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KYC vs. DeFi! Permissionless or Private 🤔 The Aggregated Ep. 117
Recorded: June 13, 2025 Duration: 4:56:52Space Recording
Short Summary
This week's The Aggregated event will explore the latest project launches, token issuances, and partnerships in the crypto space, while also addressing current trends, growth indicators, and hiring opportunities within the industry.
Full Transcription
Thank you. I was first.
I was first.
Nope, I was first.
Timmy was first. Timmy was first.
Timmy. How are you doing, Timmy?
You got a dinosaur in your house.
No, no, no. It's this door. It's like a metal door. Super squeaky um a little rusted
okay let me play this and see if it actually works just like
Polygon pump it up.
Polygon pump it up.
Pump it, pump it.
You gotta pump it.
Pump it, pump it.
You gotta pump it, pump it, pump it. You gotta pump it.
ZK-EBM is Ethereum.
ZK-EBM is Ethereum.
ZK-EBM is Ethereum.
ZK-EBM is Ethereum. Z, K, E, V, M, T, C, Thierry.
Pump it, pump it.
You gotta pump it.
Pump it, pump it.
You gotta pump it.
Pump it, pump it.
You gotta pump it.
Pump it, pump it. you gotta pump it. Pump it, pump it, you gotta pump it.
Yeah.
Thank you. Pump it, pump it, you gotta pump it, yeah.
Hello, hello, hello.
Are you here, Timmy, or?
Okay. Okay. okay that's a yes
yeah I got
I'm just gonna message
Rock and ask where Rock is
was literally in his DMs like
I don't know three minutes ago
two minutes DMs like, I don't know, three minutes ago. Two minutes.
Welcome, welcome everybody to this week's The Aggregated.
We're getting set up here.
If you guys could all like, retweet, and space, that would be amazing.
Definitely got a great topic today.
So really excited about this one.
If you're a speaker, go ahead and request.
Bring you up.
Unless you're rock there we go
yeah Aaron Day I've sent you a request Thank you. is anybody speaking
or everybody just unmuted it sounded quiet to me okay yeah yeah i see hello hello awesome
yeah i was just wondering the same thing like am i having an audio visual problem yeah yeah how you doing kurt i'm good i'm good i just got back from
boulder colorado i'm playing catch up this week i was out of town for four days on business so
good to be home how are you wonderful i'm doing great doing great how you doing rock
doing well back here in beautiful sunny puerto rico
after a couple weeks uh a few weeks out of out of town a couple of them in vegas was there for
bitcoin vegas for a week and then um michael turpin and joyce um asked if c if Cindy and I wanted to stay at the Tiger Mansion,
so that was pretty cool.
Got to stay there for like a week.
For those who don't know, it's the house from The Hangover.
It's the one Mike Tyson had all the tigers.
There's still a tiger den there.
There's no tigers in it, but the den is still there.
Are those where the bedrooms are upstairs yeah yeah it's where they they had the we had tokenized conference there uh you know the week before and pit angels and then um brett had their
party which i think was pretty crazy there was a there
was a couple parties at other days there but i think the brett one was where they had like the
i don't know girls spinning in the weird you know whatever those
champagne cup things are or whatever they call them apparently the brett party was pretty crazy
Apparently the Brett party was pretty crazy.
The acrobats.
Yeah, they also had a based angel event to barbecue there as well.
I didn't get to go to that one because we were at White Queen Summit.
Yes, sir.
All right.
So we talked a bit about this last week. Is KYC an extortion epidemic?
We talked about, you know, that we had someone on. I wonder if she'll be coming back because I pushed back pretty hard.
back because I pushed back
pretty hard.
She was from Change Now
and was kind of arguing for KYC.
I hope we have someone
today who will argue for KYC
because it won't be so fun if we're all
just shitting on it.
Yeah, I'm
totally against it for sure.
I sort of have a
50-50 view on it, so that
might be as good as it goes.
It's heresy I sort of have a 50-50 view on it, so that might be as good as it goes. Nice.
It's heresy for crypto Bitcoin.
I think it's heresy for the fucking planet.
I think it's an abomination.
I don't want to come out so strong early because I don't want to taper down other people's... I'd like to hear some opposite opinions.
And maybe I could even try to steal men the other side a little,
but it's hard to do, honestly.
I mean, there are definitely, you know, various situations
or reasons why KYC could be good.
But those are very niche and specific.
Yeah, my position on it is that if you,
if implemented very, very, very differently
than how it's implemented today,
I think it could be a generally good thing
that still protects privacy and security
and a bunch of other things.
And so, I mean, my position is like identity, identity is fundamentally good.
The way that it's implemented and weaponized is very, very bad.
So, you know, I could have like a futurist opinion on how it could be done.
Well, this is kind of my, my take.
Yeah.
But I don't think if you look at the history of KYC
starting in 1970 with the Bank Secrecy Act
to what's going on now with the Stable and Genius Act,
there's no reason to have any hope
that it would be implemented in a way that protects privacy
and is anything other than digital tyranny.
Yeah, it certainly won't be implemented well by the bad guys,
but I think it's why it's a little
bit our job to
do it well in such a disruptive
way that, you know, just
everything good, like the government
is forced to say,
okay, we have
to go their direction because we're
so far behind.
I almost feel like even saying yes to any of it is kind of a to go their direction because we're so far behind. But, you know.
I almost feel like even saying yes to any of it is kind of a snowball effect.
You know, because one – 100%.
It just goes downhill from there.
Yeah, it just becomes – what is that meme or gif with the little kid with the soup bowl saying,
please, sir, may I have another?
More soup, please.
Isn't that like Oliver Twist or something?
I think it's Oliver Twist.
Yeah, I think it is.
Please, more boots, sir.
Oh, please.
Yeah.
More taxes, please.
That's Oliver Twist yeah I mean that
yeah it's exactly that Richard the problem is like when these when all of
these things that they do to invade our privacy or infringe on our rights when
all of them start they always start light and small and, or temporary, uh, to get us, uh, to agree.
And, and then, you know, of course, whenever the government says something's temporary,
you know, it's permanent. Uh, and if they say it's, Oh, don't worry. It'll only be on,
you know, the worst criminals or the highest paid, uh, people,
which these days,
I think they kind of lump together.
Rich people are kind of like considered criminals.
Now,
success is kind of criminalized.
I mean,
to me,
it's just,
it's just another platform that takes my identity now and then has the
opportunity to,
you know,
quote unquote,
leak it.
They get hacked.
So yeah, let me just give more people all of my information, who I am, so they can share
it even more.
Well, they've gotten us so used to it that like the argument now is not even like, does
privacy matter?
It's, well, you already gave up all your privacy anyways.
So who cares?
Like you already gave by using mobile phones and modern, you know, technology, you pretty much have given up all your privacy anyways.
So like, why does it matter?
Well, of course, it doesn't apply to themselves. So the U.S. Treasury can make four point seven trillion dollars worth of expenditures with no line items and with a complete rubber stamp on all transactions. all of these other things. But we get to have, you know, KYC AML, which I think has about $216 billion in compliance costs
and catches less than 0.2% of the actual crimes
it's intended to catch.
Yeah, I guess for me, it's like KYC is,
and Aaron, could you mute in between speaking?
It's some clunky sounds or
something. It sounds like the phone's in your pocket or something. No worries. Um, and so,
yeah, for me, I mean, look, I understand the point of KYC. I'll try to guess best I can
steal, man. We, we need to stop, um, God, this is man. We need to stop.
God, this is hard.
We need to stop drug dealers.
We need to stop North Korean hackers.
They're not KYC anyways, but we need to stop.
Child pornographers.
Listen, KYC is not for the criminals, okay?
It's not.
KYC is for the everyday person.
Criminals have various ways to get around it.
That's why they're criminals,
because you think that they're going to actually KYC any of their stuff? No. Yeah, that's the unfortunate thing when you make, like,
a lot of the laws that we make, the criminals don't abide by them. So all you do is you handcuff the law-abiding citizens who will actually abide by them. If someone is selling,
you know, kilos of fentanyl, they're not going
to follow your rules. They clearly they've already, that is by definition, we know they're
not going to follow your rules. And so now we just put this undue burden on everyone else,
on businesses that have to comply. And that's not easy. KYC for a business can be very, very
expensive. Um, I mean, I know like at quick swap, we don't KYC, but we, we geo block, um,
certain areas for like our perps and we do, um, run, um, uh, anyone who comes to our front end, the website, we do do OFAC checks. So like
if someone is, um, trading, I think from like North Korea, uh, we do block them from the website.
That doesn't mean they can't still access the contracts, but the website that we manage, we do block certain geographies.
Isn't that what VPNs are for
still?
Yeah, I don't know what we can do about that.
I don't know if there's
in the wallet level.
So they basically scan
the actual wallet to see the contract that it's interacted with,
if it's participated in a hack, if it's affiliated with a hack, if it's got some dodgy funds in there
from a phishing attack or something like that, or just an old fact sanctioned wallet for whatever
reason. So it looks at the wallet, it's like, oh, you're bad.
And then it blocks that wallet from being able to interact.
Yeah. And to be honest, I don't even want to do that.
But I also am a U.S. resident citizen and I don't want to go to jail.
So I just do what the lawyer said we have to do, unfortunately.
But like for me, blockingoreans or blocking people in iran or
blocking people in russia or blocking people in any of the countries that the u.s sanctions
i would definitely not want to do that if i didn't have to because like yeah there might be
bad people like the government there in North Korea,
but the people aren't bad people.
They're struggling, and they need this stuff more than anyone.
They need Web3 the most.
What's that?
I think the Iranians have bigger worries just now anyway than getting access to Quickswap.
I was going to make a comedy-like sound there,
but I'm not going to do that.
I was going to say, who's got the balls to make a joke about that one?
Yeah, exactly.
I was definitely going to dive into the part where the KYC part
part is is the opening to basically debank an easier way to debank um anybody and just destroy
is the opening to basically debank,
everything that we've fought for in this space since the beginning right it's like
everything that we've done is like they're unraveling it with with the kyc, in my opinion. For sure. Hey, guys, can you hear me now?
Yes.
Oh, cool.
I have some problems with my microphone, so sorry.
I wanted to say like two things.
As a KYC, I think that it's a concept that will probably
stay here for a while, right?
Especially in regulatory spaces.
But maybe how it's done could radically change
becoming my more private and decentralized i think i don't know if you guys know about
human node i'm a bd here at human order as a core member and we're trying to build the
let's say the opposite of the topic of this conversation we're trying to build uh let's say the opposite of the topic of this conversation we're trying to
bring private biometrics on chain um we just we we verify humans in a private way um is it like uh
like civil resistant where you know you basically have like a face it just recognizes your face as
a human and then you get like an nft or something that? No, we're not giving NFTs or something like that.
So the way we work, we take the biometric data of the user and the original video or the photo,
it's instantly deleted on the user device.
And we encrypt and anonymize the 3D face template of the user and then we sent them to a
CVM where it's a TE okay then we create a random string which is linked between this bio token okay
so yeah since the life data gets deleted immediately and only a random string
life data gets deleted immediately and only a random string associated with your id let's say
it stores it's stored uh even let's say if an attacker gain access to the servers uh the only
information they could potentially retrieve it's this id associated with a random string
and of course if you try to render this data,
it's useless for malicious purposes, let's say.
But can you, I'm sorry,
could you run through that one more time?
Yeah, so basically we take the user information,
the facial scan of the user, we encrypted it, okay?
We create this 3D face map of the user.
And we send...
Is that attached to a government ID?
No, it's anonymized.
We don't know who you are.
We don't know your age.
Nothing.
Basically, it's just your liveness data and your facial biometrics.
We encrypted it.
And we sent them to our CVMs.
And that's it. that's how you can identify
in our web tree industry with your wallet so we can link your wallet with your face in short
with the human bird what does that do like if it's not attached to a you know government ID
who is using this and and how do they use it and what's the purpose of it?
Well, one of our biggest clients, let's say, we are working now closely with Verax from Linear.
So we are part of their attestation program.
It's called Verax, right?
So we are like a verifier for them.
In order to verify if a wallet is unique in your DAP,
imagine that you have a lending or borrowable app
or maybe a gamified application, right?
So you can, every time you connect your wallet
that is linked with your biometrics,
the DAP can see if you are a unique wallet
in their ecosystem or not.
Okay.
So that's the primary focus of our tech.
So you could do, uh, go ahead.
No, no, please go.
Please go.
So you could do, I'm trying to think of what this would be useful for, because
like part of the reason people KYC is so that if they do something wrong later, you
have a way to go after them.
But in this case, it would be less about going after
because you don't know where they are, who they are necessarily.
You just know that they're a specific person
and you could tie that to like a serial number basically.
But so the one thing I could think of that could be cool for this
would be like building on-chain credit score.
Yeah, we're working with some teams
that are trying to integrate our tech for that.
That's interesting.
That's cool, man.
I'd love to see people finding new ways to do this.
Like anti-civil resistance?
Yeah, that's exactly what I thought.
I know somebody who they have a civil um for purpose where they just do human verification
and what it does is it sends an nft it deletes your your you know your image or whatever and
it sends you an nft to the wallet itself and that way you can actually either participate in whatever
airdrop and that's actually what hemi utilized for their airdrop in order to like combat
various farmers and just you know people over you know over farming it of course so yeah we basically
developed more integration we have some option integration for discord and telegram when you can
basically in for the discord integration you can link your Discord with your face.
And for Telegram, you can create a group and you invite people in.
And before to enter that group, you have to pass this facial verification.
And the coolest thing that we have in our tech is the Biomapper, which is an on-chain DAP.
We deployed it on almost 10 layer ones and layer
two already and we're working with ecosystems and this on-chain DAP as I said lets you verify
just one EVM compatible wallet in DAPS yeah awesome so let me thank you for sharing that so
I wanted to kind of just kind of gear the conversation with one of the questions that we definitely had are topics.
And so, yeah.
So do you guys think that KYC is now the death of DeFi or is it just in an awkward kind of like teenage phase right now?
I think so. I think it really depends what you're trying to accomplish.
Like if DeFi was a way for you to, you know, separate from the state in some way,
like have your banking payments, finance, et cetera, all be done in a way that is more
private, you know, and all these things, kyc is is the major uh hindrance to it and i mean
the tracking part of it is trivial if you bought your coins on coinbase or you know kraken or
something and then sent them into an ethereum contract like you literally made one jump from
your completely kyc wallet over to your uh you know, Ethereum or any Ethereum.
It's the same thing if you sent it in Polygon or whatever.
You're putting it in an account, which is very obviously yours.
And then you are trying to achieve yield or whatever else you're doing.
You're trading on it.
And, you know, I mean, you're completely doxed as far as the state is concerned.
And so at that point, then, you know,
you have to be reporting your taxes or whatever else, or, you know, you're on the fast road to
prison. So, I mean, it's, so in short, I'd argue the answer is yes, KYC is, you know, a big part
of that. But the other problem that a lot of people, you know, don't talk about, like you're, you know, libertarians like myself would generally ignore, but is an
increasing problem is the fact that it also opens lots of people up to to malicious attack from
violent criminals. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yes. That's, you know, as much as I, you know, I don't want the IRS knocking on my door. I also don't want, you know, whoever bought the, the KYC info from Coinbase or stole it from Ledger or whatever else, you know, kicking my door in and, you know, cutting my fingers off until I give them my private keys. And so something, something I always kind of like laugh inside, but like when I laugh,
I die a little. Every time somebody talks about the IRS and not paying and having this fear of
going to prison, I look back and, you know, America was born because we didn't want to pay
taxes, right? We got so mad and started a whole new country over like 2%.
And now we're afraid of going to prison.
It's just something that I noticed.
For sure.
The U.S. was founded by pirates who used to take tax collectors and tar and feather them and march.
who used to take tax collectors
and tar and feather them
and march on the street.
You know, we're a far cry
from the values
that founded this place, for sure.
Yeah, I mean, what in the...
God, what in the actual F?
Like, what happened, Americans?
What happened to everyone else
in the world where we just...
I think it was war, right?
We've gotten too many wars.
Yes, but... I think it was war right um we got too many wars yes but what conquest i think it
was soft i'm not i'm not gonna i'm gonna say it was soft dicks it was a bunch of we became a bunch
of pussies and we let the government completely control our lives in every aspect you know like
you know when i really was like what is this is just a small one, but it really made me now.
It stood out in my mind forever since is when in California they started telling people what flavors of like cigarettes and e-cigarettes or vapes that they were allowed to smoke.
When the government is telling you what flavors you can have, it's something is wrong here.
We've gone too far.
They banned menthols in California.
Why?
I don't know.
That's racist.
I don't know.
That's racist.
Sorry, guys.
So I have a theory about this.
Not the menthol thing but um but specifically like it's it's the reason i say it's soft conquest is it's like it's little trade-offs
over time it's like the okay i guess i'll let the you know like uh whatever tsa take my photo
now in order to pass through it It's, it's all these
little things that are like little inconveniences. And it's like, ah, do I really need to fight
every battle? Because ultimately it's like, you don't, you don't control people by putting chains
on them anymore. Like that's just ineffective. You control them by keeping them a little bit
them a little bit in debt, but also saying, Hey, as long as you service the debt, you get a cookie.
in debt, but also saying, Hey, as long as you service the debt, you get a cookie.
So I, yeah, sorry, go ahead. No, I guess with TSA, that is one thing, like a border crossing TSA.
That is one thing that I, I, I'm okay with that. You know, if they know who the individual is,
that's crossing, that's, you know, going from one country to another,
in my opinion, that's fine. Sure. But it's also, that's also a, you know,
you're actually illustrating the problem. Not that your idea is the problem.
Not necessarily on that side. Like, I mean, obviously when it comes to other things in my in my life my personal life
that i don't want to share with the public you know like kyc on chain you know a lot of this
you can track the transactions they know who you are that's why they have like wallet watchers
and then they can combine the kyc from whatever leaked information to the wallet watcher. I mean, that, that, that's how that's done.
I mean, if it's just a single point where, you know, you are, you're protecting your
people from, you know, these potential, you know, criminals who are, you know, doing whatever
they're doing, right.
That's okay.
In my opinion.
The issue that you're illustrating though is that
we're all you know we all we all want liberty on the things that we want liberty on but we're all
willing to compromise on different things and the problem is when you have millions of people or in
you know the u.s's case hundreds of millions of people those values are going to spread out
and such that like i'm willing to let my picture get taken
to the border i'm willing to give my my fingerprint or my biometric data over to the government i
guess just for me i'm i feel i feel comfortable and okay with with them knowing and i understand
knowing who i am i guess that's a hard one because if you don't if like yeah i'm torn on this if you
don't because they didn't use the ids so much it becomes impossible to travel if if you don't, if like, yeah, I'm torn on this. If you don't, because they didn't use the ID so much. It becomes impossible to travel if you don't. So it's, you know, or not impossible,
but very, very difficult to travel if you're not willing to consent to that stuff. But it's,
you know, but that's what I mean. I mean, so they kind of landlock you. This is what I say about,
I say about like, you know, people say it's a free country and I said, it's kind of a
like, you know, people say it's a free country and I said, it's kind of a closed plantation.
closed plantation.
Like if you try to jump the wrong fence, like you can, you can end up in very, very big
trouble very quickly.
So it used to be that like, you know, like in general, if they were to fingerprint you,
they would only fingerprint you or have a record of your fingerprints if you were someone
who's committed a crime.
But now pretty much anyone
who's ever flown on a plane like right now they have your i guess they don't fingerprint you every
time but like when you come into lax for example they don't they don't need to now it's all facial
recognition and iris stuff and you know yeah you don't even need to show your ticket anymore your
passport half the time because they just like scan your face and they're like nah we already got you we already know who you are we don't need
to see your passport it depends from which country which country you came from indeed but uh yeah
yeah actually you guys know that actually it's very easy to trick the qyc system right i mean
of course yeah many scammers sell sell verified QYC identities.
I think I bought one, for example, from a guy from Nigeria last year.
I tried it so I can understand how it works, the system.
So you can buy a full QYC for like 20 bucks.
So I don't know.
And what is that, like a passport or something yeah you can contact
guys on telegram and but this kind of undermines the whole purpose of the qic right i mean that's
my point is like criminals will find a way to get around it you know it's like when we say like
let's ban guns you're only banning guns from the people who will follow the law the criminals they don't give a shit about those laws they're still going to get the guns right
yeah now and now you just have a disarmed you know good guys against the bad guys who have the guns
well and it's and exactly it's and for the same reason it's why you know grandma grandma's getting
her identity stolen every six months because she doesn't really understand the implications of it. Meanwhile, criminals, you know, the criminals are
still laundering money, however they will. But, you know, there's a lot of actual, you know,
spillover, second and third order impacts of this stuff that are really, really bad.
So, yeah, I mean, KYC, I would say KYC is not only an abject failure in accomplishing
what they attempted
to accomplish, which is, you know, stopping money laundering, tax evasion and, you know,
criminal bank shadow banking, like all of that is much worse than when KYC AML laws started.
But then, you know, it's also really negatively impacted all kinds of just simple people who
want to have a bank account or want to do any other thing in finance and then find themselves getting solicited by scammers or, you know, worse,
getting, you know, actually abducted or assaulted by violent criminals. It's a really, really big
problem. Yeah. How often are people getting their like, you know, social security or other things,
you know, posted to the dark web? I mean, the system is so broken and the reality of of the
system is not it's not to stop the child pornographers or the um the drug dealers it's
to stop money laundering is to stop tax evasion really i think i think that's the big monetary
incentive for them uh is you know we got to stop people who don't want to pay their taxes.
But, you know, on that, going back to the first one of the first things we talked about, you know, the U.S.
Because we were paying a, I think, 2% or 3% import tax on tea and paper and I think sugar.
And we said, no, we're going to blow your heads off and we're going to start a new country.
You're not going to tax us 2% on paper or tea. And now, you know, I was in California up until seven months ago, and I was paying 54% taxes.
You are definitely going to be punished for having aspirations and being an entrepreneur and trying to be productive.
that that's that's what that says to me you you are going to be punished and you're going to have
That's what that says to me.
to pay more because you want to be an asset to society or um you know you want to build wealth
and it's it's a hard one because yeah that that is also how i look at it i i mean i'm
this is where i'm i'm unsure and i, it's hard for me to make an opinion
because I think there's probably some like legitimacy to having a progressive tax, which
is where you have rich people pay more as a percent. I think there's something fair to that.
Um, but why, but yeah, that's the, that's the question. I thought we were all created equal. Are we not?
Yeah. I mean, there's lots of like ways you can make an argument for it. I guess I'll make,
I'll make the argument against it first, which is what you were saying.
You're punishing people for success, right? I've, I've heard, and I'm sure everyone here has heard
someone, one of their friends or family members say, yeah, I don't really want to take more
overtime, or I don't really want to work more hours. Cause then I go into this higher tax
bracket and it's just like, not really worth it. I'm just not going to do it. So you're literally
disincentivizing people from making more money because you're taxing them more as they make more.
And, you know, Charles Munger said, you know,
tell me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome or show me the incentive.
I'll tell you the outcome.
And even, even with that, you know, that, that individual who has those,
you know, aspirations, the entrepreneur making more money, right.
As they're making more money,
they're still learning because they don't come from wealth.
So they don't already know the tax loops and laws to not have to pay all of that.
So it's so-
This is what happened to me until I figured it out.
I mean, like 2017, 2021, these were great years for a lot of us in crypto.
I hadn't set up my taxes properly.
So people here know I never sold any of my QUIC token,
but I actually had to pay a ton of taxes on it because the small amount of QUIC that I received, I received from LDA as pay. So it was seen as income. So I had to pay income tax on it, even though I
never sold it, which is actually what Cynthia Loomis is talking about changing for the Bitcoin
miners right now, because she's saying they get taxed when they mine the Bitcoin, then they get
taxed again when they sell it. It should only be on one of those. So she's saying they shouldn't
pay taxes until they sell the Bitcoin. And I like that. If you receive Bitcoin or crypto or whatever as income, but you don't spend it, I could
see an argument for why are you being taxed when you receive it if you never spent it.
That's how actually Australia and other countries handle equities.
other countries handle equities. A lot of them, they don't get taxed on their vesting, on their
equities, on their stock options. They don't get taxed until they sell it. But in the US,
you get taxed as you receive it. So that put me in a shitty position. And I got a notice from
California. I don't know if I should even say this publicly, but I got a notice from California. I don't know if I should even say this publicly, but I got a notice from California that I was on the – or my CPA told me, you're on a public list.
You are one of the top 500 tax owers in California.
And that's pretty crazy because I guess.
It's like the worst leaderboard to be on. It's the worst leaderboard to be on. California. And that's pretty crazy because I, I guess I don't,
it's like the worst leaderboard to be on.
Did they send you like a thank you letter with like, I don't know,
like a coupon or something for like a free?
Well, I, no, I, I paid, I,
he doesn't owe it anymore.
No, I, I paid it because that scared the shit out of me and I didn't want to be
on a public list. So I paid it. And then I shit out of me. And I didn't want to be on a public list.
So I paid it.
And then I moved to Puerto Rico.
So you're telling me it didn't come with a burger and fries?
No, it didn't come with anything.
Except for like a sad, bittersweet bragging rights.
That's terrible.
Brutal.
It's like bragging that you got like hit by a train, but survived,
you know,
but moving to Puerto Rico,
save you from paying taxes or you just,
you have like an exit tax.
Puerto Rico's tax laws are incredible.
If you're,
if you move there,
you have like an exit tax or something.
Nope.
You have to live in Puerto Rico for,
I think it's more than half or it's half the year in a day or something like that.
But if you do that, like your income taxes are the smallest possible and still within
like a US territory.
I'm in Spain based.
So let's say that if I want to move to New York, I have to pay like an exit.
So yeah, I can explain.
So Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States.
So and because in our Declaration of Independence, you know, one of our things we levied, we said, you know, to the king, hey, here's why we're leaving.
And one of the things was, you know know you taxed us without giving us representation
so no taxation without representation so the u.s is luckily still sticking to that one they don't
stick to a lot of the stuff from the early days but that's one thing i guess that they still stick
to and so puerto rico is a territory of the united states but it is not a state they don't get
representation in congress they do get they can send a not a state. They don't get representation in Congress. They do get,
they can send a representative to Congress, but they don't get to vote. They just get to say what they feel. By the way, did you happen to catch the panel, the fireside chat in Vegas,
at Tokenized, with the, I think he's either the IRS commissioner or ex-IRS commissioner.
Were you there for that?
I don't think I was, man.
I don't think I was there.
I missed a bunch of good tokenized talks on the second day.
I actually sat through that one.
It was definitely interesting to hear him maybe lobby a little bit.
But just to kind of hear the different things.
Yeah, tokenized has some incredible, like, politicians and regulators come through.
Really incredible.
Alex, I see you just joined us.
You need to come.
Have you ever been to a Tokenize or BitAngels event?
I have not.
We got to get you out.
100% we got to get you out.
You would love it.
I would love to go.
I think that'd be amazing.
I've never to go. I think that'd be amazing.
I've never actually been.
I'm honestly with a lot of the conferences,
I have to say that I'm actually really,
I'm super introverted.
So I have a hard time going to conferences if I'm not speaking.
That's just honestly the way it is.
I have a, I'm just, I'm really overwhelmed.
I have a whole bunch of stuff that I do.
Like I had to come up with my own, hold on a second here. I had to come up with my own
pitch style, literally when I was fundraising to go to these big giant events, because I was like really overwhelmed with the way that these,
with all these people and trying to meet a whole bunch of people.
So I don't really go to conferences unless I'm speaking because it gives me like a way to introduce myself to people.
So honestly, like I just, I don't, I don't just,
like people always ask me like,
are you going to this giant event or that giant event?
And I'm like, if I'm not speaking, I'm totally overwhelmed. So no.
You know, funny thing, I'm very, very similar. I'm the type of person to sit in my house,
not go anywhere, order Uber Eats, you know, work. But conferences, you know, crypto conferences
are places that I do feel comfortable going because it's people who, you know, crypto conferences are places that I do feel comfortable going because it's people who,
you know, like they share a lot of the same, well, we're in the same space, right? And for me,
I feel a lot more comfortable going to crypto conferences rather than me going out into like
regular public, you know, wherever I am. Yeah, we have a couple people on our team that have expressed similar things.
