.
It's given some stability versus their previous, you know, peso.
And it's given instability too, you know, anytime the dollar.
I mean, at least their people that are using dollars aren't, you know, going to the store
and rushing to spend their paycheck before their inflation, you know, halves the value
of their currency and doubles the price of the loaf of bread.
So it was a positive for them.
But that, yeah, that's the, that's what I was referring to is they were dollarized.
So they didn't have a money printer.
Other countries will be slow to this because they all have money printers and no one wants
to break their money printer.
Right.
So El Salvador had already given up their broken money printer.
They were using U.S. dollars.
So for them to transition to Bitcoin, it was just a logical move at this point.
It wasn't a, hey, wait, we don't want to mess up our money printer.
That's the problem that the calculus for every other country that's not dollarized or using
some other currency, which is most of them, they don't want to switch because it will,
it could break their printer.
I'd like to bring this back to the point on revolution.
I think it's just kind of a segue into it and, you know, certain regimes being resistant
to this change that we're bringing about with these different technologies and the different
types of financial instruments that are being introduced.
And then other countries kind of openness to embrace these things and to embrace change
in hopes of a better outcome for their people.
And I really appreciated Alex's comment at the beginning in terms of, you know, making
the conversation broader than is this or that coin a security or is this or that asset a
security?
I mean, the conversation does need to be so much more broader than that.
And I would even like extend it beyond any one regulatory framework or regime.
But, you know, looking at the spirit of the law and looking at, like, what are these regimes
for?
What are these regulations for?
And where do our values align or where do they not align?
And I just feel that's something that the space generally loses sight of.
We get kind of like pigeonholed in hyper-specific questions or applications often that are very U.S.-centric
or U.S.-aligned.
And it's interesting to consider just kind of, like, more broadly, you know, how are we
aligning with the best interest of people and as many people in the world?
And, like, where are these people located?
And, like, what would benefit, you know, these societies and these cultures and the people
in them in a way that it can apply the political pressure we need to move this technology forward?
It's one thing, you know, to talk about, like, the specific regulations of specific areas.
But then, like, you know, politics kind of at a brass tacks level, when it comes to revolution,
when it comes to this kind of change, you know, how does it connect with masses of people
in a beneficial way and in a way that benefits the whole?
And that's just something we can't lose sight of when it comes to what we're building
and our values.
That's a great point.
I'd love to jump in real quick about preserving self-custody as well, being that point of how
the public is able to be benefited or the masses, you know, giving people the tools to properly
manage their own and empower them to manage their own digital assets.
And I think that's that's the I think that's the crux of everything.
If I were to put up my hand about something and throw in my hat, if that thing, the ability
to self-custody is affected, everything falls down.
Um, so I think that's a big piece of how we understand the implications of a kind of like
a country free border free way to look at what needs to happen for all of this to maintain
its utility for the people at large that use it.
Yeah, I agree.
The ability to self-custody in the United States, I'll say it here live, I will move out of this
country and I would I would strongly.
Yeah, we're all fucked.
Yeah, it is the core of it.
And, you know, I've been in D.C. now three times the last two months, you know, spending
time with regulators.
And there's a lot of really good progress.
Obviously, there's McHenry, there's Keeper Coins Act.
There's stuff that's happening that that is telling people to, you know, federal sort of
institutions to back off, as it were.
But those things haven't passed yet.
And we're still seeing, you know, the FP, federal or the whatever, the Protection Bureau
say, oh, wallets need to be regulated now.
And you're like, wait, hang on a second.
So there's a lot of stuff.
And so I definitely wanted to hear your guys' perspectives on this because you're all lawyers.
You're all very, very knowledgeable on the technical parts of this.
But that is one thing that I'm morbidly afraid of, is self-custody being affected in some
way, shape or form, and how likely that will be affected, as Rock just attested he's going
to leave.
I don't want you to leave, dude.
So I want to jump in where Jessica was saying earlier, sorry, one second, Seth, was saying
earlier that, and hello, did we introduce you, Seth?
No, yeah, he's just up.
What's that?
No, yeah, he just came up.
But we'll say later.
Hey, Seth, do you want to introduce yourself real quick, actually, brother?
I didn't want to disrupt the flow, trying to just keep things centered there.
Sure, I'll introduce myself briefly, though, because there was an allegation made that
everybody on stage is a lawyer.
And that is just not true.
I am...
I'm not either, but...
Yeah, right.
Right.
No, fair enough.
And I think I just want to start by saying my name is Seth.
I represent the brand, Mind Your Biz, on YouTube, been publishing for a few years now.
I spend a lot of time with the top KOLs, both here in the United States and then internationally
do a lot of live speaking engagements.
You'll see me on stage very frequently with channels such as Altcoin Daily, Crypto Wendio,
Ben Armstrong, alias BitBoy Crypto.
And we put differences aside to attempt to educate and entertain, right?
Do equal parts education and entertainment.
And it's a very fine line, right?
Because we wind up being the first exposure point that most of retail has to all of these
concepts.
So, hug a KOL.
That's what I'm going to say.
Hug an influencer, right?
Don't be so mean.
You need to win their hearts and minds so you can win, ultimately, the hearts and minds
of retail.
So, but I just wanted to start by saying, I think we can all agree, everybody on this
panel has said something patently false or wrong already in this space.
And I'm excited to tell you exactly what I disagree with as we move over it.
Tell us now what's going on.
No, he's gone again.
Was it, oh, was it that, uh, that we're all lawyers up here?
I mean, I think if you put, what are we like a coven?
Is that what you call it?
Like all this too many lawyers on one stage?
I don't know what group of lawyers is called, but she's got to be called something like that.
But, uh, I, I, um, I agree though, like there was this statement, I think that Tersis made
earlier about the CFPB, um, which is the Senator Warner's, you know, little baby, um, of, you
know, watching consumer protection.
And, and I am not a regulation hater.
Um, I just believe in, uh, smart regulation, right?
Regulation that makes sense and, and is workable.
And, um, and like, for example, like what I mentioned before, where the regulations that
are coming out now that are saying that, uh, that all brokers have to report all of the
crypto transactions.
What if there are no brokers?
I mean, in general, in securities, uh, most of the securities regulations are based on brokers
that, that don't really function anymore.
Like that's a, you know, post, what is it?
Like after, um, uh, uh, after the end of Glass-Steagall, uh, that whole idea of, of, you
know, using, uh, brokers as the center of every transaction fell apart.
For everyone, not just for crypto, but we still pretend like everybody is calling up
somebody like, you know, like it's the eighties and we're playing, you know, we're watching
wall street and someone's got a big ass phone with a little antenna on top, you know, that's
that, I mean, this is not the way the world works right now.
So the regulations do have to make sense that with DeFi, you know, we, on, on the part of
regulators with DeFi, one of the things that makes sense for us is we have to make sure
that, um, the system that we have first, uh, there is no issue in terms of, um, being able
to collect taxes and things like that.
There's no reason that, uh, that the transactions that we have should be tax exempt for the most
part.
Right.
That's one of the things I think that people are looking for that the truth is, look, you
benefit from society.
You, you, you, you have to pay taxes, right?
That's just kind of the way it is.
And if we agree to some of these things, which we don't really have a choice in, then it becomes
a lot clearer.
The other thing is we have to stop protecting wrongdoers.
That is one of the key problems with the crypto space is that, uh, we celebrate and protect
people who do really bad things to, to innocent people.
And we have to stop that.
That is not something that does anything positive for us.
And, uh, it doesn't do anything for the people we're trying to bring in.
It doesn't bring trust into our world, right?
It doesn't make people want to be part of what we're building here.
And what we're building is revolutionary, right?
What DeFi can be this idea of, of finance without banks is something so powerful.
The idea that it's not, not just this ability to, you know, create financial tools, right?
But the idea that you can finance any asset without a bank, without, without someone limiting
the value of your collateral is incredible.
Like there's just so much that can happen with it that I really want to be able to have
this very powerful tool and not have it preemptively closed just because of this fear that a small
portion of bad actors are, you know, the bulk of the population.
It's not, but we also have to make sure that the regulations that come in are ones that are
actually functional.
So many of the regulations that we have right now, like up until this year, it was literally
impossible to comply with securities regulations because it required you to use a regulated
intermediaries.
You had to use a regulated broker dealer and you had to use a regulated exchange.
And until this year, we didn't have either one of those.
So it was impossible to be fully compliant.
So unless you didn't do your transaction.
So it's one of those things is just, you know, we have to, on one hand, make sure that we've
got regulations that work with the technology.
And on the other hand, we have to make sure that we are not celebrating the bad actors that
we know exist.
Right.
And on, on, um, on, on the web three, uh, X spaces, right.
There are a ton of people who rug people and then come back and people still follow them.
You know, we, we know that that exists all over and we have to stop celebrating that.
I mean, we have to stop following them.
We have to stop like, you know, the, the worship of the people who either we think got away with
something or have money or whatever it is that makes people want to follow these people.
We have to make sure that we do our part as well and say, look, these are not people that
represent the entire, you know, crypto movement and do not represent the, you know, the people
that we believe are the best of this, of this movement.
Well, Alex, we've got a problem there in that, uh, we, we don't always get to choose what,
uh, what retail thinks is interesting and, and we don't get to choose what pop culture
does, right.
Culture is the hardest thing to change.
We can change regulation overnight, right.
Stroke of a pen, make a bunch of people into criminals, but we can't turn them into friends
overnight by doing the same thing.
And what influencers and what just people of influence, right.
Celebrities it's, it's maddening, right.
Cause you don't want to buy insurance from somebody whose only qualification is that they
happened to play football 20 years ago.
It shouldn't matter.
I agree in any industry, but for, for whatever reason, maybe because, you know, people are
kind of dumb, higher primates.
We're kind of, we're kind of basic, right.
We love, we love shiny objects, but for some reason, we tend to believe that people who
have means and people who've achieved anything else that it, that it does translate into
other areas.
Um, even though, you know, intelligent people know better.
Most people are just, you know, by, by the numbers, right.
50, at least 50% of the population is below average intelligence and realistically, it's
going to be a bell curve.
Celebrating, um, you know, people with integrity, which, you know, our collective moral compass,
I would argue has shifted slightly over the last few years.
Um, but I think properly doing that, but then money also comes with these highly unqualified
people that you mentioned, or at least the perception of it does.
Um, yeah, yeah.
Well, the perception of easy money is what, is what attracts.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's been the fundamental problem that crypto has been dealing with is that there
is a PR problem for many, many years now that every four years or so you start hearing
things that sound like moon talk.
Right.
And so when, um, so when we get to that point, who is going to rally the attention of these
people?
Uh, well, I think it's pretty obvious that the people who have rallied the most attention
have been those who talk most loudly about the, the potential for life changing gains.
Um, so yeah, that, that, while Alex is mentioning, we don't want these people becoming the face
of crypto.
Like, frankly, as met for as many stages as I've shared with Ben Armstrong, many people
have a serious problem with him.
Um, they, they've really don't like him as the poster child.
So, uh, the, the question is how do you propose to make discussions of fair regulation?
And how do you propose to make, uh, to make some of these concepts that have been discussed
here?
And you're the very, they're very lofty ideals.
They're very great.
They're very great ideas.
How do you propose to make them sexy enough to have appeal to retail such that people in
pop culture on YouTube, TikTok, everywhere else can make it interesting.
That's a challenge.
This is exactly.
Oh, sorry.
Go ahead.
No, I mean, I'd say at the same time, as you say that, I would say crypto doesn't need to
have a face, right?
The technology is moving forward.
Part of the brilliance of crypto is that it's faceless.
It's not owned.
It's not gatekept.
It doesn't have influencers.
You don't need to convince someone to make Bitcoin or Ethereum work.
So yes, it's not unimportant to get legislatures, people to understand some of the brilliance and
that it's not all scam and that it's not all terrorists.
