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Was "Crypto Week" Good or Bad for Crypto? 📜👍👎 Crypto Quorum Ep. 16
Recorded: July 24, 2025 Duration: 3:27:51Space Recording
Short Summary
The crypto community is buzzing with excitement as new regulations emerge, signaling a pivotal moment for the industry. Discussions around partnerships, fundraising, and innovative projects highlight the growing interest and potential for growth, while concerns about regulatory impacts on creativity and freedom remain prevalent.
Full Transcription
Thank you. I've seen the charts, pumped them all, had my Lambo dream
Bitcoin castles, now a shattered meme
Hot wallet nights, DeFi craze
When you and I chase those golden days
The memcoin pumps, telegram fights
The way you'd ape with me through the nights
Will you still love me when I'm no longer a crypto millionaire?
When my bags are dust and I'm broke
Beyond compare, I know you won't
I know you won't
My dear, when the mark is red, you'll disappear
I've shielded the coins, built them up with mine My dear, when the mark is red, you'll disappear
I've shilled the coins, built them up with my tweets now
Chasing moonshots, ignoring all the doubt now now hot staking days blockchain dreams the way you'd hold with me it seems and
all the games we got to know your diamond hands and crypto glow Will you still love me when I'm no longer a crypto millionaire?
When my bags are dust and I'm broke beyond compare
I know you won't, I know you won't
My dear, when the market's red, you'll disappear
Dear Satoshi, when I lose it all, please let me keep my dash
When the bear comes, tell me it won't crash
Vitalik, tell me if you can
All that code, all that chain, all that speed makes me feel no pain it's my
hedge it makes me feel like diamonds
will you still love me when I'm no longer crypto millionaire
when my bags are dust and I'm broke beyond compare I know you won't, I know you won't, my dear
When the market's red, you'll disappear
Will you still love me when I'm no longer a crypto millionaire?
No longer a crypto million there
Will you still love me when I'm not rich beyond compare
All right, that was quite fun.
I'm glad that we finally got the song jam thing working,
at least until it gets kicked for some reason.
So enjoy our little
fun, not quite theme song. Funny enough on that, I do, I know that song better than the original
Lana Del Rey version now because I've heard it so many times and I'm not mad about that,
about that whatsoever. So we have a bunch of people coming in late, unfortunately, just the way things work.
But more than happy to let people up to come speak in the meantime.
Might as well. Let's see. Invite to speak and invite Paul to speak. I just saw it showed up.
I just saw it showed up.
And Nicole, feel free to get the quick swap handle up if you want.
As well as Paul, do you have the edge wallet account that can do an extra co-host spot?
Yeah, let me go ping Elizabeth who has actually the account to join in.
But yeah, I'm happy to do so.
Yeah, just be great to be um and maybe i'll
actually let you do i'll let you do the edge show this time because i've been doing it every single
time oh well thanks for doing the show sorry i wasn't able to join in the past couple weeks been
a busy couple weeks but i'm glad to be here yeah absolutely uh good stuff yeah everyone join up um and we'll get this thing going this is actually a very
interesting topic for me um because i've been as paul like listen it's more interesting for
someone like paul who's had to run a crypto company for almost as long as i've been in this
space and um i've you know we've seen, the legal kind of vibe around the crypto space
sort of evolve over the years, but it's been very much in the dark until this last week.
And, um, yeah, just wild times, can I say?
And I'm sure that like crypto regulation is one of those boring, annoying things that no one really wants to talk about on its face.
But at the same time, this is it.
Like this is the big thing.
This is like the we are officially here moment is now that we got things enshrined into the system.
Now crypto is here.
It's here to stay.
And we know, you know, all the uncertainty on that side of things enshrined into the system. Now crypto is here, is here to stay. And we know, you know,
all the uncertainty on that side of things is gone at least.
And so even though I don't like government personally
and the laws have their own issues and stuff,
I think that it's a very good,
I think it's a very big moment for crypto for sure.
So that's kind of what we're here to talk about
is like not just the big moment,
but also like the specifics
because I dove into the actual laws
and one of them is signed into lie,
I believe the Genius Act
and then the Anti-CBDC Act
and the Clarity Act passed the House.
But as far as I know,
there could be some stuff going on to
the Senate so before we officially get started on this I just put up a little
thing for edge real quick right there and that the edge download link and I do
check the people people do click the link every time which is which is very
nice and then I'm also going to um not not that people should be reading articles during this whole thing but i
did write a pair of articles on my personal account this joelle by the way in case it wasn't super
clear um that cover this the the subjects i'm just adding those to the space as well.
So all in all, hey everyone, welcome.
And I am going to try to hit the actual theme song
that we have, get this thing officially going
while we get everyone else up as speakers
and then we'll get going on this.
So here we go
don't let me dance
back we're live in the zone dash xano edge wallets set the tone from the blockchain to the stars
we're here to roast joelle's in the house and her girl runs the phone gather around the quorum
it's a wild ass fray dash and xano spark it edge wallet's got the play Quick swap slip and tokens, markets in a spin
But some fool tried to crash us, yo where to begin?
Aaron Day's got dreams, rocks dropping hot takes
Cody's layer 1x, making chains for high stakes
Crypto Quorum, bring the noise
Holders, hackers, and the blockchain boys
Talk it loud, throw some shade
In this space, we're never afraid
From the nodes to the fights we roll
Crypto Quorum's got that soul That's all
Sound the agorist rants, Kurt's truth hits like bombs Joel's laughing hard at the crypto dot coms
Then some lunatic screams with the rage so cold
That's what you get for D
Don't sing my master note
Yo you stupid asshole
Heel to the void
Nerd girls on the mic
Keeping calm, not annoyed
Crypto quorum, bring the noise
Hoey loves hackers and the blockchain boys
Talk it loud, throw some shade, in this space we're never afraid
From the nodes to the fights we roll
Crypto Quorum's got that soul
Hash it out, stake your claim, crypto's wild, it's an unhinged game
Masternodes crash, tempers ignite, we're shining
Laughs in the crypto night It's an unhinged game master knows crash tempers ignite. We're shining
Last in the crypto night
Justin bonds is debating maximalist collide
Multi-chainers like quick swap take it all in stride nerd girls in the booth keeping chaos in check
while Joels dodging DDoS, frets to the... ...the neck.
From the code to the fights, we're never alone.
Crypto Quorum's the place where the truth gets home.
Crypto Quorum, bring the noise, hold those hackers and the blockchain boys.
Talk it loud, throw some shade in the space, we're never afraid.
From the nodes to the fights we roll
Crypto Quorum's got that soul
Tune in, join the crew, the stage is set to fight
Maxi, multi, oy, or just trollin' in the night
What you get for d-
Don't sing my master, no Nice. And thank you, Cody from Layer 1X and others for suggesting Song Jam. So anyone
who's running these spaces and is doing some ghetto way of getting
piping music into their use song jam song jams.
Space slash DJ especially gets you into the app.
I am not paying anything right now,
so I guess it's free for you guys too.
So try that out.
And thanks to Nicole,
our wonderful producer for helping with that song.
And thanks to the, our wonderful producer, for helping with that song. And thanks to the often useful Black Mirror designer for managing to get that opening song,
which was the Lana Del Rey parody, which you would not believe how difficult that is to get an AI parody on copyrighted music like that.
But I guess if you know a bunch of sketchy Russian karaoke versions, it's a lot easier.
So that's the, of course the secret sauce there.
So I'm going to, if I see Zage on grid,
is that someone who, I know, message me some
or comment somewhere else if it's not a sketchy person,
maybe I'll let you have to speak. But before I get to the debate, basic subject of
the space, as I mentioned, is the crypto week last week, good or bad for crypto, all those bills that
passed in the US, the house and the genius act got signed into law, I believe. So we're going to be
talking about that stuff. And let me go
introduce everyone. But first, I'm going to introduce kind of as a two for one, Edge, or Paul,
have Paul introduce himself and then give a nice shield to Edge Wallet because Edge is our sponsor
for this space. So how's it going, Paul? Why don't you tell everyone who you are, what you do,
and then run into your Edge wallet pitch.
And of course, we have the link pinned over there in the Jumbotron area.
Oh, hi, everyone. I'll try to make this quick. Paul here from Edge, CEO and co-founder.
We've been in crypto since like 2014 building what I call is kind of like mass adoptable apps for crypto to keep people private and allow people to self custody their assets.
Privacy is a big focus for us. We've been one of the earliest to support Monero from as far back
as 2018, let people buy, sell, trade, swap, send, receive, spend, whatnot. Then we added Zcash a
couple of years ago and more recently Xana, which we're very excited about from the viewpoint of the upcoming token ecosystem where people can send privately on the XANA blockchain tokens that are pegged
to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and whatnot.
So very excited about this community.
So glad to be a part of the spaces.
And as we say frequently, we're so private, we don't know what people do in the app.
So please let us know if you run into things and what suggestions and comments you might have.
All right. Awesome. Thanks very much.
And speaking of Xano, obviously there's a second co-spot that's always open.
And I extended that to a bunch of different people or the opportunity.
And I always appreciate those who hustle,
those who show up and Zano agreed to be a consistent co-host here and be here
every week or almost every week.
And so far every week they've been here.
So that's why you get to be up here.
You get the free promo here, courtesy of us and edge.
Of course, Zano might as well introduce yourself,
let people know who you are, what you do,
and there you go.
Hey everyone, glad to be here.
I'm Gonzalo, the community manager at Xano.
And Xano is a layer one platform for confidential assets
and private decentralized applications.
And yeah, I mean, we're big supporters of edge um it's a great
wallet i um i tried the other the other week when they interviewed us um the experience is uh so
much like uh not not not the usual ones like you don't have to deal with the seed phrase it's just
an account it's very much like a normal app and it's very rare to see in crypto. So yeah, glad to be here and for the opportunity.
Yeah, absolutely.
Good stuff.
So next down our list, well, at least from looking over here, would be BroCan or the
one and only Kenneth Bozak.
Do you have a middle name?
You don't have to say it.
You don't have to say it.
I just would have said it.
How's it going, Ken?
How's it going, Ken?
Who are you?
What do you do?
How goes it?
I'm Ken Bozak or Kenneth John Robert Bozak, if you want my full government.
One of those was given to me by my mom and the other one I picked during my communion.
So you can guess which one I chose and which one was given to me.
But anyway, I have two middle names.
I've been in the space since 2015.
I've been using Edge edge wallet since it was uh
airbits so shout out to paul edge wallet is definitely the best wallet there is for crypto so
forget all the other ones just use edge big fan and i've been in this space all in since 2016.
2017 i quit my day job and i started traveling the world basically being like a roadie for conferences
i've been to over 400 conferences all around the world i started by sneaking in and now they invite
me as a speaker kind of cool um in las vegas i'm running one of bitcoin ben's crypto clubs out here
so uh we have a 5 000 square foot physical brick and mortar crypto club if you're ever in vegas and
you want to do some degenerate things with your degenerate friends i got your back and i also do a podcast
with uh miggy crypto uh whoever that guy is not another bitcoin podcast i've been doing that since
2016 and my first guest was uh dimitri buterin second was andreas antinopoulos i think my third guest was charlie lee so i started
my podcast just as a way to have a reason for people to talk to me that i wanted to talk to
people like paul you know i interviewed him as well back in 2016. so yeah it's good to be here
thanks for having me nerd girl love you joelle love you thank you thank you i love you too i was
just about to say like, yeah, absolutely.
Crypto degenerates. That's your, uh, yeah, that's,
that's your big claim to fame, Ken.