And then once you get them at the conferences a couple times, you get used to it.
I mean, I'm surprised that you're an introvert, by the way.
But I did feel like you're like maybe an introvert on the outside, but really an extrovert on
the inside that wants to come out maybe.
But I'm like kind of like Richard. Well, I consider myself like, I've always been like ultra extrovert,
but I don't like, I don't go out of my house. I'm like a hermit in that I just work and take calls
and walk around my neighborhood just in circles for miles every day on business calls.
I'm actually pacing back and forth in my little apartment here.
I'm doing the little horseshoe.
Yeah, same.
Same, but I need to put some clothes on and go outside in the sun.
I'm cool.
Like, I talk to people at the gym.
You know, I am able – you can take me in public.
I'm not, like, I am able, you're like, you can take me in public. I'm not like completely inept. Right. But for the most part with a lot of these events, first of all,
they're like, I mean, they're getting better, but they're literally, they're like 80% men,
the ones I've been to so far, they're so male heavy. And the women that are there tend to be
all marketing. And they're like, they're like 20 or like 20 years marketing. And they're like 20 years old and they're like party girl kind of people.
Like it's a very different kind of woman.
There are very few women that are like me.
So it's a very different dynamic for women than for men.
Tokenized will be better for you.
Have you thought about maybe joining or looking into SheFi?
SheFi? What's SheFi? better have you thought about maybe joining or looking into she-fi maybe she-fi what's she i think isn't that correct me am i wrong i may be wrong like a
female focused kind of conference event type circuit small small event type circuit but um
yeah they're they're cool um we um yeah actually one of our CTB members runs, uh, SheFi, Maggie Love, one
of our grants board members.
But anyways, you'll, I think you'll like, um, I think you'll like tokenize a lot.
I mean, it's, so there's BitAngels and there's tokenize.
BitAngels is a global pitch event.
Um, I I'm the head of the global leadership council for that. So I oversee
the city leaders. So the city leaders, there's one, Sheldon Weisfield is in Houston. And
there's people, we have all these city leaders around the world in 30 different cities
that have pitch events, in-person pitch events. We'll usually have like, I don't know, 40 to a hundred people apply to pitch.
We take the best like 10 to 20, uh,
let them pitch and we put a bunch of investors in the audience and on,
on make the judges are usually investors with dry powder. And, um,
then there's, so that, that, that cities around the world,
and those are run kind of decentralized.
So there's things they need to follow, but generally it's up to the city leaders how they want to run the event.
The only main requirement is that there have to be pitches.
It can't just be like a hangout.
But it can be a hangout too, but there need to be some pitches at least. But anyways, then Tokenize is also by michael turpin who used to
be called coin agenda uh and that's like a super long-running conference bit angels also has been
around since 2014 or 13 uh vitalik has come uh bit angels invested in ethereum um a lot of big
projects have come through bit angels i think bancor augancor, Augur, I mean, Brock Pearson, Tether,
they come to the events all the time.
I've interviewed him twice at BitAngels events.
But I don't know if, so definitely BitAngels invested in Tether
and Michael Turpin did the PR for Tether.
But I, and I, I'm not sure if Tether pitched.
I actually haven't asked that part, but, um,
anyways, yeah, it's a really cool event.
You would love it.
And it's not just a bunch of young girls.
There might be some young girls, but it's mostly actually kind of older women.
Uh, it's like mostly older people, actually.
I mean, there's some, it's, I mean, uh, you know, Michael Turpin is, I don't know.
He's pretty old.
Are you, are you calling me old?
No, but you said you don't want to be around a? No, but you said you don't want to be around
a bunch of young, you said you don't want to be around
a bunch of young women.
That's funny.
It's not, it's not that one.
Dude.
It's just, the
20 year old girl vibe
is like a
very different, for that matter, the 20 year
old guy vibe is also a very different vibe, but it's a very different, for that matter, the 20-year-old guy vibe is also a very different vibe.
But it's a very different,
it's a very different vibe.
Like I'm all education,
which is not, and like, and deals.
It's a very different vibe
than the 20-year-old girls that are in there to,
I'm not like, look,
I'm in a car right now because we're driving across the country, which,
oh my God,
so much to say about what I have learned about the people in this country.
That is very different from what I had in my head even.
But I,
I can't say what I'm,
what I want to say about the, you know, there's a lot of women who are, and I don't, I'm not, this sounds very generalizing.
This is certainly not all women.
But I've been to many of these conferences where there's a lot of people there who are basically looking to catch the next, you know, what they think of as like a Bitcoin billionaire. That is a very different, that's not really, that's a very different, it's a very different
That's what I would be doing.
I'm just being honest.
If I was a 20 year old girl, I would be, I'd be looking for that.
But that's not who I am and that's not who I am.
Right, but that's not who I am.
So I'm going to.
That's not what I'm, you know.
Yeah. So I'm going to, I'm, you know. Yeah.
So I'm going to get us back on track.
I'm just saying that that's not what I'm doing at conferences.
But I'm here to talk about the KYC.
Yes.
So I want to, yeah, thanks, Richard.
We have Zorro who's building some cool tech that we can talk about.
And generally to talk about, I think, ZKs
and how we could use ZK proofs for this stuff.
But I'll finish answering the question from earlier about Puerto Rico.
So basically, as a U.S. citizen, you can move to Puerto Rico.
And you have to apply for this Act 60 program. And if you do, you basically
pay 10,000 a year, you donate 10,000 a year to, uh, charities. Um, and you do some other
requirements. You got to live here for at least half of the year. Uh, I thought I would be here
like maybe half of the year and then maybe go back to LA for, you know, almost half of the year. But now that we're here, we love it. And we're like spending very little time in LA actually.
Only, I only go there mostly to see like my parents, but yeah, so it's 0% capital gains
for your personal and 4% income tax for corporate. And you can set up the corporate, uh, in a way that you,
um, like most of your money goes through the corporate, uh, and it's totally legal and kosher
and everything. Um, so it's, it's pretty incredible. And it's the only place you can do this because,
um, like the guy mentioned earlier, sorry, Richard, but like the guy mentioned earlier,
uh, was that, I don't know if that was Andre maybe, but you can't, if you go somewhere else in the world as a U.S. citizen, the taxes follow you wherever you go.
It doesn't matter.
You go move to Dubai or Singapore or some other tax haven, you still pay U.S. taxes as a U.S. citizen.
There are some caveats with that, but you pretty much pay, pretty much you just pay all the taxes.
You get to write some off if you're paying to that country, but it's the same
thing at the end of the day. Uh, Puerto Rico, they can't tax you because it's not a state and
we don't get voting here. So I can't vote for the president. So I voted and then I moved here the
next month. Um, so yeah, it's really incredible. It's like, it's a super hidden gem. Really cool, yeah.
Awesome.
I don't know how there's not more people that have done it.
There's only like a thousand crypto people here.
And that was all initiated by Michael Turpin, the BitAngels creator.
Was he the first one?
Yeah, he was the first crypto person to move here.
To take advantage of X60, right?
Yeah, the first crypto person to do it.
And then he got you know
brock pierce and he got me to move here he's gotten everybody to come and it's like it's
incredible i mean it's it's the perfect setup for a crypto person zero percent capital gains oh and
about the exit tax so the way it works is you just mark to market your assets your accountant just
like you just log down the day that that you moved and then you still owe.
If you don't have to sell your assets at that time, you just can leave them there.
But whenever you do sell, you'll owe capital gains to wherever you, whatever state you were from and federal, you'll owe that.
And then anything from that time on, you pay zero.
And then anything from that time on, you pay zero.
So let's say you moved here, you know, you bought Bitcoin at 10K, you sold it at, or you moved here when it was 100, which is basically when I moved here.
So then anything from, you know, when I first started buying at $200, you know, to the 100K, I'll still owe the government taxes on all that.
But then anything past 100K, I'm not, I'm,
I'm, I'm free gains. It's incredible. Yeah. It makes sense. Yeah. So yeah, let me, let's,
let's put up another question and yeah. Welcome Alex. Or does she drop? Does she drop?
Yeah. I'm sure she'll be back. Oh, okay. This is the time where she's like taking her kids to school and stuff.
I was going to mention her space.
You know,
she does pitches.
but yeah, that's why she'd be perfect for bit angels.
We will put her as a judge at bit angels for sure.
Well,
and that's what,
I think that's what she was just trying to kind of like say,
or like the message she was trying to deliver is she,
she helps people learn how to pitch and how to raise.
But anyways,
yeah,
we usually like to make the judges investors who have a dry powder to
invest.
Most of the judges,
we have that qualification,
but I don't know.
I don't know if Alex is writing checks right now,
but I know she's doing a lot with pitches,
so we can make an exception.
Even if she wasn't writing checks,
I don't know if she is or not. And by the way, this Vegas BitAngels,
one project actually walked out with like a 500K. So one of them I know.
Well, there was 27 projects pitched. I'm sure a ton of, I heard a bunch of them got investments,
but one of our own portfolio companies got a, got a 500 K check, like pretty
quick. Richard helped close that deal on the spot. Well, I was just telling them about your,
your show Alex, but, um, back to the, the, um, the topic here, I have a question, kind of a tough one. And basically, hold on, let me...
I had it right here in front of me.
Anyways, so what's more important,
that we are stopping financial crime
or preserving financial freedom?
Freedom!
Freedom, always.
Always freedom, man.
I mean...
Go ahead, Alex. You don't have to raise your hand.
Word.
I don't actually think that
an either...
Oh, no.
You're cutting out, Alex.
Pretty bad.
Oh, am I...
I'm cutting out really bad?
Yeah, you're better now. No, no, on. Let me. Yeah. You're better now.
No, no, no, no. Don't. You're good now. Leave it now.
And we have Prometheus here also. Good to have you. I'm sure you'll have some opinions on this.
Yeah. And we have two cent Timmy here we didn't mention.
Two Cent Timmy is the man.
I've been trying to talk to Two Cent Timmy this entire space,
and he just doesn't say anything to me.
No, I'm here.
I'm here. I sent Darren a message of, like,
oh, I think we figured out how to not have the intros last an hour,
and that's to skip intros entirely.
I mean, I was trying to say hello to you when we first got here and I was like, well,
maybe he doesn't want to do intros.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Anyways, yeah, back to this pop.
Yes?
Yes, we can hear you.
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me? Can you hear me?
We could, but now it's making weird noises.
Can you hear us?
Hey!
Are we in the Verizon commercial?
Hey!
Shhh!
Can you hear me now?
Yeah!
How about now?
Yeah.
Now?
Okay, let's go to...
Yeah, Alex, you're having a little bit of issues there,
either with your mic or with your...
I don't know.
It sounds like you're in a...
When you used to lose the reception on a TV
and the old black and white TVs,
and it goes...
Prometheus, what's up?
Hey, bro.
Great to see you, bro.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah.
Dude, we have had the most wildest week today haven't we um you know i was late night up um in some of the spaces uh talking about
this invasion by israel oil prices have gone through the roof uh we've had a 15 rise crypto is in some wow yeah i know right so this is this
is a wild week do you think do you think anyone ever like when israel goes and starts launching
missiles do you think any i wonder if futures on on oil like if you could see a tick up in futures
or derivatives because imagine you know you go you go 100x long and then you you like launch a missile that's a that's a good uh that's a good strategy yeah i mean prices are up
significantly so yeah i'd be curious to see if you can track uh did it start uh did it start
climbing before missiles started going and then it'll start telling you who knew what uh early
well somebody knew because the stock market clearly reflects it. But Rock, I definitely
want to hang out with you guys. I have another space. I need to go to Crypto Pulse with Wolf
Financial. Are you guys, will you be here an hour later? Because I can come back.
Yep, we'll be here. All right, my guy. See you soon, bro. Bye.
That's when we get it. The last hour is typically when we get real weird with it, too. So we'll see you there.
Wait, is this not already really weird?
Yeah, we started a little weird today.
Yeah.
I mean, right now we could probably jump in and throw a rally.
Yeah, later I'll be drinking wine out of a Diet Coke can.
Why?
Because then you can walk around with it.
Nobody knows you're drinking it.
You can, like, wave your hands and gesture, and it doesn't fly out.
To be honest, that'd probably judge you more seeing you drinking Diet Coke.
Are you saying that you can't drink in public in Puerto Rico?
Yeah, actually, you can.
Yeah, so you don't need to hide it now.
I'm joking. It's from Always Sunny.
He's drinking a wine out of Diet Coke can.
He says, I'm going to get real weird with it.
And then they're like, what is that?
Why are your teeth red? Is that wine in that Diet Coke can?
It's Frank.
Anyways, come on.
No Always Sunny fans? You guys suck.
Listen, I've watched always sunny quite a few
times it's funny i like half paid attention because i could only half pay attention to tv
shows but uh no it's great it's definitely got some funny things that you know they just one
liners that are great all right i don't need your i don't need your your uh patron patron
patronage patronage pity pity is the word i don't need your pity I don't need your pity I don't need your pity
pity is the word you're looking I'm not Mr. T okay
Cindy gives me enough like pity laughs at my dad
jokes I don't need it from you Richard
Alex we can hear you now is it okay if I try to answer that question
yeah what's up is it okay if I quickly try to jump in and try to answer the question that Richard asked about financial crime or financial freedom?
Yeah, yeah. We'll try to stay a little on topic.
By the way, welcome here, Enrique.
Funny thing is before Enrique and I were supposed to actually have a call regarding of what he does.
And last minute ASTEC asked me to come in here
and and help um with the show but Enrique is also kind of does a lot of this DDKYC um
as well so anyways go ahead and answer the question welcome yeah sure and very quickly I
mean just just to let you guys know uh we detected a $1.89 billion scam.
And the guys right now are arrested.
There are other people that are, you know, being searched.
I personally come from my background.
I've been in crypto for quite some time, but also intelligence at the same time. $80 million a day in scams, there cannot be the vision of financial freedom if we keep getting
people scammed. So there has to be, and by the way, I'm not talking of, you know, big banks or
anything like that. I'm talking about the average retail investor, right? And the promise of for them to come to crypto
and put their money into crypto with the intention to have some kind of financial freedom in the
next, whatever, three, five, 10 years. But that cannot happen if they keep getting scammed because
they simply don't know how to do due diligence. Actually, most people, and I bet to say 90,
95% of people cannot do real due diligence.
That's the reason why we built our platform.
And so far, we have been pretty good at detecting or allowing people themselves to detect if
they have or if they are going to invest in a scam or not.
But long story short, I mean, the reason why I decided to be in this industry a long time
ago, by the way i come
from puerto rico i know the rules i help michael my family's very close to michael's family as well
uh from when michael moved to puerto rico but i'm currently based in miami uh nonetheless
yes if we get a lot we get a lot of floridians here on vacation 100 100 and i'm definitely one of them i'm going over there tomorrow
um nice yeah nonetheless i mean it's something that that to me is close to my heart
uh i all of us have to some extent either being or hurt someone getting scammed it's it's a very
painful process and unfortunately the only answer that we have right now is well you cannot get your
money back you know sorry so i think that we can be more proactive at least and share with people or give people some tools so that then they can start protecting themselves.
So that's kind of my vision.
That is a massive issue.
Basically, when people get scammed and, you know, getting the money back is extremely difficult.
People get scammed and, you know, getting the money back is extremely difficult.
And if you're not vigilant enough to understand, you know, blockchain and how the transactions and being able to kind of read and identify these things, it makes it a lot more difficult, you know, for new users that kind of get scammed into these, you know, these really well-constructed, you know, projects, pitches from these people who just want your money.
And one way that I know, if it ever gets reported to the off-ramp, whatever it takes, it just kind of gets frozen and sits there.
Still good luck ever getting any of your money but like there's so many steps and processes
it's way over complicated um you know and the system is extremely it's extremely painful
not just when when the money money leaves your pocket but also even trying to recover and
you know finding help um with that as well I've sadly known a lot of people who are very advanced in crypto
who've been hacked or scammed.
It's crazy.
By the way, I just noticed, yeah, Alex, we'll let you go.
And then I just want Ravi to know, we're coming to you next, Ravi.
I just saw who you are and our team was pinging about,
we need to get you up.
But yeah, really excited to talk to you.
But yeah, Alex, what's up? So here's the whole thing about KYC is that we're used to how banks are doing it.
Fundamentally, this idea is an all or nothing concept. And this idea is, it doesn't have to be this way. This
is what I'm working on. So my day job, right, I'm a lawyer and I'm a consultant for companies,
but what I'm building is this link between fiat and crypto without banks. And we're doing KYC in a different manner
because fundamentally, you don't need to give up your anonymity when it's being used as a shield,
right? Nobody needs to know who you are when you're conducting a transaction, a straight
transaction. That's really like, if I'm buying
some goods, nobody needs to know who I am. You just need to know if I have the money for it,
right? And I just need to know if you have the goods, and then we can conduct the transaction.
You don't need all my information. I don't want to be marketed to, things like that. We should
be able to preserve our privacy. But when it comes to conducting something illegally, you should not
be able to use anonymity as a weapon. And that is really the fundamental difference. It's not such
an all or nothing thing where it's essentially you either give all of your information all the time
and thus open it up to people who like the way that the banks do it is fundamentally
flawed, right? The way that they're collecting information and using information. So this is a
different way of being able to collect information where it's just in order to protect people in the
event of illegal activity. So it can't be used as a weapon,
but it doesn't mean that anonymity has to be thrown away in transactions. So the way I fall,
generally speaking, is I would rather let some, and this is my personal leaning, people have
different leanings, right? My personal leaning is I'd rather let a few people get away with a bad activity than have
innocent people, you know, put in jail.
Like that's, everybody has a particular leaning of, would you rather have innocent people
put in jail because of overaggressive attack?
Or would you rather have guilty people on the streets because of underaggressive, you
know, prosecution?
And I'd rather have guilty people on the streets because of underaggressive, you know, prosecution. And I'd rather have guilty people on the streets because of underaggressive prosecution
because my terror is I didn't do anything wrong or my kids didn't do anything wrong
and they're trapped in jail.
That's like, to me, far worse than guilty people being out on the street.
You couldn't look at it.
That's far worse.
far worse. Yeah, you could look at it like utilitarian point of view would be, okay, if we
Yeah, you could look at it like utilitarian point of view would be,
catch a thousand criminals, but we have to make seven billion people or 300 million or whatever
number you're looking at, lose all of their like privacy and freedom and rights. I don't know if
that's a good, I guess it depends on what we're doing. If we're stopping a nuclear attack, sure,
maybe, but if, if we're just stopping like some criminals from selling pot, uh, I think that, I mean, to me, it's very simple to me
is if you're raising money and you want investment, you should then disclose who you are.
Oh, of course.
Super simple.
Super simple.
But we'll disclose who you are for sure.
If you're asking for money for sure, but if you're conducting a transaction, there's no need for the type of disclosure that is actually needed.
And this is the kind of thing that I think we're like conflating any transaction with money involved with particular types of fundraising transactions. And we can actually put different types of guardrails on different
types of transactions because not every transaction requires all of your information all of the
time, which is essentially what allows all of the data to be loose. The other thing is
we need different laws, right? Fundamentally, all of these bills that I've seen people try
to go through where they're like, I have a new way where you can sell your own data. None of that matters unless we change the laws where data
aggregators still have the right to own and sell your data because fundamentally no one who has
the access to their own data is going to be able to sell it for less than a data aggregator can
sell your data because they're selling it for a fraction of a penny. Nobody's going to buy it from you where you sell it for a dollar, right? Or $10 or $15
when a data aggregator is selling your data along with 10 billion other people for like,
or 10 million or whatever it is, other people for like, you know, half a penny per person.
So fundamentally, none of these change unless data aggregators no longer have
the power over your data. So this is a rule change that has to occur before anybody has power over
their own data. Well, this is a perfect segue to Ravi here, who I'll let you introduce yourself,
Ravi, but you guys are doing something super cool, which is actually who I'll let you introduce yourself, Ravi,
but you guys are doing something super cool, which is actually, I don't,
I guess you must not have been on earlier when we were talking about ways to
do, uh, like, you know, the facial KYC,
but that doesn't attach to an ID. I was thinking about you. It's so funny.
I was thinking about you guys and I didn't even know if you were on the stage.
I was literally thinking about what you guys are building, uh, because you can have, um, for example, um, attestations or badges from
either governments or a credit, uh, department, uh, like, uh, the credit, um, bureaus or, uh,
or anything, or like an NFT could give you an attestation, but you don't have to show people. Like, I think it's ridiculous that when you go to buy alcohol from a store, that you have to show your ID that has your address on it.
So you have to give them your home location to prove that you're 21.
But with what you guys are building, you don't have to do that.
You could just show them, hey, I'm 21, but you don't need to know who i am or where i
live but yeah go ahead uh ravi yeah absolutely and thanks for having me i'm sorry i was a little
late to join in but um yeah quick intro for ravi agrawal the site director of growth at
privado id previously polygon id and uh you did mention about one of the use case,
which is where user don't necessarily need
to share their data, but at the same time,
they can generate what we call as a zero knowledge proof
in the user device itself.
And user can send that proof,
proving that whatever credential that you're asking,
whether it is age, whether it is a particular country,
whether it is about a gender and so on. I think this is where we are finding very,
very interesting use cases, especially if we are sticking to the financial space
and just talking about Web3, let's say for airdrops. Majority of the tier one projects
have started asking a little more information about the participants. And unlike previously,
where one user can go with
thousand wallets or there are you know scripted bots who can go and corner majority of the tokens
how are those tokens been secured at the same time not letting those tokens from the foundation to be
distributed to those bots I think those are interesting use cases that we have been seeing
in the web3 space and we are providing on both the sides the
proof of humanity proof of unique humans um you know very lightweight kyc that ensures that you
are not belonging to a particular sanction list and so on i've been hearing some of the previous
conversation uh in this call and um there were very very interesting pointers in terms of how
are we uh you know ensuring that financial crime has to be at a certain limit
so that we are not actually curtailing to the fostering entrepreneurships
or maybe creativity or the personal growth by providing financial freedom
to all those 7 billion plus users.
But I feel the problem is not completely solved
and we are still figuring it out how we provide more efficient,
more easy way of knowing the customer. And I feel that we have reached to a tipping point now where
we are getting addition of the customer base with not 7 billion, but maybe hundreds of billions of
those AI agents who are also going to be interacting on our behalf very soon. And that's where the
problem is multiplied by several folds. And that's where the problem is multiplied
by several folds. And we might have to ensure that we are not only talking about know your
customer, but know your agents. And how are we letting our agents to do those transactions,
bring in those transactions again into the framework, which have been built over a period
of time. And, you know, this simply blow up the overall existing problem when we have not sorted out with so many decades building around the KYC framework.
How are we going to be uplifting the overall KYC framework so as to also address with those billions of agents coming in?
And I think this is where some of the conversations which we are talking in terms of the guardrails.
which we are talking in terms of the guardrails. How can we even create those kind of guardrails
for the agents also to interact and we ensure that certain limits of transactions are allowed,
certain types of transactions are allowed and then there is a legal person who is authorizing
those agents so that in case if there are things that have been non-compliant, there is a person
who can be responsible for those actions of those agents how are we going to be dealing
with it and um you know this is something uh uh something that we are also building which is know
your agent in order to see that we are not only providing the kyc and identity related solution
for humans but also for the agents
Yeah, I'd love to jump in on that because this is my thing.
And then Zoro, I saw you unmuted.
We'll come to you soon.
Sorry, I know you've been here for a while.
We'll come to you next, though.
But yeah, go ahead, Michal.
Yeah, so Ravi, you know, for sure, will definitely set up like a call or something between us
because, you know, our protocol like dominates all the ZK proofs.
I kind of, you know, without, because I always end up when I get on the space, I end up like getting super enthusiastic about our stuff.
So I'm going to try to do like a little explanation of like stealth addressing.
And I heard Alex talk.
I don't have a ton of time today because it's just like super busy. But I want to explain stealth addressing and how
it works in general and that how that just happens not accidentally because this is a thing I've been
working on for years happens to sort of solve that need for verification between parties but
anonymity you know from attackers and everybody else right So, and then how that supports KYC.
So, real quick, what's a stealth address? Well, stealth address classically has been an address
that only the two counterparties in the transaction know that it's their address. Now, obviously, on
most chains, everybody can see all the addresses involved, right? Like, I mean, that's how UTXOs
and Ethereum and everything works. But what you don't know is like, okay, this address that money was received at, you know, who does that belong to? Who's the sender
and the receiver, right? So what we did at Matterfy, which, you know, shortly will be
available as American Fortress in retail, is we made this automatic. So you have a name,
and then these two parties can just compute these stealth addresses automatically based on their names.
So what does that mean?
Well, if Alice sends to Bob, Alice can just know what Bob's stealth address on any chain
and token is and vice versa.
And this is done by a one-way non-interactive crypto proof that just as a minor technical
point is actually not a ZK.
We only use ZK in one of our implementations where, you know, Ravi, you would probably have a lot
more tech to add to this, which is why I want to talk to you at some point soon-ish. But what that
means now, it also works in reverse. So like Alice and the Bob, Bob can also compute Alice's receive
address, and they're all stealth, right? So the address is on chain, but no one knows who it
belongs to, and it's automatic. Now what that does is actually creates identity, the beginnings of identity between the two parties,
right? Because mathematically, only Alice and Bob can compute that address. It's not mathematically
possible for somebody else to compute this address or guess it, right? I mean, it would be one in a quadrillion billion accident,
essentially, right? So Alice knows that Bob sent the money and vice versa. So now you have,
the Delft address is actually not only create sort of this layer of anonymity, but they actually are
the beginnings of KYC. And what you can do on top of that is you can use either ZK or non-ZK proofs to then attach other properties to that, right?
So like, okay, Alice knows that Bob sent her money because the address that she received funds at can only be computed by Bob.
Now, maybe Bob was trying to be sneaky and like he had some different wallet, like that's also under his control.
And he sent some dirty funds to Alice's address that he computed with his clean wallet.
So we have actually a ZK proof that will detect that sort of hack.
But what this lets you do is have, you know, between two parties, you can have a proof of funds proof.
You can even have a proof of proof of funds proof where you can say, okay, Alice, somebody to Bob and Bob sent to Charlie, and Bob can prove to Charlie that it came from Alice,
and vice versa, right?
So, and then on top of this,
the identity proofs can be infinite, right?
Essentially, you can prove your full identity,
you can reveal your passport,
and all this is decentralized.
So, you know, we feel that this is sort of like
the ideal thing people want, right?
And it's, and certainly like from being on spaces
and just hearing customers talk and custodians talk,
like this is the thing that I'm interested in.
So like one of the really cool paradoxes
of stealth addresses is they not only create anonymity,
but they create KYC.
But the KYC is just between the parties involved,
which is exactly what you want, right?
So like everything Alex was just talking about, which is like, hey, you don't want to just give away the house for the benefit of the government and everybody's exposed. That's clearly bad. At
the same time, you want people to be able to comply with the law. So like that's how stealth addresses work and how they help with that.
And that right there, I absolutely love that, you know, to have the not just the anonymity, but knowing the privacy of my wallet.
And people can't just put a wallet watcher on me.
They can't see what I have.
You know, nobody in their right mind needs to know
how much money I have in my wallet. Nobody needs to know how much money I have in my bank. I mean,
even banks, they don't share that publicly. Okay, maybe some really, really rich people, but
you know, that right there is one of the biggest concerns and risks in crypto and why you have these issues with people being abducted to the point where – I mean, that is my biggest fear over government because that could lead to your family.
your family, that can lead to so many different angles and people. I mean, even in my IRL world,
That could lead to so many different angles and people.
I'm very careful of what I even tell people what I do for a living sometimes because I don't want
them to get some weird thought as if I have either millions of dollars or something crazy like that,
or that I'm even potentially even a scammer in some cases, right?
But anyway, government that you should be scared of probably the most,
but also hackers and kidnappers and ransomists, right?
Like just recently, I mean, that's one of my biggest fears is being kidnapped
or someone breaking into my home and like, you know,
cutting mine or Cindy's fingers off or something until we hand over crypto.
So luckily for any would be, you know, people who would want to do that.