But at the same time, that's not really core to the lifeblood of crypto.
And we should also be comfortable, like, just because an entity is suffering some kind of
regulatory enforcement doesn't mean we have to rush to defend them.
Like, one, quote unquote, bad actor that everybody seems to defend is Ripple, just because the
SEC is after them.
Like, Ripple went ahead and manipulated the price of their own token.
They dumped billions of dollars worth on their own community.
But then the moment the SEC sues them, we're like, oh my god, Ripple is defending everybody,
which just isn't the case.
They're in it for themselves.
So, you know, it's not just, you know, that we have to say that Ben Armstrong is a bozo,
which he absolutely is.
We also have to say that there are some regulatory enforcement proceedings that, like, do have
grounds in law.
And just because someone slaps paint on a token and calls itself Web3 doesn't mean they're
doing anything to achieve a reduction on dependency on centralization.
And so we have to be very careful about that as well.
Yeah, but honestly, we like the decentralization stuff.
Didn't they win that case?
So did they, in fact, what you're saying here?
I mean...
They didn't win.
It's not done.
It's a whole other thing.
But I thought it was a good point.
Yeah, but there's three kind of things.
They lost on direct sales of the token to people, like, on an ICO level.
They won in the sense that they can pay people using their own token.
And there's still kind of middle ground on when it comes to kind of programmatic sales
down the line.
So Ripple did not win.
Nobody won.
I mean, there's the case that's still going on.
Yeah, it's still...
It's very likely going to be appealed.
And they have just the summary judgment.
And then the SEC decided to pull the remaining part of the case to drop it, probably because
they just want to go ahead and appeal instead of deal with the directors, the two individuals.
So that's likely what's going to happen.
And then we'll see what happens with the circuit court.
But can we be honest about the retail that they don't give a crap, basically, about self-custody?
They don't care?
Like, just to be honest.
Like, if you had gold in the past, right, or dollars, whatever, and somebody came to you
and said, hey, you don't want to keep it at home or with you in your pocket or with your
horse because it's risky.
Listen, I will take care of it for you and I will put it in a treasure or in a vault and
you'll be fine.
Whenever you need it, you come and pick it up.
That's a value proposition, right?
Okay, cool.
Here is my money.
Give it to me when I need it.
Let's go, right?
But now, saying, hey, you can keep all your money for yourself and everything, that's
way more work.
People don't care because people don't have money, okay?
So we are talking in a bubble.
Just to be honest, I just wanted to open your eyes, okay, that people don't care about self-custody
as much as we care here in this space.
I mean, I love it and everything.
But unless there is a pain for the population, which is not the case in the Western economies,
right?
Unless there is a pain and they must have self-custody because otherwise, whatever bad thing
happens, they don't care, okay?
I was going to say, you added a caveat, which was what I was going to say, which is, yeah,
maybe not in the United States where we actually have decent custodians, but in other countries,
self-custody, it does matter.
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
No, and I love it.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm super on board.
I know the technology, how it works and everything.
I'm just trying to be, you know, to think out of the box that if you want regulation,
but let me connect the dots, right?
I agree.
Because if you want regulation, then most of the population has to want it, right?
Best case scenario, you vote for the politician, right?
But they don't care, right?
Why would they vote for somebody that helps crypto, you know?
Well, utility-driven, like, you know, I kind of compare the internet browser, right?
Kind of like an access point, much like a self-custody mechanism or wallet, right?
And then people adopting it.
I mean, the UX is still terrible today, but that's going to be improved, obviously.
But I think, you know, not to, you know, conflate the two things, but net neutrality in a way
is related to self-custody being affected.
There's the utility argument, and then there's the, you know, sort of the government intrusion
argument.
But I think there's pain-driven and then utility-driven are the two components, for sure.
By the way, you said that why would people vote, you know, because maybe not a lot of
people hold crypto, but, I mean, estimates range between 10 to, I'm seeing here, 21% of
Americans hold or have held crypto.
So I think I heard once this interesting take that if you could get, I think it was 5% or
more of the population to own something, then politicians really are careful about fighting
it, because 5% can swing a vote.
So that's why, like, guns, you know, are very hard to ban, right?
Because, you know, there's a lot of people that hold them and will vote against you, and
it could change the vote.
So I think it's a matter of not only is it, do people vote for the politicians who support
crypto, it's also the politicians start following that.
And they go, look, there's a lot of people who like crypto, maybe that's a good platform
for me to run on or something I don't want to attack.
And we have to consider also what the experience of people is with the technology.
And this is where, you know, this aligning with the spirit of the law, and it's everyone's
responsibility, you can't just kind of blame everything on retail in terms of like what
people gravitate to, and like the prospect of making quick money, that kind of thing.
You know, it's on all of us and what we build to inherit the values that we're moving forward
and that we're pushing into the space.
And if we are allowing for things or endorsing things and turning a blind eye to things that
are giving consumers a bad experience that aren't protecting consumers in certain ways
that they should be protected, and that are basically endorsing these behaviors where
people kind of manipulate or take advantage of, et cetera, et cetera.
It's just we all need to take responsibility as an industry in terms of the standards and
the practices that we are creating and that we're upholding.
And that goes down, you know, all the way down the stack to the governance of our products
and the way that we are, you know, running our organizations and running the technology
that we're building and where we're just kind of brushing things off or patching things
up with, you know, duct tape and glue gun.
And it's up to all of us to uphold these values and to make sure that the people who do hold
crypto have a positive experience of it, or at least can see the benefit for themselves
and for society.
I like it.
I like the whole, you know, fighting bad actors, but I'm very skeptical when you say
protecting consumers.
I am tired of being protected.
I'm tired of the government telling me what I'm able to do.
And don't touch that stove.
You might burn your hand.
I know.
I get it.
And if I make a mistake, I'm a grown adult, right?
I'm old enough to vote.
I'm old enough to go to the military.
Let me make my financial decisions.
Stuff like, you know, the accredited investors laws.
I mean, these things are a joke.
And I don't want the government bubble wrapping everything for me.
I think it's made America and many countries very weak that our citizens are constantly thinking,
oh, well, this must be safe.
The government endorsed it.
No, we people should do their own research.
They should study finance, but they should study a company before they invest in it.
They shouldn't always just count on the government is bubble wrapping it for you.
If we can.
The way I.
Oh, sorry.
I thought you were done.
I was going to say that.
Go ahead.
People going into a casino and gambling or people buying lottery tickets, it should be no different.
In fact, I would argue that if the individual can sit down and research the company and look at metrics and make an educated decision about whether or not they want to, quote unquote, gamble their money, that's that's much more sound than walking into a casino and betting all on red or black.
Let me tell you, this is very important to me.
I'm sorry to cut off.
But we talk about accredited investor rules and investing in companies.
But in my view, Web3, blockchain, crypto, DeFi, none of that should be about venture capital.
None of that should be about whether we care about investor protection rules like the SEC exists.
We have to deal with that.
That was created specifically to deal with the means of investment.
I don't think crypto should be about, like, can I invest in a startup?
You know, we can litigate that and lobby for that separately.
But to us, I think that the unifying theme is that self-custody principles of kind of putting the brakes on massive money printing.
That's what's important.
So I think we do conflate this idea that, oh, because we can treat Ripple like a startup, because people can buy a bunch of tokens on the promise of awesome shit to come.
Therefore, we should kind of unify that idea.
But I don't find that particularly unifying, and I don't find it particularly helpful to say that we're here to offer kind of the opportunity to invest in startups to be a crypto.
But that's a revolutionary thing in itself, actually.
I would disagree.
And I agree with you that, you know, giving competition to money and self-custody, these are incredible revolutionary concepts that will change the world.
But allowing anyone in the world, whether you're in, you know, Nigeria without a bank account or where, you know, as long as you have a self-aware or wherever you are, you're not an accredited investor.
Allowing you to invest in any startup or large blue chip or whatever, allowing global access to capitalizing businesses and projects and markets and DAOs and all this.
That is revolutionary to me.
That's true.
The laws do exist on that.
And, you know, it's, you know, intellectually consistent to say, OK, let's then repeal the SEC.
Let's decrease the power of the administrative state.
But I don't think it helps us to say the SEC does not govern here because it explicitly does.
And so we can have that discussion separately.
But we can't just say, OK, the technology is here.
Let's go gangbusters and use it to circumvent the laws that were written in 1930.
We can say those laws are obsolete and they should be repealed.
But we can't say they don't apply.
It's a good point.
But there are big differences, right?
There are major differences in the fundraising and the custody of tokens and all these things.
There are major differences, and I think it is entirely possible that many projects should not be governed by those securities laws because they're not there.
There's big key differences in the safety of these things and the control of these things.
It's not the safety.
It's the nature of the tokens.
There are very good arguments why the SEC doesn't govern, but it has nothing to do with the traditional securities laws.
I think the revolutionary part is actually having non-accredited investors, so like the 99%, right, this idea of having people take part in the one activity that is the single greatest wealth builder, the most consistent reliable wealth builder in the country, right?
In the U.S., the one most reliable wealth builder, it's not getting a particular type of job or earning a particular type of salary.
The most consistent way to gain wealth in this country and has been over generations is being able to invest in private companies while they are private.
So we screw ourselves a lot, right, by having really early IPOs.
That's really stupid.
We should get rid of that because we would have literally hundreds of millions of dollars more in our ecosystem if we didn't do that.
We're leaking out value everywhere, and it drives me absolutely crazy.
But the number one way—
Wait, I'm sorry.
Can you expand on that?
Where are we leaking value?
So here's how people gain value.
When you invest in a private company, right, before it goes public, what you do is you buy something cheaply.
And you are one of a few people who get to buy something cheaply, right, and it's very high risk.
And it exists in this crucible where what happens?
It is being de-risked over time and increasing in value.
Now, not every company does that.
But of the companies that do that, that is a very important time period where it is not—you must hold on to your interest in that company during that time period.
You cannot actually let go of it.
You can't trade it.
There's no incentive for anyone to leave the project, to leave that business.
The only incentive is to continue to build value for that company and trade out risk for value.
What is the biggest overall creator of risk for any company?
It turns out it's actually founder risk.
It sounds like a stupid truism, but it turns out that the more you run a company and create value, the more likely you are to create value in running that company.
It sounds very stupid, but the truth is that when you start off running a company, all of the risk is that the founders are not going to know what they're doing and they're going to screw up somehow.
And that company isn't going to be executed well and there's not going to be any value in that company.
But as time goes on and they show that they're increasing the value of the company by generating revenue and solving problems, the tradeoff happens where all of the company itself now increases in value and reduces in risk because we've shown the most important thing.
Those founders know how to create value for that company.
And then what happens?
But why does it matter?
One second, I'll just finish this so you guys can actually see how this works out.
One of two things happens, right?
So while this tradeoff is happening, there's zero incentive for anyone to leave or exit this company, right?
So all of the focus is on and all the interests are aligned in making sure that value stays with that company.
Then what happens is you do one of two things.
Usually you either go public where you sell to the masses, right?
Or you get acquired where you sell to another company.
And what is that really?
Why do you get a premium for that?
That is because those shares are now de-risked materially.
So you get a higher price for any interest that you have that is materially de-risked.
So you sell your shares to the public or you sell your shares to a company that are fundamentally de-risked and higher valued.
And that is how all the people who were involved in that process during that early crucible period, that is how they actually become multimillionaires, right?
They realize a huge amount of value because they've been stacking it up this whole time.
They bought into the company at a very, very low rate.
And then that percentage that they bought into multiplied.
And now they have huge amounts of interest.
That doesn't happen with crypto companies because we don't have that period where people are just holding on to things and building value for their company and then releasing it once they're de-risked.
That's not happening.
But you could build that with just resting schedules and things like that.
And that's actually built into private companies as well.
So I don't understand why it matters if it's private or public.