I'm the only,
I'm the only degenerate that's been a multimillionaire multiple times,
burnt that bridge and rebuilt it multiple times. Like I am an actual degenerate, not just like, you know what I mean?
I am it. I live it.
I know it, man. am it i live it i know it man the dreadlocks
say it all it's so i have to say um before you introduce nicole uh both i can't tell if ken or
nicole are the most underestimated person in crypto as far as some people see like, you know, the fun exterior and just think, oh, let's just another,
you know, fan, whatever. But some of the like smartest and most knowledgeable and savvy people
about like the actual decentralized tech, et cetera, as well. So like, don't, you know,
ignore them at your own risk. They're kind of, even though I'm technically, I'm usually a kind of open-minded look past the exterior kind of guy,
I was definitely surprised by both of them.
So, Nerd Girl, why don't you introduce yourself?
Hey, I am Nerd Girl 007.
My name is Nicole Grinstead, if you want my government name.
And let's see, I've been in crypto since 2016. I started exploring it because I
was interested, like I wanted to apply the theory from my dissertation to understand the evolution
of tribalism in cryptocurrency. Then I started working as a journalist and then freelancing and I work for a marketing company or a sorry a
venture fund called LDA rock will be here any minute I think and uh in the theme song yeah
yeah and then I am the I am a producer for multiple spaces including this one and one on QuickSwap that's the aggregated. That one's on
Fridays. And, oh, and I am also now a producer for the Paul Barron Network. So I book guests
onto Paul's show. That's what I do. Yeah. In other words, everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever comes, I'm like, cool.
I could do that. Yeah, absolutely.
And I guess finally for this lineup,
cause there's a few others who are probably going to pop in in a bit,
but Migtoshi, Snakamoto or Miggy, how's it going, Miggy?
You want to introduce yourself, say who you are, what you do.
Yo, what's up? Happy to be here. Thanks for the invite. My name is Miggy Crypto,
Miguel Celis on Facebook. I am co-host of Not Another Bitcoin Podcast with Ken.
I've been a Bitcoin degen since 2011. I'm also a club ambassador for the Crypto Club Las Vegas.
And I've been trolling around the events with him for the last several years. And I've got about
maybe around 300 or so booth interviews under my belt. And what we're focusing right now is
just creating content through our podcast and also finding partners to work with us at
the club.
Thanks for the invite, man.
Happy to be here.
Yeah, absolutely.
Always good to have you there.
I remember running into you in person
at Rare Evo with Ken.
I have to say,
again, just about the..., I've been, had a lot
of personal, like good in-person interviews that I've done at conferences this last year,
because I, I use that little gimbal camera that I saw you guys using last year for interviews.
And I'm like, dude, I need to do that. It looks cool. And it's been great. So again, as most
underestimated people in the space, it kind of holds true.
So as we kind of roll into this big subject of, you know, crypto week, was it good or bad for
crypto? I'll kind of have some questions to run around with and just kind of go down the list.
But as soon as this starts, as soon as the conversation starts to pop off, definitely we'll just roll with that.
So also a couple of things.
First of all, I see you, DB Crypto, Patriot Sounds,
Halaway, Michael Cluster, some other,
Sylvan, Bobcat even.
If you guys want to speak, just send a request.
Jose Trejo as well.
We have some spaces to let you up.
Obviously, we have a couple other coming. Hi, DB. Just hit the request have some spaces to let you up. Obviously we have a couple other
coming. Hi, DB. Just hit the request button. I'll let you up. But anyway, the first thing is
there was a few things going through. As I mentioned, the genius act is one, the stable
coin clarity. There's an acronym. It's a dumb acronym. I don't care. I don't like the name genius, but
anyone is familiar with this. Does anyone want to say, do you think this is kind of a good or
bad thing? Cause it establishes a basic regulatory framework for stable coins, as far as who can
issue them, how they get issued reserve and audit requirements. And they, they carve out two different kind of ideas of
stable coins, which are payment stable coins as they call them, which are basically centralized
USDC style stable coins with full reserves and everything. And then I forget the name off the
top of my head for the other one. I guess I should read my own articles once in a while.
top of my head for the other one. I guess I should read my own articles once in a while.
But the other one is basically considered like an algo stable or an over-collateralized stable,
some decentralized thing that is just slated to be studied over the next year, but is out of the
scope of the act. Because basically, well, that's not a regulated stable coin. Now that's just
something else we'll figure out later so genius act good or bad
oh paul's raring to go on this one i know because a lot of the a lot of people in my circles would
say all three of these are like absolute shit and um you know dump on them but i'll take the other
side of that coin and say there are definite positives from this and one of the biggest
positives is the fact that exactly what you said um Joel, the algo stablecoins don't fall into this category at all. And some of the critics of the
Genius Act say that, oh, well, that means all stablecoins don't have to be backed by the dollar
in a bank account, blah, blah, blah. I go, well, no, not an algorithmic stablecoin.
And fundamentally, while I'm not a big fan of the existing like USDC, USDT, I see their value add. It just doesn't complete the vision and everything that the Bitcoin white paper says about crypto. It doesn't complete that at all. Right. It's not permissionless. It can be censored. Not everyone will have long term access to it. Everyone has short term until you do something that is deemed malicious and then you won't have access to that ecosystem.
But the advent of algorithmic stablecoins, while difficult, harder to build, less stable, and we've had our issues with things like UST, that to me is the future of stablecoins. This bill hasn't touched it. So how I view it is,
let's run as fast as we can in algorithmic stablecoins before the government then goes
and figures it out. And by then, let's be dependent on the algorithmic stablecoins through a lot of the
DeFi protocols, through payments, get an algorithmic stablecoin bridged over into Xano,
and we're actually transacting with it.
Where by the time the government decides that they want to try to do something with it, we'll be too dependent on it for them to shut it down or put any severe regulation on it such that it won't be usable the way we're already depending on it.
So that to me was one of the biggest positives, that they didn't touch the thing I most care about.
You know, from the viewpoint of like how they regulated Tether and usdc it's neither here or there to me i think it's something like hey you look and smell like a bank go get regulated
like a bank um and already know that there's severe limitations to those and those aren't changing
in any meaningful way it's just becoming a bit more clear i know one of the arguments against
it is that you have to have you have to back the stable coins with like kind assets such as dollar
equivalents which means some companies that may have wanted to back it with bitcoin can't although
you know that's not really in the interest of someone using a stable coin right like the
interest isn't hey back it with bitcoin or other assets because you want it to be stable in bitcoin
let's face it isn't it could still drop you know 80 in value and you don't want the stable coin de-pegging because of that you just want it
to be stable so that's my take on it i think it's um overall positive but mostly because
of what it doesn't do yes and that's kind of the um the overarching theme for me and these these
bills is obviously i don't expect anything good to come out of anything completely good to come out of Congress, for example, or any government thing.
But there seems to be there was this gray area.
I think this is kind of the overarching theme, for my personal opinion, at least, is that crypto has existed in this gray area for 16 years right now.
We're just, I don't know, who knows what it is or how it's treated according to the law.
And as a result, gray area, gray markets in a lot of ways produced a lot of freedom and innovation
where people could just do what they wanted. That's when the gray area is good. But then where
it's been bad is really shown in the last few years where you have people like, say, Roger Ver facing 109 years in prison for, you know, accounting his Bitcoin poorly on his exit tax when he renounced the citizenship.
Or Risen, who's actually coming on this podcast a little bit late to talk about this stuff, going to prison for peer to peer selling of Bitcoin that he thought was
legal and it wasn't specifically defined.
And then,
you know,
there you go.
And the sec going rogue,
then that's when the gray area starts to become a really dark area for
everyone.
And so I would kind of agree with that sentiment that like when you do
make things clear,
like I don't think it's a massive innovation loss that like Tether can't continue to just like print Tether out of thin air, allegedly, or back it with Bitcoin or whatever else that they have to kind of clean up their act to be more USDC like.
I don't think that's a massive loss that that gets kind of codified in law.
If the codification now kind of leaves a little bit more of a weight area
for the rest of the space that it didn't speak on.
It's like, this is just what we're regulating right here in the moment.
Although could be speaking too soon because there could be crypto week 2026
and we could all get screwed when algo stables have
or endogenously collateralized stable coins.
I mean, governing some may name things better,
but when those things kind of get cracked down on, maybe, let's hope not. Miggy, what do you want to say?
Hold on. Can you hear me okay? Now I can, yeah. Okay. There might be a little bit of background noise.
So me and Ken have had some time to talk about this a little bit this week.
And as we've been reading articles and stuff from Toynetelegraph and ToynDesk.
I'm kind of in the middle way between you and Paul.
I think you guys, you've had a lot of great points.
And for me, I'm a bit more neutral.
I think things like money and cryptocurrency are really not designated good or bad much like you
know tools it's really up to how you utilize them and I think for for what we need and for the
advancement this is just another tool that depending on how it's used you know by the
government and by the community you know we'll see whether the results are good or bad but
I think for now you know it it could be a bit neutral. And again, we'll see the outcome of it.
But if we focus on, you know, it as a tool and not really have any side that is good
or bad, because there's going to be a little bit of both, I think we'll be able to get
further along with it.
But I think for now, though, it's something that's very necessary.
You know, we need these stepping stones before we can really get to the full picture of,
you know, Satoshi's vision and really what
defines money and our understanding. And I think that's what we're really pushing towards is
figuring out what the hell we're doing in society and what is money, what it's for,
where does the value derive from? Why are we using it? Who has control? Who has power? And so
I think those focuses will kind of help open the door with things like the crypto week happening.
I think those focuses will kind of help open the door with things like the crypto week happening.
Yeah, absolutely. Even though you just invoked Craig Wright. Sorry.
We're all triggered still. Nicole, what do you think? What do you think about the stablecoin bill?
I'm similar to what Maggie just said, right like i think that there's a lot more nuance to
it i don't think that it's like easy to say blanket this is good or this is bad it's more like
exposure wise it's great right and then but what are the long-term consequences of having
major regulation like signed into law i'm not sure so i would say like it's not one or the other
but that's just my perspective
all right so um let me go to let's see i'm gonna hit up ken real quick um and i'll re-explain the
question because i just hit the allow button
for Rock to come speak. So just in case you didn't hear the thing, but basically it's about
the Genius Act, the stablecoin bill, is it kind of good or bad? Does it establish a crappy kind of
over-regulated thing for stablecoins? Does it allow much needed clarity because it targets payment stable coins as they
call them and not endogenously collateralized stable coins say that 10 times fast um oh so
anyway um maybe by the way do you have your hand up again or is that just same from last time i just
saw it i think it just uh. My hands down.
Ken, you want to say something?
I'm not a big fan of stablecoins,
but I do think it's going to be interesting with all these
regulations coming into their little
sandbox where they've been able to play
unregulated. I would love to see
Tether audit it. That would be nice.
I think what's the most interesting outcome from
the genius act when it comes to stable coins and all that stuff is the inspiration and and uh
kind of the confidence it's giving industries in rwas being tokenized that part i think is going
to be the bigger outcome nobody's really talking about about it, but that's sort of the byproduct of the Genius Act is giving through the stable coins is
letting everybody know that you can experiment with these RWAs and it's not going to be time
wasted. You're going to be getting ahead of the curve. So just keep an eye on what you can when
it comes to that. I don't know what interests you when it comes to RWAs, whether you're into
tokenized Pokemon cards or you know property real estate
data or debt you know credit and debt can be rwa and you can buy debt as an rw anyway i think that
is probably going to be the best thing um for this space but when it comes to like is it good or bad
for crypto it doesn't matter for crypto crypto is doing just fine but I do think it's good for
America to finally you know be getting in like I saw a lot of tweets saying uh Bitcoin won or
whatever I'm like nah dude America just won like Bitcoin's been winning dude uh yeah but anyway
that's my take on it uh stable coins suck they're always gonna suck the dollar is gonna fade out
anyway so it's planned obsolescence I guess guess. But RWAs, that's the future.