First, you're going to have an incredibly hard time finding me.
But even if you do, I don't keep much on me.
So I guess just to clarify, it's not not that I it's not that I don't fear government.
I respect government.
You know, the authorities is different for respect government, you know, the, the
authorities, it's different for me with, you know, those individuals who are criminals, um, that are
targeting people. Yeah. Those are, those are major concerns and risks for me, but yeah, just to
clarify on that. Yeah. I never bring anyone to my house in the industry. Even people I trust never bring anyone to my house,
have multiple properties. So if people are trying to figure out my address, they're going to have a
fun time with that one. I guess you could watch all my properties and try to find me or something,
but you're probably not going to find me. So good luck. But it is a big concern and I have to go
through all these hoops and I can't keep crypto local to me.
So sometimes that's inconvenient. Right. If I want to make a big investment, I got to get like, you know, multi-sig signatures.
I have to literally most of my funds I would have to fly. I'd have to get on physically on a plane to get to access my funds.
And I have multi-sig keys broken up in multiple countries
around the world for in case there's EMP attacks or whatever. But it's a big concern. I mean,
I just had to make a flight just recently just for that. It's really annoying. But if you've
If you've made it in this industry, you've got to be very careful, especially if you're a public person, of being kidnapped and ransomed.
made it in this industry, you got to be very careful, especially if you're a public person,
I mean, it happens.
It's not terribly common, but it's not uncommon.
Yeah, so like an obvious example of this that just happened was the $30 million that got given to Ross, right?
And everybody knew because his donation address was just sitting on his page.
And then all of a sudden there was a $30 million transfer.
So now like if you're an attacker, you're like, for sure, Ross got 30 million.
Right.
And the government now, too.
They got to tax that transaction.
Yeah.
So just so you understand how this is just kind of how does stealth addresses solve this problem?
So, like, if you have a name, right, and the name lets all counterparties generate a unique receive address between you and them, right?
So you got Alice Bob, you know, trying to donate to Ross, right?
So they know Ross's name and Ross's name is Ross.
And actually I offered to Ross, I know his mom.
I actually sent her this message.
I was like, hey, you know, I'll give you the name Ross.
It's reserved in your system forever
whenever you reach out to me, essentially, right?
Just like, so is Trump, et cetera.
So when the counterparty wallet gets the name,
they'll compute a unique receive address.
And so those funds are guaranteed
to go to a fresh address that no one knows.
So no one knows that Ross got 30 million,
that he received any money. Like in our system, the only sort of leak, if you will,
is that when Ross receives the funds, he'll see what the source address is. So he can actually
chain analyze his own funds and, you know, and it's a benefit to be able to see if any of them
are fraudulent, for example, but he will see the balance of that thing.
So like the one chain feature
that I'm working on with a few chains
to make it even more perfect
is that the source address,
you can see what it is,
but you can't see its balance.
So like, you know that say,
you know, you got two Ethereum from someone,
for example, or $30 million or what have you,
and you still
have that kyc proof of who it came from but you you can't tell the source address whether that
source address had 30 million bucks in it or one or two or minus or whatever you know well obviously
not minus but you can't so that would be like the one feature and there are a few chains already
working on this which is this uh which in that case you have what I would call sort of like a perfect financial system where you can just easily pay with crypto for anything.
No one knows your balances at all, whether you're the sender or the receiver, but the parties involved have KYC.
And the other thing I'll point out is this also happens to solve all the phishing because most of the phishingishing just you know the end point is always like hey
send money to this address and you don't know if it's really the counterparty's address and
and so like you know another example this is you know what's called zero transfer attacks which is
where you know all this this dust gets sent to a lookalike address somebody's looking at their uh
their own history and say ether scan and they grab the attacker's address and it was just a story on
this like just four days ago i think on coin teleraph some guy lost 2.6 million to that exact attack
and the reason it's called zero transfer is like you know they didn't the attackers didn't steal
the private keys or like forcibly steal the money they just really pasted an address that
the beginning and then looked correct right um to the end user so that they just copied it from
the transaction history they thought they were sending it to their friend, but they actually sent it to the attacker.
So obviously, like, when you have, you know, sent a name, which is really what we're calling
it, like, you solve that problem as well.
So, yeah, I mean, and what's exciting is that, you know, all this stuff will be available
in production in months.
Like, we're just right at the very, right, still close now to releasing. It's been
a long road just to all the economic ups and downs, but you know, I'm like super excited to
finally get in the hands of the people. And I can also say that there will be two different wallets
that we're releasing. One is going to make Bitcoin purists absolutely thrilled. It's a UTXO only wallet that uses non-privacy snooping accelerators.
So we have this special tech that only we have that lets you sync chains,
even as hugest Bitcoin in seconds, because we checkpoint the entire chain.
And then we don't use Bloom filters.
We use the opposite. We use like our custom version of C filters.
And what this does is the accelerator doesn't even know what money you're
looking for, which is unlike like inferior and everything on Ethereum.
Right.
And we're also going to be releasing a wallet for EVMs that will also have
Bitcoin in it that does use infra,
which means that generally if anybody's snooping the infra,
they'll be able to tell like they can't control your money,
but it can tell what balances you're looking for.
But we're going to, you know, because the UTXO tech is so unique,
we're actually going to release a special product for just, you know,
hardcore Bitcoiners.
Like if you want the most private wallet on planet Earth, this will do that.
And what it does is it like literally the only thing in the system that knows
your balance is your own wallet.
Nothing else in the infrared can tell.
And then you communicate directly with the peer-to-peer with the nodes on the network to send transactions and like figure out like if a particular block has money in it for you.
And so obviously it's like as decentralized as humanly possible.
It's not, you can't make it more decentralized.
You can't make it more decentralized.
So I'm super excited about that
because when you combine that with stealth addresses,
you have one of our devs, Justice,
who was the original inventor of Bit47.
He's really been campaigning,
like this wallet needs to exist.
So I was just like, look, man,
we're going to release a special justice version
for the hyper-technical people
that care about that level.
I think we'll call it something like the Raptor wallet, you know,
because it's for Dino coins.
But, like, yeah.
Awesome.
Yeah, thank you for that, Michal.
I see Joel.
He's got his hand up.
Hey, how's it going?
Joel with Dash.
The account is also on there as well.
Just want to say say on the general like
kyc kind of thing um it's not necessarily that anyone ever decided that this was a good thing
to begin with it's that it was a something that could be forced upon people when you have a
permissioned financial system and so uh what we And so what we're having now is we're trying our
best, I would say, to create the most permissionless financial system we've ever had.
And as part of that, a lot of the old system is sort of trying to get in there and say,
look, this is the way we did things before. Let's kind of try to do this on the new system.
However, if we do achieve the goals
of a permissionless financial system,
then being able to sort of enforce any kind of KYC
is not going to exist.
That doesn't mean that polite society
or whatever that means won't still use it.
But at some point you'll have
two different parallel kind of options,
whereas you can use stuff without permission,
or you can go through KYC to do whatever else.
And I've kind of...
I got a completely...
Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
Like I just said,
you could have a completely permissionless system with full KYC.
Like you just...
You can, but my point is you can have a completely, that's not
what I said. I said
you can have a
permissionless system and therefore you
can have a no KYC system.
So now that you can have both side by side,
you have the choice, you get a proper
evaluation of the systems
of will people use one
or the other, whereas right now there's
no real choice because it's not
permissionless and it will be interesting to kind of see how this kind of thing um evolves
so like for example i noticed in my you know life using money in the last decade not really using
fiat at all i've noticed that in a lot of ways, the cash only type of world before KYC was definitely
not mandatory in a lot of ways.
It's gotten a lot more cracked down on over the years for sure.
But with the crypto world, I've found a lot of ways, a lot of things are easier to do
without using KYC or otherwise identified services than before.
It's kind of bring digital cash is kind of breaking back cash in a sense.
And as long as this is possible,
as long as you maintain the integrity of decentralized systems,
I do think that there will be a lot of people that will be like,
oh, this is way better.
You mean I don't have to give my ID to a government honeypot or
whatever else in order to just buy my coffee in the morning. Now, of course, that doesn't mean
that there's no use case for people having their actual personhood identified for a financial
transaction or engagement of any kind. Of course, there's always going to be that, especially if
you are, if a sale or a trade or whatever
is only open to certain individuals.
You should obviously have to be able to prove that you're that individual in order to do
that.
But I do think that we will see kind of a reduction in what I would consider as a financial universal
KYC policy, where people say, if you want to use money, you have to be identified and
policy where people say, if you want to use money, you have to be identified and permissioned.
permissioned.
I think that those two, as we get rid of the permission part of it, I think the universal
identification for any kind of monetary use case thing will probably be on the way out. At least
that's my hope and prediction. So yeah, just to jump in there really quick.
Can I just agree with you, Julia? Sorry, I misheard you. You're completely right that
permissionless systems allow for full anonymity, right? So that's true. The KYC is optional. Essentially, you have to code it in or Binance or, you know, and the, the, the user just knows it's, you know, this wallet is used for custody.
Therefore you have to have KYC at the beginning. Then we put it in on the, on the, on the client side.
Now it's actually possible for an attacker to, to make a wallet using the same protocol that will be decentralized, and it will fail the KYC checks.
Therefore, the recipient can know, like, okay, this isn't necessarily a legit user.
But it is actually, there's no workaround around the decentralization.
So, Joel, you're completely right about that, and I misheard you.
Awesome. So yeah, just to jump in here, two points. The first one is there's a massive issue with the KYC platforms themselves, right?
Awesome.
So, yeah, just to jump in here, two points.
to get KYC'd. It's all in who's actually even doing your KYC. And if they are going through
the thorough checks to even make sure that it's really you or not just some scammer.
And then at the same time, because they're not always necessarily actual government agencies,
they just have various licenses and deals with government agencies or law enforcement.
you know, various licenses and deals with government agencies or law enforcement.
You know, they they're not that is somebody who is not government. That's that's not law
enforcement. That's not somebody that I necessarily trust. And when they get leaked,
it's just another platform for my information to get leaked. Now, number two, entering into KYC
and even entertaining the idea of a KYC and a financial system is, in my opinion, complete heresy and completely terrible.
I mean, if you really want to go down the theory of the rabbit hole with this, I mean, there's a few tunnels in here. you can eventually find yourself in this world where you are not just debanked,
but you're being told of what you can, you cannot buy for whatever reason that they want to decide
that. And that's a major issue that we are currently, in my opinion, we're running in
full force towards it by having to have a lot of these different KYC systems. I mean,
nobody needs to know who I am and where my money comes from or what I have. All they need to know
is that the transaction is good. And if they want to do that transaction at that time, right? I mean,
everybody has, every business has the right to refuse service, of course.
And I'm not talking about like there's a lot of what ifs that we can throw in here.
We can say, what if you're a criminal?
We can say, what if you're buying, I don't know, bombs, uranium, whatever it is.
I'm talking about the everyday person like myself who, you know, I get worried that if it comes to a point.
Everybody, they know who I am, they know where my, when I'm buying, they're able to study me on a deeper level. I mean, it's a really easy way for, you know,
even psychologically to, I don't know, do crazy things that the government does, right? Or have
been known to say, or there's a theory that,
you know, they do psychological warfare, like MKUltra. I mean, these are things that you were
just providing them with all this information now for them, and even companies, right, like Coca
Cola, they know how to target you now, even deeper and even better. So anyways, all right,
we got to go to Zorro. I don't think we've had Zorro talk yet.
Yeah, thank you, finally.
But a great conversation, though.
This is very timely.
I'm Che, CEO and co-founder of Zorro.
I wanted to bring attention to data side of things, right?
We're talking about KYC or Ezekiel Proofs here.
Quickly on that so we built the zoro um
at the intersection of ai and uh web3 which is blockchain and and zk proof uh using solution
for data contribution data annotation um and also we are entering into ai agents i know ravi talked
about a know your own agents, right?
So we are building a marketplace.
So on the data side, think about this, right?
So we initially, when we launched a mini Telegram app for Zorro,
we got millions of users rushed towards the platform to push in the data.
However, the funny part is the reason why we started Zoro is, as you know, the data
aggregator, data brokers are in the hands of a handful of giants. So we wanted the data to be
coming from the users themselves and compensated rightly and fairly on the system. However,
on the flip side, when we saw millions of users come in and we saw half of them were like mostly duplicates, bot and all sorts of attacks.
So that's where we had to roll out Wallet Connect for supporting Web3 users. And on the other side,
we also started seeing multiple wallets belonging to the same person. So we had to roll out KYC in
this case. So we have unbiased and more globally with, since we are entering into physical
AI too, wherein in that case, the patent data is more important than the actual user-specific data.
We strip off using ZK. And we also have to validate the quality of the data when we do on
the process. So from my side of things, how we rolled out, right? So initially it was open for anybody and everybody to do the task and get rewards.
And then we went TGE recently.
Hoo-hoo.
So again, converting points into tokens, we don't want to be, again, incentivizing a handful
of people who hold multiple user IDs and multiple wallets.
It's not fair for the system. And I think that colludes
our data. It's garbage in, garbage out, as we all know. So that's where we keep our point in terms of
why KYC is key, especially keeping data quality high. Training these models with garbage data is
nothing but, and if you are using computer vision and robotics
to train from these data,
essentially that's the worst you're doing for the future, right?
So yeah, that's what we see from our side of the world.
But happy to hear people's talk here.
Can I, can I, I don't know if you guys can hear me.
Can I comment quickly? We can. Hopefully you can. Yeah, I don't know if you guys can hear me. Can I comment quickly? Hopefully,
yeah, please. Yay. Okay. Sorry. My connection, I'm on the road. So my connection is always iffy,
but so I wanted to say with the KYC thing, now there is actually an issue where internationally
there are 200 countries that are signatories to FADF and the rules there. So we do have an obligation to know
where money is coming from regarding like AML and KYC rules. Even if we don't want to be part
of these regulations, there's still an obligation. We live in jurisdictions where there's obligations,
right? Like what I'm building is fully legally compliant. It is, even though it's different and better than what banks are doing, it doesn't involve all the AI and the processing that, you know, they are looking at what you're doing and what you're, they're looking at your patterns.
They're looking at, they're selling your data, all of that stuff.
I'm not doing any of that stuff, right?
And I'm not doing anything where, like, you know, no one can get your data other than if you commit a crime,
right? If there's a subpoena, because we should still have accountability. You shouldn't be
allowed to commit crimes and have this anonymity protecting you. Like, I still think we should
build this in where we say that anonymity is not something that you have a right to so that you can freely commit crimes.
And that is the thing that other jurisdictions, that laws have an opposition to. Now, we may have
our own views of whether or not there should be some absolute right to anonymity, etc. But the
truth is that legally, we have this set of regulations that says that we have entitlement to know who you are in certain instances.
Some of those instances go too far. There isn't actually a right to know who you are.
In those instances, even though most entities will take your information, my system is saying, no, you can't get the information,
right? There is a baseline though saying that there is an entitlement to have information
available in the event that you are someone who commits a crime. It's not accessible to anyone
though, unless there's a subpoena. And I think
that's actually a minimum requirement. I do think that if someone steals from you, you have the
right to hold them accountable. You should be able to do that. I don't think that our constant,
that the way that we treat criminals, where it's like, well, that's just a cost of doing business.
that we treat criminals where it's like well that's just a cost of doing business that's one
of the things that keeps what we do from being mass adopted and there are many people who say
don't have mass adoption that's fine the way we do business is not for everyone that's fine
i actually think that's not a good thing because i think this is one of the most important steps
though in being able to create generational wealth.
The other point that I wait one second, one second, because I'm going to have to get going soon because I'm entering really bad reception.
So the other aspect, though, is remember that for many, many, many people in this space, this is first in family wealth.
Anything that they've gained in crypto is absolutely first in family wealth. Anything that they've gained in crypto is absolutely first
in family wealth. There is a lot of fear in general in this space, in crypto in general,
in blockchain. There's a lot of institutional fear and there's a lot of fear of what happens
when I get something because this is first in family wealth and they don't know how to treat it
or how to grow it. Most people who've gotten anything in
this space still don't have generational wealth, which is the ability to support yourself plus at
least one heir from the interest alone of the money that you have. Most people still don't
have that, even if they have some significant amount of money. You need to know how to build the rest of that.
The issue here is that most people are not learning how to treat the wealth that they have
or anything that they gain here.
They don't know how to treat, first of all, the things that they build in blockchain like a business.
And then they don't know how to treat wealth earned like wealthy people do, right?
They're hiding money like squirrels, right? As opposed to learning how to protect wealth earned
and make it grow. That is a very different set of information, right? That's a very different way
of acting. It's very, this is just very different and it's a different skill set, right? It's a very different way of acting. It's very, this is just very different
and it's a different skillset, right?
It's something that everyone can learn,
but it is just not endemic to the way most people
that start off retail in blockchain act.
It is something that everyone must learn
in order to gain net worth, right?
In order to gain generational wealth, everyone can do it,
but you have to start switching your mindset, right?
So that's all I wanted to say.
And this is a great space, but I feel like I'm, you know,
I'm starting to lose reception.
So yeah, thank you for that, Alex.
And just to jump in there, you know, for me, like KYC,
I find I'm okay.
I find it, it's a great idea. If I go to cross, go into the U.S., you know, Customs or TSA, they know who I am.
Right. That's perfectly fine.
Identifying yourself when you're crossing a border into a different country is totally fine.
Perfect. But when it comes to finances, I totally believe in anonymity.
That's private.
This is private information that nobody needs to know, even the government.
And even just to counter that, I know it's not easy for the everyday person to be able to track down and take down these criminals.
But we do have detectives and these people who are trained that know how to do this
specifically with or without blockchain. I mean, it's not about, even if you make it harder for
them, you know, privately, they're still going to find the information. I mean, that's what they're
designed to do. You know, the people who, anyways that that's uh that's all
so i just wanted to propose a a couple of ideas that i think are largely untouched upon and and
actually a lot of speakers on here have touched on lots of key things i like what alex is saying
about like legal structures like for example setting up a trust in a place like North Dakota, for
example, allows you to have a ton of privacy and tax benefits and all kinds of things.
You know, or like rock, you know, live in Puerto Rico and you get these massive tax benefits.
And some of the other people were talking about, like, you know, figuring out ways to,
you know, create confidentiality or create, you know figuring out ways to you know create confidentiality
or create you know various levels of uh anonymity like joel was talking about like all of these
things uh ultimately um they they come together in such a way that you know i i think that if we
were using the blockchain for literally all of these things like one of the things that we've
theorized at my company over at uh gorilla Pool, and we support these things, we just specifically support them
on the BSV blockchain, which makes it not really portable to lots of other things. But so we have
a few things. We have the Sigma identity protocol. We have the Bitcoin attestation protocol, the
author identity protocol. And what these things are is you create an on-chain
identity as like a transaction object, a UTXO object. And then from there, you also have public
attestation of the validity of that identity. So that like, for example, if I create Kurt as an
on-chain identity, it's fine. Like that looks like it might be me, but I would need other people to
attest that they confirm that that's me. And then, you know, it, this is, is actually kind of like
what they do with the DMV. When you get your driver's license, you have to bring your,
your cell phone bill and you have to bring a water bill and, you know, like maybe, maybe your
passport or whatever, like you're kind of bringing in all these like, hey, you know, these five companies agree that I'm me. And because I'm holding these things, can you agree
that I'm me and issue me an ID? And so we've kind of ported that same idea in that, you know,
you can have like a mining company, for example, or, you know, various other like commercial
entities in the space on the chain that you're using can say, yeah, I agree that that wallet or that signature. So you're essentially
doing like a Satoshi ID, like, yes, I own this wallet. And you're doing that for an identity
on chain. And then with that, you know, let's say I have a hundred attestations
that my ID is me. And therefore, if I publish an NFT project, like that, you know, that that's me
that did it. Or if I create a smart contract for a DeFi platform, like, you know, that it's me and
not some like unstoppable almost, right? Essentially. Yeah. I mean, you're, you're
distributing, you're distributing the, the pseudo KYC aspect of it.
But that same concept can also be used by banks and lenders and other institutions.
So I can imagine if...
Go ahead.
Well, yeah, just on that, you know, like the unstoppable idea.
I have an ENS.
I have an ENS. However, after maybe being in a couple projects and I buy a large amount and it says my name, after people already know who you are and they're asking you, oh, did you just buy this? You're like, how do you know? it's because it's under your ens i i no longer
pretty sure richard bought a racist coin on solana i'm just kidding no no um no um anyways no it was
like i mean listen there's a bunch of nfts from from some ecosystems and you know i support them
but you know do i need the the the people in there to know that they're
all mine like that i bought it i mean that's kind of why i went away from it because it's
it's kind of scary in in my opinion that's what matterfied yeah uh that niha earlier is solving
private send a name you can use you can use a send a name like rock.eth or rock.polygon, whatever, but no one can see your balances.
It's all done with these individual, not payment channels, but like a handshake individual address for each party.
It's really interesting.
Kurt, you were talking about institutions, right?
So one thing is, like, I can be Kurt, but i can also be some other you know pseudonym like
you can get as much attestation to a pseudonym and then that itself is privacy and so imagine if
you have a pseudonym and say hey can i get a loan as this pseudonym like you can see that
this pseudonym is in control of a you know $50 million and also has attestations of good faith from all
these other entities. Is that enough for me to get alone or do business with you without revealing my,
my government ID? Such a good point, man. This is something I was, I've been thinking about.
So earlier, I forget who was, uh, talking about, um, uh, they were doing the, it was Andre, I think,
they were doing the, it was Andre, I think, but was it doing the like facial recognition? But
I was thinking like, why do chains, for example? So one thing you can use this for is when people
do airdrops, they want to know it's a real person and not a bot, right? But in reality, what is the
reason you want to be a real person? So there's a few reasons. One is you want your user count to
go up because that helps get valuations or metrics or for investors and retail or whatever. You want people to actually
use the chain. But what's the value? Is it that it's a real person or is it that it's a real
person who's going to spend money? So advertising, for example, to U.S. customers, you get way more return for your money than, you know, a third world country.
So what is it that we're actually after?
Is it like we're all trying to solve this, like don't let the bots in or whatever. But at the end of the day, at some point, bots might be more valuable
than humans when they start trading and they have bank account, you know, crypto wallets and
all this. So you almost, I saw a project do this. A few projects started doing this where
when they're doing like an IDEO, like a launchpad IDEO type thing, They're looking at all the wallets who signed up, how much money do those
wallets have in them? And they're using that as a metric saying, we have not 40,000 people signed
up on a watch list for our IDO because a lot of those could be bots or they could be poor people,
no offense. I'm just saying this is how businesses think. It's just a reality. If they're not going to actually spend money, they're just there for an airdrop or
whatever incentive you're giving them. But it's interesting if you have people signing up for
the watches who actually are going to spend money. This is like, again, advertising. This is a big
part of the science of advertising. So does it matter that it's an actual person? I would argue yes, but for businesses,
maybe that isn't the North Star. Yeah. I mean, it really depends on the context. Like,
is their ID relevant to the value? I think you could have a relevant pseudonym. I mean,
like you go by Rock. Is your name Rocky it or do you have some longer name like does
that matter like you have a reputation as rock zacharias and it doesn't matter if that's you
know a lot of people go by their middle name because like they didn't like their dad and
they have the same name as their dad or that kind of thing i'm actually a junior that's funny i i
loved my dad a lot he passed away but uh yeah but it's but that's a common thing you know like i i i know a lot of
people that go by a pseudonym in the first place because for whatever reason and they build in this
industry it's probably a smart thing to do when you have hackers and kidnappers right there's
it makes a lot of sense same with same with celebrities i mean like i don't think brad pitt
or tom cruise are i don't think that's their real names either.
Like, that's partially as a way to simplify their identity
for the sake of getting work.
Branding and pen names.
And if I get wealthy, I don't want people to just trivially be able
to start tracking me down by my real name either.
That's in due date.
Remember, his name was Ethan Tremblay, but that's not his, remember he was uh his name was uh ethan tremblay but that's not his like real
name and they put it all to get money from like the western union and he couldn't do it yeah i
mean you know this is a sad fact but yeah there's people in other countries who have uh not english
sounding names and so they use an english sounding name because it's easier for them to get investments
or things when they're not like and it's just a fact of the world.
I'm not saying that that's a good thing or not, but it's just a fact of the world.
There's other, another part of this is like, uh, if like many people do not touch politics or do not comment on politics, because if you do, you're quick to get like lumped into one side or the other.
And now you lose half your audience.
Look at Elon.
His,
his,
he lost what?
$80 billion or something of his net worth.
There's something crazy. Right.
because he chose a side and then he went against that side.
So now both sides hate him.
didn't he say sorry though or something?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It looks like they're,
they're making up.
Who knows?
Whatever. Anyways, but I mean, thankfully he never made fun of his golf game or it would have been game over but yeah so like i have multiple reddit accounts for example uh and i use one is more
business kosher focused the other i will comment on more political stuff. I'll be a little more, I'll say things that I might not say with my public identity just
because, you know, maybe they're more aggressive things to say.
But we do that, right?
Humans do that.
And I think it's a good thing to do.
You might have a gamer tag where you're, you know, you don't want to associate your gamer
friends with your business colleagues, or you might not want to associate the people you're talking about politics with with your family because your family will
disown you you know like how many of us have had family members just because you make a comment
about politics that like never want to talk to you again it's crazy oh yeah oh yeah yep all right
i gotta run guys uh all kinds of stuff going on, but happy Friday.
Thanks again for having me on.
Good chat.
Is it going to be a long run or you can do like a 5K?
So I do actually need to get my steps in also, but that's not what I meant.
Bro, do that during this show.
Everybody needs to do that during the show.
I didn't do as good today because I was pacing in my house.
I wasn't outside.
But I'm at two and a half miles already.
Nice.
That's awesome.
I average seven miles a day on Twitter spaces and business calls.
I do like maybe 10 to 12 hours a day of business calls and Twitter spaces.
And I average seven miles just doing that, walking around, talking.
And it gets your – I'm way more uh my iq goes up by like
20 points when i'm walking if i'm sitting i'm like my brain is all foggy yeah yeah yeah exactly
yeah yeah and sun go walk in the sun yeah it's it's magical for your health and for your mental
health and for your energy levels so i gotta chime in and in and say, I agree with Kurt. It is time to go.
I have to leave as well.
I've got a work call in two minutes,
but thanks very much for having me.
We didn't get to talk to you enough today, Joel.
Yeah, sorry.
I had another space right before.
So, you know, back to back to back,
you know how it is.
Cool, man.
Thanks for coming, bro.
Cheers.
Thanks.
Cheers to you too.
Cool.
We have some new speakers coming up shortly also.
Let's see. We got someone.
I don't know if this is a scheduled speaker or not,
but we're going to play speaker roulette here,
and we're just going to bring this person up and see if I'm taking the risk.
I don't know if it's scheduled or if this person's gonna yell curse words or something but how you doing at identity block
president of the pulse chain foundation
sorry guys just before the guy to pop in I I'm also gonna leave you guys so I
thank you for having me today and yeah I'm really happy to leave you guys. So thank you for having me today.
And yeah, I'm really happy to be maybe on the next call with you guys. Okay.
Yeah.
Everybody give Andre a follow.
You've been on here for two hours with us.
Thanks for coming.
You had great insights.
Yeah.
Give Andre a follow.
Give the other speakers and give the listeners a follow guys.
A lot of these listeners are long time supporters.
These guys are a lot of these people are longtime supporters. These guys are a lot of these
people in the audience are like ultra supporters, actually, that we've been seeing for years.
We have Ale in the audience and Alistair Kromova and Pete Schroeder from Circle. Good to see you
in the audience. If you have any opinions on privacy, Pete, you could come up. Let's see who else we got. KBot, always a good supporter.
Digital fellow. He's in like all of our spaces anywhere. Roy has brought, he came up when we
had, who was that incredible published speaker we had? Roy came up and talked to him. Let's see,
we got King Dank Kush in the audience.
We got, let's see, Panda.
Give Panda account a follow.
He's on the Quigswap account right now.
Just to give a shout out, Rock.
Crypto Stacks is down there.
Yeah, Sheldon.
What's up?
Yeah.