Yes, but people are putting their tokens on markets before they're de-risked, before they even have a product, right?
Yeah, they do IPO basically from day one.
Yeah, so obviously that's super risky because also there is not a lot of liquidity in the market.
So of course it's super risky.
And there's no pent-up demand for it.
There's nothing we should promote.
But, you know, when you said these people who invested early, right, they have the benefit of selling their shares more expensive and so on.
I mean, you basically explained how, you know, venture works, which, you know, makes sense.
But the thing is that who can invest in these businesses?
Accredited investors.
I mean, at least in the U.S.
Right, so those people will then later on dump on the retail when finally you can sell it, they can sell it on the stock market and finally the retail can buy in.
So they will buy in at the highest price possible because when you do an IPO, you know very well that you try to get the highest price per share possible, right, for your business.
So basically every retail they will buy in at that day on the following days after the IPO is the highest price in that moment that you can get, right?
So it's dumping, it's basically dumping on the retail, right?
So that's quite unfair practice to not allow normal people to buy shares of a startup, which in Europe, by the way, is possible, right?
So instead it says like, well, people are not smart enough to understand venture.
So let's make sure they can't, right?
Let's make sure people have one million or more in net value.
They can actually do that.
What the hell?
Educate these people.
Explain them how to assess risk and let them invest.
What is happening?
And that's exactly what I do allow to do.
The rules are not about not being smart enough.
The rules are about, they were made, remember, in the 30s.
The accredited investor rules are based on this principle that if you don't have enough money and you invest because people are putting all of their money into these investments, the idea was wealthy people will put money in and if it fails, then they still will have money.
But poor people will put money in and they won't have money left and they'll become wards of the state.
That's literally about trying to keep people off welfare because of the overtaxed systems.
It's a really stupid rule.
The rule makes no sense.
I hate the accredited investor rule.
And if you actually, if we, if we focused instead.
One of the worst rules I think we've ever had in our country.
It is totally.
It is such a, like, it is such a, let's keep the rich rich and let's keep the poor poor.
Whether that's the intention or not, that's what's happening.
And I think it actually is the intention.
So that's actually, that, that one wasn't necessarily the intention of keeping the rich rich and the poor poor.
It was really about making sure that they didn't stress the state.
Here's where they made the rich rich and the poor poor.
That might be what they're saying, but I don't, I don't believe that.
I really don't.
The divide really happened.
The people that, who, who lobbies for this shit?
Who pushes these laws?
Who says, who's the banker that's in the congressional meeting that says, or the, the, the VC or whoever that's in the meeting that says, yeah, this is great.
We need to protect, you know, the people.
Uh, it's the people who want the, the access to the deal flow for themselves.
They don't want to let the public touch it.
This is the perfect system for them.
The rich invest and then the poor buy their bags.
It's a hundred percent designed that way.
At least in crypto, we give access to the poor and to the, the lower end people.
At least they, it's a possibility of having access.
If the project chooses to go, you know, public with their funding.
Amen, brother.
So, yeah, so, so the, the divide actually happened in the U S in the school system, right?
When they took out everything related to your rights is citizen rights, right?
And then they also took out the rights.
They took out everything related to financial education.
There was only very little involved in there anyway, but the focus has always been on making sure that your family teaches you like the person who brushes your teeth basically teaches you everything that you know about money and financial literacy.
And the problem is what happens if they don't know anything.
So that's where the, the bulk of the divide is, is really that you have some people who are learning from, you know, uncle Tom who runs the, the trading desk at city.
And you have some people who are learning from, you know, mom who basically is like, well, I don't know anything about retirement or, or, or banks or anything like that.
But I can tell you, you know, you know, where to get food when the check runs out by before the end of the month.
And that is the, that's the, the, the huge source of the divide, in my opinion, is that there is just such a difference in information.
Many people don't even know that investing in early stage companies is the number one growth engine for, for wealth.
Like the people who, yeah, the people who, whose, whose wealth was like generations ago, most of them it's because they took whatever money they had from an operating company, from theft, from whatever it was.
And then they started putting it into a high growth, early stage companies and it, and it multiplied.
And that's what they started doing.
This is one of the things where, you know, if you don't know, you don't know.
Right.
And that's why we need education, right?
That's what I mentioned before.
You don't know.
You don't know.
A lot of people do know, and they just don't.
That's just what Rock is saying.
A lot of people do.
And I, I knew that IPOs were lucrative 10, 15 years ago, but I didn't have access.
This is about having access.
This is about the average person having access.
If you're going to buy into a shit coin that hasn't had a protocol built out yet, that's on you.
That's, that's kind of where that libertarianism comes from.
You need to do the research.
You need to understand what you're buying into.
They don't know what the research is, is the problem.
We have to actually start making sure people know what questions to ask.
Hold on.
Who determines, who determines that we don't know what the research is?
I mean, I can point out a lot of people in my circle who have been researching the crypto market over the last year and that I've made good purchases and that I've made a lot of gains just, just based on the fact that they have the freedom to do so.
Something that was at one point available to the very top 1% or whatever on Wall Street is, is now a vehicle for a lot more, a lot more people to, to utilize and make wealth off of.
I'm totally not arguing that it's a good idea to have retail investors in, in like all forms of investing, including early stage companies.
I love that.
But I am, I do think that we have not come near the level of financial literacy that people need.
There are people are still acting as though, you know, it's, you know, please take my money as opposed to the fact that, you know, what, what, you know, professional investors and seasoned investors know, which is I have the money.
I get to ask you as many questions as I want and how do I know that this is a real project or, you know, a project that's going to rug or whatever.
And the, the thing is like, you know, you may have information to know that, but too many people don't know.
They don't know what questions to ask.
They don't, when you say do your own research, they're like, how they don't know what to do.
We have to make sure that, I mean, I feel like that's my obligation to, I work really hard to help people know what do your own research really means.
Like how do you find this information?
Because there's, it's not helping them if they're allowed to access stuff, but it just gives them access to being scammed all the time.
We don't want that.
I don't think we want that, right?
Like, I don't want that.
So I want to make sure that it comes safely.
So, and safely doesn't mean that it has to be like, you know, with their, with their hands held and telling them you can only invest in these three things and that's it.
I don't need that.
But I want to make sure that, look, you can invest in whatever you want, but you should have some, some core information about what good investments look like.
Okay.
So when we talk about safety, why do, why do we only talk about investing in, in, in startups?
Why don't we talk about a big sign on 7-Eleven that says, Hey, if you buy a lottery ticket, these are your actual chances of winning.
How come we don't have a sign in front of casinos saying, Hey, if you go and gamble a bunch of money, this is your chance of actually winning.
Why do we only talk about investing?
Because those are all super regulated also, right?
You can't, they're, they're very regulated on how and when they can, like there's control over how people access them.
They don't sell lottery tickets to like five-year-olds.
Not everybody gets to do a lottery, right?
Those are state.
Are they regulated that much?
Wait, wait a minute.
They are.
They really are.
Any club can go into a 7-Eleven and, and I watch it all the time and it's the saddest thing because when you see people buying lottery tickets, no offense to anyone here who buys lottery tickets, but most of the people I see buying lottery tickets are like, clearly they've, they've been beaten down by life.
And this is their, this is their hope that maybe someday this will change things.
It's, uh, it's really sad and I usually, when I see these people, I stop and try to explain to them, you know, Hey, if you want to take a risk, maybe you should look at like Bitcoin or crypto.
Cause if you just put the money you've been putting in lottery tickets for the last, you know, 20, 10 years or whatever in, in, in Bitcoin, you'd be, uh, he'd be a lot better off.
But, uh, I, I do agree that the financial literacy is, is a problem.
I think that that is changing though, for two reasons.
One crypto, I don't know about you guys, but I, you know, I worked for a bank for, for years and I didn't know anything about finance.
When I found out about Bitcoin in 2015, everything changed, right?
All I do is find it.
All I do is invest.
All I do is read articles and read books and watch YouTubes and listen to, you know, audio books.
That's all I do now because this thing, uh, I mean, partially because it opens up this realm to regular people.
It's interesting.
There's big gains.
So that gets people excited.
So that's one thing is I think cryptos opening people up.
And then two, you have like access to good information.
You can get, uh, you know, instead of paying some financial advisor, you could listen to the best, you know, financial advisors in the world on YouTube now.
So things are changing.
I think just, just to piggyback off of rock.
I got an, I got a degree in econ and I graduated knowing nothing about econ, knowing nothing about finance.
It wasn't until I discovered Bitcoin in 2017 that I actually started to, and we live in an age where there's so much information available online.
I know more about economics and finance now than I ever did with my four year degree.
That pretty much cost me as much money as I, um, uh, it doesn't matter.
But, but, uh, the other thing I wanted to say was that, yes, in the beginning, you're going to make mistakes.
I got crushed in late 2017.
I got crushed in 2018.
I'm sure rock can share some stories as well.
Uh, some of the, some of the projects that we got crushed on probably overlap, but with that, I'm sure they do.
I think at 17, I was just buying, you know, anything.
It was, it was kind of silly.
And I, and I already had, that was my, you know, third year in the industry.
I was still doing kind of silly stuff, but, uh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that's a double-edged sword of, of libertarianism is okay.
Um, I might not be as educated as I would be if I was, uh, if I was let into the inner circle of people that are educated, that are making those decisions on Wall Street.
But I had the opportunity to trial and error and learn and get to a place where I can say I'm, I'm pretty proud of what I've accomplished over the last seven years.
I don't know if I would have gotten to where I am today had it not been for the freedom to mess around and play around in what, what is, what was, and what still is the Wild West.
And, and I'm kind of pushing back also just for the sake of pushing back, Alex.
I mean, I think that you bring a breath of wisdom and, and we've had you on spaces before in the past, but, um, I'm very, I'm always very skeptical of, hey, uh, this is for your own good.
We're here to regulate and, uh, rule with an iron fist and it's, it's, it's, it's to protect you because I see so many different areas financially where people, the average person is not protected.
Um, and it's really, it's, it's interesting to me that this is the one that, uh, people focus so much on when there's so much more upside to this, in my opinion, than there is going into a casino and gambling or going and buying a lottery ticket.
And sure, a five-year-old can't buy a lottery ticket, but how, how financially literate, um, is an 18-year-old really?
I mean, do you want protection or do you want freedom?
I'm, I'm going to say it one more time.
I am so sick of being protected.
I'm so sick of people telling me from our governments, telling me what is safe for me or not.
Get the fuck out of my face.
Let me do what I want to do.
I'm an American.
I'm a, I'm a human.
I'm a, whatever country you are.
Let me do what I think I can do with my, you know, what I've studied, my research, my life experiences.
Let me take control of my own life.
That's what this country was born out of.
And now they're trying to like control every little thing we do.
I mean, the most silly one, and I'm, I'm, you know, I'm not like supporting vaping or
cigarettes, but like now they're telling people in California, what flavors of cigarettes and
vaping you can have, what flavors you can have as a grown adult.
They're telling you, Hey, no, no, no.
You can't have flavored vapes or flip or Nick or, you know, a menthol cigarettes.
It's fucking, I think cigarettes are retarded, but that is so ridiculous.
Well, for me, it's not about protection.
It's about coherence of messaging from us.
Like those of us who have whatever pedestal or platform to speak.
You know, if we care about accredited investor rules, everybody can call their congressperson
and say that.
Um, but, but when we're here looking at what's in the space, sure, you know, rug pulls have
some educational value, but, but that doesn't mean we can't sit around and say like, F these
guys, like they don't belong in this space.
And this is one reason that we should be very, very careful.
Like, I don't think we should say like everything in crypto has value because it's educational
and therefore let's keep it the wild, wild west.
I think we really have to keep holding each other accountable, holding rug pulls accountable
and holding the most famous names in the space accountable when they leverage this perfectly
justifiable instinct towards, you know, libertarianism and self custody and self control.