And they just pretty much got the green light.
So keep your eyes out and don't be late to that.
And NFTs will probably play a very big game in the RWA space.
I mean, I totally agree with you, basically on all points.
But I will give a little devil's advocate here.
I mean, why do you let's start with, and this is a rhetorical question,
but go ahead and give me your thoughts.
Why does stable coins suck to start?
And that'll lead to the next question.
Well, you got to embrace, they suck because they're not stable.
They're the opposite of stable.
They're paired to fiat.
Fiat only goes down in value over time.
Just zoom out when in doubt.
Same thing with volatility in the other direction.
You know, Bitcoin, volatility.
You just got to get people used to volatility.
Stability is like this weird cure to the orange pill.
Like you orange pill somebody and then they get used to these stable coins and stuff.
And it's just like they're cured of all this stuff
You just indoctrinated them to with this scarcity, you know, it's limited in supply and all that stuff
It's just like not stability and it's like no, it's not really stable. It's losing so much value every day
The ideology behind it being called stable is sort of like this, uh, you know, it's a mind fuck
You have to like re it's
one of the biggest that with fiat, like people thinking fiats are stable is like one of the
biggest con jobs of all time. Like in what world would any investor or just intelligent individual
go? I want to hold the thing that it just consistent. It's so great. It's consistently
loses value slowly, very slowly. I just death by a thousand paper. same time, your mortgage payment, your rent payment, all of these things are denominated
in dollars. So if you have dollars, you're going to be able to pay your rent at the end of the
month or your mortgage at the end of the month or whatever your bills are, because it doesn't matter
that the dollar loses value. Those payments are denominated in dollars at a fixed rate.
But that was at a time when you had a gun to your
head and you had no other choice but to use the dollar now your landlord probably could take
dogecoin might even take pepe probably would prefer an nft you never know you got so many
options now that gun is unloaded it might still be to your head but the the boogeyman
is the bullets in the chamber there's none there but but if you're holding it in doge and like listen i don't i don't like fiat either
i'm just like from a perspective of a person yeah yeah right um from a perspective who has
you know of a person who has a child and who has to make sure that she's able to
pay for things at the end of the month,
Dogecoin, Bitcoin, all of the, you know, cryptocurrencies can lose value a lot faster
than a stable coin, right? Like if I lock, so if I get paid and I lock in the money that I
was just paid in fiat, I know that next month I'm going to be able to pay my rent
and my cell phone bill and my water bill and, you know, all of them, right? But if I buy
something speculative, I don't know for sure that I'm going to be able to pay my bills next month
because they can and do lose value rapidly. So like I said, I don't love them,
but what if it would cost me like, okay, just thinking about this, right? Like obviously
a Bitcoin is a lot more than the price of, you know, than rent. But when I first got in, it
wasn't like I could have bought, you know, two Bitcoin and then, and paid my rent with it or, and then, but then,
you know, one week later it could be where it would cost me four Bitcoin to pay my rent,
where I know if I have, you know, $3,000, I'm going to be able to pay my rent.
Great points. I got a thing that solves all this out, but let me go to what my point, what I was queuing
my friend Ken up for was that like RWAs, I'm bullish on them for sure, but they have one
of the great problems of stable coins, which is they have central issuance.
There's like, we've not found any way past that.
I think someday maybe we will.
I'm sure we will.
Humans solve problems.
But like I'm most bullish on things that are
natively on chain that can have native decentralization native transfer you don't
have to have like like let's look at rwas may face similar problems to what gold has faced
which is that gold is decentralized in a way right in a strong way and gold has been around forever
it's this awesome store of value 5 000,000 years, yada, yada.
But the problem is to transfer it, to use it for payments,
you can't shave off little gold flakes to buy your taco,
and you can't send it cross-border without some central, you know,
custodian or issuer or whatever.
Whereas, like, Bitcoin is so much greater because you don't have to rely on,
on someone else, uh, for that, that can rug you like the U S has done, you know, once to its
citizens and then once to all the other countries in the world. Uh, but anyways, I think besides
that problem, I think the greatest like thing we could use that seems so interesting to me um is is gold is uh gold backed uh tokens
right so like if like to me it would make a lot of sense if you don't have like infinite money
or you know so much in savings that you can afford the volatility of crypto then you maybe hold you
know all your savings that's long term that you don't need to touch in something like
Bitcoin or another asset. And then you hold, you know, the stuff you need to pay your rent and all
these things in a gold-backed stablecoin, because it now doesn't have the problems of the dollar-backed
stablecoins. Also might skirt these like maybe overly harsh or just pro-America stablecoin regulations we're seeing, which I'm an American.
It benefits me, but I don't love them in general.
But yeah, go back stablecoins.
I think I'm surprised they're not massively larger already.
I think you weren't here when I sent my flowers out and told everybody I love them.
Rock, I love you, bro, bro.
Damn, you're my favorite suit.
Oh, that's so funny.
I just sold her a compliment.
Both. It's both.
I'm going to send a photo. I'm going to
send a photo of me right now in the
comments, and you're going to laugh at it, actually.
But go ahead. No, I
couldn't agree with you more, man. I think
that's why I
really am excited when it comes to
like the stable coins in the genius act inspiring the RWAs I feel like it's inevitable that we'll
get into the gold backed RWAs and that will be the stable coin uh this one token is always worth
X amount of gold this X amount of gold is worth a volatile amount of bitcoin because nobody's going to want fiat or stable coins for their bitcoin they're going to want something equally scarce and as valuable so
they're going to want gold for bitcoin and then that gold to have the rwa token that's the basically
a stable token that's worth x amount of gold that that gold is worth the volatile amount of bitcoin
and all that so anyway i think this is where we actually get to de-pair and decouple bitcoin from the dollar and get it into just
pairing it with with gold because it makes absolutely no sense that these miners are
accepting this money printer go brr from the government while they're stacking their bags
and building a reserve and like the miners know damn well how easy it is to print that money and how
hard it was for them to mine that Bitcoin.
Eventually, they're going to get woke to the fact that they're being scammed.
And I think that when they stop accepting dollars and maybe they ask for maybe crude
oil, maybe they ask for gold, maybe they're going to start asking for something that's actually more scarce than paper for that Bitcoin that they're mining.
And that's where everything's going to flip a switch.
And it's going to happen with this gold coins.
Gold, definitely.
Couldn't agree more, bro.
It's going to be the Brick Nations that do it first.
I want to kind of address the statement on why and the surprise that we haven't seen more gold-backed coins.
Not to talk about that shit.
I bet you.
If you think about it, backing a coin with dollars is a huge, huge money grab.
Because you just stick the dollars in a bank and earn a ton of interest, right?
It's like money you don't have to have.
You're just using other people's money to earn money. Doing that with gold really isn't interesting. It actually
costs you money. So if you actually took some gold and put it in a vault, you're going to pay money
to hold that gold. And then you're issuing a token for it. And like, well, how do you actually make
money on that? You'd have to demurrage the token. And so that one token that might be worth a gram
of gold today is not going to be worth a gram of gold tomorrow. And so with that, I want to put out a piece of caution to
those that are excited about a gold token is that if you ever do go into a gold token,
be very, very skeptical if that gold token does not go down in value. Because if they're really
holding the gold in a vault, right, and it's actually backed by gold, that means they're going to have to pay money, and that money's got to come from somewhere.
If it's not coming from somewhere, it's coming from you, and that thing probably isn't really
backed. Now, the difference in algo stablecoins now, and I think this is where both gold and
dollar-based stablecoins going into the algo style, you know, fully launched using a smart
contract.
Now that gets interesting, because there's different monetization opportunities, or even
none, you just launch a smart contract where people deposit collateral, and there's no
company behind it.
That, to me, would be the ideal thing, because there's no one to go after when you now have
coin that competes with all of these, you know, genius at coins that have a whole bunch
of regulation around them and restrictions that can't, you know, be used for whatever you want. And they're actually terrible
for payments. They're horrible for payments because they're not private. So I'm surprised
they even categorize them as payments is what you had mentioned, Joel. So anyway, I just want to
make that really clear because I have talked to a lot of people that are trying to do
non-dollar based stable coins such as gold and silver. And they generally run into this problem
like, well, okay, how do I actually make money on this thing to make sure I can pay the costs?
So I can give some information here. So I'm actually talking to a gold-backed project,
Ubuntu. And yeah, so I've dug quite a bit into this because we're considering incubating them.
And so there's definitely ways
you can manage that. So ETFs do this, right? And they are very popular. Gold ETFs are some of the
most popular ETFs in the world. They charge a management fee. So you can charge a management
fee. You can charge a mint or redeem or burn fee. You can have an option where if you want the gold
physically, then you charge a little extra fee for that.
There's lots of people who would use that function for sure.
And if you do it in volume and you're doing it, if you have enough of this gold-backed token, then you get better deals on the volume on it.
So you can give people, you know, this could be an entire path to just buying gold physically.
You get this token and you redeem it.
And then more people as more usage.
And then you have arbitrage between the the price of gold and the token and if too many people are buying the
token uh to redeem or do these things or whatever then or or not enough or the price goes up or down
you'll have arbitrage coming um so yeah management fees mint burn shipping fees um there's all kinds
of ways you can do it and And, and yes, gold,
you're right. Does, uh, it is a lot of money to store, uh, these vault fees, but, um, I,
I'm pretty sure gold ETFs have gotten this when they do it in bulk down to like, you know,
to 25 bips or less. And if you look at the appreciation of gold over, you know, a hundred years, um, then, uh, let's see. I actually just asked the numbers,
but, um, when adjusting for, after inflation, if you go back 50 years, gold is averaged,
uh, like one to two percentage, uh, in gains. So if you gave up, you know, 25 basis points or a quarter percent on that,
you'd still be net positive. So, and if you don't account for inflation, you're looking at,
you know, plus three or 4% or more, depending on how you calculate inflation,
which is a fugazi anyways. So I would say those models, as long as they're transparent about that,
are entirely fine from the viewpoint of someone holding gold and using a token to do so.
And like I said, it's almost a good thing that you're losing a little bit of money on the management fees because it gives you a bit more confidence that there's actually gold behind the vault.
So I was mostly just trying to say, hey, if this is totally free, then it's like, well, there can't possibly be gold behind the vault if it's totally free.
There may be other models.
I mean, they could – this is dangerous because it gets into rehypopulation territory.
But they could use it as float somehow or it gets dangerous.
It's real dangerous.
It definitely does.
But let's keep in mind that's exactly what stable coins do now.
They are not zero risk.
They are holding treasury bonds.
And we just saw multiple banks go out of business because they were holding treasury bonds and weren't liquid enough.
Silvergate and Silicon Valley Bank and others.
So like bonds are not the risk-free asset that people once thought they were.
They never have been.
And in most countries,
they're like one of the riskiest assets, actually. But anyways, so you could have a fund that says,
hey, we're not rehypopulcating at all. Just pay us a straightforward management fee.
This is what Caitlin Long wanted to do. She went with her, I forget the name of the bank,
but she wanted to have a bank where we're not really, say again?
I think it was custodian.
Yeah.
And then there was another name she changed.
But anyways, and the Congress blocked her.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so she wanted to have a bank where, and I think this is so great to have options.
You have some banks that are super fractional reserve, super rehypothecation.