And then we also got Crypto Bullseye, which is Kurt.
Oh, nice.
I sent a lot of followers to all of you guys.
So, yeah.
We got Crypto Canuck in the audience, also longtime supporter.
We got Art Garage, also longtime supporter.
We got ETH Daily.ETH.
We got German Bombshell in the audience.
We have, yeah, Kurt from Crypto Bullseye.
They're doing really cool stuff.
We got Jiggy I don't recognize.
Oh, we got Douglas Horn from EAST Protocol.
They're building something really cool, actually.
If you have any opinions, Douglas, on privacy, you could feel free to request and we'll bring you up. It was great to see you in Vegas. Actually, you saw a bunch of
these people in Vegas at Tokenize and Bitcoin Vegas and Litecoin Summit. We got Matterfy,
we got American Fortress in the audience. Give American Fortress a follow. That's a shameless
plug. They're one of our portfolio clients. That's a
subsidiary of Matterfy essentially. And they're the ones doing the privacy, private send to name.
We're an investor in them and incubating them. Let's see. We got Tony in the audience. We got
Joe Arcade. Tony. Yeah. Tony's he's, he's been a listener for a long time.
I've known Tony for quite a bit of time as well.
I'm giving you a follow back, Tony.
I don't know you, but if Richard says you're cool, I'm following you.
Actually, anytime I see any audience members following me, I always follow them back.
So I'll try to follow all you guys if I see you.
So we do have also some new speakers up here, Rock.
It looks like we have Douglas here.
Yeah, thanks.
Following the invite to speak up about privacy.
Awesome.
It's good to see you again, Douglas.
We've got Derek, and we also got Hummingbird as well.
Awesome.
Yeah, Steer is great.
We've been partners with them for a long time.
Derek, great to see you.
Give him a follow.
And then Hummingbird, I am trying to think if our team –
I told our team to talk to you, and I told them to talk to two people
about some market-making stuff, and you were one of the ones that I told,
and I forget if it didn't make sense or not.
Are you guys – actually, yeah.
Why don't you quickly tell us what you guys do?
And I think you're more on the decentralized side, not sexist, though.
No, so Hummingbird is actually a marketing and networking platform,
so we're not on the market-making side. Well, this is not Hummingbot. You a marketing and networking platform. So we're not on the market.
This is not humming bot.
You guys have a similar.
That is correct.
I also thought this was humming bot.
Yeah.
So no,
we're a,
we're a,
we're a marketing and a,
and networking platform,
but,
but we have a big,
a big hand in doing a lot of DeFi stuff.
Cause the other half of our business is using our treasury to generate yield that then we use to compensate our users.
So love that whole side of things.
But no, the actual platform does not do what Hummingbot does.
How do you generate yield?
So a lot of DeFi, so a lot of concentrated liquidity pools.
So that's kind of been my jam.
I've been doing it for like three, four years.
And yeah, everything from kind of your layer one tokens to, you know, your bigger infrastructure
and even some of your, you know, your more popular and established meme coins.
So not trying to hit the home runs, just trying to hit singles and doubles.
But that's worked for me my entire life in finances.
Just keep hitting singles and doubles
and never risk more than a certain percent
of the portfolio in any given trade.
And it works really well.
Nice.
So are you guys like an ALM
or have aspects of an ALM and automated liquidity
management? No. So, I mean, it's just what we do in the background with the treasury. The actual
platform is more akin to a social questing platform, but also includes like networking and,
and focus group and testing into there. So what it really is, is just trying to reward people for
the stuff they do anyway, that they usually don't get paid for, really is, is just trying to reward people for the stuff they do
anyway, that they usually don't get paid for, which is, you know, being loyal supporters of
other projects and networking, connecting people. A lot of people spend a lot of time in Web3 doing
stuff that kind of doesn't get rewarded. And so we created a platform that rewards people for doing
that and organizes the efforts to do that. And then just so happens that, you know,
we figured out that instead of just, you know,
taking our money and paying it out and expenses to build,
you know, take the money, earn yield from it,
use that yield to build.
Nice. Well, feel free to come check us out.
We are one of the premier ALMs in this space.
If you're not aware of us, go check out steer.finance. And we have a lot of ALM
strategies or LP strategies that might be worthwhile for you guys. Yeah, trusted. We'll
give it like a official endorsement from QuickSwap here. Trusted by QuickSwap. We've been working with
these guys for a while. So yeah. And which account is that here? That's the steer protocol?
guys for a while so yeah and which account is that here that's the steer protocol yeah steer
steer protocol we've been around for about four years uh live for three and we now operate across
about 43 chains uh 45 plus dexes and we run about 3 000 plus lp strategies concurrently
across all those chains but but uh but yeah basically if you're on a chain and you're on an AMM, for instance, Polygon and QuickSwap, you'll see our logo. Cool. Yeah, I have to check that
out. I mean, we're trying to do, you know, we do DeFi across, you know, many different chains. And
so while we'd like to do stuff ourselves, we also love to use other, like other platforms and
protocols to have diversity of, diversity of management and diversity of
strategy because not only is it proper capital management with how much you put in one trade
or this position, but a lot of diversity of this strategy itself helps a lot. So yeah,
we'll definitely check you guys out and maybe we can get on a call sometime to look at some strategies. Nice. Cool.
So, yeah, so just to kick off.
Before we move on from that, Steer, I'm going to – so you guys are on.
You said 49 DEXs.
Pretty sure Quickswap was one of the first.
Did you guys have – I think you guys had –
We were the first.
Awesome.
I'm pretty sure we gave you guys what we call the quick swap effect, where when we integrate people, especially like more natively or when we kind of officially endorse it, then all of a sudden you have, you like, I don't know, 10 other products where they had no, not a lot of traction.
And then we like endorsed them.
We, of course, do a lot of DD first.
I think Darren and Alexi here, Darren on the quick swap handle and Alexi did a ton of DD
on you guys.
I think I remember Alexi talking about you guys quite a bit early and saying you guys
had some innovative stuff.
We do DD. We make sure you have audits or sometimes we've been helped the teams pay for the audits. I remember Alexi talking about you guys quite a bit early and saying you guys had some innovative stuff.
We do DD.
We make sure you have audits.
Or sometimes we even help the teams pay for the audits.
And then once we start using you and start getting you volume and liquidity and battle testing and Lindy effect, then a bunch of other people start using you.
I think that happened with Steer, right?
True.
True.
Very true. Yeah, I mean, we also have investments by SushiSwap as well, which is also helpful.
But yeah.
But it started with us.
There was quite the quick swap effect that did happen.
That is a real thing.
Awesome.
Yeah.
The quick swap effect was a wild one just because for us, just in the way that it happened and the timing, the TVL went basically parabolic to a point.
So that was pretty awesome to see.
Hell yeah.
$80,000 away from taking the top TVL spot on Polygon,
which is a spot we have not held for probably three or four years
when Aave first passed us.
Was someone saying something?
Congratulations.
That's amazing.
Yeah, we are at, I think, $278 million on QuickSwap as of today
and generating a lot more fees than Uniswap
and volume we go back and forth with them on.
But we almost always generate a lot more fees than they do.
I mean, I think for the past month or two,
we've had more fees than the rest of the chain combined.
I mean, on Steer for QuickSwap,
we'd have 10% right now on stables,
which is just crazy.
Wow.
I think that's across USDC, USDC, USDT,
and then maybe one other pair.
But yeah.
That's incredible.
Is that consistent?
Yes.
Yeah, I mean, I will say.
Why are people using like Aave or other things?
They should be putting it in Steer on QuickSwap and getting 10%.
Like four to six, I'll say four to six generally.
Sometimes it'll bump itself up to eight on the APR native off of QuickSwap alone.
And again, you're applying like a proper strategy to your liquidity.
So you're juicing this a little bit, right?
But none of it is like rewards or anything.
So you're usually doing between four to six,
maybe sometimes eight.
And then on top of that,
there's also Merkle rewards
that are also being distributed.
I think by Circle,
which gives you another 4%,
which basically inks you around like eight to 10.
Yeah, it's really good.
Circle is distributing those rewards through merkle
uh wow some of them yeah come there's an additional four percent that comes out of merkle
so merkle is a perfect other example you're queuing me up here uh softball but uh i don't
even know if you know but we actually basically not incubated in the way that lda incubates
companies normally but kind of in the way that we did with Steer or Gamma where we support you guys.
We do co-marketing.
We establish you like from an official endorsement and then put you on the UI and things.
But yeah, Merkle was one that they had a product.
It was cool.
It was interesting. actually Alexi from our team, our head of BD, came up with a new idea for how they could use their Merkle rewards
for V3 and for some other things, and they've exploded since.
So we were a big part of the early growth of Merkle and still to this day.
So I want to welcome Justin here to the space.
Are you there, Justin?
Hello. Yes.
Welcome.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah. Would you like to introduce yourself?
Sure. Now, I am. So I I'm a lawyer, not not a real professional.
Like I get this fence that all of you are um in this space but i uh i'm
in new york city i'm at the law firm of mayor brown i before i came here i was in the government
for 13 years i've been at the firm for two years now and so i had um that's really where i think
probably most of my relevant crypto experience started i was from 2010 to 2019 i was a federal
prosecutor and i did a few different things eventually came to be cyber crimes prosecutor relevant crypto experience started. I was from 2010 to 2019, I was a federal prosecutor. And I
did a few different things, eventually came to be cyber crimes prosecutor and was the chief of the
cyber crimes unit in Newark, New Jersey. I think the, you know, I started in that job, I got my
first exposure to crypto in 2011. At the time, I was a federal prosecutor in Baltimore and some federal agents came in to speak to me
and they said, we arrested a drug dealer yesterday,
which is pretty common occurrence in Baltimore.
And he told us that he was using internet money
to buy drugs on the internet.
And I said, was he high?
They said, yes, but then he showed us how he did it.
And that is the first time I saw a Bitcoin in action.
I remember us trying to teach ourselves how to do it.
And then fast forward, when I was focused on sophisticated cyber crimes work, mostly focused on cyber crime groups operating out of foreign countries.
And their currency of choice had become crypto by, say, 2015, 2016.
crypto by say 2015, 2016. And I also investigated like the first corporate ransomware group,
which was the first group in 20, starting in 2016, that started shutting down
hospitals and cities and companies and extorting them, a crime which also revolved around crypto.
So in those capacities, I would say that teams that I was on, we were early adopters in terms
of crypto tracing and trying to understand how it was being used by by bad actors in 2019 i flipped over to being a regulator at the new york department of
financial services which some of you might know um has been prominent in the crypto space this has
uh a regulatory license called a bit license which um has been one of the avenues for actually
getting regulated in the united states but a pretty
terrible one i would probably argue what's your opinion all right we can certainly have that have
that talk um the um and in that role one of the things i served on like the licensing committee
where we did that and now i'm in the last two years i've been in in private practice a lot of
my work revolves around cyber security and regulatory but I also work with some of my colleagues
that focus on crypto space, on regulatory,
a lot on regulatory and security type issues.
Really cool.
You said Mayor Brown.
So who's Mayor Brown now?
Because I know there's Mayor Eric Adams,
who we were just hanging out with in Vegas, actually, at Tokenize and BitAngels.
Mayor Brown is the name of my law firm.
A lot of law firms are named after their founders who founded the firm probably like 100 years ago.
Okay, cool.
It's a global law firm.
I mean, I'm here in New Yorkork but there's about 1600 lawyers who do um
almost everything transactional litigation almost everything that a law firm would do
in total and then it's it's different offices around the united states and also um about i
think about a third of the lawyers are also outside the united states so for your purposes
i guess big big global law. Um, I can't say
what it is, but some crazy news is going to come out about, uh, mayor Eric Adams soon. I don't
think it's, let me look it up and see if it's out yet, but pretty crazy news is going to come out
about Eric Adams. He's switching parties, isn't he? Uh, what, what do you know?
It was in Vegas.
No, no.
Wait, who just said that?
I did.
I thought it was in the news, wasn't it?
Let me look up.
This is why I'm not allowed to say things.
Yeah, it's not. Stop you from as well.
What's that?
Your was also quite telling.
Hold on.
Now, the news is not out.
So I'll just I can't.
That's all I'm going to say.
But.
So what he has said so far is that he'll be running as an independent, but there may be more to that. Okay. Enough moving on. Um, so yeah, very cool. Uh, Justin, thanks for coming. Who invited you by the way? It's good to have you. Marshall? Oh, cool. So, yeah, perfect. So, yeah, I think you could probably give some good insights on this.
So the topic today that we've been discussing is basically KYC.
Is it a good thing?
Is it a bad thing?
The pros and cons.
Should DeFi or crypto embrace KYC?
Should we fight and resist it?
Most of the people on today have been pretty anti-KYC.
You being a prosecutor, I'm guessing you could have a different opinion.
What is your opinion on all this?
You were saying that the news hasn't broke yet.
It's on Politico.
What is the news you're seeing?
Eric Adams will run for re-election as an independent.
That is the news that is out. That is not the news I'm talking about.
Okay.
The news I'm talking about will be significantly
more interesting than that.
Oh. All right. Never mind.
Yeah, it's been crazy.
I mean, at Tokenize, you get a lot of political
insights.
We have a lot of regulators, lawyers, politicians, the people.
We had Brittany Kaiser, who helped write a lot of laws and was one of the whistleblowers about Cambridge Analytica and things.
Yeah, BitAngels, Tokenize, Michael Turpin, incredible network, as I've been saying.
And actually, Douglas here was at Tokenize.
How is Tokenize for you, Douglas here was at Tokenize.
How is Tokenize for you, Douglas?
And then we'll go back to you, Justin.
It looks like Justin fell off.
Can we bring him back up?
And then, yeah, how are you doing, Douglas?
Do you want to introduce yourself quickly?
And if you have any thoughts on Tokenize and how that went. Oh, I have a lot of thoughts.
Hey, everybody, Douglas Horne.
You may know me as the founder of Telos in 2018, no ICO. I haven't been involved in that for a couple of years. And my current project is called Ease Protocol. And we're focusing on making mass adoption possible by easing paths for end users and governments so when we talk about when we were
talking about privacy before i think that we need i think for massive there's a lot of there's a lot
of reasons to do privacy there's a lot of kinds of privacy but i think for the kind of privacy
that will lead to mass adoption i think we need the kind of privacy that will give privacy
against uh between users right so each user has an account has account privacy. So it's not like a current block explorer where you can just see everything for and know who whose house to go to with a with a gun. But we also need to be realistic about the fact that governments are not going away.
They are really the largest industry around.
And it's probably better to use a form of privacy that doesn't completely remove them and make the chain Monero or something that'll never be accepted, which I actually love Monero, but, um, but, uh, I don't expect it to be a mass adoption chain ever.
Well, you know, by the way, Monero has been seeing pretty significant growth over the last
years. It's done really well. Surprisingly. I've run a Monero. No, I don't even want to say out
surprisingly i've run a monero no i don't even want to say out multiple years right like it's
i don't use it anymore of course but uh just just to just to support the culture right but um you
know i i love monero but i don't see monero ever being something that you know uae is gonna you
know get on top of to build their to build their build their blockchain-based government systems or allow their people to
freely use and enhance that use.
I think that what we need is something that protects people and provides a lot of protections
against government, but acknowledges the fact that governments are going to continue to
exist and run.
That's what we're aiming for.
That's why we're not using like ZK proofs,
which are very actually computationally heavy.
We're using a privacy gating technology
that means that no one can scrape the blockchain
for people's information and things like that.
But again, EASE protocol is designed for users and governments.
There's only one type, there's many types of privacy,
and I think they should all exist.
And end users should have the option of what they want to engage with.
I'm focused on what's going to, what's going to,
what's going to do well for mass adoption.
So this is optional kind of privacy or layered privacy uh sorry
richard real quick um so that i think this is very interesting i think there will always be a place
for things that are purely and truly and at its core private like monero um and then there will
be other things which are like optionally private or have layers where i mean the way the u.s banking
system is set up is that the government
can't see everything you do um but they reserve the right if you're uh you know accused or convicted
of a crime to then ask the banks you know subpoena and ask the banks for your information so i think
that's exactly how we're set up as well that's the exact model that we follow because that's how most jurisdictions work.
So I have a question.
It's for everybody here, but I do want to direct it to Justin specifically.
So the question is, and then after everybody can jump in, but would you use a DEX with no KYC if it meant higher risk but total freedom?
Would I personally? I mean, I can answer that question. On a personal level, I probably wouldn't.
Right now, I do come from, I put my cards on the table. I think I said, by the way, sorry,
I dropped for a moment here. I'm going to resize the screen, clicked on the wrong one.
dropped for a moment here.
Resized the screen, clicked on the rock.
Yeah, this is exactly
I wanted to direct this
question to you
and see what your
opinion and what you would
do personally
with this.
Rock, how is that different from every
dex that currently exists?
Yeah, I think that, you know, look, I and this is probably two of my cards in the table, you know, a product of what I spent a good chunk of my career doing, focusing on the bad actors and how they found their way into or made use of crypto.
found their way into or made use of crypto. So I have that perspective and I try to be
self-aware about the fact that there's a lot of other perspectives. That said, from my own
perspective, I think first about how do I secure myself? Or if I'm thinking on behalf of an
institution or somebody else, how do you approach the security problem? That is my subject matter expertise.
So maybe it's not surprising that would be my perspective.
I do worry less about my own personal view,
is my own life and how I think about my own structure, my own privacy.
I worry a bit less about government actors, which I used to be one,
wanting my information for some reason.
I worry, and the way I think about it too,
is when I think about sort of my own personal data and privacy,
and this is sort of, it's almost like a shorthand
because I can't keep track of everything.
I sort of accept that some of the biggest technology providers
are just going to have a lot of information about me,
like Google and Microsoft.
By the way, that's what I said earlier is it's kind of unfortunate that for a
lot of people, the question is when you talk about privacy and hey, are you doing good OPSEC
or good privacy best practices? And you tell them and they say the common response is that they
already have all my info. The cell phones have all our info. They know where we are, what we do.
all my info. The cell phones have all our info. They know where we are, what we do. So it's
unfortunate, but that is how a lot of people feel. Yeah. And I think more about how criminal
actors might or real adversaries might come after me or maybe an institution that I'm working on
behalf of or a company that I'm working on behalf of and i think that in that so in that
context right and also i you know i spent i spent time looking at the kind of frauds that are
committed against people um and how a lot of criminals really focus on crypto and their want
for theft right it's very attractive for for criminals more attractive than traditional
currency because in traditional like quote unquote traditional cybercrime what cyber criminals do is they steal data when the data is the asset right it's extremely attractive you think
about the monetization for a fraud store or a cyber criminal in a free digital asset world it
was you know first one step one hack in step two steal data step three monetize data right they
stole bank account numbers they try to monetize that.
So credit card numbers. That was a big, that was the main focus of criminal hacking for a while,
like 15 years ago, steal credit card numbers and bank account information, try to monetize it.
When the data is itself the asset, it's like just as an economic model, far more attractive
for criminals. And one of the reasons why they focus a lot on crypto, right? But I can talk about that in a minute,
but your question was about privacy.
I also think, look, I respect,
I think these kind of privacy protections
are important and valuable,
but I also think for a lot of, you know,
look, a lot of ordinary users,
it's hard to get them to take basic steps
to protect their own privacy and security, right?
I mean, as a security person, like, what's the stat?
Like, when MFA is made available to people to use on accounts,
multi-factor authentication, like 90%, 98% don't enable it, right?
And so, although, and for a lot of ordinary, you know,
ordinary users who aren't sort of like tech forward or crypto forward,
I think about trying
to sort of protect them from when I was a regulator I used to think about that when I was a cyber
crimes prosecutor to think about that now sometimes institutions we're thinking about KYC or anti-fraud
are thinking about that too like the clients that I that I work for like well how do we how do we
have protections that can identify what bad actors are accessing or trying to access their accounts?
And I think, frankly, for a lot of ordinary users, that kind of stuff is important.
It is important because it's a lot to expect the vast majority of people who aren't sophisticated in this area and have a million other things to focus on.
They just don't think that much about their privacy and their security.
And that can be dangerous in a lot of ways in the modern world or make them susceptible to crimes in a lot of ways. And frankly, I think
the risk is even higher with digital assets, because like I said, I think cyber criminals,
they find it very attractive, right? I think that when I'm talking at a higher level about these
issues with companies, I do think that more than the traditional financial services industry,
companies, I do think that more than the traditional financial services industry,
security is really kind of existential for crypto, right? Because if a bank gets hacked,
it's actually, there's a lot of different steps that have to happen before the money can actually
be taken out by a hacker. Whereas if the keys to the crypto are compromised, that is, it's going
to be lost, right? And I think a lot of crypto forward companies and even big traditional institutions that want to move into this space because i i talk to those
kinds of institutions as well um i think are aware of this and they're certainly thinking about it
right but i think when not just your sensitive data but your assets are going to be digital
it makes it makes security kind of like existential so that's that's my lens you know
obviously lens shaped through my my professional focus but that's how i see it so so i could just
jump in here yeah jack go ahead uh yeah so i was just going to suggest like as a framework from
which to think about how best to approach the privacy problem and also the uh kind of kyc
anti-money laundering problem that exists in crypto.
I think probably what would be really good to see is blockchains and wallets adopt a modular approach.
So if you imagine like the base layer of the system is completely permissionless, no KYC.
And with that, you can interact with DeFi protocols and whatever will allow you to interact with it.
Maybe certain countries are even open to that.
And then as you go further up the KYC compliancy, let's say you were trying to buy a property in the US, for example,
which I would assume is on the highest end of KYC and AML legislation.
like on the highest end of like kyc and aml legislation um perhaps there's uh you know so
like a decentralized identity document system like we had a few of these uh spring up in the last few
years that integrates with the chain and so if you want to do if you want to say like you know
come out into the open to dock yourself to a real estate agent or whatever so like hey this is me
these are my assets like or these are the assets that i need for this sale um or whatever and then that could
be secured with a cryptographic proof on the like decentralized identity side so that they could
the uh the real estate agent could then take that data and while they might not have access to your
information directly they would know that it's like it's there it's on the
chain it's verifiable if they need to point the law enforcement agency in that direction at any
point in the future and so like the way i would urge people to think about this is just the more
optionality and modularity we can build into the system the better because there's always going to
be folks that don't want to engage in any sense because their privacy maxes or their decentralization maxes they don't want to engage
in any way with kyc um and then you'll like further up the the other end you'll have like
you know corporate entities or whatever that want that are fully compliant with everything they do
and that's just part of their business model so they're fully happy to engage with whatever kyc
checks are required and i just think that we should like build this in from the ground up so
the wallet should have like a threetiered system, let's say,
where it's permissionless and then slightly permissioned.
So basically you have to prove who you are,
but you don't have to provide big KYC documentation.
And then you can have a third layer, which is KYC with AML
and source of funds and everything else.
And I think that way you can give people the optionality that they actually want to interact
with the elements of the system that they want to interact with.
If they're just buying a coffee at Starbucks, there's no point using a KYC.
Showing someone my, or buying a beer at the liquor store, showing my ID with my home address.
Right.
But I want to go to, yeah, I want to go to Prometheus, but I actually think the question
is, is like a misnomer in itself i don't think that the world that world exists where you have more risk if you
don't do kyc on a dex no dex is there is no kyc has nothing to do with the risk when you trade
with someone on a dex quickly when you trade with someone on a dex there's it's a smart contract you
don't care who the person is the person can't take your funds
the worst risk you have is that someone in the liquidity pool or someone on the other side of a
trade is some sanctioned person so you can have like for example unfortunately our lawyers made us
uh have you know ofac blocking on our quick swap front end now we can't stop the smart contracts
again but anyways i i think another way people are doing this, like what you're saying, Jack, is instead of having layers with KYC, you don't need the KYC necessarily.
You can have layers where you can't see the public addresses.
But if a government subpoenas, there is some multisig or federation or party that can expose the transactions, but not expose they don't have the person's kyc necessary that's
another type of way of doing that's why i mentioned the dids so if you remember there was like a few
protocols 2022 2023 that came out with this concept where they would hash all your identity documents
but keep them private we had on one of the biggest ones provato earlier they used to be polygon i
yeah maybe we had them on Earth earlier in space, actually.
Yeah, I missed that.
Apologies.
But yeah,
so the whole point is
that you send a cryptographic proof
so that they check on their end
and they don't disclose
to the blockchain
or whichever platform you use them.
But the platform can get that hash
and then it's like,
okay, this person's legitimate
and they've not been involved
in anything dodgy.
And then if the government
ever needs to come after you for whatever reason, because you're a terrorist or whatever, they can follow that back and eventually back to the DID protocol.
I'm going to...
I think you're missing...
Go ahead.
You're missing the in-between though, right?
Where, like, let's say the US were to deal with this problem right with kyc and all
this stuff right there's still like remittances that need to happen to other countries and those
countries have different different regulatory means right so like kyc pools although they're
not fun to think about they're actually kind of a means for institutional demand to kind of come
on chain because they actually have to report the counterpart thing. They need to know that their counterparty is not a no fact person,
right? Or they just can't do the transaction on the AMM. So I feel like there's a large amount
of capital that through a KYC pool could happen, even if it just happened through just pure
remittance or some kind of other conversion. But yeah, of course. Can we wait to do that though? Can we wait to do that though
until we've all made our money on DeFi?
Because if they all come in with trillions of dollars,
these yields are going to go from 50% to 5%.
So let's wait like three years
to bring in institutional capital to DeFi,
if you guys don't mind.
I would also say that like the OFAC sanctions list
was kind of invalidated by the attack involving
Tornado Cash, USDC, and
ETH distribution. So, I don't know if you
remember this, but basically
there was like
some, let's call
him a grey hat person, because we don't
know where the funds came from, but they essentially
went through the Tornado Cash. They were
sanctioned by OFAC, and they sent
thousands of
these transactions out to notable people in the industry dust or small transactions yeah so you'd
never notice you got like 0.1 usdc from some unknown wallet really like most people wouldn't
notice that and they even sent it i think to black rocks fund on chain and so what the the
legislation then suggests with that is okay if you receive money
from an of act sanctioned address you should be sanctioning yourself right because you could be
involved with them and there was lots of stuff in at the time from coinbase and stuff suggesting
anybody that received these funds would get blacklisted but you can't really do that in
defy because it's permissionless right i can go and train now if i know your address and send you
some ethereum that i've got from a hack
sometime like five years ago, and you would never know.
And when you're interacting with people,
like in the real world,
the other thing I was trying to say about modularity before
is think about communication in the real world.
You can choose to use an app like Signal
if you need privacy.
If you need like Grayzone, where it's a little bit private,
perhaps depending on what you're doing,
then like WhatsApp or, you know, Telegram telegramming you know good enough for most people or you can
choose to go talk to somebody in the street where anybody could hear it and i think we should have
a similar approach to finances where you know like one day you may need a certain level of privacy
and another day you may need like no privacy but we should give people the tools but by the way i i hope nobody truly believes that
signal is is super private but i'm gonna give it i'm gonna give it 60 that it is private fully
uh but uh but i'll give it you know 90 that it's very private mostly private but that you know
nsa or someone has a back door i mean we they had a back we already found out
So if you're if you're like the you know if you're Vladimir Putin and use an instant messaging app like yeah
Someone's gonna find out what you say like it doesn't matter what I'm used in all where you cut it from
Someone's gonna try that down. I don't know if you just use like what what people use on on dark web which is like pgp or is it also gpg i don't know but um if you just send encrypted
messages using that uh protocol i don't think there is a way but i i maybe i'm wrong who says
who says you don't have prometheus on your phone just recording the entire screen? Right? Like the message could be encrypted.
There was like, you mentioned about the Dart web and there was stuff to do with Tor browser being compromised and stuff because of the nodes.
But even if Tor is compromised, the onion routing, the PGP encryption is, I think, pretty solid.
Because it's not like a protocol where they can insert things.
It's just, you're just sending a message
and only you have, or your receiver, you know, has a key.
So, just, I don't know.
There was, like, some things in the past
where there was, like, terrorists using, like,
like, Neopets and, like, kids' games
to communicate with each other
because nobody would love that.
Like, these things happen.
The point I'm trying to make is, if you're a normal person to communicate with each other because nobody would look there. These things happen.