When they leverage that against us and sort of force us to say, we're all in this together.
I hate the idea of unify DeFi.
I hate the idea of unify crypto because there should be as many cryptos and DeFi as there are
ethical positions.
We should all be able to disagree aggressively.
We should be able to hate each other in a way and not have to say we're all in this
together.
If my brother and sister are out here pulling scams, no, I'm not going to say that's educational.
I'm going to say that's dog shit.
And I think we need to be more comfortable with that.
That's all I'm trying to say.
I don't, I'm not here to say what the legislation should be.
You know, we're going to disagree and call your congressperson there.
But, but let's also hold those bad actors accountable.
And that is the problem, right?
We're going to disagree about who's a bad actor.
And that's why coherence of messaging is so, so hard to achieve.
I completely agree with Pete.
I mean, first of all, great to see you again, Peter, and share the stage with you after,
after a few months.
But I completely agree with what Peter says.
The truth is, and this, this might not be popular, but your favorite influencer on YouTube
or on Twitter is not thinking about you.
They've loaded their bags.
They have the inside information and they're shilling the token after they bought a reasonable
amount.
And those same influencers calling for a super cycle in January or rather in December of
2021, while they're offloading their bags, just making sure that there's enough exit
liquidity, do not have your best interest in mind.
That's why it's important to do your own research, really do your own research.
I think there's some, there's, I think it's like politicians.
There are some good politicians that actually care about, you know, the world and the citizens
and doing their job and have a moral, you know, like compass.
And then the same thing with KOLs.
I think KOLs are probably more on the for their own profit side generally.
But I think there's plenty of good KOLs out there that you can listen to and do give good
opinions and do actually care about things.
Yeah.
I mean, even, even Aztec, obviously he's not here today, but he's sort of like essentially
a polygon KOL at this point, but he doesn't take any, he's never taken any payments from
anyone doesn't.
He talks about IMX and Chainlink and he's never received a dollar.
We don't know.
No one up here, of course.
I mean, but generally speaking, I've, I've seen it too many times.
I mean, we all have our own, we all have our own, uh, selfish reasoning for the, you
know, and motives.
So, uh, people up here, including myself, we all have our own biases and motives.
I'm not saying we don't, but I just think that it's, it's maybe too much to just say all
KOLs are like, they don't have your best interest.
I think there's some, some good, good, uh, good seeds out there.
Um, I'll just, uh, jump in here for some housekeeping.
We have, uh, Anthropoids, NFTs on, on stage and we brought David up as well.
So, um, if you guys want to just introduce yourself, take 30 seconds, um, uh, go for it.
Uh, we'll start with David.
Hey, what's up people?
How's it going?
Yeah.
I've just been listening.
Um, yeah, a lot of great points.
Jesus.
I could go back like, oh man.
Um, this has been amazing, honestly amazing.
The, the, from the perspectives to everything.
I mean, I, I run a, uh, uh, a telegram room, 24 hours voice chat for the last three years.
I have on to sort of protect some of the people from some of these things that are going on.
Uh, so man.
Hey David, good to see you.
Did you, uh, how did you hear about this space?
Was it from me posting it in that group?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You posted it in there.
I was like, oh, rock's doing a thing.
Let's go see what's up.
Nice.
Nice.
Good to see you.
Well, yeah.
Polygon punts.
I've been, you know, polygon for forever now.
And I don't know.
It's.
Fairfax rock thing is, is fucked because I don't need protection.
I'm a fucking adult.
I can do what I please.
Right.
But the other side of it, that, that there definitely, definitely needs to be a lot more
education.
I think that's the biggest part where, where we're failing as a country, financial education.
You see people coming out of high school, they know how to do calculus, but they don't
know what a budget looks like, or they don't know how basically anything in this world that
means anything works like, yeah.
Oh, great.
They know how to, you know, citate, put citations in the back of a paper that they'll never do
again anyway.
And they know how to do calculus, which they'll probably never use ever again in their fucking
life.
But they don't know what a budget is.
They don't know what their rights are.
They don't know, like we, our education system is pretty fucked.
I'll be honest.
Agreed.
I've been telling friends for a long time.
Um, basically the way I look at it and you kind of have to because of inflation.
So you can't use, you can't save in cash anymore.
Right.
For a while now.
So I've been telling friends for a long time.
You're, I think I said this on a interview with Mark Cuban.
Actually, I said, uh, your, your left, your right hand is the hand you work with, you know,
at your job, whatever that is, banging a hammer, working on a computer, whatever your hand
that you work with and earn an income salary, that's your right hand.
And your left hand is your hand that you invest in and save with.
And you, if you're not using your left hand, you're walking through life, you know, with,
with one arm, uh, you have to learn how to invest.
You have to learn how to save properly.
It's just a part of life.
It really is.
Einstein said compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world.
Those who understand it, earn it.
Those who don't pay it.
Uh, and it's so true.
I, I see family members who are in debt, uh, and I get in arguments with them all the
time, you know, and tell them like, you realize like how much interest you're paying.
If you turn that around and saved instead and earned that compound interest, uh, do you
want to be, you know, the person paying someone interest or do you want to be the one earning
interest and dividends?
But if you wanted people to understand that we would teach them, right?
It would be a, some kind of lecture at school or high school or whatever, but it's, it's,
it's the same in every country.
I know at least that it's not part of the education system.
It's the system is basically made to create workers who create, who work basically.
Right.
And they only use their right hand, as you say, and, and, and it takes so much effort or
luck to have the right friends or the right family you're born in or something like that
to actually get the left hand to work, to get educated and to really learn about this
stuff.
But somehow we, uh, system education system doesn't really care about explaining what
fiat money is, that is actually called fiat money, that it's actually, they can print
as much as they want.
Why is it called fiat money in the first place?
Exactly.
Why is it not pegged to something useful?
Nobody explains that, right?
Like, ah, no, let's talk about other things.
And it's for me, like coming from, uh, Romania, which was earlier on, like a dictatorship
with, it was a pain in the ass.
We also had boatloads of cash, which you buy bread with.
Basically you pay with 1 million of this currency was by buying milk or bread or stuff like
that.
So anyway, so back then you were happy to have anything, right?
So you come to Europe from there, right?
Which we did.
We kind of immigrated from there.
And then you find, you find a social system.
Nobody explains to you how money works, but you, you're happy that you have more than you
had before.
So you don't ask questions, right?
You be like, fine, I'm happy.
Okay.
But at some point you build wealth a little bit at least.
And then you're like, wait a minute, I didn't invest here and there.
And what the hell is venture and how, oh, startups, nice, you know?
And so you learn it step by step because let's say I was lucky to have the right friends
and so on, but not because my family knew anything about investing.
They didn't have anything to invest in the first place, right?
What I'm trying to say here, I agree with David that the education system is super fucked
and it's on purpose in my opinion, not explaining how the systems work because you might have riots
if you do that, right?
Like, imagine everyone knows what we know, then they would not.
You definitely would.
If they explained how we got onto Fiat in the first place, you definitely, and I think
that was what the guy said.
If people knew what we were really doing, it would all be over, essentially.
And the other thing I wanted to say is, I don't think school teaches you how to learn
anyway.
They teach you how to memorize some garbage that isn't even true in the first place.
Most of our history books are full of lies.
Jesus Christ.
Like, let's be honest.
Most of that's lies.
So there's no, they don't teach you how to learn.
They just say, memorize this.
Yeah, I think to a large extent, you're right.
I mean, I don't think I really started learning how to learn until university.
And I was doing a lot of memorization, but I think I did learn how to be, you know, critically
minded.
I mean, it was a good private university, Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
But yeah, I mean, generally, yeah, I would say you're probably right.
I feel like before that, I don't think, and in most of my classes there, I didn't.
But some of the higher level classes, I think I started to learn how to think differently
about things and how to be critical.
You got to learn how to learn.
Yep.
Yeah.
Darren, we got a topic.
I come from a family of educators.
So it's kind of strange being from a family of educators and then going through school and
then realizing that school doesn't actually teach you how to learn.
They just say, memorize this.
More like, essentially.
Yeah.
It's on the degree.
But generally speaking, I also agree.
I think that that was my experience with school.
So all right, Darren, I don't think we've had we been we haven't even been referencing
any questions or topics.
We've done one question at the start.
I mean, we've still got a couple of intros to go.
So, yeah, I think I don't think we got around to introducing the Anthropoids.
And now we've got a car key studio on the stage as well.
So, yeah, just just go ahead and introduce yourself.
Either of you, go ahead.
Anthropoids or Corgi Studio.
Hey, how is going, guys?
Yeah, you got an interesting conversation.
So I just stay and listen for a little bit.
But, yeah, we are Corgi Studio from.
Yeah, we're currently expanding from Kronos to Polygon for a few months.
And we're running an NFT marketplace, the Launchpad and NFT swap.
And we are hosting staking pools for other projects.
That's pretty much what I do.
It's just I just want to throw out a short introduction.
And then I'd love to enjoy your conversation.
Cool.
Anthropoids, do you want to jump in and introduce yourself?
By the way, Corgi, do you have any background in compliance or regulations?
Or what was or just going to come up here and join in?
I'm just joining.
I'll speak on who I want.
But maybe I'll drop my opinion on what it is about.
But, yeah, I'll join the conversation with you guys.
Sounds good.
Anthropoids?
Asleep at the wheel.
All right.
Yeah, I think he's panicking.
By the way, I'm sorry because I'm on the PC.
So I may not be able to raise the hand or see somebody raising the hand.
No worries.
Just jump in where you want.
You don't even need to raise the hand.
All right.
All right.
Thank you so much.
I think it makes the conversation flow better when we just kind of try to jump in.
Sometimes people speak over each other, but that's all right.
Anthropoids gave some emoji.
I didn't see what it was.
So I don't know if he's having a glitch.
But, yeah, I mean, Darren, we've got a question or a topic?
Yeah.
I mean, we still have the same topic.
We've probably got a general question.
Yeah.
So, I mean, we've still got Marina and Tertius anyway.
So what do you actually perceive the current sort of landscape just now with regards to sort of legalities and cryptocurrencies?
So basically, where do you think we are just now and where do you think, how long do you think it will take us to get to somewhere that people can reliably buy cryptocurrencies without getting a giant warning on every screen that they use?
Well, I don't think the warnings are going away by any means.
I don't know.
You know, where crypto is, I think, as of maybe two years ago, really well known because of size only and well discussed.
I think that U.S. regulators have obviously picked up on that and have started to build up their enforcement divisions, have started to see inroads.
I don't know that they're accomplishing anything that they necessarily want to.
They're certainly trying.
They're kind of getting a little butt on their face in the process, which I think a lot of us enjoy watching.
You know, I think that it's crypto as it is right now is doing really strongly, kind of building to the bear, spreading out.
And I think the technological innovation is still going on and the regulators are not catching up.
They're just catching on to where large sums of money, trad fi, and like blanket fraud come in.
And I think that that trend is going to continue certainly through this year.
But beyond that, I think no one really has too much of an idea.
I have a question.
So I think a couple of months ago, there's news about the U.S. government, they want to put a DEX doing something like a centralized chain does,
which you have to verify the identity of the people who, you know, start the token and provide liquidity to a DEX.
So what do you think about that?
It's ridiculous.
I think if the U.S. does that, they're just going to be hurting the U.S. citizens who would participate.
And then they're going to be hurting the U.S. founded or whatever projects and make it basically already.
I don't know.
You know, I hear about, you know, I don't know, 10 projects a week being built, you know, created, whatever.
Uh, and I, it's one out of 500 is starting up in the United States.
It's unfortunate, but we're, it's already there.
So I don't know, I don't know how much more harm they can do, you know, hurting U.S. citizens and excluding us, uh, from these, uh, these protocols and being involved with whatever it is, providing liquidity, building the protocols, et cetera.