They're lending out the money, which is more
capital efficient kind of for the world in a way, but carries risk that you have to understand.
And most people don't, they think they put their money in the bank and it's just sitting there.
It's not, it's been lent out maybe multiple times depending on how you look at it. But anyway,
so you could have the same thing with gold. You could have one fund that is zero rehypothecation.
The gold is there. It's audited, no collateral usage of it, no risk of it, but you're paying a straight audited. You're paying a straight fee, or you could have
ones where the gold is there in a vault, but they are say borrowing money against it to buy bonds.
And then they could get the same yields or similar yields to stable coins. Um, so there's,
there's different models you could look at with this. But one of the problems
is they all require central entities. And I don't think any of us here love that.
No, you're fully right. I think that's where I've been pushed for algorithmic stable coins. And
one of the things that I'm wary of with the central entities is that I don't think any of
these stable coins are at all useful for payments. They're all on account-based chains like EVM
chains or Solana.
And being, you know, we already know Bitcoin's fairly transparent. Once you go into an account-based chain where you have one address to do everything, the privacy just really, really takes a dive.
And fundamentally, I don't think any of these quote-unquote stable coins are going to be used
for payments unless they are private by nature. You Monero level privacy, Xano level privacy.
And I'm excited to get a stablecoin with a dollar or gold backed, silver backed onto
Xano.
There's no way in hell I think one of those would survive if it was a centrally backed
coin.
If it's a gold backed, silver backed, dollar backed stablecoin, bridge that into Xano,
I am 100% confidence that that bridge will have the funds locked up on the stablecoin
issuing side like the evm side it would get locked up by the issuer like they would have to lock it
up um as soon as i'm a little lost can you can you expand on this idea so it's is i i think i'm
imagining but did you say like it would be backed by gold but it would be like would it be pegged
to dollar or yeah so so a dollar or gold or silver back to stablecoin but it would be like it would it be pegged to dollar or
so a dollar or gold or silver back to stable coin so it's only pegged because it's backed meaning there's someone that's holding this it's centrally pegged to what um back to one of those
assets so okay so just gold pegged to gold got it okay let's say pick the gold right and if someone
were to take such a coin and then bridge it onto a private chain such as Xano, the bridge makes it where the coin is locked on one side chain, such as like Ethereum, and then minted on Xano.
This is what MakerDAO has become.
Well, not necessarily because MakerDAO is backed by a few different assets, one of them being USDC.
But my point is that they can freeze usdc directly they can't it's like almost like how we have banks are a middleman in between the
government so the government is in a cbdc and cannot freeze your assets directly they need a
subpoena now maker dow has their business model and a lot of others even like frax and some others
part of their at least part of their business model is they are a middleman between the stable
coin and between the user. You give USDC, you can now use DAI. It's backed by, I mean, at one point
it was like 70% or something. I don't know what it is now after the last scare, but the point is now
the US cannot put their thumb on Circle, a publicly traded company, and say, freeze this person's assets.
And this will happen, and this will become prevalent. They will weaponize these just like
they've weaponized a dollar. I would bet my life on it. But now you have DAI as this intermediary
so that, yes, they could technically freeze the DAI pool, but it's not as nimble or as easy to,
you know, there's there's problems there.
And and MakerDAO, by the way, has had government lean on in the past.
So I'm not saying it's all safe. They had the UK government force them to move funds that were in there from a hack.
And a lot of people don't know this. But anyways, go ahead.
Well, yeah, they so they are what you'd call like a weak shield because you'd have to freeze everything that was backing.
what you'd call like a weak shield because you'd have to freeze everything that was backing die
all the usd definitely but it's absolutely doable and the same thing would happen if you go into a
privacy coin i think a privacy coin has way more crosshairs on it than die right die is still fully
transparent you can see where things are moving um a privacy coin you're like whoa like where the
hell is this going is it is it going into quote unquote nefarious actors? And I feel like it takes one person to post a public address asking for kiddie porn on the dark web, pay me in this privacy gold back coin for just about all the funds to get frozen.
And that person asking for the kiddie porn might not even be a pedophile.
It might be a government plant trying to get
and i hate to say it but you got to put your mind you got to put your you got to put your head and
wear the hat of you're a government plant right how would you bring this thing down well yeah you
just post it right you don't need someone nefarious to actually do it and so it'll make the headlines
it'll give bad rep to whatever coin it is it's been launched and boom you've got them shut down
how easy would that be if they confiscate computers from dark web people and then they just post from their account
and then just make it seem like you know oh look bitcoin is used for kitty porn or monero or dash
you know exactly that's literally how they got ross so yeah didand. I mean, so Ross's, the Dread Pirate Roberts' Silk Road account was compromised,
and that's how they did the parallel reconstruction to get Rock back in the game
and catch him with the laptop open.
So a ton of this stuff, it's not even a question of fact.
of facts like we know that the account was compromised by government agents it's just a
We know that the account was compromised by government agents.
question of whether or not Roth also had overlapping access to the account and did some of the things
they used him of my brain is foggy was was dread pirate was that not wasn't that Ross well so DPR
was a moniker that was used by several different admins. It was originally Roth that he got out of it,
and then he was allegedly brought back into it.
I mean, it depends on whose story you believe,
but I believe Roth's story.
And so Roth said he was brought back into it and then entrapped.
Thanks.
Yeah.
So something on the whole genius thing, Thanks. Yeah. Well, it is interesting how quickly the discussion segues straight into
collateralized by not dollar stable coins.
So according to,
according to,
and I ID shock over here,
I'm going to,
or at any block,
sorry,
I'll let you speak next.
But it is kind of interesting how like the, the genius act does kind of say payment stable coins.
It's like, this is the one we're, we're clarifying.
These are basically digital dollars that now non-bank entities can issue and let people trade in.
And they have to be backed all the way by dollar, dollar equivalents, et cetera.
be backed all the way by dollar, dollar equivalents, et cetera. And then the endogenously backed
stable coins, which are backed by the own protocol assets, such as over collateral,
as they said, well, that doesn't apply. Well, we'll discuss that. But they didn't talk about
collateralized with other asset things, which according to the Clarity Act, which you might
dip into in just a little bit, could be construed as securities in this case which that's that's where it gets a little bit
weird but before we get ahead of ourselves i just want to hear what id block has to say how's it
going thank you so much joel what up bro bros so the the main thing that i i think that the genius
act is going to hide and i think Ken brought it real quick.
So thank you so much, Brozac.
They are hiding some of the fuckery they started doing at the end of 2020.
In the middle of 2020, when they brought in Brian Brooks into OCC, the office of the controller, they basically allow banks to start doing crypto custody behind the scenes.
They started allowing banks to do crypto mining later in probably January of 21.
So even though later, you know, the Biden administration came up, Operation Chokepoint 2.0 came out in March of 22.
It was just like a suggestion, like operation, the executive order that came out of the White House in March of 22, 14067, that executive order, it was just a suggestion.
It was just telling the banks, hey, if you get caught in a bad situation and crypto is the main culprit, we might not give you FDIC.
We might, you know, we might put your bank in receivership, which it ended up being by choice.
Cause I don't know if you guys follow what happened later on. And then, uh, 23 when, um,
Silicon Valley and, and, uh, Silvergate and first Republic, some of the other banks are collapsing,
but then it was just by choice. You know, like they would say, Oh yeah, we're going to save this
bank. We're not going to save this bank. You you know like if your bank was middle of nowhere oklahoma they would just say yeah you
have to deal with it so i think that's some of the major things that uh the genius act is gonna
hide because everything that they did for march of 2020 when the banks went at zero reserve requirement
started doing all the crypto custody and all that and and the main thing is what ken said that they're just
debasing the dollar it's linked to fiat they're making everyone poor and you know they love that
so just pay attention to that because it's gonna it's gonna keep happening now they're gonna link
it to treasuries and the sky's the limit because because some of the other things that you guys were bringing about,
they don't even need court orders anymore. We're seeing Circle and we're seeing Tether and
Paulo Ardorno talking like this is a feature. They're kind of saying, yeah, we can freeze all
these assets. This is good because now we can save all these money for you. And of course,
it goes against everything we've in the last like 15,
16 years.
So thanks for having this space,
Joel.
Mark,
you want to chime in?
I saw your hand pop up.
Yeah,
I mean,
I'm going to get,
Sam's what,
what was just said.
the,
the operate,
what,
what people don't realize because the most visible parts
of Operation Choke Point
did kind of start in 2020 to 2022.
But to be completely honest,
in my opinion,
everything kind of began in 2018.
And that is,
you had to set the stage
for Operation Choke Point at the higher level to actually work, which was to kill the P2P markets.
Now, what's interesting here, and I'm not sure if we've got Clarity Act here on the discussion table or if we're just specifically talking about Genius Act.
Clarity is on the table. We haven't officially switched to that, but if you want to give that a go go for it maybe this will be a good segue or maybe there's a lot more to be said on genius i'm i won't try to
monopolize it but i will say that when you take those two together what you see is an interesting
holistic picture which tries to uh put united states hands around the neck of all of crypto by constraining how P2P is decriminalized.
So as a lot of you know, I spent a year in prison for using Bitcoin in a peer-to-peer manner.
And what I found throughout the course of my case is that if you have done so much as buy Coca-Cola for $5 or $3 worth of crypto on the Lightning Network or with a dash
peer-to-peer payment, you have committed a felony that's punishable by up to five years in prison.
Until the Clarity Act is signed into law, you are still guilty of a felony every time you've ever
done that. So enjoy that. living with that uh that hanging around your
neck however it's not actually usually enforced like that there have been over 330 specific 18
usc 1960 prosecutions in the last 15 years specifically around cryptocurrency of which i
am one which uh ian freeman is another another name that a lot of you guys would know, that's been
prosecuted under the Operation Chokepoint
Enforcement Methods of 18 U.S.C.
1960.
Antem Blancard?
Yeah, I'll try to get him on the show, actually, right now.
Dr. Aria
Demezzo,
she was also another one.
I always locked up with three of them in Beaumont,
Texas, during my term, too. So I always locked up with three of them in Beaumont, Texas during my term too.
So anyway, the idea, but what's going back to what we're talking about today, what has the Genius Act and the Clarity Act done specifically?
So the Genius Act specifically outlines what a stable coin is.
We now have a legal definition of what the United States declares a stable coin to be.
We now have a legal definition of what the United States declares a sale going to be.
The Clarity Act, it decriminalizes all of the non-business related peer-to-peer.
And that is to say, you can still do it in a business context if you're buying or selling a car or something like that.
or selling like a car or something like that but you're as long as your primary business is not
the sale of a commodity which is anything that's not a stable coin or a security
uh you're and it's not for business purposes you do not need to register as a commodities broker
if you are selling bitcoin if you're selling dash if you're selling monero if you're selling Dash, if you're selling Monero, if you're selling any other coin to the public as a means of, you know,
like charging a fee for that some way,
you are going to now need to no longer register
as a CFTC, or as a, sorry,
as a FinCEN registered broker dealer,
but now register as a commodities broker dealer,
which is a much more
onerous process, a lot more regulation, a lot more case law around that. However,
this is the interesting loophole that I don't think anybody has really noticed. I've not seen
anybody talk about it in the press. Fable coins are specific, as defined in the Genius Act,
are specifically not securities and they're not
commodities and the clarity act says you are not considered a money uh services provider or msp
if you are buying and selling stable coins even if it's for business purposes treasury department
fintson has no jurisdiction over whatsoever so there's this very narrow window for the OTC markets to come back as long as you're selling a stable coin like the compliant version of Tether or USDC or whatever is narrowly defined as an American legal stable coin.