The point I'm trying to make is,
if you're a normal person who's just trying to make a little bit of yield in DeFi and trade some meme coins,
the level of security that you need and require to feel happy
is like 0.0001% of what you could theoretically have
if you're trying to fund Hezbollah via blockchain transactions.
And I'm not saying that those things are good. I'm just saying that you need to realize what you do, theoretically have if you're like trying to fund Hezbollah via blockchain transactions, right?
And I'm not saying that those things are good. I'm just saying that you need to like realize what you actually, what you defended against. If you're just a bit paranoid about privacy,
that's a different concern to like somebody that's trying to move like $300 million for a
terrorist finance. Well, or you're just a journalist and you're speaking out against
your regime and you don't want to have your head cut off so you need privacy right there's lots of reasons people need privacy you know there was a signal back door and
apparently the u.s government had it and uh and they they closed it or said they closed it because
they needed their own fbi people to have uh uh to know that they have privacy i mean look at
just recently what uhx or whatever,
you know, his signal conversations got leaked
because they were in a chat that could be
screenshot or whatever, but
there are lots of people, including our own government,
who know that they need privacy, right?
So they can't
completely close it off.
Who was it who got added to, there was like
some politicians that were talking
in a signal group and they accidentally added a journalist.
That's like hilarious.
Or on purpose to leak.
Yeah.
Who knows.
But I'm going to go here.
I want to just say one thing about the whole space we're having here is I'm going to go out on a limb.
i'm gonna go out on a limb and i want to i want to move the overton window of this spaces which is
like the kind of accepted or expected um allowance of conversation sort of meaning like everybody
here is like oh well maybe some kyc and you know well we got to do it in a certain way to appease
the institutions i'm gonna go i'm gonna try to move the overton window a little bit over to the privacy side and say fuck all this fuck kyc i'm i like i have to do it because i want to obey the law and i don't want
to go to jail and that's why quick swap does the ofact you know on our just on our website not the
smart contracts we can't do that but uh i'm just going to say we should resist all of this crap at
all costs we should try to build our own financial system and if the institutions don't like it don't
play you know or if they want to build their own systems that people want to interact with because there's some yield there, they feel some safety there, cool.
But we should have a totally almost dark system.
Maybe that's not the best branding, but we should have a separate system that is anonymous, private, you know, and protects our freedoms as much as humanly possible, because the more we
negotiate and compromise and allow small bits of KYC, the more the government will creep in and
the more they will invade our rights. And you might be in America where you think you have rights,
but they've already shown, you know, both sides, by the way, Trump has had his bank accounts
compromised. Liberals have had their accounts or their bank accounts compromised uh liberals have had their uh accounts are their bank accounts
compromised i just had a call with the team yesterday who is building a project that's
gonna help protect against um illegal immigrants or uh or women apparently there are liberal women
who think trump is gonna like start freezing women's accounts and make them have a a a a
male cosigner to have a bank account. I think that's obviously crazy,
but there are people that are worried about this.
The point is nobody is safe from the overreach of the government.
And it's not just, you know, government.
It's one side of the government might disagree with the other side.
It's one state might disagree with another state or federal.
And we should try to avoid giving any of them the power
because power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely
and the more power the more control the more kyc we give to any of these people they will keep
taking more and you know eventually we're in 1984 and it's kind of felt like that over the last 10
years i guess for me the way i explain it and and it's just the way i i, I truly feel is, you know, my on-chain assets, those are my personal
possessions. That's something that I own. That's something that I have. There's no reason why
anybody else, doesn't matter who it is, needs to know exactly what I have. It's like telling me I
can't wear any more clothes and I have to walk around naked all the time right
that's just me that that's the way i feel it's it's not necessarily because government or whoever
but for the most part it's my personal possession those are mine why does anybody even deserve what
who thinks that they actually deserve or have the actual,
well, I can't think of the word,
but entitlement to be able to peer into my assets.
Hey, Justin, you are unmuted.
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
I want to go on this as well.
I've been waiting for that rock rant all night.
Go ahead. But, you know just just very quickly like Rock I'm totally with you on this
bro like listen I'm here in in the you know the freedom land of the United Kingdom right where
the police definitely don't knock down our doors for sharing memes and trashing on Keir Starmer.
That totally doesn't happen.
You know, we're the beacon of free speech in the world, right?
And so totally, like, you know, the kind of tech you're describing,
it is so beyond needed at this point.
It's ridiculous.
I think, you know, we actually need to build stuff from the ground up at this point i think we need to actually invest in new hardware you know i i don't care if we start with freaking
linux on you know on a raspberry pi or whatever but you know just from the ground up rebuild um
you know basic blockchain based comms um there are multiple ways to repackage the signal but the problem is as long as you're using
android or iphone you know there's under as as a developer i can tell you there's always going to
be underlying listening where that's that's that's constantly listening to whatever app
that's within the operating system right like it's just you know it's just the way of the world today
and and so we need to break out of this duopoly much like, you know, we're in duopolies in our political system or whatever.
But, Rock, I completely agree with you.
Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
No, what I was going to say is we need to even go back farther.
You need to look at the U.S. Constitution.
We have unalienable rights.
You know, these are my unalienable rights.
Why do you need to look at me and know what I have?
Well, I think the government's argument would be that you could be a child pornographer.
You could be a terrorist.
You could be a drug dealer or you could be a money launderer, right?
But the government is already all of those things, my friend.
And the legal principle is that they don't get to go on fishing trips.
They have to start with probable cause and then be able to investigate from there.
Now, that's the U.S. government, right?
But there's all kinds of governments.
That's not necessarily true.
I mean, it's all –
It's supposed to be like that, he's saying.
But yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, I'm saying if we're talking about what our inalienable rights are, what, you know, what what we what the what the legal tradition is in the country and whatnot, that that's what that's that's where it should start.
Certainly in practice, it doesn't always do that.
Well, I think the question he comes down to is is what what, what bad can come of not assigning who owns something, right? Like if, like, if you can't claim that something is yours, and that's not assigned to you, then now theft becomes like a huge ordeal. I mean, that's why banks became so popular, right? Because people got tired of having their money stolen from them. So we're seeing all these ransom cases and kidnappings and stuff like that.
Would those things go up if everything was just dark and permissionless and you could just force people to give you their stuff and then there was no way to track or do it?
So I'm not saying we should go.
But you have the way.
You have the optionality.
You have the optionality of do I want to put my stuff in a bank where I know that they can see my stuff,
or do I want to hold gold in a hole in my backyard or wherever?
People should be able to pick that.
They shouldn't be forced on that by the government.
And by the way, for many people around the world, I'd argue more than 70% of the world probably,
and maybe I'm biased here in being facetious, but I would argue a big part of the world are much more fearful of their own government than they are of criminals. that we have specific individuals who are trained in order to be able to prevent these crimes,
these heinous type of crimes, whether it's, you know, whatever they're trying to stop,
a sex ring or drugs or I don't know.
How about just tax evasion?
Can I suggest that we look at this in the other direction?
the other direction.
Look what happened with Coinbase.
Look at all the users.
Look what happened to all the users at Coinbase.
Look at all the users at Coinbase.
So if we were to look at this from the point of
where do we, what do we want the situation to be?
What would be the ideal situation
as opposed to, because it focuses the conversation, right?
So what would be the ideal situation?
To me, the ideal situation would be
I can do anything I want with my money.
No one knows what I have. But if I'm a victim of a crime, I would like to be left, you know, have quiet enjoyment of whatever I have. that is not built on forcing, on destroying my life as a suspect, somebody's suspect,
to get me to turn over my keys for everything, which is, you know, the Bitcoin reserve we have
and love, right, in the strategic reserve is all based on seized assets, right?
And situations like that, right? These are very specific situations that are what-ifs. They're big. But in those cases, there's obviously – there's different ways that they can work with it, right?
I mean as law enforcement.
Are there though?
100%. How are you going to tell me they're not? Come on.
I don't know. I know, but I would like to discuss specifics. I'm not saying they're not i'm not disagreeing i'm saying what what are those
i'm just saying we we have a government that can literally launch a missile and you could be in the
amazon force and it's literally going to hit you wherever you are right like like they can get it
certainly so certainly that's the problem if i get a hundred thousand dollars of crypto stolen
from me there's no chance of getting it back hardly any well yeah that that is an issue i
mean you can obviously get assets frozes like on binance i mean these these are i don't know
that i would say it's zero chance i mean i bet by percentage i bet by percentage and let's let justin talk in a
second but by percentage i don't know what the percentage is but it's not zero people do get
funds back their hacks have been recovered there's a lot of that actually and that's thanks to you
know look by the way law enforcement has said many times they would rather have someone transact in
bitcoin than a lot of other things that are doing crime
because they catch them and they get the money. That's why the U.S. has so much Bitcoin. So you
can catch people and it didn't require KYC to do that. Now let's let Justin talk because he's
unmuted a couple of times and we're all elbowing our way in here. Go ahead, Justin.
A few issues wrapped up in here. Good discussion. i will speak up for the long arm of the government for a minute how about that um so uh look for starters one issue right
all right i gotta interrupt just quickly that reminds me of in uh super bad when he says i am
the he said the long arm of the government he says i am the long dick of the law and he like
punches the guy or something anyways okay go ahead all Go ahead. All right. Well, I, um, so look, there's a few things there, right? I think one thing is that
when, look, when it comes to privacy, I understand that I respect it, but let's keep in mind that
with a warrant based on probable cause, let's step out of the digital world for a second.
The government can search your house. They could search your car. They could seize your property.
They could even arrest you with a criminal complaint based on probable cause. I think for
the most part, people think, well, that's kind of the way it has to be. Like law enforcement has to
be able to search people's houses in their cars and they have to be able to arrest people that
there's probable cause to believe that they've committed a crime. So I do wonder sometimes when
people say, well, they shouldn't be able to search my email account or see my financial transactions, even with a search warrant.
That's private. That's mine. Well, do you also think that law enforcement should be forbidden from searching all private property, like like physical private property?
You know what I mean? Like, let's let's let's keep these things in proportion, I think, because you have, you know, we most of us sort accept, or at least there's not a lot of debate that, yeah,
law enforcement has to have probable cause to believe that somebody's committed a crime.
You have to have the ability to arrest them.
And yet I think sometimes they seem to react differently when it's,
oh, well, you know, under no circumstances,
even with probable cause to believe that it was used in a crime,
should a government be able to get somebody's transaction history?
I don't, I don't think that it's a problem that if i mean
i don't i'm not going to say this for 100 certain but my instinct is and i was giving you thumbs up
as you were talking uh is that if you commit a fucking crime uh and by the way crimes are
arguable a crime in one state might not be a crime in another state a crime under one regime might
not be a crime under another regime but let's say, for the sake of argument here on your side, that you committed a crime, you're a bad dude, and you know what?
We get a warrant, and we search your shit, and we catch you.
Good. We need that. I'm for that.
There's a difference, though, between having this, like, I think, so, okay, email you mentioned.
I'm for that. Search someone's email. But having a system where the government can just go in at any time and and look for your stuff is not good.
I think what we have in the US is a decent system where, you know, again, you they can't see that I bought a gay dildo or or whatever I bought on my bank account.
gay dildo or uh or whatever i bought on my you know bank account but they can uh do that if and
by the way in some countries you go you get your head cut off for that um but you they can't see
that but if you commit a crime then they can ask the bank for you know permission to look at your
stuff and the bank or the company can resist and fight back apple did and they won that i think
uh when when uh the uS. wanted to break into Apple
phones. And that's, by the way, now something that's upheld, maybe a little bit separate,
but is also upheld that they cannot force you to give your PIN code for your phone. It's illegal
because that's considered like a property inside of your head. They're not allowed to take, you know, your memories or your thoughts. But they can take your biometrics.
They can do that, which was, I think, a big mistake by the judges. They can put the phone
in front of your face. If you use face ID, they can put it up to your face.
Right. So by the way, this is the exact infrastructure that we are building and have built in EASE protocol. We're exactly foreseeing this situation that
we were all talking about saying, hey, we would like people to be able to enforce laws. We would
like to preserve privacy, but we understand that there's certain things that we have to give. And
if we make these very small concessions and can retain all the other protections of crypto, that would be a good thing. That's what we built in Ease Protocol. I've been working on this for two years. I think that's where we want to go, knowing that it won't ever get there until the tools are built to allow it and that's what um we're doing and rock you and i spoke to the to charles reddick the
the uh at tokenize the um the former uh irs commissioner he's a great guy talked to him for
two hours right like talk about like somebody who like the hated i are you know face of government
um he had like six legitimate uh uh, credible death threats a week.
Uh, you know, when he was in power and he's like, he's, he's a total,
he totally like supports our rights.
I sat through that, that fireside as well. Um, I mentioned it earlier.
It was, yeah, I don't want to stay on another two hours. It was amazing.
Yeah, that's, that's, that's awesome. I want to kind of keep on what Justin asked here. So, Justin, let me ask you back.
Do you think there are some cases where there shouldn't be a backdoor or some avenue that the government can check yourself?
Or maybe a better question is, should everything be KYc'd should the government be able to kyc
my gold my physical gold should the government be able to kyc my cash do you what do you think about
that yeah it's a good question let me and i don't well i don't have a different answer let me let
me give you kind of like my my higher level perspective on that i guess i think about the
current the world the pre-crypto world of kyC. It operates at an institutional level, right? It's the financial institutions that are obligated to do it, and to someone whose job it used to be was to try to stop misuse of this stuff, is that there are a lot of benefits.
The traditional KYC system, before we talk about Web3 and blockchain, what did do a lot, wasn't perfect, of course, but it did do a lot to prevent the criminal misuse of the financial system.
misuse of the financial system. Now, I do think that in a more decentralized financial system,
yeah, it's not as obvious where the KYC should be, I think, as like a policy, right? In a world
where all transactions are intermediated by financial institutions, it's a bit easier
conceptually to have a KYC obligation on the financial institutions and understand that's how it is. When you get to a more decentralized world, it's more complicated.
I think that the-
Yeah, I'm a little more open to the KYC stuff on a big institution
more than I am open to it on individual levels.
That kind of pains me to say that, but I am a little more open to it.
But go ahead continue yeah and then I guess the question is when when does a protocol when does
a DeFi protocol should it be subject should it be treated like an institution for KYC purposes and
when should it not be you know I think one of the clear one of one of the very easy answers to that
is if they are custodying your funds if they are holding your funds then i think there is at least
a argument from the kyc years side that hey yeah we should if they're holding your funds we should
we should have them register or you know kyc or whatever um but the great thing about crypto is
it's that's why it's so confusing i think for all of us is why why should um robin hood or you know
you know nasdaq or you know your uh vanguard why should they kycu but quick swap which i'm a co
founder of why should quick swap not kycu well because quick swap i don't hold anyone's funds
right i can't do anything with anyone's funds uh you know we've had we've had a tenth of a trillion dollars
of volume go through quick swap and i never touched a dollar of it yeah and also there's
only really one qualified custodian inside the us which is anchorage which has a bit license was
given out last year right and even with that right like um you're asking for people to give up their
assets and put them into a qualified custodian, which we've seen all the hacks in the past.
Right. So tough.
Yeah. Yeah. Look at look at what was the real quick.
The guy this is why we like trusting institutions to hold our money isn't always a good idea.
who was chairman of nasdaq that uh bernie made off who stole like 68 billion dollars from like
you know the like president ex-presidents are like the biggest people in the world trusted him
and his you know his company that was getting people these yields or whatever and he stole
everyone's money he was a chairman of nasdaq and he fought for all these kycs and stuff because
we'll never we'll never protect 100 against against bad governments and bad people, right?
That shouldn't be the standard.
It's not the standard anywhere else.
And I think people are holding crypto to too high a standard.
And I think, by the way, I completely agree.
I think that the Coinbase hack is a great example, a poster child for why we do not want mandatory kyc
right well it's just it's just you know the kyc thing it's wait wait wait wait wait wait before
you go on from that the audience may not know about this what what he's referring to here is
that just recently a bunch of people's information from coinbase was released and most certainly some of
that will be used to attempt scams or hacks or kidnappings or and and there's a good chance some
of that will result in people stealing people's crimes or kidnapping people that's like people's
addresses i'm not sure but i think it was people's addresses, socials. It's actually much worse than that, Rock, because Coinbase was hacked quite some time ago.
And they were given the opportunity to pay a $20 million ransom to not have everybody's information deployed.
Now, say what you will about, uh, say, uh, about what, you know,
ransoming things like that, any, there are a variety of opinions there, but like that was a
company that knew that our stuff had been hacked, gave us no, gave us no protection against us,
no forewarning, right? They could have done, there's a lot of things they could have done.
They could have negotiated it with everybody and quietly told all the all the people who might be at risk.
You know, like and by the way, they didn't get hacked.
They the way that that information was derived was their own agents in other countries were able to go in.
And when they were using the system to look things up, they would look up people's information and and and, and add it to a file, right? So now my contention is
generally that all hacks are inside jobs in that some participant was inside, it's almost always
the case. But, but this is a very clearly a very clear example where it's their fault, right? Not
because they had just because they had bad security, because they knowingly set up a system
that allowed this theft, then they had the opportunity to do things by the way i still like coinbase i i you know we
we i can we can say hey this is a good institution overall but it did something really bad here
um but i think it's you know maybe the best thing they gave us is just now is the reason why
kyc is completely ridiculous and equal facts the users. Equifax, the same thing.
This has happened so many times.
By the way, just quick for your mental math here, guys,
that $20 million, if Coinbase would have chose to kind of try to protect this,
and I'm not saying this was the best decision either way.
I don't know.
It's very complicated.
What if they pay the $20 million and then they still use the info?
What if they pay the $20 million and that just incentivize the hackers
to keep doing this stuff?
So they took the we-do-not-negotiate-with-terrorist stance. It's going to cost them more than $20 million and that just incentivize the hackers to keep doing this stuff? So they took the we do not negotiate with terrorists stance.
It's going to cost them more than $20 million for sure.
Yeah, and just so you know, that $20 million that they could have paid is only a third of 1% of their revenue every year that they could have used to protect their users.
Now, I don't know. Maybe they made the right choice. I don't know, but that's just something. You can argue that, but you can't argue that they should have told people
who were at risk and they didn't. Anyway, but again, this is in the context of KYC. Why shouldn't
we? No, there hasn't been a great case against KYC made until this, and now we have a very clear
case. So hopefully we can get rid of it.
I don't know. This has been happening forever, man. I mean, hold on, hold on, hold on. I got
another one. I got an old one. I mean, there hasn't been a really solid, public, pure play,
clear. I got one for you. I got one for you from, uh, from Nazi, uh, Germany and Hitler. So,
uh, that's, that's what I'm saying. You can't go like, sure. Of course there's stuff for not, Nazi Germany and Hitler.
That's what I'm saying.
You can't go back. Sure, of course there's stuff for not. I'm talking about where
most people say, well, it doesn't
affect me. What about Equifax?
It's happened a lot, man.
There's all kinds of... We can go back to
Julius Caesar, right?
There's tons of them.
But this is very
current, and it should be in the news more frankly well yeah well here let me really
it's a vigorous topic everyone everyone wants to talk it's a good topic go ahead
so yeah i just wanted to say about the about the decks thing rock you mentioned about not kyc and
uh on a dex because you're not custody in funds it's kind of like the market hall analogy so like if you rent space to market traders in a hall uh you wouldn't
be expected to you know ask for any identification but if one of those market traders decided to sell
you know like over the the kycable limit in gold in whatever country you're in then you would you
would hope that they would do that and there could be legal consequences if they don't.
So it's like you provide the framework for people to interact,
and then they should report that on their taxes or, you know,
whatever else is required legally of them in their country.
Yeah.
Let's let Justin up here, but I want to just give my example about Hitler
because it's a crazy one.
And I might misquote the story a little, but I think I'm pretty close on this.
When they were going through and the Germans were invading countries they were taking
their gold there and one of the things they did I believe it was France I
could be wrong but they went in and they took the whatever country it was they
took their census Bureau information on who was Jewish and they got their
addresses and went and fucking killed them the government trying to do a good
they were just trying to do a census.
They weren't trying to kill people, but look at what happened because of it.
So this is actually what I was even going to say.
I mean, data leaks and...
And they knew who had guns.
And they knew which of the citizens had guns in some of these countries from looking at this.
Our military records have been leaked, right?
And hacked into to where, you know, people who are in the military have people know
who their their information is already like these data hacks happen all the time but my main concern
with the kyc is it's just another platform to give my information to that somebody already has my
information and then also at the same time like the people who are getting hurt are literally 90% just average people or more.
Let's let Justin jump in here. Cause I think we're all like kind of more pro KYC. And I think it's
really a lot more interesting of a conversation to have when we have a fair start on both sides,
but yeah, Justin jump in. Thanks, Rob. Look, I think that a couple of things, right? One is that
I think a world without, you know, KYC and intermediaries does have its costs,
right?
And regardless of where you come out on this, I hope, you know, you acknowledge that or
think about how we can address that.
You know, look, and this isn't purely a KYC issue, but I, when I was a prosecutor, spent
a lot of time investigating ransomware, and when you work on cyber, that is the number
one cyber threat like cyber extortion has become kind of the center of gravity of the
profit-seeking cyber crime world and that type of crime it wouldn't be possible without um
without a distributed currency like like bitcoin like the reason that that cyber extortion as a as a criminal business model was kind of invented in 2016, 17, and has eventually within a few years came to be like the most profitable form of cyber crime by many measures is because there was a widely accessible currency that had no intermediary Bitcoin.
Right. The technology to do encryption and to steal data had existed at that point in in for
more than a decade but it needed a decentralized currency without any intermediaries to take off
and i think the same thing is true of i mean you're talking about people getting the some of
the stories that have come out recently the terrible stories about people getting kidnapped
and extorted for their crypto again those, those crimes are maybe not possible, but vastly more difficult without mechanisms of payment that are decentralized, irreversible and can skip KYC.
And so I think, look, that's not to say that these technologies are bad.
Bad actors find a way to use every new technology that's invented.
It is just the fact of the world.
Shoes, cars. You can't rob a bank without shoes and cars, right? a way to use every new technology that's invented it is just the fact of the world shoes cars you
can't rob a bank without shoes and cars right i'm not i'm not i'm not thinking of what i position
here that new new equals bad i'm just pointing out that there are there are there are some
consequences to this and i think when policy makers focus on are you know are are scared
and speaking to somebody who's not policy to maker, but used to be a policy maker, like that is, that is a lot of what, what worries them. Right.
And that is what they are perhaps inartfully at times trying to figure out a way to, and even,
and I think that is true, even of policymakers who fundamentally are supportive of the, you know,
crypto and blockchain technologies and, and digital assets. You know, having, having been
one of those policymakers in the
recent past.
Hey, Justin, do you want to hand up?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So one thing that kills me on these conversations is that, and I understand you're coming from
a cybersecurity perspective, right?
But like from a cybersecurity perspective, you've got like millions of people, like over
a million a year that have identity
of theft issues. Right. And you have additional millions of people who have other fraud that's
brought against them. Right. But then we talk about crypto, which affects maybe like 700,000
people, maybe 500,000 people a year. So like it's, it's disproportionate. Right. So you look at them.
maybe 500,000 people a year.
So like it's,
it's disproportionate.
Right.
So you look at them.
I don't know.
Just for me,
it's just tough because it's,
I understand that ratio you just gave is,
it's,
is way off.
You said a set five to 700 ratio to a million.
It's way worse than that.
I mean,
it's like,
I think I think pro regulator people have come out and said,
it's,
there's less than 1% of crime is happening in crypto in two ratios versus other crime and versus the light side.
My point is more that cybersecurity, right, because of how it's online and digital, everything like that, right?
We look at it and say, okay, well, Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a problem.
It's hard to isolate that.
We need all these different things in place.
But then you look at everything else, and it's just so much worse.
And the KYC is there, and all the other regulatory frameworks are there.
And it's just tough to say, okay, well, because we can do some regulatory capture
and say, okay, we're going to go do XYZ to put KYC and all these old fact stuff. And I understand that all that stuff is great,
right? And we should definitely try and stop hacks at exchanges and try and figure out a way to kind
of prevent some of these problems. But to sit here and say like, oh, it's hard for the government to
figure out a way because it's decentralized now. And all the KYC used to happen to institutions and all that stuff.
And, oh, well, the cybersecurity thing, it still hasn't played out well.
None of it's worked out.
That was why I was saying that crypto is being held to a completely different standard than everything else.
And also that no technological thing we
do can overcome bad actors and bad government oh i thumbs downed you earlier because i thought you
were saying we should lower our privacy standard for crypto you were saying that crypto is held to
too high of a standard yeah well i think the and and i think that there are a variety of ways that, oh, I didn't see your thumb down.
Okay, I'm going to switch it here. Here's a thumb down.
Okay, okay, thank you.
Yeah, no, so my position is that, you know, we are being held to a ridiculously high standard that no one else is being held to.
People are saying, well, why can't?
And it's actually
partly because we could do more. We could be a better solution than the existing solutions,
but it's not fair or right that we are, right? It's just sort of like a crypto hater standpoint.
In terms of security, I think there should be a broad range of security. If you want to use Monero, you use Monero. That is great.
Bitcoin security is great. I think there should be another paradigm that protects as much as
possible, but also says, hey, for certain use cases, having a middle ground that allows, you know, governments to enforce their laws,
especially when it's your crypto that's stolen, without giving away everything that's good about
crypto, which means it would be pointless, right? I think that's in the panoply of crypto,
of security possibilities. I think that's a very strong one. And that's the
specific one that I've been building for with ease protocol. So by the way, and, and I've got to say
this because, um, you know, even as a normal person, you know, who's been scammed, right. I've,
I've been scammed pretty hard and, you know, I know how to use blockchain. I know how to read,
um, you know, the chain, I know how to gather the data. The hardest part, you know, if we ever did,
if you ever did get scammed or, you know, rugged or whatever,
the hardest part is actually the being able to communicate to get those funds
even back. Right. And, and I mean this because you have a couple of different
options, you know,
you don't necessarily have somebody like that's
near you that you can like log for local law enforcement can't help. All they can do is
pretty much take your name, your information, write it down. All good. You know, if you were
to go to another, you know, another thing, you could go to a lawyer like, you know, Burwick
law, right. And then you would have to go through their process. And then if you wanted to do it
yourself individually and you were maybe to report it, right, there's no possible way that
a normal person could even actually file those types of cases inside of what the government has
for protection, like IC3, for example. We can look at our friend Michael Perpen, right?
And then the stipulation- Who has the biggest case.
Well, the problem is the stipulation is is even if you do report something like that, they have like a bare minimum threshold of it has to be a certain amount of money to take a look at it.
You know, that entire process, it's not for me, it's not necessarily about micromanaging the people and what I have.
It's needing to be more accessible for the people to be able to reach for the help rather
than micromanaging.
But being able to have access to that help, you know, easier.
But anyway.
100%.
And that's why I'm building.
Or you could go to like Zach's XBT or somebody like that who does this for a living.
You know, they have those things.
But those are still third-party services that you kind of end up having to pay for unless they're like bouncy
hunters right but anyways it's still like there's so many different ways we can blame each other but
still the kyc is just another platform for me to have my data leaked you know douglas brought up a
point uh michael i think you were talking about Turpin and his half.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our mutual friend, Michael, who, yeah, who has the biggest such case in America, right?
It's a massive and it's taken years to run through the legal system.
And thank goodness he's doing it. So it's blazing a trail for us.
But I don't know. What do you think? What do you have insight on that, too?
Yeah. So, I mean, I've known Michael as long as that case has been happening or longer.
And that, so what happened is I think it's AT&T, but I could be wrong.
Don't sue me, whoever.
That's my understanding too.
So basically he got SIM swapped and it was an inside job that people at, I hope I'm not
saying any details of his case that aren't public, but I'm sure they're all public by
now.
It's all public by now.
It's all public, and it's always an inside job.
So, yeah, so there was a person or group of people at AT&T who sim-swapped Michael.
And the crazy part is they had done this twice before, and AT&T didn't do anything about it.
They did it on smaller scale.