But they're just going to do what someone mentioned earlier, uh, jurisdiction shopping, right?
They're just going to go, uh, people, U.S. citizens won't be able to provide liquidity or they'll just do so with maybe a VPN or something.
Um, but if they tried to, to KYC people, I mean, there's people in the world.
The whole point of this thing is that there's people in the world that don't have IDs.
There's people in the world that don't have bank accounts.
So to say you have to, like, I don't know what they would do there.
Are they going to KYC every single person?
Are they going to KYC only U.S. or certain country people?
It just is a, it's a ridiculous notion.
Yeah.
Without a doubt, they're undermining U.S. innovation.
I mean, I don't worry.
Sam Bankman's going to scan your eyeballs and you'll all be registered.
You know, there's lots of potential in proof of humanity, proof of even citizenship without in a zero knowledge proof or not actually technically in a zero knowledge proof,
but a way of being able to prove, uh, where you're from or that you are an individual and not holding multiple accounts.
If we're talking about universal basic income, if we're talking about lots of kind of brilliant public good ideas,
maybe even some sort of reasonable regulation, but the, the technology or the adoption of that technology, uh, is, is very new and hasn't really proven.
And like the scanning of eyeballs obviously creates problems there as everyone can understand, but if we can, it'll be fine.
Don't worry about it.
If we can start to prove jurisdiction, you know, that, that allows a lot of engagement with traditionally regulated business in a way that is beneficial to crypto and beneficial to the world.
Yeah.
I would, I think that KYC is inevitable, honestly, even though if I don't, I don't like it, but there's one word you need to, you cannot forget, which is called taxes.
Okay.
Taxes, taxes, taxes.
If you cannot enforce taxes, you're a worthless state, right?
So if you don't know who that person is, you cannot enforce taxes.
So you're screwed.
So you will have to do KYC.
Like, you see what I mean?
So the whole discussion goes way back to self-custody and should we have to bring sanctions in there too, because sanctions, exactly.
Just to enforce sanctions is very strong.
Exactly.
So, so all of these things, they play against what, what we would like to have in our utopia, you know?
So I think, I think it's not black and white, right?
So, so there will be some sort of, you know, I guess there will be some sort of regulation because otherwise they can't enforce the country's law, right?
And then there will be some sort of freedom, but limited because otherwise most of the money will, will play around the law, right?
So that's what I was, that's why I was asking in the beginning.
Do you think right now in the current state, do you think most, you said most of people would play around the law.
Do you think most people are not claiming their crypto gains or whatever?
No, I mean, I think, okay, so you're right.
Like, but how do you prove that, right?
Without completely, you know, controlling the system.
How do you know that most people are paying their taxes?
Whereas, you know, just a fraction is not, it's fine.
Let's not care.
But you don't know, right?
Unless you do KYC on everybody.
There's lots of, I mean, taxes are a self-reporting system as it is.
So, I mean, there's lots of reasons people would not dare, you know, fuck with that.
Because one, if you make money, you want to spend it.
And if you go to buy a house or a car and you can't say where the money came from, maybe a car, I don't know.
But if you can't say where the money came from, I mean, and not only that, I mean, the biggest reason,
I completely disagree with a lot of things about taxes.
But I say it all the time on our team calls.
I say it all the time with friends and family.
Like, look, I disagree with taxes too.
But I pay them because I don't want to be put in a cage.
That's the scariest thing to me.
Well, yeah, of course.
But if you can pay with crypto and then you can use that.
So let's say you buy my house, right?
For cash.
You give me Bitcoin, right?
And then I use that Bitcoin to buy a car.
Then it never goes through any system that would ask me where the money came from.
And that is where you cannot enforce anything.
No matter how good the law is.
And that's going way back to, well, everyone needs to report and have KYC.
I mean, I'm sure they'll find ways to, you know, whatever.
I'm sure they'll find ways.
Look, the government can listen to every single conversation on your phone.
They are reading probably or scanning or using AI to scan every email you send.
Like, these things keep getting exposed.
I don't know.
I think the surveillance state is strong enough that people will just be scared of that big brother.
You're crazy, Rob.
That doesn't happen.
They would never do that to us.
They love us and they want to protect us.
Rob.
If you're in this space, you're already suspicious.
I can guarantee you that.
But there is always a workaround way that people will find out, right?
Even in real life, there's always a workaround way that people know to avoiding tax.
Of course.
I mean, tax is the biggest workaround, right?
And that has president's face on it.
You mean cash, the dollars?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, I don't know.
I think we need to fight back.
I think the surveillance state is so outlandish at this point.
I think taxes are so outlandish.
What do you think about the mint function?
Dev has mint function.
U.S. dollar.
If we were talking about it as a crypto, dev has mint function.
Yeah.
What's that about?
It's a shitcoin.
It's a shitcoin.
I never, like, until I got into crypto and, like, that whole thing where it's like, oh, is there a mint function?
You know?
Like, and then I looked at the dollar and I was like, wait a minute.
So, this motherfucker over here has a mint function, and everybody's okay with it.
But over here, we're all like, no, we can't have mint function.
Like, what?
What's going on?
Imagine if, like, Bitcoin or ETH during COVID printed 40% new Bitcoin.
40%.
That's what the U.S. did in two years.
20% new.
No, no, no.
No, no.
It's gotten, oh, you need to update that stat, my man.
It's over 80%.
So, 80% simply.
Oh, it got way worse, man.
It got way worse.
It's over 80% of all dollars have been created in the last, like, three, four years or something.
It's bad.
Holy shit, man.
That sounds pretty bad.
I was not aware.
But anyway, the education, right?
So, if people knew what you're just saying, just what you're saying, then there would be riots and everything.
But, of course, they don't, right?
Because the media doesn't tell them, hey, the U.S. dollar is a shit coin that you can print an infinite amount of and you're all fucked.
Instead, they're like, okay, whatever.
The state protects us.
There are laws.
We'll be fine.
But, you know, like I said, if there is not enough pain, then people will not be going to arrive.
I think we are at, like, not just the U.S., but the whole world.
Like, if you look at polls around the world and in the U.S., we are at peak, all-time high for distrust in governments, governments and institutions, all-time high.
And I don't think that's getting better.
I think it's getting worse.
And I think we are on the precipice of, you know, I don't want to say, like, revolution or something.
I don't want to, like, incite – get in trouble for, like, inciting violence.
But I'm just – this is just a prediction.
I think, like, things are – could get messy.
I think hopefully the pendulum will swing maybe and it just takes some small events that the government backs off on some of these things.
Stop surveilling us.
Stop surveilling regular people.
If you haven't – or haven't committed a crime and are not suspected of committing a crime, you should – they should not be listening to your calls and reading your texts, period.
I don't know how that ever happened.
I don't know how we allowed that to happen.
You know, our forefathers would have been up in arms the second – yeah, exactly.
Our forefathers – our country was created because there was a 3 percent, I think, tea and paper – what's it called?
Import tax.
It was some sort of 3 percent tax per pound.
And it was actually silly because the funny thing about that is it's not what you think it is either.
It was, like, that was already a law that was on the books, but, like, they were just – that whole tea tax thing is not what you think it is either.
Like, it really wasn't.
Like, it's – man, I'm telling you, we all got lied – we all got lied to in high school and everywhere else.
We all got lied to.
I'm serious.
Okay, what did you say?
Everything you learned about in history class was basically a lie.
It's fucked.
It really is.
Okay, what is the truth?
It was already something that was on the books.
That was already something that was already there.
It wasn't something that was new that they were adding on.
Well, whatever.
People still were pissed off about it.
Yeah, and that was a 3 percent tax on some tea leaves that came from the Dutch – the West India Company or whatever it was.
And now they're taxing us 50, 40 percent of our entire income.
I mean, think about it.
It's 50 – I pay 54 in California.
And on top of that, right, you're taught – you don't forget sales tax.
Bro, move.
Don't forget –
What are you doing?
Get out of there.
Registration.
Don't forget getting a license.
These are all additional taxes.
Don't forget speeding tickets.
That's another type of tax or revenue for the state.
What?
Cigarette taxes.
Property taxes.
There's gas and gas.
If you work it out –
I'm in California, bro, so I know exactly what's going on with the gas.
It's probably closer for someone – a high-income earner is probably closer to like 80 percent when you actually –
It really is too.
And the worst one I think is that property tax because think about it.
There's a guy who bought his house in 1950.
He paid – let's throw out a random number – $50,000 for that house.
He may be paying in property taxes today like what his house was worth almost.
He's owned the house.
It's his, right?
But does he own it?
No, because if he doesn't pay, they're going to take it away.
You own the lanes, but you still have to pay tax on your lane, right?
Yeah, and if you don't, they're going to come for you and take it.
You're going to take away your house.
Hey, you know, I saw a funny stat, and I don't know if this is true, and I'd like to know if anybody else knows or someone can fact-check.
Jamie can fact-check this one.
Is Elizabeth Warren, you know, she has this new bill she's trying to push to hurt crypto or whatever, the hurt crypto law.
I forget what it's called, but I saw someone say that in the – they read off like, okay, in the last like five years, she passed like – it was like – or not passed, initiated, sponsored.
It was the word sponsored.
It was like 30 bills, then 40 bills, and 50 bills, and 70 bills, and now – and then it was like 130 bills in the last year or something.
And guess how many of those – what percent of those have actually gone through as law or even passed – the bill has even passed, not even gotten to the point of law, but just the first step.
Three percent.
Zero.
Zero.
Oh, man.
What the hell?
Any of those bills has passed.
So what's crazy there to me is like, is she just signaling all the time?
Is that her thing?
Is I just –
Bro, are you kidding?
Yes.
Yes.
She is Focahontas.
She faked being a fucking Indian.
She's the first woman of color at Harvard or MIT or wherever she was.
She faked being Indian.
Yes, she is completely a signaler.
She is a panderer, a signaler.
She's a – all of – yes.
She faked being fucking Indian.
And the loser.
She never passed anything.
She never passed any law or anything.
I mean, she's totally useless.
But people keep voting for her.
And – well, bankers love her, right?
So that's how she makes money.
But isn't she always signaling that she hates banks?
I'm so confused.
She's like – all I can see here is a scam artist.
It's like –
Well, here's the question, Rock.
Wait, wait.
Here's the question.
And through the banks.
But then she's working with, you know, Jamie Dimon and these other bankers now to fight crypto, which actually supports the people.
But, Rock, remember what you just said.
Why do people keep voting for her?
Here's the opposite side of that question.
Are they voting for her?
Right.
Are they voting for her?
I know what you mean.
Oh, let's not go there.
Woo.
Election fraud.
Woo.
We can't talk about that.
We'll get canceled.
We have a couple hands up here.
Guys, feel free to jump in any time.
But if you need to raise your hand because you feel rude jumping in, that's fine.
But if you want to jump in, even better.
We just keep the conversation flowing.
I'm not going to jump into political conspiracy theory spaces and crypto spaces.
It's like this is why I come to crypto spaces and I don't go to my normal political spaces.
Like I have my home.
So, David, please, let's keep some separate.
I will say –
Well, this is compliance and regulation.
So, if there was one where we might talk about this, I'd probably this one.
And I am an attorney, so let's have fun.
I will say this.
Last week was memes.
If you wanted that, that was a crazy –
We had 1,300 or 1,400 live listeners or something.
That was –
See, everybody cares about the memes.
They don't care about the laws that regulate their lives, unfortunately.
Well, the good thing is they don't understand either.
So, probably have similar conversations.
Good to see you, Fidgetal, by the way.
You as well, Rock.
How are you doing, brother?
Doing good, man.
Doing good.
What I was going to say is what crypto has done for me very interestingly is actually – and kind of the first principles and the ethos of sovereignty has actually kind of made my political leanings a little more clear.
Like, I always voted Democrat and I considered myself a Democrat.