So in my mind...
You're saying like peer-to-peer OTC? Sorry, I was typing something.
Yeah, like local Bitcoins or Paxful or saying like peer to peer OTC. Sorry. I was typing. Yeah. Like local bitcoins
are packs full or something like that. Yeah. Interesting. So there was huge markets for all
that stuff for so long. And then I, I mean, I personally knew people who got in trouble for,
uh, doing it and not having a money transmitter license or these kinds of, I don't remember all
the details, but, um, yeah yeah it was a weird time i mean it
used to be very prevalent in the early days oh yeah yeah i mean it's now hard to find got into
bitcoin i did it for almost 15 years you know uh 14 years something like that uh before the fed got
me for it oh that's what you got they got you for for? Yeah. Wow. Specifically, and it's, so I was doing it before there was any regulation or even guidance on it, right?
And so, yeah, I won't.
And why did they get you? What was the charge, if you don't mind?
The charge was having not filled out a free form on the internet, not filled out a registration form with Vincent.
Wow. What a fucking joke.
I could buy and sell,
you know,
I don't know,
fucking chairs in the world,
but I can't buy or sell Bitcoin.
Get fucked.
That's exactly it.
Right.
So this is,
I guess,
to bring it all back around,
we are specifically decriminalized
under both of these acts put together as long as we're using these American-defined, you know, stable, I mean, sorry, Genius Act-defined stablecoins.
But not Bitcoin.
But not Bitcoin, not anything else, not a security, not a commodity.
I mean, it's smart of them to do.
it's smart of them to do. They, they need someone to bail out the dollar right now.
They need someone to bail out the dollar right now.
And we're the, we're the, we have a common, you know, friendship kind of like common goals here
with the government now, which is, I mean, look, I'll take that. Like, I don't love all this stuff.
I don't love the government being involved, but I will certainly take it over being put in jail.
And I'm sure you would probably agree there, Mark, because you've dealt with it.
Yeah. I don't want to, I don't want to go back, for sure.
Yeah, I mean, I've got a story with that that I won't share. I may share it publicly someday,
but for now I won't share. But yeah, it's not cool when you're trying to be a law-abiding,
tax-paying citizen and government wants to mess with you. And by the way, if people do want to know more about Mark's story, I did interview him a couple
of years ago on my own podcast, and I just put that episode up there. It's like over an hour
long. Don't jump out of the space, you selfish people, to watch it right now, but bookmark it
for after, and also after the Big Angel space. But yeah, it is, as I kind of mentioned before,
this is kind of a gray area type of a thing
where all of crypto for 16 years was in this gray area
where anything could happen.
And it meant freedom for a lot of people for a while.
And then you get the last few years where the gray area
just means almost like a blank check on throwing people in prison
if they wanted to. And that's kind of starting to sort itself out. And so the decriminalization
of peer to peer, especially, I mean, for me, that's like a footnote in that act, but it's like
the important footnote, like the big thing that will actually affect real people's lives.
It's just strange that it's like,
it's the most important piece,
but also it affects so few people in a practical sense,
because again,
the government doesn't crack down on people for peer to peer things,
except for the few unlucky people like Mark here.
So it's yeah,
it's one of those things where I,
you know,
a lot of the crypto anarchist type people you know
which i definitely consider myself as by the way just not not a not a dumb dumb right um a lot of
more crypto anarchist type people just no new laws new problems and like yeah but the old lack of laws
could have been much much worse um so crazy question. Actually, before you go to another topic, I've,
I've made the decision to, to share this story publicly. Um, the government knows about it
anyways, but, um, yeah, I don't think I've ever shared this publicly. I've, I've told some
close friends and stuff, um, like confided in, but, um, this was a long time ago, many years ago. I was driving one night near my house
and I got pulled over for speeding. I was going like, I don't know, eight miles over the speeding
limit or something. And I get pulled over and I'm wearing a suit. I'm in my Tesla,
no tinted windows. I'm a very clean cut guy. I run multiple,
very large businesses. I get pulled over and the cop says, you know, you were, you were speeding,
you were going, you know, whatever, you know, whatever. And I said, you know, sir, with,
with all due respect, if I didn't drive that speed, people are going to honk at me and try
to fight me. You know, like you, you have to go with the traffic. And he said something else. And I said, okay, sir, how fast do you drive? Because nobody's
driving 65, right? And I was a little grumpy. I was tired. It was late at night. It was like
9 or 10 PM. And he says, you're acting funny can I search your car? And I'm like, what?
Like, I'm in a suit. If anyone's met me, I'm very clean cut. You know, and I'm in a Tesla again,
no tinted windows, clean, brand new Tesla. And he says, can I search your car? And I said, no,
you can't search my car. What are you talking about? And I'm giving him a little bit of an attitude. You know, I don't love cops. I'm usually respectful to them, but anyways.
So then he says, oh, can I have my dog smell your car? And I said, okay, I don't care. Go ahead.
And I know they can do that anyway. So I said, go ahead. So he has me go sit behind his canine. He was a canine. Has me go sit behind the SUV where I can't see what's happening now. I can't see my
car. I can't see the dog. He comes back and he says, well, now I know why you were acting that way. You were acting nervous.
I found what you had in your car. And I said, what? I don't have anything illegal in my car.
And he says, I found what's in your backpack. And I said, yeah, it's cash. Cash is not,
there's no law against having cash. And he says, well, my dog hit on on it so we believe it was used for uh drug sales sales or something
like that and i'm like what are you talking about hasn't been used for drug sales right right so i
don't know if he just like you know they have these guys can literally like snap their finger
and their dog will bark you know right they have their ways of of that and it was just such a
ridiculous thing so uh they take me to the police station
and the whole time I'm asking to call my lawyer, they won't let me for hours.
They're questioning me, will not let me call my lawyer. They say they think it's from drugs.
They're like, look, we both know it's not your money. It was probably some drug deal. It has
nothing to do with you. Just sign it over to our police department. We'll let you go. We'll be done.
And I'm like, no, what the fuck are you talking about? I'm not signing you my money over. It has nothing to do with you. Just sign it over to our police department. We'll let you go. We'll be done.
And I'm like, no.
What the fuck are you talking about?
I'm not signing you my money over.
And I was like, I want to talk to my lawyer.
This is ridiculous.
You guys are violating my rights here.
Finally, oh, then my, I think I don't remember.
I got a hold of my lawyer and he was on speaker and he on speaker and they, he didn't know he was on speaker maybe.
And the cop is standing there and my lawyer is like, what is this? Like some Mexican shakedown?
Like, what are you, what, are you in America?
Like, what is happening?
And the cop was so pissed when he heard this.
As someone who grew up in Mexico for 13 years and has paid bribes to cops, that is a very apt, that is a very apt thing.
Seriously.
And so they, so they had me stay there.
They said, and I figured out later, I did a lot of research on what exactly all went
down here.
But basically, California had already gotten rid of the way federal asset forfeiture works
is it's basically guilty until proven innocent.
guilty until proven innocent. And in all other cases, right, we're innocent until proven guilty.
And in all other cases, right, we're innocent until proven guilty.
But with federal asset or any asset forfeiture from states, cities, et cetera,
it used to be that the states and the cities mostly had the same thing. If you have over a
certain amount of money, they can take it. And now the burden of proof is on you, not on them
to prove you did something illegal. It's the opposite. Again, guilty until proven innocent.
And if you don't come with receipts, paperwork to Again, guilty until proven innocent. And if you
don't come with receipts, paperwork to prove what the money was from, and if you say one word wrong,
it's a felony. So if you say, you know, if you don't, if you, if you're even inaccurate slightly
in what you say, and there's so many, you could go on YouTube. There's like thousands of people
that are like, you know, old veterans or old people that just hold their money in cash because
they don't trust the government or whatever it is, or they've been through the Great Depression, of these people
that finally got proven and they sue after this. But anyway, so what I figured out was happening
is California, many states have updated this now. They fixed this because they realized this is
unconstitutional. And so many states actually got rid of these rules and made it the other way
around. You don't have to prove that you're innocent. They have to prove that you're guilty. Otherwise they need to give you your
money back. Now, California had fixed this at the time that I was in this situation,
but federally it had not been fixed yet. And I don't think it's fixed still, but at the time,
so what they did is they said, okay, we're going to, uh, we're going to have someone come talk to
you. I'm sitting there for like two hours. Uh, finally, Finally, I think it was DEA, I believe. Yeah,
I think it was DEA. FBI or DEA, one of those. I think DEA. But they came and they questioned me.
They said, hey, we want to talk to you. We want to ask you what this money was. And I said, look,
I've been waiting for hours to talk to my lawyer. They won't give me my lawyer. I have nothing to
say. And they actually just said, okay, thanks. We're done here.
And the cop came in a few minutes later and said, they told me to let you go. And I said, yeah,
that's right. Let me go. It's ridiculous. And I said, okay, give me my phone, give me my money.
And they said, no, we're keeping that as evidence. The next morning by like six in the morning. So
I have my parents come pick me up. They towed my car was towed. And so the next morning by like six in the morning. So I have my parents come pick me up. Uh, they towed,
my car was towed. Uh, and so the next morning by like, I don't know, I think six, five,
six in the morning, my phone had like, all of a sudden all my accounts were logged into.
So they got into my phone and my phone had a long encrypted. I had my phone, I had encryption turned on. I had lots of long password, uh,
and my phone died. Uh, and so anyways, um, so it's, yeah, they got into my phone. Later,
I found out that at the time they were using, I believe it was Pegasus and Israeli, uh, like
company that could break into phones at the time. Um, but yeah, really crazy story. Um,
yeah. And it was, if anyone anyone's curious it was like a little over
a hundred thousand dollars so it was a decent amount of money but I wasn't breaking any laws
um but because you know I talked to my lawyer and he's like you know how much does this money mean
to you he's seen it before where people have like said the wrong thing and gotten felonies and it's
a big deal and so at the, I was so worried about it.
And I'm in the crypto industry, and this was five, six years ago when we were seen as criminals, like Mark here knows.
And so I was like, you know what?
I'm just scared to even try to fight the government on this.
I'll just let them keep the 100K.
And I had enough money.
I was wealthy enough at the time for my Bitcoin from the years that I just let them keep it. And
anyways, I could technically go for it now. And now that I've been kind of thinking about it,
because I think it's still within the, I think it's a set, you get seven years to claim it.
So I've been kind of thinking about it now that regulators are changing and things, but I don't
know. Get that bag. Yeah. My family's always bugging me about it.
Like, aren't you going to go get that money?
Yeah, your employees too.
A nice dinner.
By the way, don't ask me how I know this, right?
But if you are ever caught for any crime with dogs, you can get out of it because they don't want to reveal how the dogs are trained.
And for that to hold up in court, they have to reveal how the dogs were trained.
Otherwise, it's too easy to argue that the dogs were following the command of the police officer.
And it is true in a lot of cases that the dogs are just following the
commands of the police and they don't want to reveal how the dogs are trained like i said don't
ask me how i know this but yeah you can get out of some serious charges yeah i mean i mean and i
didn't even commit a crime there was no crime they didn't i didn't get any charges or anything
they just did one of the things they do with this federal asset forfeiture is they rely on scaring people, saying you could go to jail for a long time, just trying to instill fear.
Because a lot of these local and state police departments and the federal government, they have a huge amount of revenue from this.
It's crazy how much money they make from this.
It's like for some police stations, it's like a good percent of their overall revenue i mean they made 100k off of you
yeah that's not a jump change right there yeah and like the i have to say i mean obviously it's
going to go a little bit off topic into the u.s politics and law thing but civil asset forfeiture
was a big thing in the U S and still is where,
which is exactly this, where, uh, people don't know this.