And instead of firing them, they just got a little slap on the wrist from AT&T and said, hey, don't, don't SIM swap people. And then they got him for, I want to say 24, 25 million out of one of his centralized exchange wallets. And so he sued AT&T. He won. I remember texting him.
I was at Consensus in New York and I want to say 2018 or 19. And I remember texting him. He was,
he, he was going to come to one of our events we threw we
threw the biggest party that year at consensus actually it was if anyone was there the three
story crazy party anyways he I texted him and said hey congratulations you're you won the case
and I think he won with punitives I think he won like 70 million or something uh from the 24 that
got hacked so um punitives is basically punishing the entity so punishing
at&t for their negligence or whatever uh and making them not do it again but uh then they
i think appealed it and it's been now being appealed for like six plus years uh maybe seven
years and so what he had to do is and i i'll be careful what I say because I don't know what he wants public about this,
but he hired private people to go after the person who did it personally and find them,
find where they live, infiltrate their friend groups, because it's a lot of money. We're
talking about $25 million here. And they had good reason to think that the person had the money
still or had most of the money still. And so by doing that, without the help of the law, he had to hire private people, private investigators, etc.
And he was able to recover some of the money.
I forget how much, 10 million of it or something that he was able to recover by having people partying with the guy or going into the guy's house and getting to know him and finding out where he hid the money.
Somehow they, that's a crazy feat, but they were able to do that.
And by no thanks of the law, no thanks to the law.
And by the way, the person that worked at AT&T who did it and AT&T, the company, those are known entities in their KYC.
But that didn't help, actually.
It was his private investigator and his own work that was able to do it.
That's a fantastic point.
How many people would have the resources to do that?
He got a $70 million award.
What's that?
Sure, but I don't
think we can completely extrapolate
from one case, right? Some people are going to have
a hard time. Some people are not. Most people do
not have Michael's resources
and temerity to be able to stick with it.
They don't.
Yeah, that's an interesting story though.
And I'm just saying that, you know,
KYC didn't help him there.
And in many other cases.
KYC helped him because the people that did it were KYC'd
and he was able to figure out who it was that did it.
Ah, that's a fair point.
I think you're right.
Very good point.
I'm not sure, but I think you're right.
But it didn't, so it did help him.
It didn't solve it for him.
Can we agree about that?
Yeah.
No, it's all it's all for him
because A, he won a $70 million case
and B, he knew-
Well, but he hasn't gotten a dollar from that.
No, that's still being appealed.
No, but that's being appealed for like seven years
and he has done a dollar back from them. No, that's still being appealed. No, but that's being appealed for like seven years.
And that's about, I believe, like mis-acts, bad acts by AT&T, which are now proven in court, not about the recovery of the assets, right? They, they owe him something, but separately he could go and try and find the assets. And it sounds like he's doing a, you know, a little Ross Perot, you know, private,
um, badass group to do that. I don't have the details you do, or if I did, I wouldn't share
them, but, um, I think it's mostly public context on that. mean, context on that. Yeah, I guess one of the craziest parts about it, I think I'm allowed to say, I hope, but I'm pretty sure it's fine because he's been talking about this for a while now.
But a lot of the money was under the guy's fucking bed, under his floorboard or under the bed or something.
And they found it.
They went in his house and found it.
So how did he convert the $25 million that they stole in crypto into money that was under his bed or something and they found it they went in his house and found it wait so how did he convert the 25 million dollars that they stole in crypto into money that was under his bed
i'm not sure i don't know i i don't know if it was like you can
i'm all for like defy and all that stuff not having kyc the part that needs kyc is where you convert bitcoin into dollars or
euros so here's what if i do a pure trade with someone hold on hold on hold on hold on this is
the issue let me let me let me give you the answer like this this is this is what you guys don't
understand those people who are off-ramping they purchase multiple accounts or pay different people who are KYC on multiple off ramps.
And they send it to like, it's like a shotgun.
Like they send it to like, you know, 2030.
And that's how they off ramp all the money.
It's kind of stupid because it's on chain.
But like it might be uniquely able to answer.
I think you're right.
I think he's going to say the same.
I know I'm right.
Like it's kind of stupid how they do it they think that they could just swap wallet to wallet
it's kind of funny how the spread works but anyways yeah there are criminal services that
do that for other criminals that break up the asset to help them off-ramp um help them move
like traditional currency there's an ecosystem of
criminal vendors because this is a big business. This kind of crime is a multi-billion dollar
industry in the criminal world. So they mostly operate on countries that don't extradite the
United States. Like North Korea?
Like Russia and Iran are hotbeds of this. So it's funny. People often don't realize...
Is Hawala part of that?
Does anyone know?
It's a good question.
I'm not sure.
I don't consider it a traditional sort of cybercrime service.
I guess I would guess.
I'm just guessing that there's probably interactions because it is, you know,
Huala comes up in money laundering.
And that's a big, that is a big part of this right
it's like when the um so one of the things that people realize it's helpful if you're not doing
thinking about this stuff all the time is that one of the reasons these cyber criminals and fraudsters
are so successful despite all the security measures that you put in place is they have
like their own industry of service providers and vendors that are building them tools and providing different services. So,
you know, even simple extortion crime or a simple sim swapping and theft crime probably involves
different groups of criminals in an arm's length business relationship. There's somebody to
offer a bit, maybe somebody even who sells a sim swapping service to a different criminal
that's sort of researching and targeting specific targets, right?
I think one of the things, you know, someone said earlier that crypto is being held to a higher
standard. And look, maybe that's right in some respects, but to go back to something I said
earlier, it's also important to note that crypto is more attractive to criminals than traditional
assets. It just is. And so some of it is-
That's false. That's false. That's false. But that's false, Justin. Justin, that's a fallacy
that you're believing and you're telling yourself. Because if you look at the traditional financial
crimes, I'm sorry to push back here. 1.5 to 2 million individuals affected annually by the
FTC, reported by FTC and IEC3 estimates, right? Where if you look at their cryptocurrency crimes, it's only 100,000 to 200,000.
Like it's because you work in cyber security.
You also have to take that sample, right?
That sample that you have of those people is actually like,
there's only 7% of people in the world actually own crypto, right?
Like of wallets and stuff.
So the sample size is a lot smaller.
Yeah, anyways. Well, look, let me explain to you why I said what I said, right? And I can even use
an example here. I obviously can't use any names, but I know an instance where a significant large
financial services, large asset manager, big multi-billion dollar entity was hacked. And the hackers went, once they got access to the network,
they went straight after, this was a few years ago,
the little side, almost test investment they had in crypto assets.
And why did they do that, right?
There's billions of dollars of assets of all different types.
Yeah, but Justin, who cares?
Because if they knew that they could be reversed. But no one cares? Justin, who cares?
But no one cares.
Because you still have the other financial crimes of what you mentioned around data, right?
And now that the assets are there too next to the data, it's even worse.
Well, we're talking about all the data stuff. We're talking about all of the loans that originated to fake people, all of the other stuff, all the credit
card fraud, all of that stuff is- But these are, again, I mean, maybe to Justin's point,
it's a sample size. 7% of people are invested in crypto, right? You take wallets and people,
the sample size is much smaller. But can I give them them i can give you the apples to apples on that let me give you the apples to apples on that and i've seen this from
like many entities including law enforcement have echoed these things uh not political
their words but just like people law enforcement uh chain analysis these people that work on these
things so this is what grok says take it with a grain of salt two to five
percent of global gdp is used in uh financial crime money laundering and other uh crime two to five
percent of gdp okay now take that number and let's go to cryptocurrencies 0.15 of crypto volume is
crime and so that that solves that you don't have to worry about volume though not gdp 0.15% of crypto volume is crime.
And so that solves the, you don't have to worry about the box. That's volume though, not GDP.
That's volume, not GDP.
So actually do the math.
Is GDP not 0.15% of all the volume?
Hmm.
Yeah, they are two different.
GDP is pretty equivalent.
You're comparing two different metrics.
It's not exactly the same, but yeah.
I mean, GDP is gross domestic product.
It's revenue, right?
Yeah, it's tough to talk about financial crime.
Correct, it's revenue, not volume.
Like I can move money back and forth between 20 bank accounts, and that doesn't increase volume.
I can move money into Vanguard to buy mutual funds, pull it out to buy Bitcoin.
All of that doesn't affect GDP.
That's volume. So 0.15% of all crypto volume might actually be bigger than 3% of world GDP.
I don't know. I would have to do the math.
So what it matters, and maybe this doesn't, maybe it's just Grock's opinion, but Grock,
the statement they use in this when they're comparing, and maybe it's wrong, and maybe it's not apples to apples, but Grok says it vastly overshadows crypto.
Like traditional money vastly overshadows it.
Oh, yeah, but that's only because 7% of the world is on crypto.
So now imagine –
But they're using it as a – it looks to me like they're trying to compare it as like a percentage of overall.
But okay, maybe – I don't know.
But hold on.
Justin, you were making a point.
Yeah, well, I wanted to say that, look, here's what I am convinced of, and I have not done
the research on the aggregate numbers.
The return on investment for criminals is higher for fee-stealing digital assets.
And let me give you an example, right?
And it's something I touched on earlier. And that is, it's just, that's the reason why.
It's not that it is more attractive for fraud and theft
because if you hack into a traditional bank account
and you try to transfer out, say, $100,000,
first of all, you've got to pay another criminal service
that has a network of bank accounts
or a money laundering system.
So part of your cut goes to them.
Secondly, and believe me,
this happens to companies and individuals all the
time. So I saw in my eyes in the government, and I do some of this work now in private sector,
helping people who have been in this situation and companies. If it's cash, like dollars,
it has to move through a series of bank accounts. And the banks will only process a certain size.
And so there's also a shrinkage from the criminal's perspective. A higher percentage gets seized,
blocked, reversed, plus they're paying a contractor to do it.
Now, that same hacker, if they hack into a Coinbase account
or they just hack into somebody's laptop and get their private keys from their laptop,
and then they transfer the digital assets, 20 minutes later, they've got it,
and it's 100% return.
I don't know, but that's probably harder to do.
Look, quick, quick.
It's not because you just told us how there's a bunch of people who help
critical enterprises convert to cash, right?
So it's not.
It's the same thing.
By the way, credit cards, about 3% of all of their volume gets charged back
because of fraud.
So I don't know that it's really that much better.
I've never lost money to a crypto hack.
I have lost money multiple times to credit card fraud.
Many times, actually.
Probably five or six times in my life.
I just went through that.
This just happened to Richard like two weeks ago.
You still need to convert the crypto to cash, right?
But they are doing that.
That's why they're getting the chargeback, right?
No, I think.
Whatever on the chargeback, the argument for Justin, though, is that they're going to have the crypto, and that's how they got it.
Therefore, it's cheaper.
It's not because I'm not spending the crypto.
I'm trying to spend the cash, and that's why you just talked us through it.
There's another organizational system for people to convert their hacked crypto into cash, right?
But now you're telling
me that it's not the same yeah but if now all these places start accepting crypto i mean amazon's
going to start it and do its own stable coin and accept that as well well now we're talking so i
want to make i want to make two two points i want to make two points here um first one uh we have
to also understand that all all the uh the Street guys, they haven't gotten into crypto yet.
So those financial crimes haven't converted over. And the second part, as far as like the KYC and,
you know, government knowing everything that I hold my assets, I mean, this is why I argue about,
you know, some of the micromanagement and them being able to just see what I have because of the point Justin did make.
There are these big organizations, these rings all over the world who do this.
I mean, and listen, I would never underestimate or overlook what our governments already do.
They already know who these people are.
They're already targeting you.
They're just gathering the data enough to be able to get the threshold, maybe 10
mil, right? They hit the 10 mil, then they can go and take them down. Like that's the issue.
In my perspective, they don't need to see me. They don't need to see what I have.
They already know who they're watching. And that's that. Let me remind you, when we took down
people like Osama bin Laden, they didn't have crypto ledgers with them.
They had pallets of cash and U.S. made guns.
I mean, so, like, I don't know.
And but, OK, look, broader point.
We're arguing about, like, which is worse or where more crime happens or, you know, this stuff.
But the bigger question is, what is it?
It's just like the environment.
I have published research on environmental stuff, but I am, and I consider myself an environmentalist, but I also see that
it, like my mom says, we have to protect the environment. She uses the word at all costs.
That is a foolish word. You cannot use that phrase because at all costs means you better go move to
the woods and don't cut down a tree to make your house because that's hurting the environment.
So like, we have to weigh, what is the net, is it net positive or net negative? And like we go to the Patriot Act. We, they said they were enacting
that to protect us against terrorists. Well, we haven't had any terrorist attacks. Now maybe it's
because of the Patriot Act, but I would argue and Snowden would argue and probably Assange and many
other patriots and other, you know, people who care about this stuff would, would make a big
argument for
normal people were hurt a lot more from the Patriot Act than any terrorists were hurt from
the Patriot Act. That was a fugazi. That was bullshit. And now they're just tracking everything
we do. So the question is, is KYC catching more criminals than it's, and like in utilitarian sense like dollars lost by criminals
or lifestyle lost or gained by criminals versus the lifestyle or the rights or the privacy that
is lost by law-abiding citizens that's the question i have to i have to leave i just want
to say thank you for the conversation i'll leave you with with this information from grok false
swift movements the swift payment network, false Swift payments
this past year, there were between 50 to 100,000 incidents between three to four billion in losses,
right? Crypto side of things, 100 to 200,000 with five to seven billion in losses. Pretty similar.
Credit card fraud. It's like around 100 billion a year too.
Early on the Swift money transfer network.
Hey guys, I have to leave too.
Thank you so much for having me here.
And I hope you'll invite me to personalize.
Give these guys a follow.
Audience members, give these guys a follow.
Guys, give these guys a follow.
And followers, give the audience a follow back too.
And check out what they're building.
Douglas building his protocol is very interesting.
I know some investors who are big in it and think it's really interesting.
I'm looking more into it and, uh, and may,
may try to get involved at some point, but if you want to look at it,
it's at EASE protocol, um, here on, on X.
And then we, we got, thanks Douglas. And, uh,
who else was dropping Derek from steer. Thanks for coming, man.
And then we have, can we get, um, Anthem Blankard up?
He has some views on this. I am sure.
By the way, shout out to Norbert down there. I see he's in the space. Oh,
did he leave?
Alan's son also in the audience. Who else have we not shouted out today?
Uh, NFT ultra, a D gen with the, that's a m'lady right um writers should know yeah
that that that is a m'lady uh uh we got satan in the audio okay okay well i shouldn't be shouting
you out uh we've got romantia in the audience we've got calencia okay let's continue on the
conversation quickly anthem could Could you introduce yourself?
Give maybe like a 30 second or maybe we'll stretch it because you have such an interesting
history, but maybe a one minute intro of your past.
Thanks.
Yeah, real quick.
So thanks for inviting me.
Anthem, hi, Blanchard.
Been in financial services startup world since 2002 with gold money, which is the digital
currency. I have personally
been Operation Chokepointed four times knowingly, directly. Mostly Treasury, one's Securities
Exchange Commission currently. So that's my background and that's my understanding here.
So thanks for inviting me here, Rock. Really appreciate everyone here. We're all people on
this planet just working to figure out solutions.
So much love to you all and look forward to listening and learning. I got to throw in. So
this was like, you know, you could argue some of this digital gold like e-cash, e-gold, hash cash,
Chomian e-cash by David Chom, who we know well, all these things were all things that led to
Bitcoin. And another thing that's interesting about you for the audience to know is your father,
when the US made gold illegal
and started seizing gold from people
in what was that like probably 40s, 43 or 39?
Or when was that?
Yeah, 1933 was the executive order
was kind of the official decree by US federal government.
It was like 8016 or something, whatever it was.
Yeah, something like that. So they started saying, you know, it's illegal to hold gold. Give us your gold. They
gave you a certain price for it. And then they increased the price right afterwards and kind of
like shafted everyone anyways. But they tried to take everyone's gold. And Anthem's dad was
part of part of the helped re-legalize gold, from my understanding.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He actually helped pay for a plane that went over President Nixon's re-inauguration that
said legalize gold.
So that definitely would have been choke point in this day and age.
But in any event, yeah, so he did that.
He basically illegally brandished gold bars as a paraplegic for about two and a half years,
ended up creating the world's largest retail gold company with my mom.
Ended up creating the world's oldest investment conference.
It's still going to this day.
Ended up being one of the first companies to having companies put ADR listings in the U.S., which are basically stock listings.
They were South African mining companies.
So very lucky, very blessed.
I'm very grateful, and I've had a very blessed life. So just grateful, grateful to be here. And is your middle name, were you named after
Friedrich Hayek? I was my middle name. Yeah. And actually, if you want to check that out,
it's I've got it linked on, I think, pinned on my ex still. It's my dad interviewed F.A. Hayek
when he was a board member of the Cato Institute in 1984. And yeah, he basically talks with Hayek and they've actually
memed this. I've seen they, I don't know who they is, but somebody memed this as Hayek predicting
Bitcoin. And so it's my dad's giving the interview. He's the one conjuring the questions
that ultimately conjure the answers from Hayek. So Hayek won a Nobel. It can't be the one where he
says in some sly, the only way we'll ever have a good money again is we must in some sly around
about way circumvent the government. That's it. That's it. No way. I just got fucking, I swear
to God, I just got goosebumps, man. That's crazy. It's an an honor I should take a picture of my goosebumps right that's
an honor well I'm honored to be James Ulysses Blanchard III son um it's an honor to carry the
torch and yeah that was the interview and so yeah basically and it by the way Cato Institute has
graciously transcribed that although I did notice I think there was the word government money or
money I think there's something weird there i remember with the transcription that i kind of caught but
in any event all good people we're all just trying to survive the administrative state so
um god bless us all right this is my whole basis for my entire believing in crypto and it didn't
start this way i didn't understand this concept until later. And it was partially through listening to that speech by Hayek, actually, that your dad did.
That's crazy.
I didn't know this until now.
But anyways, and I've known you for a long time.
I don't know, close to a decade.
But I always learn new stuff.
But yeah, so, okay, Bitcoin is this incredible thing.
All the stuff we're doing is all incredible.
But what I think the real innovation was is that we, in some sly or roundabout way, found a way to take money out
of the hands of the government, or at least make the government compete with our private money.
That's what he was talking about, that we need private money to come back. We need to have
private monies that compete for your business and compete for you to use them. And you aren't
forced with a gun to your head to use a product that sucks and that they're going to inflate your life away for your entire life
so that you're in like an indirect slave. They've found a way to sort of enslave us or enslave a
part of our wealth without actually putting us in shackles or locking us up on a farm.
Like I would argue if, let me ask you guys, if someone took 100%
of your revenue, what are you? You're a slave, right? So me being in California, not now,
I'm in Puerto Rico again, but me being in California, they're taking 54% of my income,
and if you add up sales taxes and property taxes and alcohol taxes and cigarette, I don't smoke,
but if you add up all these taxes, I think it's closer to 70 or 80%. So what am I? Am I 54% slave? Am I 70% slave? That's how I look.
No, Rock, you don't have missiles coming at you. That's how you have to view it. You don't have
missiles being shot at your home today. That's what your 54% is. What about the people in other
countries that do have, what about the people in Iran that just had missiles launched on their head?
What about the mRNA?
I'm saying that's why we in the U.S. pay high taxes, so that we don't have missiles shot on our heads.
Well, that's a small percent of our GDP.
So here's the funny one.
We've got vaccines.
We've got a lot of other things that we're subjugated to.
The vaccines killed more people than World War I and World War II combined. Exactly. That's been what's been admitted. And that was all mandated, by the way.
And guess what? Even if it's zero percent taxes, we're still fucked. Why? Because we have fiat.
We have to pay our bills and credit currency and we have all these credit markers everywhere. So
until we can commercialize public protocols, we're all slaves, even if we have 0% taxes.
And ever since Nixon took us-
You guys really consider yourselves slaves?
I mean, I'm sure if we look at your houses-
No, I'd consider myself 54% slaves.
I need the clothes you need, you're not slaves.
I would have to argue there's a level of addiction
to a standard of living.
So you do a lot of, okay, so a big majority of,
you know, the United States are
addicted to debt, right? They are in car debt. They're in home debt. They are in complete debt
their entire life. They owe money. So they have to get up to work as they're 95 every single day
until retirement. I mean, it's not like they can just walk away. And the system is engineered for that. But a lot of those people are happy. A lot of those people, like, yeah, are they thrilled
that they're not a billionaire? No. But like, if you just go somewhere, go to the grocery store,
go to a library, go to an amusement park. There's tons of people smiling and laughing and having a
good time. I think happiness is probably not at all time highs. I would probably, if we could look
that up, I would guess it's not. If we're not, our happiness is not going up as a society. I don't
think right now, even though we have all these pleasures. No, but it has nothing to do with the
money side of things. It has to do with how we hate each other. It has to do with all the crap we do.
It does. It does have to do, because here's the deal. Here's how those wars, those missiles are
being funded.
We're the ones who are sitting here working, addicted to a different lifestyle, having to live in debt all over. I'm paying taxes on taxes, income tax, and then I got to pay tax to buy some.
And then if I have generational wealth, I got to pay the tax to even give it to my child.
You know, we live in this tax world. The net money goes back to those war places to be able to shoot missiles at people, kill children, whatever you want to call it. It's a circle. It's an entire circle.
Right now, the fact that my kids can go play outside in a pool and relax and have a good time, I'm happy to give 40% of my income to that versus what I see everywhere else.
But your 40% is not going to that.
Only a small part is going to that.
And by the way, I would argue defense and military is one of the most important parts of our budget.
And by the way, it was one of the only parts outlined in the Constitution that the federal government was allowed to do.
But now they do everything.
They're telling us what flavor of cigarettes we can smoke.
No, I agree.
The federal government should only do what we can't do for ourselves.
Well, what the states don't do also.
That's the Tenth Amendment, right?
Sorry to interrupt.
Go ahead.
No, so I was just saying that's exactly like I'm not saying that the government is doing it correctly. I'm not saying that they're perfect in it. I'm just saying,
do I want a world where there is a lot less law and people can get away with tax evasion and crime
and everything like that? Or do I want something where, yeah, maybe it feels like I'm a little bit
watched, but I wake up, I go to sleep. I don't worry about if I'm dying that day.
So for me personally, you read the book 1984.
That's how this is how this all goes.
One second.
I've got to say this.
Listen, I think all this Huxley, I think, is more appropriate.
One second.
Just to answer that.
Just your question.
No, I'm not happy.
I'm not okay with it.
I've lived those type of lifestyles where I felt like a slave.
I will no longer do that now.
I work with things that I believe in, I'm passionate for, where I personally believe I'm making an impact.
I'm going to help change the world for the better.
I refuse to live under those kind of standards.
under those kind of standards. I mean, and this is why I dove deep and just went into crypto web
three with, you know, no, no rope, no nothing, just dove in and said, this is what I want to do,
because this is the future. I want to be a part of it. And if I can make maybe a domino effect,
or be directly a part of that impact, that's why I'm here, because I'm not okay with it.
I have to make a difference. And it has to be the right I'm here because I'm not okay with it. I have to make a difference
and it has to be the right way, right? I'm not going to, I'm definitely not a person that's
going to go out and, you know, do terrorist attacks that that's not the right way. You know,
you, you, you have to, well, I don't know. I'm doing my best to, I'm just here. So anyways,
and by the way, life is not going touffy-rosy when you start making money.
Take a whole hospital staff, right? Doctors, surgeons, nurses, janitors, nutritionists.
They're all making a difference every day. They're saving people's lives and doing stuff.
Not thanks to the government. They're doing that in spite of the government.
The government is not helping with that.
The government has made that much worse.
It's licensing the correct people.
It's allowing – I mean, now, I wouldn't say that's true.
I mean, C's get degrees, and I would have to argue about the quality of medical care in the U.S. now, to be honest. But the government has to put certain laws in place that people don't get hurt.
And so the question is, is the law in place?
But I agree with that only to a certain extent. Okay. For example, should a grandma in Wyoming
who sells a blueberry pie to her, and by the way, this is actually, now that I have you here,
Anthem, this is actually from an interview with Trace Mayer and Tyler Lindholm and Caitlin Long on the What Bitcoin Did podcast, one
of the best interviews ever.
But he talks about how in his state of Wyoming, he was on their Senate for the state, and
they changed a lot of the food laws because the food laws were so strict that they were
arresting grandmas and people for selling
a lemon meringue pie to their neighbor do we need licensing for a grandma to sell a lemon meringue
pie do we need licensing for barbers do we need medallions in new york for the taxi drivers
that just make these basically moats around businesses what about the lemonade stand with
the kids the kids at the lemonade stand,
do they need a license to learn worth ethic? Well, technically they do. Legally, yes.
Exactly. Like what? I mean, look, I'm a libertarian. I'm not an anarchist. I believe
we need regulation. We do need government, but we need as small as possible and as small and
effective as possible.
And when the government is telling us what cigarettes to smoke or any of this crap, then we've gone too far.
Yeah, but the government didn't even do that, right?
The government did that because political groups went after cigarette companies and then lobbied to have those things done.
Whatever the reason is.
Whatever the reason is, right?
I don't care what the reason is.
It's the people, again, that are the problem.
It's not the government actual structure of the government.
Yes, there are problems of it.
But the problem is, is like here in Arizona, right?
Like we have California labor union groups, not the government.
We have California labor union groups coming to Arizona, getting petitions against development and then making that company that was trying to develop
something here adopt a union in order for them to drop that protest against them it's not
California is everything California is everything that a state could do wrong they've done wrong
I mean I just like every I just moved from California. Every corporation on the planet.
And I have a house in Arizona.
Oh, nice.
Well, when you're here, let's meet up and grab a beer.
I have a house in Lake Abasue.
Every corporation, every union and corporation on the planet requires government authority as a proxy.
Every single one.
And so does the banking system. And the banks need higher
authority from the banking state, which sits above the nation states. That's a reality. So the unions
are a proxy of the forced marketplace. It's all an administrative state. I'm not criticizing it.
We need it. I'm just saying we've obsoleted it now in a digital era where we have public protocols
and we have AI that can automate
away all administration practically. We just need scale now. That's why Polygon's here. That's the
whole point of this chat, I thought. Yeah, but I still don't know how that solves a labor union
group hijacking and doing stuff. A protocol, a permissionless AI protocol still won't stop
people from doing the bad stuff. So you still have to have things in place to do it.
Well, here's the thing, right? The union exists because the corporation exists.
And the corporation exists because the nation state exists. And the nation state exists because
the banking state exists. And they all exist because we need ways to communicate with one another
spiritually, commercially, and socially.
And that's just a human reality.
They're forced ways of doing things.
Everything administrative is forced.
Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.
Psychological warfare.
It's psychological warfare, right?
I mean, listen, there's reasons why they did tests
on MKUltra, AutoChoke, all the fun stuff. There's reasons why they did that. There's reasons why the Nazis did it, right? I mean, listen, there's reasons why they did tests on MKUltra,
auto choke, all the fun stuff.
There's reasons why they did that.
There's reasons why the Nazis did it, right?
It is what it is.
It's passive aggressiveness.
And, oh, Jesus, this goes weird.
People want – look, here's the problem.
Humans want power.
We want control, right?
We want money, power, control.
And that's a natural thing.
And in many ways, when you can harness that ambition, you can get great things out of it.
Richard here is one of my secret weapons in business because he has, you could call it
ambition or selfishness, and he's not a selfish person at all, by the way. But in a good way,
selfishness is a good thing that we want to try to accomplish more and have more for ourselves
and our families and the people around us. the problem is that that especially when it starts being kind of
systematized and you have governments who start the worst thing of it all is it's crony capitalism
capitalism i think is a beautiful system the problem is crony capitalism or capitalism gets
infected by crony capitalism and crony capitalism is when you have government, corporate incest,
where the government protects the corporations.
In return, the corporations pay them
in lobbying dollars and campaign donations
and all of this stuff, right?
And so-
But isn't that what we're getting with exchanges
and the cabals in crypto?
You know, a token that nobody knows about goes from, you know, 200K market cap.
I mean, yes, yes, of course.
But who cares?
Don't use that.
Don't use it.
You're not forced to use that.
Whereas the government will force you to use their things, right?