I do not consider myself a Democrat anymore.
I consider myself liberal.
And I think that the libertarian perspective is really, really getting highlighted, especially as we see more like Middle East wars and you see people on the left trying to balance like the fact that they love Jews but they hate – and on the right they love Trump.
But they – it's really, really interesting to see the fragmenting of what people think they believe in.
And it's just highlighting things like Elizabeth Warren, which is really – nope.
You think Bitcoin is dangerous just because for the same reason you think Muslims are inherently dangerous.
Or you think that Hispanics are coming in to murder us from the south to the southern border, right?
And the fact is we're all controlled by one thing.
People may want to call it Jews but it's really just money, right?
And I didn't mean that controversially.
I'm really interested to see the next year of legal arc happening as the industry becomes more entrenched in kind of its history.
Kind of like case law, it becomes more and more settled.
So I think we'll soon see the questions answered about the major questions doctrine.
We've got – for better or worse, if we're talking about 2023 and kind of a recap, we got a lot of clarity that people don't give credit for.
No longer will the argument about post-hoc law application and the grayness argument work, which is okay.
Are you listening to me?
What's the grayness?
What?
What is this?
Oh, so Ripple tried it.
It's the argument that the laws weren't clear.
Therefore, you can't apply unclear law clearly now, right?
That's what – almost the library tried it.
Ripple tried it.
And the judge just says the laws were clear.
I'm not buying that.
They don't really address it.
It's a fair argument, though.
It's a fair argument for Coinbase, which is going to be more interesting.
So I think that question is really going to be challenged in 2024 by Coinbase.
I think a lot of legal grayness will be uncovered by Coinbase.
I don't think –
That one seems more clear because they were asking, please, we want to obey you.
Give us the rules.
Okay, fine.
You want to say these are securities?
Tell us which ones are securities.
Specifically tell us which ones and why.
Correct.
And then tell us what framework we need to build with you to list them.
And by the way, don't fall for – okay, so a bunch of big misnomers.
One, don't fall for the shiny object argument, which will be just because we allowed you to list, therefore, that doesn't mean you're legal.
That's smoke and mirrors, right?
You hit the nail on the head rock.
The argument is we specifically asked you numerous – did we have to file a declarative judgment motion?
Like, is that what cases need to do?
And I think the second biggest thing that people need to be very clear about is the parsing out of the XRP ruling and how the SEC decides to move forward next year with it.
And I think that is the dance that they've been doing with legislation.
And I thank the UK and the EU for MICA and other regulations globally that's going to force, by virtue simply of a flight of human capital and flight of capital in general, to finally make decisions.
The XRP ruling was not what everybody thought it was.
It did not say that XRP is not a security.
In fact, the only thing it said essentially is that the U.S. government, the SEC, didn't proffer or claim enough evidence that people in secondary markets bought it based on speculative intent from information from Ripple.
All the SEC needs to do in appeal is – even if it's not true, just get a bunch of people to say, yeah, I bought Ripple because –
I thought that ruling was hilarious because the judge basically said it's okay for you to sell unregistered securities as long as the people you're selling it to are stupid.
Well, no, as long as the people who are – no, it's two steps.
As long as the SEC doesn't alter the argument that people don't look at the internet, right?
Because all you have to do is look at the internet and go and see an XRP tweet, the SEC just didn't actually allege any of it.
So the Ripple will lose terribly on appeal if it goes that far.
So I think it's in all our best interest to ensure that the appeal doesn't happen.
Coinbase's case gets fucking accelerated to death and the SEC needs to deal with another $2 billion worth of litigation.
And I think at some point they will capitulate.
Gary Gensler goes away.
Elizabeth Warren stops her kvetching.
And I do think that post-havening, post-retracement and massive pump, they will have no more choice anymore, right?
That's my thoughts.
And thanks, guys.
Do I just keep on talking now?
Is that what happens?
I just heard massive up.
Is it up on me now?
Is that what you're saying?
And here's my real play right now.
Please nobody post about Polygon.
I haven't stacked enough Matic yet.
Please don't let it pump before I get my bags up.
Hey, it's been looking pretty good lately.
Well, by the way, anything we say here, anything any panelists or guests say here as Polygon is on the space.
But, you know, anything we say, it's not like their opinion or anything.
They're just here supporting and helping the algorithm and supporting this town hall.
But that is my opinion.
It's just not financial advice for you.
Anthropoids, hands up.
You want to introduce yourself now?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Hello, everyone.
My name is Elijah.
I'm just a young father, founder on Polygon chain.
Yeah, I'm the founder of Anthropoids.
I'm just 20 years old.
So I just, you know, I came here to support.
I also came here to learn a lot.
I've heard a lot.
Yeah, when you guys have said a lot, yeah.
So I just want to keep listening to what you're saying.
Yeah, we've got another couple of thoughts.
I'm thinking we start up with another question for these new guys.
So if you woke up tomorrow and DeFi was full KYC,
you couldn't do anything without having to send a picture of your passport,
what do you do?
I think we'll start off with maybe Cesar.
So what was it?
The Fed, what was it?
If DeFi was full KYC tomorrow,
you couldn't even access your wallet without having to send a picture of your passport.
I think I would, I really think I would,
I would be looking at moving out of the US.
What do you think?
I would, I would even, if I had to, I think, and this is, this saddens me to say,
I'm a proud patriot.
I love this country.
As much as I disagree with some things about it, I think it's the greatest country in the world.
And it's made my life, you know, so enjoyable.
And, you know, I'm, I'm a happy person here, but if that happened, that would be probably a step too far for me.
Yeah, I think it's, it's funny you say that, Rock, but it reminds me of, I can't remember what the movie is.
But there's a, there's a part of a movie, I have to go find it, where there's like a professor that's talking, you know, during a lecture, during, you know, some kind of talk.
And he makes a comment up on stage where he says, you know, America's not the greatest country in the world anymore.
You know, and he, and he kind of initially, you know, it takes people back a little bit because they, they don't understand the context of it.
But then he gets into it.
He says like, you know, it sure damn used to be, you know, we used to be able to have X, Y, Z.
We used to be able to live this way.
We used to have this kind of community, this kind of lifestyle, et cetera, et cetera.
Right.
And I think it's interesting that you say that because it's, I feel the same way.
I mean, I've been here in the U.S. my entire life, but my family, my family came here from Mexico.
And, you know, my dad's always had this, this thing where he's just has a love for his country.
He loves Mexico.
And even though this is where, you know, he, he built his career, he raised a family, you know, he's, he's retired, all that stuff.
He's always told me this and I never understood it.
And I'm starting to now as I'm a little older, I have a family.
I have kids, et cetera.
I'm starting to understand it.
Right.
But he's always said, you just aren't as free as you think you are in this country.
And it's always, and I never got it as a kid.
You never got it.
You're like, nah, bullshit.
You know, this is America, land of the free, you know, bald eagles and rockets and, you know, all that good stuff.
Right.
And I never got it.
And I've got a dual citizenship.
So, you know, I've got the benefit that at any point I can go and I'm a full citizen in Mexico as well.
Um, and he's always told me, he's like, you know, just one day you're going to understand it.
And one day you're going to understand why you've got such a valuable thing in that dual citizenship that you can go, you'll be able to buy land.
You'll be able to do everything that you need to do if you, if you choose to do that.
Right.
So I don't know, for me, it's, I think we're getting to a point where much like we say in crypto, like don't fall in love with projects.
Don't marry an investment.
Don't write it to zero.
I almost think we have to get to that point, even with where we live.
And it's okay to have love for your, for your history, for your nationality, for your, you know, the history of your family and where you come from, your culture, all of that.
But I think where you live and where you decide to plant your seed at that time and build a business and raise your kids and, you know, do all of that, the community, I think that needs to be a little more flexible.
And if that means that at some point we need to be okay with saying, hey, it's time to pack up and go look elsewhere, because right now at this point, at this time, this is not where it's best suited for me to, you know, to, to basically putting my money, my time, my energy, my resources, et cetera.
We have to be okay with that.
I think the same thing, just like we say with crypto, you know, you get into an investment, it starts going the wrong way.
You got to cut it, pull the pin, boom, move on.
Same thing, I think, with lifestyle.
I think maybe we're moving into a world where, you know, you could have a kind of virtual citizenship or you don't need a citizenship as, as, as things change.
I think, you know, this could be still decades away, but if, let's say, Bitcoin does well and if, you know, maybe countries compete against it with their CBDCs and, or whatever they do, which I am, I'm strongly against CBDCs in general.
But if governments start saying, competing against, you know, looking at, okay, well, Bitcoin has, you know, 1.8% monetary inflation with negative price inflation.
And so, hey, maybe we need to compete with that now.
Maybe we can't just print at will because people will go to the life raft of Bitcoin in the digital currency, you know, ecosystem.
If fiat currencies aren't as strong as they are in the future, I mean, that is one of the big things that really makes it so you have to be part of a nation state.
And why governments fight to have you as part of their nation state and fight to have you pay your taxes in their currency and use their currency is it's a big part of it.
It's a big part of why we have wars in general.
So I don't know, maybe if countries don't manage money anymore, maybe if monies are managed by private, either institutions, DAOs, businesses, or whatever, countries can compete.
If we have real competition of money, maybe, you know, having a citizenship in a specific country becomes less relevant.
The fact that we can travel on planes so easily, the fact that, you know, maybe people don't, you know, want all of the burdens of a certain country and all the crazy, like we said, 50 to 80% or whatever.
If you include all the taxes in the United States, I don't know, maybe digital nomad life, maybe virtual citizenship.
Maybe these things actually start to play out like it like was kind of forecasted in the sovereign individual.
Well, let me ask you a question as a follow up on that.
I see Fidgetle's got his hand, but it kind of follows up on what you just said.
Do we think that truly the entire citizenship model as we know it today really was just built to be able to tax individuals?
Right. I mean, is there I mean, outside of giving you also like governance type laws and stuff, right, like the ability to vote and do different things.
And benefit from state or national programs or whatnot.
But really, it was built around money. Right.
If money wasn't a nation state thing, if it wasn't controlled by the country or the state where we live, if it was, let's say, Bitcoin in the future, gold, a gold standard type thing, global.
Is it less relevant then? Is that accurate? Am I understanding that correctly?
It may be, but it could also be more relevant in some ways, because if you take away the ability to issue seniorage, to to print money from governments, that's a big revenue source for them.
Right. That they can print this money and do things with it.
But if you take that ability away from them, I mean, there's an argument.
I mean, by definition, actually, they would have to either decrease spending or increase taxation. Right.
Yeah. But I also think the argument could be made that like I'm arguing kind of against myself.
Right. You know, we're playing devil's advocate.
Yeah. Yeah. No, I think it's a good topic. I'm glad we kind of went down this this route just because I I, you know, I think Fidgetal was saying earlier, but I I I kind of consider myself like a right leaning libertarian in a lot of ways.
It's probably the most accurate description if I had to give myself one.
And some things I think you just toss up to like total anarchy is probably the correct outcome.
Like, I think for sure with in terms of markets and free enterprise and free capital, I mean, I think you kind of just have to let the market dictate what the right answer is.
Like, you shouldn't bail out anything. Nothing should be propped up, etc. Right.
What's going to succeed is going to succeed. What's going to fail is going to fail.
And so if we look at that from like a citizenship perspective, same thing. Right.
People always say, well, how are the roads going to get built and how are the schools and all this stuff?
Well, I don't know. How were they how were they done before the current system?
I mean, I don't know. Let's maybe look at that. I don't have the answer.
Well, to be honest, they weren't done. You could argue they weren't done so well.
And I'm also a libertarian. But you could argue that maybe they weren't done as well.
And maybe look, I'll just give my personal take. I'm also a libertarian.
I think I play with this idea a lot of like, could all these systems that the government manages be managed by private, you know, entities?