I mean, the U S is a pretty great country legally compared to the rest of them, but
holy crap, this is bad because a police officer can go.
And basically if you have, if you, you are suspected of a crime, get not even charged officially,
just, well, this might've been used in the crime.
They can just take your stuff.
Like speeding.
What the fuck, man?
This has happened a lot.
There have been like immigrant churches
that have raised money in cash from donations
that have just haven't had stolen
and just not never given back.
The Institute for Justice, ij.org,
which is,
they do a lot of work on litigating stuff like that. And a lot of states have reversed civil
asset forfeiture on the state level. Obviously there's federal issues as well. So things are
getting better, but there's a lot of work to be done. And by the way, this doesn't count criminal
asset forfeiture. When if you're a charged of a crime or convicted, they can take your stuff where you say, hey, you sold drugs.
We think we're going to charge you officially with that and take your stuff.
That's already bad.
And the stuff might not even been from the drugs, right?
The stuff might have been from your normal job.
Yes.
Have I said yet enough times today that taxation is theft?
I just want to throw that in there for good measure.
Yeah. Yeah. Federal asset forfeiture is definitely theft.
Yeah. And that's the thing about like the not your keys, not your coins kind of thing.
Custody things can really like this is something that we're going to have to figure out a lot more of in the future as we have crypto as stuff that people really have and
hold obviously if they can break into your phone they could probably figure out a way to get into
your phone wallet and whoops and just do that kind of stuff but other kind of more hardcore backups
and biometrics and other things that's a whole nother rabbit hole which i'm sure we'll do a
whole thing on mark you want to say don't do face ID on your phone. That's one probably most people know,
but there were laws, you know,
this has, you know, case precedent
that they cannot compel you to give your password
because that's in your mind.
And there's like previous case law on,
if something's in your head,
they can't like, you know,
they can't torture you to get your personal memories
and thoughts.
So they can't ask for your password, but they can.
I can't believe this is still a thing, but they can put the phone up to your face and get in that way.
It's legal.
Yeah.
Well, that's why you don't have to actually keep your Bitcoin on your phone either.
You know, you could just download the Edge wallet, log in, username, password.
You have your keys. phone either. You know, you could just download the edge wallet, log in, username, password. You
have your, your keys, you can spend your crypto and then uninstall it, delete it until you need
it again. Of course. But I mean, there's so much more on your phone. Our phones these days have,
my phone has more information about me maybe than I do. I mean, like I can't remember. I go through
my photos and there's all kinds of things. I'm like, Whoa, I forgot about that. You know,
like our phones are deeply personal to us.
I think they should be protected.
A phone should not be allowed to be looked through.
This is part of our, we are becoming basically, as Elon would say, cyborgs, right?
We are merged with our phones at this point in a lot of ways.
And it'll get even crazy.
Imagine if later they could get into your Neuralink with a password.
This was actually one so i i
i did spend an embarrassing amount of money on my defense uh and one of my lawyers said that there is
a growing amount of support and case law they just need the test case for somebody to take it all the
way on the idea that uh humans americans are effectively cyborgs and that phones should be
considered part of like uh you know right the privacy uh types of constitutional supports um
she was also that particular was like do you want to be that case law because this is the way to
test it but like uh yeah so but uh at the end of the day for me um just to yes and everything you're
saying about civil asset forfeiture the only uh dollars that i lost in my case because there were
no aggrieved parties and there was no fines assessed uh i had three thousand dollars in cash
uh sitting on my uh so you know just sitting on it in like a little not like a safe but just like
a little money box in the house.
And when they discovered that, that was literally the only money they took. They didn't take any of
the crypto. They couldn't find my private keys. They took a bunch of things they thought might
have wallets on it, but they were not intelligent enough to understand if it was just a thumb drive
or a Bitcoin keep key or something. So, yeah, you know,
civil asset forfeiture,
your money is not presumed innocent until found guilty.
The case is against your money.
The case and the cases,
your money is guilty until proven innocent.
It's a totally different standard for law
that's unique amongst the American criminal justice system.
Totally unfair.
Yeah. And that's, I guess, what
makes a lot of this decrim stuff
a lot better because, again,
if it's not explicitly illegal, a lot
of people might be ignored.
Why did you say decrim?
Decrim, as in decriminalizing
peer-to-peer crypto.
That's why it's important because...
I thought you were talking about decentralized crime
well we have enough centralized ones of that as we're just discussing you know a lot of centralized
crime but um as far so as far as like the decrypt stuff obviously things uh it makes stuff clearer
for people on that the peer-to-peer front uh The other thing it makes clear of, and now we're going to a more awful government agency
smashing people down in the SEC type case.
So cryptos have been launched for 16 years,
with impunity, almost no oversight,
the way God intended in my opinion,
but kind of like that.
And then the SEC started really coming out
after projects the last few years, especially under the Biden administration.
I remember when EOS got charged by the SEC and paid a big old fine, but a slap on the wrist kind of thing for their sale.
Some friends of mine ran the library protocol, LBRY, which is kind of a decentralized YouTube and content platform out of New Hampshire.
And they got smashed by the SEC.
They're gone now because of a case they also get charged for selling unregistered securities,
but not that they had.
The token itself was a security.
The whole securities thing charged everything.
People alluded with FUD and seen these cases that Dash might have fallen under that too.
But all those cases are since dismissed. So that's all water under the bridge. But people panic sell a token and
when they hear all the SEC. So there's a lot of crap. And now with what Clarity gives is it
separates the two different categories of crypto assets as crypto commodities and crypto securities. And basically said the CFTC
regulates the commodities and exchanges have to be commodities, brokers, et cetera,
and securities or the SEC and gives a kind of clear test, not just like the Howey test,
but a clear test of far as far as is this a decentralized protocol, mature protocol as they call it, or is it a immature slash security thing?
Before I just go into a big ramble on this,
anyone want to talk on any of that?
Anyone have any thoughts on the way clarity
is sort of separated out the two different styles
and the criteria that they give?
Mark, go ahead.
I would say also the other key piece of this,
and anybody that's been on this
spaces and heard me tag out or been on anything that joel has hosted in the last few years and
heard me tag out what's the piece of legislation that i've always plugged and say call your
congressman about it has been the it's been alternately named the defy regulatory certainty
act and the blockchain regulatory
certainty act uh which decriminalizes p2p for non-commercial purposes uh that is also a
specific addition which uh again decrims and protects us uh in a specific way which is to say
uh if it is considered a commodity or if it's considered
a security under the Clarity Act, and there is no custody of customer funds, i.e. it's
in a smart contract or it's a point of sale, like in-person transaction, you cannot be
considered a money transmitter regardless of how much money is being transacted in that
moment.
So that's an important distinction i think uh i i don't know i just want to throw that in there were you asking for opinions or further interpretation joel i didn't want to step on your
question yeah just just anything because i mean that's a good that's extra context but also like
because we have these two different definitions, first of all, it's
like, is that good or bad that it's been made sort of clear?
Well, one thing I would say before we get into the decentralization test, which I think
could be one of the most fascinating parts of this, is I guess the implication a lot
of people would have is if it's ruled not a security, woohoo, that's great. It's good that
this bill exempts decentralized projects from being considered securities, but it makes them
CFTC regulated, meaning the commodities features, commodity features, whatever the acronym is,
is going to have to register. All crypto exchanges and brokers are going to have to register at the CFTC
where previously they might not have.
And basically, let's just start with that.
What do you think of that part of things?
Do you think that getting the CFTC involved
in the decentralized cryptos is,
is it like, woo, did we let a wolf
into the hen house accidentally with this law?
Or is it like, no, that was fine.
What do you think?
The issue has been,
and this has been kind of like ever since 2017,
all of us that have had anything to do with crypto
and commercializing it
have kind of viewed this SEC as the boogeyman
because not just because of Gensler,
but in large part because of Gensler.
You know, he just ran the SEC like a tyrant
and with no regard for anything that represented reality.
Bad for everybody.
The problem with saying,
okay, well, it's either a commodity or a security
is it doesn't preclude them from coming up with
like there could be another there could be next time we don't have uh you know somebody a friendly
executive administration and a new gentsler gets appointed to the sec or a new gentsler gets
appointed to cntc it's just you just devils that we don't know.
That's the problem here.
They could change how enforcement works,
even though now we know who we answer to
and we have some idea of how we could be compliant.
There's still going to be this gray period
where hopefully over the next three years or so,
because we have crypto-friendly institutions, they start to develop some practices and some guidance for us that is not nonsensical and is workable so that there is some established case law and it's harder to change things down the line in a way that could be very Gensler-ish.
I don't think just because the CFTC and the SEC have clear guidelines as to what their jurisdiction is, our problems are over.
It's just that one set of problems are over.
The only thing I love about, literally, the only thing I love about the Genius Act or the Clarity Act is that the Regulatory Certainty Act was tacked into that.
That takes the Treasury Department and FinCEN out of the equation
because that what that does that's the that's the the the DOJ is basically kind of like a part of
the government that is its own like banana republic and then within that banana republic
you've got banana publics like the BOP that are completely unanswerable to any type of regulatory oversight.
The DOJ is like the all-powerful organization in American government. And being that they were who prosecutes FinCEN violations,
that was like, we all had the sort of Damocles hanging over our neck,
whether we knew it or not,
the entire time that FinCEN had jurisdiction over stuff.
Now that they don't, now that Treasury doesn't,
it pushes things more towards civil,
which could be potentially damaging in real ways to our entire industry,
but it's not nearly as damaging as it could. So it's progress.
Anyone else got some opinions on that?
It's not much progress when they can cherry pick who they enforce those regulations on.
I mean, it's cool to have some kind of clarity frameworks, but you know, they're just going
to use it to pick who they enforce it on and when they enforce it if they do at all and whoever so
it's good and bad but you know just keep in mind you know it's favoritism all the way
no i i'm not i do not deny that uh but like so take for instance if so i built the website i'm
going to launch it in a couple weeks it's called project 1960 and it outlines like the 15 years
of enforcement against crypto.
And so you can actually look through the cases, look through the PACER documents, and see what they were doing to people.
And in a lot of cases, some of these crypto cases that were prosecuted by the DOJ, they were low men on the totem pole in organizations that may or may not have been criminal and they didn't even operate inside American jurisdiction,
but they would pass some American dollars
through the organization
in an effort to claim jurisdiction.
They pulled people out of Brazil
or Western Europe somewhere,
just descend on them,
put them into custody
and then prosecute a major
major like 100 million dollar federal case against this low-level person that was hired to answer
forum messages on the board for you know like a ransomware company right and so i mean obviously
if you're committing fraud or committing like criminal acts you're still under doj regulation but that sort of thing will not be able to be
prosecuted in the same way uh to people globally uh that it was pre-clarity pre-genius so it
pushes things to civil court there's different burdens of of uh criminal you can win a federal
civil case right it's possible to win those it's not easy and civil case, right? It's possible to win those.
It's not easy and it's not cheap,
but it's possible to win those.
It's almost 100% impossible to win a federal criminal case.
Like by the time that you have been charged or indicted,
you're done.
It's just a matter of how you're gonna plea out
or how long you wanna go into prison for
if you wanna fight it.
We have 18 months till any of
this goes into effect right why don't we uh start our own cabal and launch our own stable coin get
ahead of the curve sure why not let's do it yeah i want to call it fiat token i'm sure there is one
uh so one thing that's interesting with this whole thing, right?
And by the way, hi Sterling, I see you're up here to speak.