That's also correct.
did like for example why did when faith when the congress was concerned about social media growth
when it was getting really big in the earlier days of facebook why did mark zuckerberg why was
he the first person to go to capitol hill and say we want to be regulated yeah we agree we need to
put great regulations here because he knows that's how you build a moat that is you build a regulatory
moat around your business where you can handle those regulations and you even help
write them. And then other people, new startups can't afford, they don't have billion dollar
legal teams. They can't afford to follow those regulations. So Zuckerberg wants the regulations
because they're helpful for his business mode. And you never know. You never know.
Let's not even talk about Zuckerberg. They created Facebook saying you needed a college email address. And then as soon as they got to like 10 million users, he totally changed it and screwed everybody.
Well, he also screwed over the Winklevoss twins, his business partners, and fucked the whole idea from – stole the whole idea from the beginning.
Look at the Winklevoss twins now. They're like one of the biggest –
I'll never trust him.
They are like one of the biggest holders of Bitcoin. I think they hold one of the largest supplies of Bitcoin, in fact.
Yeah, the silver lining in that lawsuit is that they did get, I think it was like 20 million or 30 million.
I think they put like 10 million each into Bitcoin when they sued Zuckerberg for stealing their idea.
He, you know, made a lot more arguably now, right?
And arguably, you know, Mark a lot, he made a lot more arguably now, right? And arguably, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, right?
Like him being there and I'm sure everybody's going to have like,
there's a backlash on this,
but perhaps he was in there and he was able to negotiate some of the best
regulations to, you know, protect not only his platform, his users, but,
you know, also accommodating the government at some degree,
not saying that nobody else could have done a better job or could have even had that opportunity to do something like that.
I'm just trying to look at the end of that.
Not that I'm saying anything good about it, but just at a different perspective.
You know, we talked about the missiles and the bombs and how we protect ourselves.
ourselves, but I mean, how many of those, if you took as a percentage, all the missiles and bombs
that we have blown up over the last 20 years, tell me what percent of those were we defending
America and what percent of those were we bombing brown people in other countries to get oil or to
do whatever the fuck we were doing? You mean just like having like the drug war and people just
making money because, you know, one, one bombing brown people in Afghanistan and Iraq and, and, and elsewhere.
And now Ukraine, you know, bombing white people, I guess,
Russians, the new brown people, I guess.
Yeah, the bombs aren't racist. Hey, don't say the bombs are racist.
The bombs will blow up anybody, you know, they're going to kill anybody.
But no, I, and I agree with that. I'm not saying the whole system is right.
It's just at the end of the day,
do you want to be in a country
that's on the news for this kind of turmoil
or do you not want to be?
Look, I like living in America.
I'm a proud patriot.
If anyone ever sees me at any conference
or any time I go out to date night,
which is tonight with Cindy,
I will be wearing a suit
and I will have my Bitcoin lapel pin with, my, my American flag lapel pin on top and my Bitcoin
lapel pin underneath it. Uh, you know, so I'm a proud, you have to be a proud citizen to agree
with everything either. So I'm glad that there are people like you that are more outspoken
than other people that wouldn't be. So I don't, um, it's, it's, we need that, right? That's why
America is great is that, and not saying we don't have censorship and stuff, but like,
that's the other part that's great is, is hopefully when we see things, I mean, like,
you know, Elon going in and doing, you know, you know, DOGE or whatever. I mean, again,
it's just, at least there are these avenues where something can happen or a new company can come up and, and, you know, try and, you know, try and break up an oligarchy or a duopoly or something like that.
At least that chance is there. And so, you know, that's, we need people like what we're doing on
this base to challenge that. I just don't always want it to seem like it's so doom and gloom that
it's like the world is ending tomorrow because, you know we don't have it perfect yet look i would die for this country i mean that wholeheartedly with every ounce of my
heart i would die for this country but i don't have to agree with everything we do and it's very
important that we have these conversations i think it's not only a right as an american to speak out
when your government's doing something wrong it is your duty that is the american duty to speak out
when your government is doing something wrong i mean that your duty. That is the American duty to speak out when your government is doing something wrong. That's true. I mean, that's why we have the right to bear arms. We also have the right to form
militias, right? I mean, that's what those... In the Constitution. Yeah, that's why they're written in law. The Constitution's not that long either. It's not like it's like a million
things in it. This is one of the things. Could you imagine if they wrote the constitution today? Could you imagine? It'd be like 7,000 pages. Oh my God. Oh, it's sub-pause what? Sorry.
If I can jump in here, two things. First of all, I have to jump in a few minutes. So if I don't get
a chance to chime up again, thank you guys so much for having me and letting me fire off some
of my contrarian views um
it's been a lot of fun i don't often get a chance to mix it up with a crowd like this
i have to say my usual events are a little different so it's been a lot of fun uh you
know the libertarian discussion point i will say in speaking to someone who who had libertarian
sympathies although i spent 13 years of my career wielding government power,
so make of that what you will.
You know, I also say...
I appreciate the honesty and the double-sidedness of it.
Yeah, thank you.
I will say that my cynical sense of modern politics, including of libertarianism, you know, I feel like it's just, it's not a viable ideology,
although maybe it's a useful framework, because it just doesn't have, it has no mass constituency.
Like, you know, I think that some people who retain some small government sympathies,
even sort of like, you know, the Reagan conservatism version of small governmentism,
not necessarily like libertarianism, it just seems so like there's no constituency left
for that kind of viewpoint, right?
I think people focus a lot on outcomes,
not kind of structural questions about how,
what's the ideal design of like the government or the law.
That is just, it's very, I don't know,
I mean, on the left and the right.
I know, I totally agree.
The idea that we should focus on like design and principles, it's-, I don't know, I'm the left and the right. I totally agree. We should focus on
like design and principles. It's a minority of a minority at this point. But here's the thing,
like there are lots, by the way, of senators and congressmen who identify as libertarian,
but that's not the party that they represent because that's not a viable party. Okay.
Unfortunately. And that's, so my ultimate goal is to go into politics to fight for libertarianism.
That's my life dream.
That's everything I do is heading towards that.
But I know that that's a very hard path.
And I know that, like, as being kind of a libertarian and being anti-government in some
ways, not anti, but just I want small and effective and limited controls on government.
But it's a hard path. And that's one of the
reasons the Libertarian Party never goes anywhere is because there's so many Libertarians. They're
like, I'm not going to support a Libertarian Party. That's like stupid. We're supposed to
be against the government. I mean, Eric Voorhees told me, you know, long ago that when I told him
this, these aspirations, he said, Rock, please don't do that. Just keep working from the private
sector. You could do a lot more good for the world from the private sector. And I told him, you know,
I appreciate the opinion. And he's one of my heroes, Eric Voorhees. And I told him, look,
I'm still going to do it. You know, I got to do this. It's just, we have to have people that are
willing to sacrifice. You know, Cindy, she doesn't want me to do it. My parents don't want me to do
it. Cindy's parents don't want me to do it. My parents don't want me to do it.
Cindy's parents don't want me to do it.
They're worried about the kind of, like, backlash our families will get.
But someone has to do it.
You know, I don't want to be a martyr.
I don't want to die, but I will fight for this cause.
And I think, like, right now the incentives aren't there to make a libertarian statement or, like, policies.
So we see this right now.
Trump and Elon and all their cabinet ran on
reducing the size of government, getting rid of waste, fraud, abuse, all this stuff, right?
Balancing the budget. They ran on this. The people voted for them for this. This is a big part of why
people voted for them. This was one of the highest rankings on when Trump won. It was one of the
highest rankings of their people's opinion of him was economy and balancing the budget. And now look, they're not doing shit for that. They reduced spending. Now,
the big, beautiful bill reduced spending by 160 billion out of 7 trillion. That's nothing.
Then they increased revenue by, you know, whatever it was, a half a trillion a year.
So now could those balance out and could tariffs make, knows it's a big argument Okay, but the point is if they're that's we need way more than that to fix this problem
Like the the deficit is growing so fast and now it might grow even faster if Trump and Elon and Elon
Even going out on a limb to fight Trump and fight him in public
About this that it's so important to them and a lot of the people that supported trump are now saying hey trump he's right we need to balance the budget um but there's no political will because
the problem is trump cannot reduce spending by two trillion dollars and balance the budget right now
because it would create a temporary catastrophe you would be taking the cocaine addict off the
cocaine without giving you know or the heroin without giving him the methadone to get off of it.
And that's unfortunate, but that's just how it is.
That our economy is on drugs and to pull it off the drugs, even if it wasn't catastrophic,
it would at least result in a temporary slowing of growth.
And Trump only has three and a half years to make his legacy.
Every president only has two to four years between midterms and their election to make a mark.
And so reducing spending is not going to make the mark.
So there's not a political will for it.
Now, I have a solution for this that I actually am now hearing a lot of politicians talk about.
So I'm in the camp of Eric Voorhees, Rock.
I don't want to see you sacrifice.
And I actually have a story about the Libertarian Party
because the Libertarian Party asked my father to run as their candidate in 1984 or 1980.
It was one of the two.
Now, I heard from a guy who's very high up named Steve Mariotti,
who is a pretty famous guy in libertarian circles.
And he told me that in 1984 there was a lot of
popularity for the libertarian candidate and somehow between the libertarian
convention and the printing of like the manifesto something got in there about
pedophilia and Steve swears he didn't hear anything about that in the
convention and that it basically caused I I think like the Koch brothers, I
think had gotten in at that point, like they'd brought big billionaire money.
So this is a cautionary tale.
I also was a delegate for Ron Paul twice in Nevada.
I made it to state.
I never went either time because it conflicted with my father-in-law's birthday.
Obviously, it didn't matter anyway.
I'm just saying like, I think the best evidence is that the majority of people didn't turn out to vote last federal election. The smaller we can get that number,
once it gets under 10%, I think we know we've won, honestly. Wait, what? I agree with the
Treasury person. I agree with the FinCEN guy. Wherever he went, Justin or whatever his name is,
I actually agree with him. On which he's right. I think it's all
crazy. I think most people under 30 years old are so disillusioned by the political administrative
state that they don't buy into the dream at all. It's like emperor's new clothes for them.
It's so unrealistic. I mean, I can even speak to my personal experiences. As privileged as I am,
I have seen an insane amount of corruption on every single government level in the United
States. So if a white man in the United States can't get justice through the government nation
state construct, like what fucking chance does anybody else have on the planet, really? And I
think most kids see that. And that's why the crypto is so fucking big because it's all speculation.
Yes.
However, once protocols stack like Linux did, like TCP, IP did, et cetera, you know, watch
out.
It's going to obsolete the banking nation.
It's all administrative state.
It's all just a proxy for the administrative state.
That's all it is.
Right.
That's my view.
That's my crazy view.
But what were you saying about you want to see a less of a voter turnout? Why is that?
Yes. Yes. Because I believe that that is one of the best indicators that people have lost
total confidence in the administrative state as a form of commerce. I think that's what,
that's what Polygon and Ethereum and Bitcoin to me are all about. They're just, they're single layers. We just haven't metaphorically figured out how to bake the cake yet.
is uh yesterday yeah yesterday and um yeah i mean i think the network state is an interesting concept
i don't know how realistic it is in the short term i hope it's realistic in the long term
but i don't know i'm actually quite happy i guess i think of it differently but that's an interesting
really interesting point is um i look at it as right now political like fervor and people talking
about politics is at an all-time high for my entire life. And I think that that's probably a good thing,
because if the people are not involved,
then the big people who control things and are doing the crony capitalism
and are getting lobbying dollars, they'll just take full control.
So I think it's really important, just like I think there's a personal opinion.
People might hate this, but I think we all should have guns
and to protect ourselves from government mostly.
But I think it's so, if we all don't have guns
because we just think, oh, the government's too big,
they could take us over anyways, they got tanks,
then they do take us over it,
like every other country in the history of humans.
But if we do have guns to protect ourselves
and if we do exercise our right to vote
And to protest and to speak out
And use our free speech
Then we have a better chance of
Fighting that system from getting too big
The system that I love
I think our government is the greatest government of mankind's history
But we still have to keep controls on the government
That was the whole point of the constitution
The sad part about that is
What normal person has the time
to go protest
and take off of work
to actually do
these, to launch
these campaigns that they do for days.
It's just something that I bring
up sometimes. We are
protesting right here.
That's what I'm saying.
It's addicted. It's addicted I'm saying. It's addicted.
It's addicted to the lifestyle.
It's addicted to the debt.
And something needs to change.
I guess, you know, if, okay,
here's my greatest hope right now for libertarianism
is because Elon tried so hard
and it doesn't seem to be working.
He's seeming to lose that battle.
And Trump is like, just as being more realistic and saying, oh, we're not going to get a bill
through if we do this or we're going to, you know, or we might lose midterm seats if we go
too aggressive or whatever. So like, I don't know, maybe hope is lost for the U S in the current
time. And it just has to get way worse before it could get better. Like a drug addict, things have to often hit rock bottom. Yeah. I mean, maybe, maybe we don't have to think of like
how great our nation state is like to personify how great individuals are and how blessed anyone
is living in the nation state, geographical, invisible lines of the United States or Canada,
et cetera, has accessible resources, maybe more than other
places relative to the incentive. I mean, to your point, right, it's just, I think,
maybe abstracting some of these words will help us get less emotional and be more mathematical
about our decision making and the tools at our disposal today. We can pick up a tool that we
can make with a Google, you know, AI app creator and, you know, figure out,
you know, proof of authenticity of eggs or someone's garden or someone doing a cleaning
service or kind of like you were talking about, like the age of needing licensing as a proof of
authority is obsoleted. It's all in our head at this point. The technology is we all know on this
call better than like, you know, 99% of most in
the general world, I would guess, even the digital natives, right?
Because there's probably a lot of digital natives on this conversation, right?
So, I mean...
Well, you know, our constitution and the founding of America was very much about the individual.
It wasn't about necessarily the country.
It was about the individual, right?
They were leaving their country to create a kind of union of individuals and to celebrate individualism and the ruggedness of the individual.
And so the whole constitution is literally to protect the individuals from government.
That's what the constitution is.
That is the theme of our constitution.
Those are the unalienable rights.
I could be wrong on this, and I'll have to look at the constitution again here, but I feel like
almost everything in the Bill of Rights, at least, yeah, the Bill of Rights
more specifically, I guess, everything in the Bill of Rights is
literally to protect us from the government, right? Let's think, I mean, we could walk
through every one of them, but I think it's all to protect us from the government, right? Let's think, I mean, we could walk through every one of them, but I think it's all to protect us from government.
It absolutely is. If I may chime in just for a second here, guys. So I don't know if you guys
are familiar with the Buckminster Fuller quote, which I live by which is you don't take the establishment
head on you build a new model that makes the old model redundant and so bitcoin have web3 amen amen
web3 bitcoin quick swap guys we have everything we need to create essentially new nations within nations.
Okay, just like the network state rock
that you mentioned earlier,
like that's I think the way to go.
And this is something,
I've had conversations with Charles Hoskinson
and others on,
we're building what we're calling crypt towns.
So there's gonna be a dedicated Cardano crypt town
that's gonna come online in the future. Some alpha for you guys there. Happy to, you know, by the way,
consult you guys to do the same. But basically, the way to do it is that you have to create a
black hole kind of situation where value, like goods and services are cheaper and more valuable within your network than it is
outside your network to some degree so that there's always incentive for businesses to come
and set up within your network right so uh just to give you a simple example you know quick quick
swap foods for example if you guys set that up, because we're doing something like that with Cardano right now.
But say, for example, you guys did something like that.
Oh, the food is higher quality.
You know, it gets delivered right to your home.
Come up with simplified, unique services within the network and have it slight price differential.
Oh, yeah, you can get it in USDT or USD or whatever.
But hey, if you did it in quick, it's slightly cheaper or whatever, right?
So there you have the kind of like black hole.
You just got me thinking.
So I've been trying to like, I love the idea of the network state.
And I'm, you know, in a way kind of a digital nomad, right?
Cindy and I are here in Puerto Rico now.
But I mean, we're every month,
we're at least a week of the month,
we're in some other country,
you know, or at a conference or wherever traveling.
But I've always thought like,
how can we make this network state actually work?
And I just kind of thought of a good MVP for this
that might work.
You guys poke some holes in this for me.
But what if you got,
you would need some prominent figures, I think,
and people to put together the first one. And there's already some already created.
You have Liberland, I guess. That's not really a network state, but I guess kind of. But anyways,
you could have, you could put together this network state, we'll call it whatever,
X network state. And you can negotiate, you can have everyone in that network state,
basically just renounce your citizenship of your country.
Now, you give your allegiance or your citizenship to this network state.
And then this network state contracts with various countries.
And you pay at some, you could even have taxes with this.
Because if you don't have any taxes, how are you going to have militaries to protect you?
How are you going to do the roads? there's arguments for you could do that privately but anyways there at least for the time being it seems we do need funding for some
of these things military etc but you could have a network state where everybody who joins it don't
you know give some reasonable amount of taxes or whatever the network state votes on or agrees to
and then those taxes are split between the countries that whatever the network state votes on or agrees to. And then those taxes are
split between the countries that support that network state because you need physical countries
to be able to walk and eat and live. And so you could have, you know, for example, you know,
Cayman Islands would probably be open to something like this. You would have maybe Singapore,
maybe Dubai or Ireland, these kind of like places that are more open to these like tax
haven style stuff, because that's part of what this should be, in my opinion, is a bit of a tax
haven. I don't like taxes. But anyways, back to so then you could rent like you could rent passports
from these countries, you could have an agreement, hey, anyone in this X network state gets an
automatic passport or visa to these countries. And we, the network state,
will pay a percentage of our income to these different countries that are part of this.
And we'll only be in one, like one person might only be in one country 1% of the time or never
even, but we're still going to pay a small amount to each of these countries just to support us and to give us some regulatory protection military protection where needed and visas uh
and we will so for that we will contribute to their roads and to whatever they want to use the
money for we give them the money they could use it for health care they could use it for roads
they could use it for military but it would be a more reasonable number and you could almost bypass the requirement to be a citizen of a place.
So I just, me personally, I, I, I couldn't give up my U S citizenship. I just, I just couldn't,
um, even if I really wanted to, I just, I just couldn't. Um,
but I haven't done it either. I thought about it for years, but, but I, I didn't do it because I, I, you know, I want to go into politics, so I can't do it. But otherwise, it would be very tempting.
nation-state-wise, not really recognized, I don't think, by other nation-states.
I mean, I think it's going to be more like obsolescence.
Like, all these administrative states, banking, nation, corporate, religious, etc.,
are all going to just continue to be so frantic and panicked to create more velocity,
like more inflation, basically, you know, trying to create velocity,
and it's just going to get harder and harder.
And I think it's just going to obsolete.
I think it's going to be like an entropy thing, honestly.
As exciting as it is to kind of think about like Armageddon and Hollywood and Titanic and cliffs and stuff,
I just, I don't think it's going to go that way.
I think it's going to kind of go like the postal service.
I think one of the things that holds these, yeah, one of the things Anthem, I think,
and curious what you think, but that holds all these countries still together and the nation state borders is dollar, is currencies.
I think once you get rid of government currencies or they become just obsolete because we make better ones that are better, you know, and people just slowly, like that's what's happening, right?
Slowly, Bitcoin as a percent of the world's currencies is increasing rapidly.
Not slowly, rapidly, really.
It just passed the Swiss franc like a year or two ago.
It passed Canada.
So Bitcoin as a currency is getting larger and larger.
And eventually, and I'm scared to say, a lot of people don't want to say this.
Like Michael Saylor would never say this publicly, but he knows it.
Yeah, this is going to eat everything.
And all these currencies of these nation states are going to go yeah this is going to eat everything and and all these exactly these
currencies of these nation states are going to go they're going to be obsolete this has happened
for all of eternity by the way it's thermo it's thermodynamics right like what i know sailor likes
to talk about that he doesn't idiomatic loss yeah right and and it is that it's it's the digital
state devouring the analog state and the analog state is an administrative state that requires force scarcity.
You know, it's why there's been technologies, for example, to have cars that would be exponentially more gas efficient miles per gallon over a century ago or using water.
The reason that the petrodollar is so important is because it's relatively easy as a fungible liquid asset to keep scarce like it's
very easy to regulate a lot of it away and it's a relatively cumbersome complex process and so
what i see happening literally is the administrative state's energy literal energy supply around the
globe is literally not going to be able to keep up with the digital state. And the administrative state is going to run out of psychological operational excuses,
basically, that the digital natives already aren't buying today.
And even us older people aren't going to be buying.
That's kind of how I see this playing out mathematically.
Hey, we got a moment here for a couple of comments on this issue.
There should be a situation where actually...
Everybody feel free to jump in.
Yeah.
We just, we don't, you can raise your hand if you need to, but if people feel shy or
whatever, but, or if it's too hard to get a word in, because we do, we're a little bit
of a rambunctious crowd as some people saw a couple hours ago, but yeah, jump in.
Yeah, sweet. Yeah. So a couple of... but but yeah jump in yeah sweet yeah uh so a couple yeah okay go ahead no you first okay so uh okay i'll jump in i won't be done so uh first thing
one um i want to delineate between currencies and nationhood here right because currencies aren't
exclusive i might have 20 bucks and i might have a couple euros. Most people are pretty cool with that, including the governments in question.
And I say this as somebody with an Australian birth certificate, a New Zealand passport and an American green card.
Right. And so we have, you know, and, you know, if I wanted to, I could go get an Estonian e-pastport by the end of the day.
So I think I think that's the first thing, is that there are very strong
relationships between nationhood and currencies, but neither are necessarily exclusive to the
extent we choose to look at what our options might be as global citizens, right? Okay, and the next
part is, I have found when imagining nation states versus network states, I have, and sort of comparing what government might look like for a nation state to what governance might look like in a network state, I found it useful to think of it as less about, like, how do we, like, manage this relationship between us as citizens and them or those people as governors and more
like, hey, how do we preserve individual sovereignty, right? And perhaps minimize the
amount of individual sovereignty that we might have to delegate to a governance mechanism,
which may or may not be a bunch of humans that we all pick, right? And that's the
only clarification that I want to chuck in here, is if we switch the framing around just a little
bit and focus on individual sovereignty preservation, rather than who do we pick to
delegate the things to, that allows us for a broader space for creativity with all these new
tools we have. Let's just give the power to Grok.
No, I'm just kidding.
Speaking of, I'm talking to Grok right now
about libertarianism.
And as I'm listening to you here,
I was looking at a stat I looked up earlier.
It says 10 to 22% of Americans view themselves
as at least partially libertarian.
Kind of interesting.
But yeah, really good points you make, man.
I thought one thing that was interesting is someone brought up that Bitcoin is larger
than the Canadian dollar and the Swiss franc, but the Canadian dollar and the Swiss franc
didn't stop becoming useful for their intended purpose.
And I think that's what a lot of people kind of get wrong about Bitcoin is that-
They might slowly be, no?
No, because like if I'm a doctor and I have to get paid, I mean, I guess if you just everything to Bitcoin, people could just all use Bitcoin to transact.
But then how do you value differences among countries?
It's just if I buy a car in the U.S., it's one Bitcoin.
But if I buy a car in Mexico, it's 0.2 Bitcoin.
Of course.
I mean, I guess you could do that.
Well, you know, the cost, the cost effect.
That happens with dollars too, by the way.
If I buy something in Mexico with U.S. dollars, you can pay with cash U.S. dollars.
It's a different price than if I buy something in America.
Just to be clear, the reason why the price differences for most things are, you know, where it's being manufactured, right?
Or like how far is it away from wherever
it's being grown i mean those play their labor costs of course of course but but but yes going
to bitcoin um just like what is it el salvador you look at the standard of living and it's changed
um quite a bit what Just by using Bitcoin.
Look, the fact is,
let's just look.
They dollarized first and then added Bitcoin.
They got rid of their currency and dollarized.
They didn't just go to it. Exactly.
So here's the thing there.
This is really important.
So the reason that it went like that,
and I think this is how it's going to have to happen
for a lot of countries,
is right now,
countries will not switch
out their dollar for bitcoin why because if you had a money printer you would never want to give
that up right you would want to keep that money printer it's an awesome thing to have right
especially when you're the government and you have the contillion effect and the you know the people
closest to the faucet get the most reward um so of course you're not going to give up your printer
do you know why el Salvador gave up their printer?
Because their currency kept collapsing, so they just said,
our printer has been broken for a long time, the people demanded, and so they went to the dollar.
Now, why were they the first ones to make Bitcoin legal tender?
Because they didn't have a money printer.
So they saw, okay, this thing's obviously great. We all know it's great, Bitcoin.
We all know it's better than the current system.
Or many people understand that. Politicians, even people that own the money printer, they see it and they're scared of it, right?
But they're not going to switch it out because they still have money printers.
So you have to just issue government debt.
I mean, so say if you're the US government and you say, okay, we're going to issue 50,000 Bitcoin of government bonds. It's the same
thing. They're going to get 50,000 coins in and then they're going to owe people interest on that
debt. Hold on, Richard. Hold on. Let him explain what this is though. So what do you mean exactly?
Are you saying they're going to issue debt to buy Bitcoin? No, I'm saying when you issue debt,
it's an IOU. It doesn't matter what currency I do it
in. I could take a loan from a buddy and say, give me 10 Bitcoin, or I could say, give me $100,000.
I still owe that amount back to that someone. I didn't change the debt cycle just because I
changed what medium I collected it in. No, no, no, no. You completely change it because the reason,
why do you think they always say you can never the u.s
can never default because it could just print more money it cannot print more bitcoin so it
cannot just borrow infinitely in bitcoin or it goes bankrupt yeah but printing money means issuing
debt uh partially the reason they can't run out of money is because they're like an elon musk that
wants to get loans from banks in whatever form it is. They know he's always going to repay it so he can always take on more debt.
The U.S. government can always issue more bonds
because people always have faith that the economy will pay enough taxes to cover that debt.
So if the government just came out tomorrow and said,
hey, we're going to sell 50,000 Bitcoin worth of bonds,
that means institutions would give them 50,000 Bitcoin and they would be on the hook to pay that back and the interest coupon payments.
How does the debt issuance change?
Well, if it's denominated in Bitcoin, I mean, they can't do it.
They wouldn't. They wouldn't. They can't do it. They won't do it.
They wouldn't. They just that would be stupidity because if Bitcoin goes up 10x, they're fucked.
The U.S. never denominates things in other
currencies they denominate it in dollars very specifically for the reason that if something
goes wrong they can print more of it and when other countries you just nail the hint and that's
why people can't use bitcoin as a medium of exchange because it's so volatile well that's
a totally different issue that's a totally different issue. That's a totally different issue. And by the way, volatility of Bitcoin has been decreasing every year for 16 years.
Correct. So that's what I'm saying. If in 50 years, the value of Bitcoin changes against other currencies about how much the dollar changes against other currencies, the U.S. government could just print debt in Bitcoin.
currencies the u.s government could just print debt in bitcoin i guess i guess no no because
dollars depreciate you can't no you do the opposite you do the opposite anybody who has a
brain and knows understands financial engineering they do the opposite of that what is michael
saylor's play borrow in shit dollars that go down in value or other assets that could go down in
value no no no i You're missing the point.
I'm not saying what would be the better financial instrumentation to do.
I'm just saying changing what you collect the debt in or issue the debt in,
if it's a stable item, wouldn't change the fact that you could just print.
I don't see it.
I mean, are you right?
Actually, actually, technically, I agree with Hummingbird's logic because debt begets debt.
See, here's the reality.
Here's why we need a multi-public protocol world to commercialize, exactly because of this issue.
Because at the end of the day, if Bitcoin software keys just become the next version of gold bullion or the next version of U.S. treasuries, then we still have a forced marketplace construct.
We still have prisoner's dilemma, violence, lie, cheap, steal, doubt.
We still have the administrative state.
It doesn't solve the problem.
But in this Bitcoin system, it's not a Bitcoin-only system.
It wants to have Bitcoin.
But it's not a Bitcoin-only system.
It's like Friedrich Hayek said.
We have lots of things, and they can compete in a free market.
Now, are you saying that if Bitcoin gained 90% market share, this could happen?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
But I'm just saying in the scenario that we're painting, we're still assuming the banking state and the administrative state supersedes everything else, including Bitcoin and public protocols.