So could roads be built by a private company and you pay a toll, for example, to use that road, which would probably be cheaper than the taxes you pay to use that road overall.
Right. Decentralized utilities.
It's just efficiency, dude, across the road.
Or competition amongst utilities. Just competition.
You know, not having a monopoly over certain things, right?
Like the post office. They tried to make the post office.
The U.S. post office was a monopoly for a while.
They tried to make it so you couldn't have private companies that did shipping.
But right there, they also, the U.S. post office tried to stop for some time.
They were trying to stop faxes and emails.
So, I mean, luckily we figured out the right, you know, step there.
But I don't know.
I think that as a libertarian, I struggle to, I struggle to, because I look at like libertarian is like we want less government or small, effective, strong government.
And then anarchists want no government and think it could completely be solved by the free markets.
I just can't get on board with that.
There's just, in my head, there's too many holes.
I'm not totally close to the idea.
Anarchists are just, by the way, Rock, anarchists are just pre-libertarians.
So once an anarchist, like, dreams manifest, then you go, oh, shit, who's going to organize and run this shit?
Okay, now we're libertarians.
I think anarchists would argue that libertarians are pre-anarchists.
Yeah, I was going to say, it could probably go both ways.
Funny enough.
I mean, to me, I think what we probably want is managed by the government.
There are things that are good that the government does.
Like, some simple examples would be like military, protecting your borders, protecting your people from foreign invaders.
Because if you didn't have a military, well, guess what?
Someone else is going to build one and they're going to come get you.
But, I mean, that's pretty likely, just given the history of humanity.
Other things is like murder, right?
And a legal system.
I think having a legal system where you can go plead your case or if someone commits fraud, like anti-fraud laws, things like that.
But minimally, I think personally, minimally, I think we have thousands, I think we probably have a thousand times too many laws on the books than we actually need and are beneficial.
But I think there are certain things that the government is needed for.
And if we could have a small, effective government, it would be great.
The problem is governments never stay small.
They always grow.
That's the nature of them.
And they never give back what they take once they take it is another key point.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sounds like a crypto vendor.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, now there's a moment of silence I was going to say.
I think it started with the question of KYC and AML and what would you do?
And I think the responsible answer is it depends where that responsibility ends up resting, right?
So if it's on the individual versus if it's on the platform, I think for me that's massively impactful on my decision making.
That's a good point.
So if, if, if they, and they're most likely right.
I think that the most glaring reality of all this duplicative or duplicitous, I actually, I said duplicative in front of a federal judge.
He said, I think you mean duplicitous.
And I said, yes, I did.
Thank you, judge.
I think the difference becomes if it's put onto the platform, right?
And, and, and I think looking at why, why in the world an asset backed stable coin would be called a security or, or, or anything in question is the biggest indicator that one of two things, one that they're not interested.
They're not concerned about consumers are concerned about their pockets, both in terms of undermining the power of the dollar and, and undermining the ability to harvest tax, right?
That's the only explanation for having any issues with asset backed securities.
So yeah, over, over, over collateralized asset backed securities or your company.
I mean, the, the, the government, basically you could look at it like a company and their revenue is taxes.
So if you were a company and your revenue was taxes or anything else, and there was, obviously you're going to fight to keep that revenue, right?
That's how you survive.
If that goes away, your institution dies.
But the U S faces the second part of it, which is the deeper problem.
And I think this highlights why the U S is so far behind is that the U S is dominance is based on it being the reserve, the dollar being the reserve currency of the world.
So if your power is found in your currency versus other countries, right?
Mexico's power is not found in its currency.
Portugal's power is not found in its currency.
China arguably is, but the U S is so ingrained in terms of its power structure being based on it's, it's petrodollar being the controlling interest in the world that crypto, that's why you get these ridiculous responses to like asset backed stable coins, which any other country is going to say,
say is fine, right?
You already look at Mika, they say that algorithmic stubble stable coins, which makes sense that they're not kosher is a problem, but asset backed, as long as they're, they add the, you know, as long as they're regulated banks and they're audited, but the U S can't do that.
And that's where it's having its biggest headache is because its power is, is derived from the use of the dollar.
So an asset backed stable coin takes that control away from them.
And that's really, I think where the largest kind of, um, uh, rut in the mud is happening.
And that's why it's so ridiculous.
In my opinion, I'd love to hear you guys' thoughts.
I mean, I think, look at being able to print money is a big positive and a big negative for the, for any country.
Because like you said, the U S is so dependent on that system, like the financial system, uh, that dollar system that we've weakened a lot of our, like things that you can argue are, or maybe more important, like being able to produce things.
Right.
We, we have this great system where we print money and then we give it to other people in other countries to give us their things.
We print this paper and then we say, Hey, you give us real shit, give us iPhones and give us whatever we products we buy on Amazon, you know, particularly like from China, we'll give you this fake dollars we print or whatever.
I guess they're real or fake.
However you want to argue, uh, and that weakens us in a lot of ways.
I think if we can get rid of the dollar, while it would be very painful for the U S in the short term, depending on how fast it happened, I think it would strengthen our country because we would strengthen our, we would focus more on our, our real economy, on production, on jobs, on services, on, on strengthening businesses and, and, and trying to attract entrepreneurs to our country instead of kick them out because they are a danger to our, you know, dollars.
So, so right now, like real world assets are a big thing, right.
That's, that's, that's, it's a topic for sure right now in the, in light of kind of the conversation we're having, is there a model where if we looked at the way barter systems work and we look at a fidget, you kind of touched on, right?
Like other countries aren't necessarily, their power is not in their currency.
It's, it's maybe in their, you know, their domestic production or resources or whatever they have.
Right.
Like it seems like a lot of these countries, they have things that the U S wants.
We have the money.
So it's, it's, it's a straight exchange transactional.
Right.
But is there a world where we tokenize some of that, like, you know, oil gets tokenized for countries that have oil reserves, um, agriculture gets tokenized for everything will be tokenized.
It's just efficient unlocking of liquidity.
And it's a common system that this is someone on this show.
I was maybe Tina from boomerangs on right now.
Actually, was this you Tina that said, ah, okay.
I'm going to say it in my own words, but I think I got it kind of like the top thinking about it from you one day.
But, uh, basically that what crypto does is it creates this central, like standard or system where you can now trade any type of asset, right?
Previously, you couldn't trade a stock for gold.
Uh, there was no good platforms for that, right?
You couldn't trade real estate for a stock easily in a tokenized way, right?
You couldn't use all these forms of things as collateral on a platform to take a loan.
You couldn't use currency in the same platform as all these other.
So now you could just anything you want, whether it's meme coins, you know, lottery tickets, uh, shit coins, stocks, uh, securities, gold, silver, palladium, whatever you, anything in the world.
Um, IOUs, uh, bonds, anything you could think of in the world.
Now you could just plug it into this crypto web three system and they can all play together.
And you could build a video game that has Aave or quick swap on in the background, uh, you know, as the, you could swap assets in it using quick swap or unit swap or whatever.
Or you can, you could take your, your sword and use it as collateral, uh, you know, to take a loan or to earn an interest with it or whatever.
There's no system in the world that brings every single financial art collections, any, every system of the world can now be email.
You could build messaging into this, right?
You could build social media platforms and they can all interact seamlessly together with value.
What do you think about, uh, taking the blockchain as your work history?
Let's say like people, they clock into work every day through the blockchains, right?
And then when they jump to another company is that you cannot lie on your resume when people looking back to your history that you work at this company for like five years, 10 years.
And then they know how you work, how many hours you work over there.
And then they decided to get you on a job.
What do you think about that?
And if you do that, if you do that through, I mean, I wouldn't want that public.
Like I wouldn't want all my stuff like that public, but what you could do is just use like some kind of, you know, zero knowledge proofs or, uh, something to like what Manta is doing.
The new Polygon CDK chain that's kind of popping off lately.
Um, they're, they're doing really well, uh, but they do some privacy applications.
You have, you know, secret network over in the cosmos and, and shade protocol things.
Um, I think if you can build a layer, I think Polygon ID is going to have stuff like this too.
But, um, if you could build a layer where like, uh, you don't show everything to the public, but you have it, you own that information and you can now show some, prove to someone, look, it's selectively, right?
Not publicly, but selectively.
I can show someone, Hey, look, I have, you know, 10,000 hours in this trade.
I can prove it right here, but not the whole world seeing it all the time.
That that's really cool.
And I think, yeah, yeah.
I don't want the whole world to know what time I go to work and what time I check it.
I clock out of work, right?
It's crazy.
Um, ghost, uh, I don't think you've been introduced and you have your hand up.
Do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself?
Yeah.
What up guys?
This is my first time on spaces.
Uh, I don't like the sound of my voice, so you guys are going to have to bear with it.
All right.
Oh, what was that?
You got muffled for a second.
Okay.
You're muffled.
I'm not a bear though.
I'm a bull.
So you can.
Same.
I'm kind of, I think you keep kind of on and off muffling, but I'm also, uh, I'm a permable.
Well, Wi-Fi six, the new generation of Wi-Fi and it kind of sucks.
It's supposed to connect me to the closest Wi-Fi, but it's not doing it properly.
So you might hear like muffling in the background.
Not the best.
You just cut out basically.
And it just sounds like mumbling for like a few seconds.
So hopefully you can get that fixed.
Uh, cool.
Yeah.
Tell us, uh, tell us about yourself.
Introduce yourself in 30 seconds, please.
Hard hitting home of the hurricanes, uh, football.
I mean, that's what we play out here.
So we're, we're brought up in new England.
We're tough out here.
We got the cold winter coming up and my Bitcoin miners are going to keep us warm this winter.
So that's what we're doing out here.
And hopefully one day I'm on a 10 year plan to run for governor in Connecticut.
So you might see me on, on the ballot and, you know, I mean, Aaron Stewart is out here.
She's a local, uh, mayor of the town.
So shout out to her for the infrastructure.
She's building out here, running routes and stuff.
Um, that's about it.
You guys, 30 seconds is up, right?
All right.
Well, good to have you for bringing me up.
Yeah.
We definitely need more people involved in politics.
Uh, man, you keep muffling.
Do you, can you try another wifi connection?
Cause it's, I don't think we can bear with this.
I don't have another one here, but can you hear this one?
Um, fuck, uh, Elizabeth Warren.
Pusted.
And that's grimy.
You're in and out, bro.
Uh, so you gotta, you gotta find a better connection or we'll have to drop you, my man.
Drop me.
I said my piece.
Okay.
Cheers, man.
Uh, but yeah, we definitely need more people.
Uh, and I agree with you on the F Elizabeth Warren.
Uh, but we need more people, uh, participating in politics and there's ways you can do that
guys without, you know, running for office necessarily.
You can, you can write your, your Congress people.
You can, uh, you know, go to your city council meetings and voice your opinions.
Uh, you could even do it on a small level, like in your own neighborhood, just, you know,
contributing to your community and, and, uh, uh, building groups in your community, whether
they're like, you know, stuff like neighborhood watch or just like, Hey, you know, neighborhood
trash cleanup.
I mean, there's all kinds of ways you could get kind of active in, in, uh, in, in our
society, I guess.
You know, what's interesting rock is that.
Okay.
What you're talking about there with like getting involved, this is part of a much larger
conversation, but I mean, in, in the whole spirit of someone was talking earlier about
how they, they hadn't really had, uh, and was it on this space?
I think it was on this space where they were saying that they hadn't really spent as much
time learning finance and trying to understand money as, as they have in the last few years
now that they've gotten involved with crypto.
Right.
And there's, there's a discussion to be had about the fact that as a society, we've been
conditioned to think that we don't need to get involved with anything, whether it's the
school system, whether it's government, whether it's finances, whether it's politics, you know,
whatever.
Right.
There's, there's this, uh, conditioning that's happened where it's like, Oh, it'll be, it'll
be done for you.