Maybe you can, maybe I'll ask, direct this to you sort of that you, so you get worked
into this thing.
As far as the definition of an actual decentralized crypto versus security there's been this whole fud around
oh this is security because xyz or this isn't and now there's sort of clear definitions uh i'm sure
people studied the act closer than i have can get a little bit more of a direct definition
but from my understanding the criteria are if one central if the blockchain itself is provides the value that people buy the token for
is in they buy ETH to do ETH things. For example, they buy dash to send it and use it as money kind
of thing. They buy Xano for private tokens is in the values derived from the blockchain functionality.
That's a commodity, not a security. And security would be if the value is derived from the actions of an
individual or a central entity as in a company or promotional efforts of that one entity or company,
as well as if the blockchain, if it just does what it does and that's the value
commodity, but it's security if the actual tokens are linked
to exogenous assets, meaning like, okay, this is tokenized gold or whatever. It's redeemable
for real gold. That would probably be considered as a security, right? Because the value is external
to the blockchain. And then they had some other things such as the governance tokens, the governance vote, whatever decentralized governance system it has, no party can control
more than 20%. And same for the coin supply. That's what they consider like a mature blockchain.
And also that all the rules and actions on the blockchain are all fair and programmatic,
meaning it's code is law. It
just runs as it does. That's a commodity. And a security obviously would be otherwise, where some
people have their fingers in the pie of controlling things. So it's, first of all, Sterling, starting
with you, just to get you into this thing. What do you think of those criteria? Do you think that
they're fair? And then do you think that they'll be applied correctly, i.e. in a way that makes XRP definitely a security? regulations, ideas, or anything fairly, especially for a still nascent industry like cryptocurrency,
blockchain, et cetera. I mean, and I'm just speaking from experience here, right? And I just,
maybe I'll give a little bit of background too. So I worked with an exchange called Cryptospace
in the US. I also had a Mexico counterpart called Cryptomex. And this was before the Trump administration.
And we'll get into that.
We'll get into the recent changes.
But when I was working with that organization, for one thing, we went through 12 bank accounts.
We couldn't keep bank accounts.
They got shut down all the time.
And then also we very regularly had, we had BTMs, Bitcoin tell machines in in Vegas, in Caesars Palace and in the Aria.
We also had some in the Los Angeles area and they were always scrutinized by alphabet soup agencies, always looked at.
We were always questioned and we had I can't go into all the details, but we had plenty of calls with guys that weren't really happy with what we were doing.
And what this caused is a huge problem with our ability just to run business as a financial company.
And we were registered with FinCEN.
We had all the proper licenses.
licenses. We even went through the trouble. So technically, when you do any kind of money
We even went through the trouble.
transmission business in the United States, you have to have a license for each state because
each state also has its own criteria. But the way that we ran business, we actually had an exemption
to do business in all of the states. But because of the way that the rules are often written,
and this is back to the original point that you had, the way that the rules are written, they make it impossible for you to fully comply because there's always some way that they can find that you may be, quote unquote, breaking the rule.
And even if you're not breaking the rule, they can still use pressure tactics to push back. And so one of the thing is that really gets me revved up is that everyone in the
industry right now, or a lot of people, I shouldn't generalize and say everyone, but a lot of people
are stoked and they're hyped about these bills, especially people in the Bitcoin community,
a lot of Bitcoin max, they're happy about this, but we can never trust governments to actually
follow through with any of these rules in ways that make sense for our
industries and for our organization. You know, I hear one of my buddies often said that, you know,
trusting government is like trusting a crack addict. They're always going to go back to that
crack, no matter what, even if they give you the illusion that you're going to have the ability to
work the way that you want to work in this industry. So I don't trust them as far as I can
throw them. And most of them,
I can't probably throw too far. So yeah, I would, I would say overall the situation is just gives us
the illusion of the ability to operate the way that we want to operate, but not in, in, in truth
or in action and just wait and see, it'll probably pan out. I mean, we already know this, you know, the Genius Act specifically was pushed as a thumbs up or a nod to the cryptocurrency industry. The reality is this is just a this is a CBDC in disguise. It's just stable coins that are easily freezable, seizeable and accessible by the United States government just through their private partners in this industry. But they're not really, quote unquote, even in the crypto industry. This gets me on a whole rampage and
tangent about the original values of why we're in this industry to begin with, which is the
cypherpunk modus operandi, which is the idea of privacy, anonymity, freedom, and civil liberties
are what's supposed to back this industry. But instead, what we have now is just people wanting to shill their bags
and shill their coins and jerk off to laser eyes, all this nonsensical shenaniganry that we
shouldn't be engaged in to begin with. Anyway, tangent over for now.
Couldn't agree more. Co-sign everything you just said. You can never trust the government.
like you can never
you can never trust the government
these are
I know like I was just I just spent like the last
20 minutes like talking about how great
these bills are or these laws
that are about the bills that are about the laws
but like I view them
only I'm a crypto anarchist
it's in my bio like and I mean that
in every sense of the word I do not
trust the government I view this as
progress I do not view it as the destination but see do not trust the government i view this as progress i do not view it as the
destination but see you can trust the government you can trust the government to do what the
government does and that's the thing if you know what to expect then there's really nothing to
worry because you already know what the government's going to do you already know what their goals are
the kind of things that they want you know their aspirations for the communities and stuff so in a sense you can trust the
government to be the government so i think in that way you know we'll be okay i'm also not so excited
as much as you guys i guess with all this stuff uh i i mean i'm i i'm a bit of a crypto anarchist
myself not in the bio, just in the lifestyle.
But I'm not excited because everyone's going to look up to some kind of point of authority to do something for them rather than be their own bank like Satoshi intended.
We're going to have these mom and pop shops looking to see who can we hire to make our
rewards token and who can we, we have to go to the government and get our license, honey,
so we can issue NFTs for our pizza store and fuck all that, man. I want the pizza store to just
fuck around and find out. I want the coffee shop to make their own shit coin and accept it. And
maybe it goes wrong. Maybe it goes right. Maybe it goes to zero. Maybe they become the next Starbucks. You never know. But when we start getting into these regulations, it's just
telling these small mom and pop shops, retail investors, us, our friends, the people in our
circles and our arm's reach, you're going to have to go get someone's permission to fuck around and
find out moving forward. If you want an opportunity, you're going to have to get the permission for it.
You're going to have to get a license
to mint tokens or I don't know.
To me, it's kind of a turnoff
because it discourages the
fuck around and find out
that orange pill anarchist thing
where people aren't really anarchist
when they're starting out.
But the more they realize
that they didn't have freedom yesterday
and now
what they have is freedom today with this information and education. And now with this
technology, they can implement it and basically manifest that into real life. I think that's going
to encourage more, but I think this is more of a discouragement. No one's going to really be
experimenting as much as we were hoping. I was hoping to see a whole nother run of ICO type shit, you know, more pumped up fun,
but let it come out of like barbershops and nail salons and little kids with paper routes.
Am I the only one or am I just, is this like, am I a child at heart over here?
No, no, totally. I agree with what you're saying but so i i'm trying to because i like to be
a positive person i'm trying to put this in the most positive light for myself just so i don't
you know break down and cry about where the industry is heading and all that crap but like
so what i would like to point out here is that uh first of all like i know most of us that have
talked here understand like what decriminalization versus legalization means, but for those in the rest of the audience
or the listeners that may not be familiar with those terms or know the distinction,
uh, decriminalization means to make something not criminal, which is, uh, to do the FAFO,
fuck around and find out type, you know, methodology, which I wholly endorse as
someone who calls himself an anarchist. Uh, legalization is what most of these bills are
genius act and clarity act are legalization. Meaning it is absolutely illegal for you to
fuck around and find out as long as you fuck around within these lines that we are allowing
you to color within. we are watching and this
is the we couldn't ask for a better object lesson as to what does that mean for the industry because
legalization is the very definition of regulatory capture what is regulatory capture regulatory
capture is when lobbyists paid for by industry leaders write the rules and Congress goes,
well, you're the expert. Sure. Why not? Also, you probably paid for my vacation. So, well,
let's just go with whatever you just said. And so you can see that the stable coin providers,
we didn't obviously make your doubt did not write the rules. You know know it was circle that wrote the rules and it was you know uh you
know probably some folks with tether and some probably some of the guys from binance and you
know like they were there were there were you know centralized organizations within crypto that
wound up lobbying for what ended up in the genius act and the clarity act except for the little bit
that tom emmer threw in there, which is the,
you know, the bit that decriminalizes peer to peer. Now, if I could jump in there just with
a quick comment, this is, this is why as a libertarian, I like seem to stand apart from
many of my fellow libertarians, uh, in that I think, and one of my big goals is to go into
politics to reduce the size of government. But so many libertarians, I think part of the reason the Libertarian Party has never gotten very far is because so many libertarians are against that kind of organization and they don't want to participate.
But if you don't participate, someone else will and they will crush you through laws.
And so previously we had banks and others lobbying against us and they had more money, so they won, right? Our people were put in jail. Mark was put in jail or charged crime, whatever. All these other, you know, tornado cash, privacy people were put in jail. Ross was put in, you know, so we were losing for a long time. It was not until, and look, I don't love the path we had to take.
It's a little bit of deals with the devil we had to make.
We had to bribe them through lobbying.
That's essentially what lobbying kind of is, right?
But, you know, we had to play the game or else we would keep being on the wrong end of the stick.
So it's a weird thing.
But as a libertarian, I do think we should be involved.
So Libby, I'll look at millay he's doing a great job as a libertarian yeah of course but uh one thing on you know obviously i'm into the hardcore cyberpunk side of things and the
not asking permission and just do it it's fun just. Just don't ask permission. Just fuck around and find out. Great. One thing I do notice though, is like the decrim versus legalization thing. And this is
might be the black pill of the entire kind of show is obviously I'd prefer to have everything
completely just decriminalized, just not, not, you're not going to jail for, and then that's it. And then just not have regulatory capture.
That being said, there's a large part of the world of society.
I would say most of it, economically speaking, at least the majority, maybe not a massive
majority, but still the majority that wants certainty before they do things and certainty
for them, you know, regulatory certainty, clarity, as it were,
which is why this act has the name, in fact,
is it means tell me what I have to do so I can do the thing.
How do I get permission?
Because if I don't get permission, I won't do it.
And I think a lot of the crypto space
or a lot of the non-crypto space, I would say,
the crypto space has been in the gray area for like 16 years, right? It's the crypto space clearly doesn't
mind messing around a little bit, but as far as like the average person, like, ah, I won't,
I won't get into crypto until I know it's legal. Like they got, they got a little, little,
little bit of Stockholm syndrome. Yes. And so I mean, for good reason, they're literally
burning Roman storm and effigy right now
for that very yeah exactly sorry say that again
uh they're burning roman storm and effigy right now to send a message to people who might build
things that are adversarial to the state what does that mean uh roman storm is right now being tried
you guys are familiar yeah one of the tornado catch
developers is uh facing trial last week and this week so far in uh new york um and it's i i'm i
wanted to go down in person i just couldn't make it happen unfortunately but um there's a lot of
good inner city press is doing a lot of good live tweeting on the thing i'm tempted to fly out man
and again well if if you do end up doing it just let me know and maybe i'll try to head down i'm City Press is doing a lot of good live tweeting on the thing. I'm tempted to fly out, man.
If you do end up doing it, just let me know and maybe I'll try to head down. I'm like
six hours driving.
What else can we do to support?
The thing is that it's got a Sange case
level implications for the First Amendment
in terms of code.
How it comes out
is actually going to matter for
what open source developers are going to have to be prepared to avoid doing in order to avoid retroactive punishment.