In that kind of scenario, I actually think that that's true.
Because at the end of the day, a fiat government can decree anything that they want.
I mean, it's the power of violence.
Well, hold on a second.
Then walk me through exactly what they would do.
Tell me exactly.
I think what they would do, assuming that nation states and the banking states still
ruled the ruse and assuming that, let's say, Bitcoin somehow, it goes against
Gresham's law, so I don't think it really works, even if, but they could treat it like gold,
let's say, kind of honorarium, let's say, as a reserve currency. In theory, then,
we need commerce essentially as human beings. And if nation states and banking states is as
good as it gets, it's Plato's allegory of the cave. That's as good as it gets. It's best effort. Yeah, we could do better. We could do guaranteed effort if we
commercialize public protocols and layer them together like other kinds of software that we've
done that with, right? It's just if we don't do that, then we're stuck in the fiat paradigm where
paradigm where everything's a credit marker. It doesn't matter what it is, it's a credit marker.
everything's a credit marker. It doesn't matter what it is. It's a credit marker.
So, but walk me through, okay, Hummingbird, if, was that Hummingbird speaking? So,
tell me how the government... No, that was me, that was Anthem.
No, before that, before that. I was actually agreeing with Hummingbird's
scenario, but I don't think it's a very likely scenario, because I don't think Gresham's law
would still hold, like, the Bitcoin keys would still be better money than U.S. dollars in that
scenario, so people would spend the dollars and hoard the keys, but... Oh, are you saying if they Like the Bitcoin keys would still be better money than U.S. dollars in that scenario.
So people would spend the dollars and hoard the keys.
Oh, are you saying if they put dollars on top of Bitcoin like they did on top of gold?
I don't think that's what he was saying.
Oh, I thought that was what we were talking about.
No, I think that's actually kind of interesting and cool.
What I was saying is the debt is an obligation, right?
Like I could go borrow dollars from someone.
I could say, hey hey give me a thousand
dollars or let's say just a hundred thousand dollars so it makes sense i could borrow a
hundred thousand dollars from someone or i could go borrow one bitcoin that didn't change my ability
to issue debt if i'm a credit worthy person and someone wants to give me that debt yes it does
because if you borrow in bitcoin against someone you are fucked if if it goes up and it
consistently does and it consistently no because think about this what if i took it what if i took
that bitcoin and then went and did bitcoin defy with it and ended up getting two bitcoin out of
it and then just gave them back the one bitcoin in two years like gold bullion just like gold
bullion has for the last hundred or two hundred or whatever years right i mean governments and
banks have been doing this off of gold for centuries and millennia, just what you're talking about.
Yeah, so my point is, is that you don't need to get rid of a fiat currency to get rid of
money printing. What gets rid of money printing is if people stop believing in the creditworthiness
of the issuer. But that's never going to change because the U.S. economy and other big economies are just
going to keep growing.
Hold on.
Let's use as an example.
Let's use, hold on, let's, because there's a free market part to these government bonds,
right?
That's why no one's buying them right now because they don't have faith in them.
And that's why the rates are spiky.
No one's buying them.
I mean, they're buying them less, but the rate's not at like 10%.
So there's still people.
But you know why? You know why? Because we are buying them. The government is buying them and mean they're buying them less but the rate's not at like 10 percent so there's still you know why you know why because we are buying them the government is buying them
and printing money to buy them so hold on so look at if let's take your scenario and say the
government did this any amount of time ago including a year ago or five years ago or 10
years ago if they would have issued debt and said we're issuing debt denominated in bitcoin
they would be the 30 trillion dollars of debt would be a hundred or a quadrillion right they
can't do that they only issue the whole point of the us dollar system is that they could issue a
currency that they devalue their own debt they devalue it. They make it worth nothing. So they print so that,
yeah, they have 30 trillion in debt. No, I'm agreeing with you. That is the better way to
print. I'm saying that you can still print using anything. I'm not saying it would be smart to do
right now because the coin is going to go up. I mean, that can unwind though.
They were taking that money and putting it in like a sovereign fund, right?
Like, so say you're like the Saudi Arabian government.
It has to outperform Bitcoin.
They could issue bonds in Bitcoin and then put it in there.
They would unpeg eventually, right?
Just like they did with gold, right?
That's what happens.
The point is that once Bitcoin becomes stable, which I was on a space, I don't know, a couple of days ago, that someone was
predicting that once Bitcoin becomes the size of gold, it probably will not have parabolic returns
anymore. Of course not. I mean, I think stop having parabolic returns and people want to use
it as the reserve currency. Then governments can just issue debt in that. Now it won't be as good
of a money printing machine because it won't devalue, but that will just hold the government more accountable. But if your country is growing
and you have tax revenue, you can always pay the interest. Why would you do that? It just
doesn't make sense though. I'm not saying. Correct. I'm agreeing with you. It's not,
they wouldn't do that out of choice if they have a fiat. I'm just saying even getting
rid of the fiat doesn't turn off the money printing because you can still just issue debt in that other asset.
Okay.
Actually, okay, I'm starting to wrap my head around this.
Okay.
I think I can see a world where this could happen if it was stable enough and the returns were muted enough.
Because my prediction is that in 40, 50 years, years as bitcoin grows it'll start to have a
return more like three to seven percent so like s p 500 returns 10 with dividends but this is
largely based on it's actually just like inflation built into that so the true rate of return for s
p 500 is like america what's that it's like 2% when you factor in inflation these days yeah I guess it
depends I'm yeah I mean it depends how you calculate inflation if you use their own
numbers from you know before it yeah then it's closer to that but um so I my prediction is that
bitcoin would be something like call it three to seven percent returns as it starts to plateau
once it gets to the peak where it's like 80% adoption,
it'll be lower, but it'll be just a consistent return just based on population and demographic
growth and GDP growth and these kinds of things, and the more demand for money. So just so we can
understand dollars, we print 7% new dollars per year on average for a hundred years. Now they
calculate that at only two or 3% inflation. Now,
part of that is because they're doing funny math, okay? They're cherry picking. We know this. But
besides that, it's also because there is new demand for dollars around the world every year.
So if we print 7% new dollars a year, but there's a demand for, call it 5% new dollars per year,
we're just going to go with their math for now. Let's just go with the government math.
There's a demand for 5% new dollars a year.
What do you end up with?
2% inflate, right?
Now, imagine if the government couldn't print more money,
then instead of having 2% inflation,
we would have 5% deflation
as dollars were more popular around the world.
And you could argue the number would go up
because demand would be higher
because it would be an appreciating asset.
But they don't do that because they want to print the money because they want that money.
They don't want someone in Africa who's holding a $100 bill to get the benefits.
They want to tax that person, and that's what they do.
The dollar, we actually tax the whole world because the whole world transacts in dollars.
And every time we print a dollar, we are not just taxing United States citizens.
We are taxing everyone who uses dollars around the world.
And it's a big benefit for us, right? And just not to mention the dollar, the US dollar actually has a
time, it's got a deadline. It has an expiration date on it because, you know, we no longer have
anything tangible to back it to, right? I mean, it's just military, basically.
I mean, it has a pretty big thing.
I mean, a $30 trillion economy back there.
I mean, I agree that it has a limited lifetime,
but I would disagree and say there's nothing tangible.
Yeah, it's not backed by gold or assets necessarily,
but I mean, in a way it is backed by,
like we've already talked about.
$30 trillion.
It's backed by $30 dollars of GDP per year backed by like this.
Well, and don't forget the total value of gold.
Yeah. And don't forget, it's also backed by people estimate in resources, metals, precious metals, oil, land.
But what I'm saying is we could we have 500 trillion in assets as a country of the United States that if we wanted, we could sell to pay off that debt.
I'm not defending the system, okay?
I'm just saying that it's not nothing that it's backed by.
But as we have more and more debt, it becomes harder and harder to try to see a world where we pay that back.
And we're just wasting a trillion dollars a year.
That's more than we spend on our military. That's more than we spend on our military.
That's more than we spend on Social Security.
Where do most of those interest payments go and who holds most of the debt?
Most 75% of the debt is owned by the U.S. people, U.S. pension funds, and U.S. corporations.
So that trillion dollars, $750 billion of that is going to teachers' pension funds.
It's going to private 401K accounts. It's going to private 401k accounts.
It's going to American people.
It's going to rich people who hold bonds.
I don't hold any bonds.
My mom's a teacher.
My mom was a retired special ed teacher.
She gets a pension every month from the state of Arizona.
I wonder how much of that interest is going to people like your mom
versus rich people and people
in other countries. I guess it's not that much. I could be wrong. You don't think the
amount of treasuries held by pension funds and 401k plans is not that much? It's an
insane amount. I would guess that the number owned by very rich people who understand how to navigate these systems is probably higher.
I do have the great problem.
And especially on a per capita basis.
I'm going to go research that info of how much is held by private rich individuals versus pension funds, insurance companies that mostly are doing that for a lot of middle class people.
I'd be interested to know that.
I'm trying to find it on Roth right now.
And that's the same thing with government waste, right? I don't like it, but when I look at all
the people that work for the government, and what do they mostly do? They go spend their money in
the economy. So when there's $3 trillion going out to government workers, it's not like that money
is just going to like 10 people's pocket. That's
going to all the, the court processors. It's going to all the people that make 50 to a hundred
they're powering the economy. So like, so would you argue that would you make the argument then
if that's true, let's find the numbers. But if that's, if what you're saying is true that you
think, uh, you know, a ton of this is going to regular people. And so it's a good are you arguing it's a good thing to have debt or what about why don't we have to double the debt?
Fuck it. Let's really help. So so I know I agree with you.
So it has to be within reason. And and a book that I read by that Warren Buffett a long time ago.
He speaks out against the debt, too. But a healthy amount of debt.
And I think he said it was somewhere between two and 4% covers with growth and enables you to accelerate growth above that. And we've been above that for a
long time, gets us into the problem we're in now where it is waste and we're accruing too much
debt. But like even corporations that don't need it, like Microsoft, when interest rates were really
low, went and borrowed a bunch of money at like 2% because that improved
the balance sheet and the return on assets for that thing.
So I agree that debt is good because look what it does.
It gives Americans and actually everybody around the world the availability to get a
constant stream of interest income that's backed by a huge country.
That's a great thing for people's asset portfolios.
And it gives you the addiction to the standard of living. I mean, debt is not good. I don't care.
But anybody says, I know they're billionaires. They make billions and billions and billions of
dollars because of debt, right? But no, debt is never healthy. Debt is not a good thing,
in my opinion, right? So all the people that buy a house putting 20% down,
which is like 99% of home buyers,
you're saying those people should all just rent.
Do you know that, do you know, hold on, hold on, hold on.
Let me answer this.
Let me answer this.
Do you know that it wasn't like that before? It wasn't until we created the option of the debt
that that started happening.
And then once that started happening-
Yeah, because people wanted to afford a house.
There wasn't just four pieces of plywood put together that they could build themselves. And so we built- Yeah, but now people wanted to afford a house. There wasn't just four pieces of plywood put together that they could build themselves.
And so we built a –
Yeah, but now no one can afford a house.
Here's the deal with debt, right?
There's a time period for debt, right?
Once that time period's over, you're not supposed to accumulate more debt.
You're supposed to be done with it.
I mean, I don't know.
I've worked with a lot of people that have been making $20,000 a year up to $20 million a year.
And you can use debt very responsibly. Look at the business owner.
Just like Warren Buffett. I get it. Just like Warren Buffett.
I'll agree that debt is not totally useless. There's great things you can do with debt.
I personally have built three unicorns now, and I never used debt
for any of that. And a lot of people I know who use debt, they grew faster than me and my companies,
but they also crashed and burned when they made mistakes. So I don't know, debt is kind of like,
you know, Warren Buffett, as you're quoting, says, you know, derivatives, and I would put debt,
I don't know, that's not a derivative, but I mean, it's kind of in a way.
But derivatives and leverage are like weapons of financial mass destruction.
Debt is dangerous as shit.
I actually dropped a few replies to this.
You use debt for appreciating assets, not for depreciating ones.
That's the key.
You use debt to want a vacation.
You don't use debt to buy a car that drops half in value when you drive it off.
You can use debt to buy a business. You can use debt to grow a business.
You can use debt even for just financial engineering, right?
We do it in DeFi literally all the time.
We go stake back.
Look at Michael Saylor.
We go do DeFi with it.
It's only for a limited time, and that's it.
But the idea isn't to go deeper and deeper into debt.
Correct.
Yeah.
I'm going to push back.
I'm going to push back.
I'm going to push back.
So like,
I'll give you an example of a debt that would not be a limited amount of
time that I would have probably intend to hold forever.
What do you mean by limited?
Like you're talking about like six,
seven years or like two.
I'm,
I'm saying like,
for example,
that soon I will likely,
because I don't want to sell my bitcoin uh to pay taxes i will likely take a loan against my crypto to pay taxes and
then i'm gonna try my best to never pay that i'm gonna just let the hopefully the crypto will keep
outgrowing the debt and this happened to me i did this to buy my tes, speaking of buying, using debt for buying a vehicle, I used, I put my Ethereum
into MakerDAO and I took a loan against it and I bought my Tesla in 2018 or something and I left
the ETH there, right? I denominated the debt in dollars and die and I, so I borrowed in dollars
but I kept the ETH and it outpaced, vastly outpaced what I, what I borrowed in dollars, but I kept the ETH and it outpaced vastly outpaced what I,
but I borrowed. And then eventually I just, cause I just felt like it. I just paid off the loan
because it was just, I just didn't want to forget about it. I don't, I don't remember why I paid it
or maybe I think I was closing that wallet out. I think I was closing that wallet out or something,
but anyways. Um, so there are times where debt can make sense, but for most people that don't
understand investing in finance,
like just stay away from debt,
I guess is,
I think Richard more your point.
I mean,
a hundred percent.
Just knowing from.
For people that can't limit themselves and work out and sleep,
right?
Don't drink any alcohol.
Don't eat fast food.
Don't smoke cigarettes.
Like it's just anything you can't do it responsibly.
Don't do it.
Why do we have to sleep?
Yeah. Richard doesn't sleep. responsibly. Don't do it. Why do we have to sleep? Yeah, Richard doesn't sleep.
I nap, okay? I nap.
Yeah, he does the Kramer approach where he takes six one-hour naps throughout the day and just spaces them out.
Not six. No, I do like two, but yeah, apparently I guess it's the Kramer. I don't know.
This guy's such a freak, Richard.
I woke up in the middle of the night at 4.50 in the morning a couple nights ago and i i wake up i look at my phone and i see richard
texting in a group and i know we have a call in like a few hours because he's on a call with me
and he's like on calls all day long uh but anyways richard you have like six you have six young kids
is that why you get no sleep because i just went through the young kid syndrome and yeah that was
so that was my lifestyle.
No, he's got six portfolio companies to take care of.
I'm a bachelor, okay?
Never had kids, never been married.
No, I'm just excited to wake up.
Almost all, maybe not every day, but almost every day, I'm excited to wake up.
And I don't know do something right richard is our head of bd at lunar digital assets uh so we're a venture studio
i saw a thing on the news the other day and it was like and it was like uh here's something to
do for mental sanity when you wake up try not to look at your phone or any device for 15 minutes
i'm like those are unsuccessful people.
I look forward to waking up
and seeing what the markets are doing.
Not because I'm like afraid, there's always opportunity.
Like what's down, what's up, what's moving?
You know, it's just, it's funny.
Richard wakes up and starts texting
and setting up business meetings.
I'm not kidding, it's fucking weird.
I'm gonna have to get to know Richard it richard is one of my secret weapons
yeah i uh he makes stuff happen honestly he's uh he's what anyone in the world of crypto you
should aspire to be like richard talk to him and find out what what drives him or i mean he's only
been with lda he he tried to join LDA for like six,
six months or eight months or something. He was applying. It was, it was six months,
eight applications. And I, I'm pretty sure I bugged the hell out of Aztec. I actually used
to schedule meetings with, uh, with Darren. Um, and then like almost every week, just to kind of
like, I don't know, just to keep talking to him about different things. But then I would host
like quick swap spaces, like educational, like teaching people about like the bombs you know how how to
use quick swap a little bit more and then sometimes i just you know set up the calls just to just to
bug them and not even show up because he thought i would so like it'd be i i think i had heard i'm
pretty i mean i had seen you around in the community for sure. I saw you in some of our community meetings and all kinds of our governance meetings.
And so I knew town halls and I thought you were a cool guy and stuff.
But I and I maybe Aztec or others told me you were applying for a job with us.
But for whatever reason, it didn't make it through the filters to me.
And you got rejected a bunch of times.
And then finally, I think Aztec came to me and was like, hey, we really should give this guy a shot.
And now he's been with us for like a year and a half and he's like one of our
secret weapons and he's fighting uh what's even fun you're i was even still waiting for like them
to even respond or say anything and i turned down two offers one of them was from a fairly big um
pretty big company and i i turned it down because I'm like, it looks fun.
It looks like a lot of money.
But, yeah, I really did.
Can you say what the company was?
It's kind of a flex that you chose us over there.
Yeah, I guess you can.
I mean, I don't get it.
It was Sony's Sonium, which I liked him a lot.
We're built on top of it, so we work with Sonium.
But I'm glad they didn't get him before we did.
I mean, I think that's the moral of this whole entire space right there
is everything we've talked about.
But the real moral is you take Richard.
He wasn't your lifelong buddy.
You guys didn't go to some Ivy League school together.
Your dads weren't country club buddies. He was just a guy.
I said, I did play lacrosse though.
Oh, there you go. But now lacrosse has become a mainstream sport. My niece just took it up
and I was like, is it a big deal? And she's like, Oh, everybody plays lacrosse where I live.
It's crazy.
I don't know. Everybody looks at me like I'm like, I'm some kind of psycho. They was like, is it a big deal? And she's like, oh, everybody plays lacrosse where I live. It's crazy. I don't know. Everybody looks at me like I'm some kind of psycho.
They're like, what is lacrosse?
I'm like, yeah, I guess there's only certain people that actually –
I think most people that I know that play lacrosse are either in finance –
yeah, most of them are in finance, basically.
A lot of them, yeah.
Kind of like joining a fraternity or the Freemasons.
Anyways, okay, guys. This went...
How many hours have we been here? It was supposed to be...
It was supposed to be three hours. I think we're at like five hours now.
This has been a lot of fun, though.
I walked... Let's see see let me check how many
miles I walked in by the way everybody keep it like I we used to talk about
this more we need to talk about this more on the show but you've got a walk
while you're listening to this show go out and get some Sun yeah I'm up to seven
miles five degree heat 100 degree heat here in Arizona and I'm working on my
tan while I'm walking outside it's's great. Yeah, there you go.
Yeah, I think it's like 85 degrees here in beautiful Puerto Rico. And I'm at, oh, it just
ticked up 7.4 miles, 16,000 steps. And I'm actually right now in our gym here and I'm actually lifting
weights while we talk. Yeah, see, I can't do that because I like to do a nice grunt around like rep eight or nine.
And that would sound kind of weird.
People would think I've got a weird fetish about spaces or something.
Or about Bitcoin or about debt or U.S. financial system.
Yeah, it's interesting to see where all of this will go.
You know, I will actually let me leave
one more little thing that Vitalik said that I don't like this. And I don't like to perpetuate
the opposite side of my argument. But I will hear for fairness. I do like to I do like to try to see
both sides. But this one I don't like. He says, you know, that seniorage. So the printing of money
is only a small percent of government revenue.
It's, he said, and now it's gone up because they print a lot more, but at the time, this was many
years ago, I think he said it was like, you know, three or 4% of, you know, government revenue was
from seniorage. And he says, so getting rid of seniorage with Bitcoin or even Ethereum or whatever only takes away three or four percent of their revenue.
And if you do that, he says, where do you think they're going to cut their costs?
Do you think they're going to cut military and wars or are they going to cut like, you know, things like health care or welfare?
It's an interesting concept.
I don't agree with it, but it's an interesting thing to think about.
Maybe they should do something with the educational system that, you know, we still have the biggest budget for, but, you know, it's still what, like, nowhere close to being number one.
Yeah.
I'm not sure what to do on that one.
Let's not go there right now.
I think that has to be a whole other five-hour space.
It does. It does. I think it has to be a whole nother five hour space it does it does
i think it has something to do with ai i think it has uh something to do with mass courses so
if you want to learn a course about like electric vehicles or batteries you get elon to do a do a
you know dedicate 12 hours of his life to like a course or something. And then you let everybody use that course.
Just like if anybody ever saw Khan Academy was incredible.
When I was like getting stuck in calculus or physics stuff in college at
university, I would always use Khan Academy and he'd explain it very well,
better than my teachers. Right. So I think that's part of it.
And then maybe AI custom AI teachers and stuff. Anyways,
let's not open up that can
yeah it's been it's been a great uh it's been a great combo though time to go time to go hit the
pool here and cool down for a little bit cheers yeah i might go swimming in a bit after my calls
but uh by the way luke i saw you commented that you requested to join and i think you might have
come up at some point i see you back in the audience listening um i hope we brought you up when you requested uh i i don't know if we did
or not but anyways good to see you luke no he was watching the kids oh guys damn it uh darren i
remember we got to read the comments from the audience there There were definitely some good ones. I want to respect this. Okay.
Anthem posted, who owns U.S. Treasuries? 30% foreign investors, Japan, China, top holders,
14% by the Federal Reserve, 56% by U.S. public funds, banks, pensions, individuals,
20% more held internally by government trust funds like Social Security.
Interesting points.
That's actually a really interesting point.
Makes me a little less scared of the debt, actually.
But yeah, that was a cool point.
I'm still deathly scared of the debt, but that makes me a little less deathly scared.
Okay, let's see.
Incense, who I saw requested to come up, I don't know if we didn't let him up or did or what, but said Singapore regulates sexes.
It doesn't regulate DeFi because it doesn't know how to.
I generally like Singapore's regulatory laws, and actually I have a company in Singapore.
Okay.
Web3wise says criminals never abide by the law.
Correct.
Kenneth says can KYC and DeFi ever truly coexist? We'll
see. I think so, but I hope DeFi doesn't. I hope DeFi doesn't.
That was the first question that we asked today.
No, it's a snowball. I'm sorry. Don't.
Yeah, I generally agree. Crypto Bullseye says, yes, Kirk David Phillips, Crypto Bullseye
in the house. Great talk today.
Yeah, good to see you, Kirk.
Anthem says
Robin Hood.
Yes,
we're men in tights. We're manly men. We're men in
tights. Yes. What is that movie from?
That's Men in Tights.
It's from Robin Hood, Men in Tights,
which is just classic.
Dude, I haven't seen that in like... I feel like I saw this like 30 years ago.
Yeah.
Go watch it again.
Go watch it again now.
And I don't know.
Like, I love going back and watching some of those 90s kind of like ironic movies.
And now you just watch them with a different whole like light on something.
And you're kind of like, this is even funnier.
All right.
I might have to do that. Is it worth watching, guys?
Should I go back and watch it?
Should the audience go back and watch Men in Tights?
It's hilarious.
I'm not going to watch it right now, for sure.
I'm not.
Leroy
Leroy J says, let's go.
DeFi Mark says, yes, the Brett party
was really crazy. Oh, DeFi Mark was at the Brett party at the Tiger mansion nice
I didn't know you Roy J. Yeah, Leroy
Leroy Jenkins
sure
Leroy Jenkins
again uh crev 23 says these guys are literally talking about making their own chinese social
credit scoring system with biometric kyc and all just imagine you'll be vulnerable to a five dollar
wrench attack everywhere on earth woohoo that's exactly what i've always wanted hashtag no escape
that's a pretty uh that's a pretty funny point there i mean i think the biometric thing actually
there's definitely a way to do it where it does not explode. It's not like, you know, world coin. I was concerned
that that was like exposing you to things and who knows, but I think the more you think about it,
there is a way to do it where you, the biometric is not exposed to anyone else. It's just you
giving an attestation. I don't trust that. I just don't, I can't listen. It's too hard. It's like
KYC, places that get leaked and hacked. I don't know. No, but that just don't. I can't listen. It's too hard. It's like KYC. There's places that get leaked and hacked.
I don't know.
No, but that's the point.
It can't get leaked and hacked because you're only giving a signature.
This is what Satoshi invented.
Was that like not that he didn't invent that.
But that's what public private cryptography is, is that you don't give the key to the person you're talking to, like a social security number that you give someone or your credit card number or your ID that you show at the liquor store, you give just a signature to
the person and they can only see the signature and they can't, they can't do anything with the
signature. They can only verify what you were attesting to them. So you're not giving them
your biometric ID. You're just verifying that you have it. But it's still, it's still the argument
of, you know, they took a picture. Like, there was data that happened.
Or you, no, it could have been generated on your own phone with a proof.
No, typically it's a different app.
So it's like a whole separate platform when you go into it.
So just like GameStop.
Well, I don't know what they're doing, but I'm saying there is a way to do this.
There is a computer science problem to be solved there.
I don't know if they've done it.
Not the biggest fan.
Yeah, fair.
I would be skeptical of it too.
Just playing devil's advocate.
So DeFi Mike says, now that's the jam.
Cryptover says, Aglayer, Polygon, Katana, if you know, you know.
Scientist says, yeah, we're alive.
GenPhantomX says, GenPhantomX, okay.
Oh, by the way, Katana, if anyone doesn't know,
is the new Polygon chain for DeFi.
I think they're up to like 75 million in deposits,
in pre-deposits before the chain goes live soon.
There's a bunch of, they're giving away a bunch of stuff there.
But all right, that is enough for today.
I just read the most relevant replies
because we've been on too long, guys.
But okay, next time, please, Darren, this is your task. I'm saying the most relevant replies because we've been on too long, guys. Next time, please, Darren,
this is your task. I'm saying it in front of the
public. If you care about the community,
which I know you do more than
anyone, please read the
community questions and comments
as we go, or just stop us to read some
because I really want the audience to be more involved
here. By the way,
Darren loves the community so much, he
will take phone calls, so if anybody
needs his calendar, he should have it.
You've got to fight for
spaces on my calendly with Richard, though.
I mean, how many...
Someone leak his calendly.
How many calls for a week?
I mean, how consistent did we do that
for? That was a long time.
There was literally times where Richard would book a call
and see it on the calendar.
He would join the call.
And then I'd be like, hey, what's up?
And he'd be like, I don't know.
I just wanted to book out the time and see where it goes.
And it led to him getting a job
and now equity in some of our portfolio companies.
And yeah, I think he's living his best life.
We just flew him to the Tiger Mansion in Vegas and for Bitcoin Vegas, Litecoin Summit tokenized.
We flew him to Dubai a few weeks before that.
We flew him to what you were in Bangkok.
Oh, we had a crazy retreat in Bangkok that I'm really sad Darren didn't come
to. That was really fun. We had like, I don't know, like LDA, Quickswap, and some of our
portfolio companies went. I don't know what we had, like 20 plus people or something between
conference and the retreat. It was super fun, actually. We rented out like an entire, I don't know, like a whole neighborhood of an island. It was crazy.
But anyways, okay, guys, that's enough. Thank you everyone for being here so much. Hummingbird,
you've been here, I think the whole damn time. And King Dank Kush, you were here a lot too. Wish
you would have jumped in a little more. I love hearing from you. And also King Dank Kush is also at LDA. He's an
account executive at Lunar Digital Assets, and it's been doing really well also. And then, yeah,
Anthem, longtime friend, thank you so much for coming. And Hummingbird. And everyone else.
Ruben, you dropped off, but thanks for coming to you too.
I'm going to call you after this. No, man. Dude, he does this every time.
I get off a space or I get off another business call,
and he's looking at my Calendly,
and then the second my call ends,
he's calling me to put...
He works me like a dog.
Richard is the one scheduling a lot of our business meetings
and having me review contracts and all this stuff.
He gives me no rest. meetings and having me review contracts and all this stuff.
He gives me no rest.
Arguably, I may almost be like, almost like a handler.
Almost.
I don't know.
Maybe just more of an assistant side.
He's definitely one of my handlers.
All right, guys. In a good way.
In a great way.
All right. Cheers, guys. In a good way. In a great way. All right.
Cheers, guys.
Bye-bye.
Speaker
Zoro
from
ZoRobotics