It'll be taken care of for you somewhere.
Or that your voice doesn't matter.
Or that your voice doesn't matter.
Exactly.
And I think that in a lot of ways, crypto has helped to make the money conversation,
uh, front and center again for a lot of people.
Um, recently it's also plugging people into political discussions and, and there's this
taboo theme, right?
About like, Oh, don't talk religion.
Don't talk politics.
Don't talk money.
Don't talk.
I don't know.
Maybe the reason they tell you that we shouldn't talk about those things is because the few
that do, that do, and that control all the decisions around these topics don't want average
everyday people questioning any of this, right?
They don't want us asking questions and trying to understand and to learn.
No, no, no, no.
Don't worry about it.
You don't need to know that.
Just trust, trust this, trust that.
Right.
So, yeah, I think we've got, uh, I was going to say we have one minute, but it is now officially
end time for this.
And I, we are going to be starting another spaces over, uh, over with those chain, uh,
the, the new, uh, the newest, uh, possible entrant.
I forget.
I don't know if the vote is over, but there's, there's either a vote going or just ended,
uh, for those chain to move to a polygon CDK.
And, uh, today I think they'll be talking about ordinals and doge ordinals and, uh, how
that pertains to those chain and polygon.
But, uh, yeah, so we got to wrap this up.
It's been great.
Let me, before everyone goes, we'll let everyone say goodbye and we'll try to wrap this up in
the next few minutes, but I want to give some shout outs to the audience.
Um, and thanks.
I see all the hearts and the thumbs up and stuff, uh, to all the supporters.
Thanks guys.
So we're going to give some shout outs.
I'm going to read some comments and maybe, maybe not questions.
Cause we ran out of time.
I apologize.
I said we would read questions and we, we were just having too much fun.
We, we forgot.
I'm sorry guys.
Let's Darren, can you put a reminder that like maybe on the hour or something, each hour, we
read some comments and questions from the audience.
Cause I forget.
And, and I feel so bad cause the audience is everything here.
Um, but yeah, here, let me read some quick, uh, messages, comments.
Let's see.
Uh, Ted wage says, let's get it.
Good morning dragons.
Thanks.
I think that's quick.
So I'll reference, uh, bit buddy says Friday spaces fire.
Uh, Eric has said, have a 1230.
Thanks for inviting me to speak.
Uh, blockchain web services says GM builders.
Uh, we've got, uh, Paul showing that there was a weird glitch on the quick swap website
showing like trillions in liquidity.
Yeah.
Sorry, Paul.
That's a, I think they're fixing that.
Um, we've got, um, headies.
Dot E says sec stabilization act to remove chair Gensler.
And he gave a link, uh, and it's rep Davidson, uh, I guess, initiating this.
Interesting.
Uh, I'll take a look at that later.
He also, uh, hashtag some, uh, what is this, uh, East soul ADA.
Okay.
Uh, Anthropoid said, nice idea.
Crypto Rocky.
Can't wait to learn more from you.
You're really speaking with experience.
Oh, thank you.
I appreciate that.
Um, let's see.
Uh, ghost fan says crypto is a building block of defy, uh, affects 100 more years down the
line.
I'm buying this just for fun, but it has a potential like any early project.
I don't know which project you're talking about.
Okay.
Uh, we got a lot of messages from ghost band who is just on.
I'm not going to read all these.
There's like, oh, bro.
There's like 30 messages from you.
What is going on?
You're, I can't read anything now.
Okay.
Jessica Smith says, I need to jump.
Thanks everyone.
Great conversation.
I learned a lot.
Yeah.
Jessica was great.
Um, quantum tech says tokens allow economic simulation.
How many economies have we simulated and continue to execute?
We have the ability to test systems that will work for states, physical and network.
Yeah, that's a good point.
That's a really cool point.
You know, when I played EverQuest, I remember, um, we were, we were, uh, we were at one point
duping, uh, like platinum and items in the game.
There is kind of a hack.
And, um, I remember there were these articles being written by, uh, economists, uh, talking
about how it was affecting the, the, like inflation and the, and they, I don't even remember.
I, cause I didn't, I think at the time I was like 13, I don't even think I knew what inflation
was, but basically I just saw that it was changing the prices on the, on the game.
But, uh, yeah, definitely like game currencies, cryptocurrencies can definitely be models where
we can try things out before, you know, governments implement them.
Sure.
Yeah.
That's a cool point.
Okay.
Someone says, um, our project actually supports financial literacy.
Join us on Tuesday nights at 9 PM EST on Twitter spaces.
His name is at C one censored.
If you want to hear more about financial literacy that we'd mentioned today, I don't know who this
guy is, but cool.
Uh, we need people helping with, uh, literacy.
Uh, someone says repair for the black American Negro can be found at the following website.
Uh, okay.
The homepage is Washington state specific.
The rest is open source and can be used for your respective state.
This is a true repair for our people.
Okay.
Um, look into that if you like, uh, crypto Rocky respect crypto needs you all.
I'm hearing from her multifaceted approach to extrapolate their effectuation of partiality
is the importance of education over regulation.
Regulation is not to protect retail.
I'm here to educate the community.
Okay.
I appreciate that.
Okay.
We need a couple more and then we'll, we'll, we'll, uh, do some shout outs to people listening.
Countries will give citizens, and this is by new social app.
Countries will give citizenship to those who buy into digital assets, specific countries
back.
Dual citizens will come with a minimum price point of entry.
This will allow virtual citizenship.
It's coming to El Salvador and it, and is already applied this method or El Salvador has
already applied this method using Bitcoin.
Yeah, that's pretty cool.
Like if you invest in El Salvador, you could get El Salvador, like, um, I don't know if it's
citizenship or residency or something like that.
I, I, I saw that.
That's pretty cool to see.
Uh, they're really leading the way in that, in that respect.
Uh, last one, great topics, especially on the KYC compliance.
I love how we brought this up.
Can't wait for the next space.
You guys are loved.
LFG, fire, fire, fire emojis.
That's by Dank Dealers.
Okay, cool.
Uh, okay.
One more, actually, this looks like a good one.
Let's talk about financial literacy.
Your obligation to help people would be less about regulation emphasis and, and more on
emphasis on education, not regulation.
The approach of those who effectuate partiality is rapidly evolving.
What about casinos lottery?
Stop regulation, emphasize education.
Yeah, that's cool.
There's a, actually a lot of good comments here.
I'm sorry.
I can't read them all guys next time.
We'll read them throughout the show.
So we don't cut them off, but really appreciate all the support from people.
And, uh, and yeah, wow.
We have 108 comments.
Um, it, it updated from, but, uh, yeah, cheers to everyone.
Um, uh, go ahead.
Um, speakers, if you want to say goodbye.
And then after that quickly, I'll do some shout outs to audience members, especially the ones
who are emoji-ing, uh, if you guys liked the panelists today, if you enjoyed this topic,
I know it might've been more dry in some ways than memes, but this is important stuff we're
talking about guys.
If you had a good time, uh, give some hearts to the panelists, give them a follow, uh, give
the audience members follows too.
If they look like they're in the same topics as you, uh, the audience members are the most
important part of this.
Uh, but yeah, go ahead.
Uh, panelists, uh, that are still here.
We had like 20 or 30 today and we're down, you know, we cycle them in and out, but those who
are still here, go ahead and say goodbye.
Hey guys, thanks for having me.
Didn't get to say much today, but fascinating conversation.
It was great to listen.
Have a great weekend.
I gave you a shout out, Tina.
I don't know if you were not listening or if you were, uh, I was, I'm actually moving
offices today, but I've been listening.
I heard you.
Nice.
Nice.
Good to see you.
Anyone else want to say goodbye?
I see Cesar Hardy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I just want to say, uh, I just want to say, um, thanks for bringing me up to this space.
Uh, really appreciate you guys.
I really love what you are doing.
Uh, thank you.
Yeah.
Appreciate you.
All right.
Thanks rock and a quick swap and a polygon and everyone else who, uh, who helps to host
these and, and, uh, make sure these spaces happen.
Always, always great conversation.
So appreciate you guys.
Great insights, Cesar.
Uh, always, always good to have you come back again, man.
All right.
I also want to say, uh, thank you very much.
Rock super inspirational.
And honestly, the whole discussion about education, I decided to also start my, uh,
tourist spaces, uh, just today I decided.
So, uh, it's about, uh, uh, how to trade the markets because that's what I know.
So if you want to know more about that, follow me around.
But anyway, I love the space in general, uh, in front Fridays is the best one always, um,
super inspirational and, uh, it's the perfect, uh, the perfect, uh, close of the week.
So thank you very much.
Rock, you did a great job as well today.
Love the audience.
Let's go.
And you too, brother.
Oh, rock.
And read my telegram.
Okay.
Yes, sir.
And I'm not, you know, I, you're doing this trading spaces.
I am probably not of a lot of value there.
I might be a contrarian that, uh, just says like, I, I think trading is dangerous and
scary, uh, but maybe I'll attend some.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe you shouldn't join.
Look, look, I mean, trading is, it's a huge part of the world.
I think just be careful with it, you know, and, and maybe like some of the stuff you're
building, the algorithms might be a way to do it if you're not a professional.
Otherwise, I think it's like trading is super, super risky.
Okay.
And when I say trading, I might actually mean investing, but we'll discuss because it's
really, uh, it's not like in and out in days or weeks.
It's really about months or even a year, depending on the signal.
Right.
So, um, it's a bit different than, you know, the, the DJs that are, you know, jumping on
everything on.
Yeah.
It's, it's not really trading.
I gotta, I gotta come to the other spaces.
I'm, I'm sorry, guys.
I gotta, I'm gonna have to run.
I just want to, I'll do quick, quick, or actually can someone else do shout outs to audience
members and I'll leave and go to the next spaces.
And then if people want to jump over there to the dose chain spaces, be cool.
We could continue this conversation, but, uh, Darren or Michael or anyone, do you guys
want to, um, give shout outs to audience members, especially the ones that are emoji.
Cool.
All right, guys.
I'm going to run to the next space.
Uh, just search dose chain family.
If you want to join that one.
See you guys.
All right.
Cheers, man.
Okay.
I saw medieval empires.
Go, come on.
Pixel three meta D whatever.
Uh, who else is here?
Dan, uh, Hunter, Pete, Alexander.
Oh my God.
So many time crypto.
Wait, wait.
Who is that crypto trader?
Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico.
Shout out to Puerto Rico, man.
That's where you save some tax money.
Right.
If you know how to do it.
Anyway, very nice, uh, to have you here, everyone.
Who else?
Dan dealers.
Dealers.
A dank dealer.
Sorry.
Yeah.
Thank you very much.
Okay.
But let's go back to the, to the, to the speakers who want to still say their goodbyes.
Who, who hasn't done that?
Oh yeah, it's me.
I just want to say thank you to you guys for having me up today.
It's my first time here, but I love the conversation.
I really love the conversation.
I'll be here like every time you guys run a space.
Bro, come up every, every week.
It's the coolest space.
Honestly, it's, it has this special vibe that I don't know anywhere else.
I got, I got, I love the vibes.
You know, I love the vibes.
I don't, I don't really like the space with all the hype about a project and empties and
things.
I love the vibe here where you, you have a topic to talk about.
So yeah, and I think that rock and Aztec who are actually the bosses around here, like
running the, running the show, they have created all of that.
So shout, big shout out to them and Aztec, if you're listening, I'm not sure you are because
he's sick or not feeling well.
Right.
So wish him all the best.
I want to see hearts in the whole audience for Aztec.
Let's go.
Meanwhile, who else hasn't given their goodbyes?
Are we through?
I think everybody did.
All right.
In that case, then producer Darren, are you still around?
Should we wrap it up?
All right.
Darren says hearts.
Thank you, everyone.
Have a great weekend and happy new year.
Let's make some money next year, guys.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
Happy holidays.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