It's going to just ice investment into anything that's even remotely controversial.
Yeah, I mean, look, this is, God, sorry to interrupt, but like, God.
Okay, one, I thought they already got the charges dropped.
So what's going on?
I'm lost here, first off.
Everybody that Roman has gone through their trial at this point
or had charges dropped in the other cases.
Like, everything else was resolved except for the one against Roman.
And they're still kind of perpetrating this case
with really, really bad evidence.
Like, the case did hinge around like some testimony from,
uh, I mean, hopefully they have a weak case.
Oh no, they absolutely do.
Like a mid trial is the real Eastern district of New York though.
So it doesn't have to be a strong case where they want to send Ed Snowden
to, you know, why expand it's that's where the case is.
It's Eastern district of New York.
So why do they not need as
strong of evidence well because stories that tend to be pulled from pools in the intelligence
community that live around that area oh no shit are you kidding me seriously is that a thing that
is a thing that's why they they like to try it's like it's like having a trial in like dc or
something it's like all it's all like you know something. It's like all, it's all like, you know, ambassadors and, you know.
Yeah. It's just a very popular place for people with alphabet soup jobs to live apparently.
Wow. I mean, imagine being a hobbit and going to Mordor on trial.
Yeah, exactly.
That's not going to end well for you.
Yeah. So that's part of the craziness going on. Like it wouldn't even still be going on if,
if this weren't the case,
but,
and I can't say who I talked to,
but I know that this isn't thing.
This isn't a thing that they haven't discussed.
I'm doing in the,
in the broader anti-crypto war unwinding,
like Trump knew about this stuff and just decided this was going to go ahead
and be policy.
I can't back that up
with somebody i'm allowed to cite but i did hear this from somebody who could ask
so what about samurai did they had gosh i should keep up more on this stuff but samurai
uh had issues as well there's been a few up there's been more what's been happening with
all these well let me just before someone jumps into the samurai thing, just on the tornado cash thing.
Yeah, please.
So obviously, you know, there were allegedly people from North Korea, obviously,
used tornado cash. And that was sort of the impetus for the sanctions against the actual
addresses associated with the smart contract contract where the actual tornado cash was
sanctioned and then came arrests around building this and money laundering other things like that
and the sanctions etc are over and done and so therefore tornado cash itself is i don't know
decriminalized the right way to say it but but there it's like fine now, which,
but tornado catch isn't a real person with lives and children and families and stuff.
The people involved, for example, I'm a little bit more familiar with the Alexi Persev case
because he was arrested in the Netherlands. And some of my good friends at Crypto Canal
have really kind of pioneered that.
And it's kind of the ETH Dam conference,
which will probably be Crypto Dam or Crypto Canal next year.
This year was headlined by Alexey Persev
with his ankle monitor out on bail
after he lost his case and is appealing it.
And it was a packed house.
That's how you know it's a cyberpunk conference
when you're headlined by a literal supposed criminal, right?
So basically his case is a little more, I don't know.
I'm, I don't know if I'm less, it's not, I'm not optimistic, unfortunately about either
one, because apparently the Netherlands sees it as a open and shut kind of money long during
type case.
And the US case, I would say of Roman Storm,
who is compatriot, who's now going through in New York,
seems to be much more,
it seems, I would say there's more hope for it,
but at the same time, the implications are bigger.
It's not just they got a money laundering thing.
It's that the writing of open source code
seems to be a little bit more on the stand there.
And the case law that comes from this, the judicial precedent could really be used to harm a lot of
different coders. Like, for example, let's just find some like Binary or Xana or Zcash or Dash
devs and just be like, well, someone used your service and you coded this in so you could be
liable. There could be some nasty
precedent from that. And so I'm not as familiar with the current Roman Storm case, but that is
just what I'll say on the end. It is. And I think that's the important point is what it does to
open source software. The thing that allows the world to make new things out of chaos now has to have this arbitrary wall around it. It will
end the
development of privacy and security
outside of outlaw circles.
I don't understand, though.
Go ahead, Mark.
Go ahead. I was going to say, to answer the question
about Samurai Wallet and with
Roman's case...
Let me finish
that i'll put a bow on that i have one thing to say on this and then we if we could yeah just
i don't i don't understand how we're you know trying to establish you know case law for this
when case law has already been established i mean uh in like the 90s the one of, not the Supreme Court, it didn't even get that far, one of the smaller circuits, whatever, established that code is protected by free speech.
So why are we even having, like, how can they, they would have to, like, you know, retract that case or something, right?
Or that would have to be escalated or... Well, because if they can paint it as part of a criminal... part of furtherance of a criminal conspiracy
then the writing of code can be an affirmative act that
despite it also being speech is criminal conduct.
Yeah, I was going to say, there is a freeze. The problem is they're trying to impute it back into the past.
He was guilty when he wrote something that didn't have a door they could exploit in it.
It's like
oh no okay i ran out of the thing the bot came back i'm gonna kick the bot real quick
you don't need it anymore um anyway sorry about that who where were we
like what have we already all written and signed our names to that's illegal next? I guess this is a better question.
Repeat that?
What have we all... Say a little louder?
What have we all built and created already that would make us guilty under the standard if they decided to come after us, right?
Yeah.
Like, look, I'll say, I'll go out boldly and say, I guarantee, and this is a risky thing to say, but I guarantee someone using
QuickSwap that I co-founded, I'm sure someone has put in some kind of money that was gained
illicitly through it.
I can't stop that, right?
Bank of America has probably had billions of instance of this, and you can't stop it. And yeah, I mean, if we're building code
and that code is being mostly used by good people,
of course, bad people are going to use it.
I mean, we say, you know, Koreans use tornado cash.
I'm pretty damn sure they use lots of other things.
It's a downside of the existence of public goods.
Do you have a checkbox that at least asks,
hey, are you using this platform for illicit means? Like, you know, you have to have that you have a checkbox that at least asks hey are you using
this platform for illicit means like you you know you have to have that 18 or older checkbox as long
as you're asking you know you're in the clear so we do so this is where the clarity act and on some
of our products um like perps we block us users and maybe even more of our products that are, I let our legal team keep updating that stuff.
But so the clarity act actually,
would probably prevent,
Roman and it might actually preclude depending upon the architecture might
preclude the upcoming samurai trial from going through.
It depends on how the judges accept the arguments because there's there.
Well, the problem is here they're charged before the law went into effect so it's really kind of a question of
will they allow will they allow it to go through can they appeal it on some grounds like that
but essentially the the part of the clarity act that protects quick swap uh from being prosecuted
the same way that roman is being prosecuted. And this goes for really any smart contract based organization is the fact that there is no custody of customer funds, right?
It's atomic.
So like there is, you're not sitting there holding on to customer funds.
It's permissionless.
They can grab it at any time if they're a liquidity provider and people that are using it for an exchange.
There's no point in which they are out the funds.
They make a deal with the smart contract.
I'm going to give you a dollar worth of stable coin.
I'm going to get a dollar's worth of Bitcoin out of it.
You're not custodian funds at any point.
Yeah, 100%.
And just to be clear, in case there are any federal or legal people listening,
we do take one more precaution.
And we pay a good amount of money
for this but we um anyone who uses our front end we do cross check so if they are um you know
trying to access it from north korea or from a sanctioned country or any sanctioned ofac list
wallets uh we do block it from the front end but we do not have the power to block it from
the smart contract level.
This is actually something that the tornado
cash did.
I did not have sexual relations with that woman.
Oh wait, long reference.
What's that? Say again?
Bill Clinton reference. Carry on.
He did not penetrate her.
He just put his cigar in her.
Hey, I wanted to throw in...
Too far.
Too far.
I wanted to throw in that
TornadoCache did the same thing, actually.
They tried to do the geo-fencing
on the front end
and were still nonetheless targeted.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, so it's not necessarily
a workaround
if they really want to get you
for something.
Again, pre-clarity uh post-clarity that that actually
uh not no no longer be a prosecutorial loophole they can use that's really cool great to hear
maybe they could apply it to the case at hand that'd be pretty cool see this is where this
is where it gets really kind of like uh It's because theoretically, I could be retroactively compliant on my case,
and Roman is definitely going to be able to be retroactively compliant on his case.
But the way the law works is just it depends on when you're charged before the law changes.
I was locked up with dudes in the feds that were essentially there, you know, essentially there for like a dime bag, you know, in, in the,
they did take you to jail.
Yeah. Yeah. I spent, I spent 11 months in federal custody.
Oh my Lord.
Sorry to hear that, man. I guess.
Thank you for your surface taking one for the whole industry.
Yo, literally.
I mean, look, I don't know what you did. So I probably shouldn't judge right now because maybe you did something terrible.
I don't know, but I'm going to take a wild guess and say it probably wasn't.
I'm happy to provide a link here in the thing to the Bitcoin magazine coverage of my case.
And you can judge for yourself, but essentially it was just, I didn't check a checkbox on a website.
Yeah.
I feel it for you, man.
Yeah, dude.
11 months of your life that you will never
get back. Sorry, go ahead, Sterling.
I was just going to say quickly, if
sticking your boot heel into the
asshole of the system is considered a terrible
thing, we should all be doing terrible things. Let's go. Not the toe of the boot, the boot heel
into their anus. That's, that's a, wow. Yeah, crazy. Trying to picture that one. I mean,
here's the thing. mean i can the geometry
doesn't work out very well i mean i yeah i can empathize with mark right i've you know i've gone
through my fair share of legal troubles when i was younger you guys probably recall i got arrested
for possession of mdma and cocaine you know to the tune of 500 pills thought i was going to go
to prison for a long time had to deal with. It made me realize how corrupt and broken the system is on a fundamental level. Because,
first of all, why is there even a drug war? Abolish that shit. That shouldn't even exist.
And then the other thing is, is they're going to do everything they can to rifle through your
pockets. And that's if they don't put you in a cage for doing voluntary interactions in exchange
on the free market.
And then, of course, just working in crypto, been made to feel like a quote unquote criminal,
even though no laws had ever been broken. So the whole system is built to act as a defense agency against new systems and innovation or anybody who has a rebellious spirit or who's a maverick or who wants to push back against the status quo and the entrenched powers.
So this is to me also why I think entrepreneurship is so vital and so critical to the survivability of our species, because as we create new things, invent new technologies and push into the future, we're overturning those
old systems. We're creating what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift, where we're trying to
evolve as a species. So I see these predatory systems, or the parasite class, as antithetical
to human evolution, as antithetical to our ability to overcome our own self, our own appetites for self-destruction and self-cannibalization.
So I think there's a huge hope that we have just being in the cryptocurrency blockchain industry, being in tech in general,
because we represent the fringes and the edges of what it means to be a human, of what it means to incite meaningful change in the world. So I can think of no better space to be, especially if you have a tendency to
want to push back against these systems. I think it was Terrence McKenna who said something about
we don't need to sell ourselves out to the bones of a dying system, right? We don't need to be
fodder for that. We need to, you know, and it was Camus who said that our very existence should be an
act of rebellion. And that's the way that I live in the way that I approach life, because, you
know, there's nothing that matters more than freedom. And that's what our technologies
represent. That's what our communities represent. That's how I characterize it.
Had to give you some claps there.
I got a question for you, though, Sterling.
How far do you go? I think I might know, but do you believe in no government, some government, some organization, pure anarchy?
How far do you go?
So on a fundamental level, I think there should be zero government because government's just a coercive entity. But there is a sort of a catch here. I'm really, pragmatically speaking, I'm a panarchist.
And what that means is I believe people should have the ability to opt into whatever kind of governance system they want. If they want to opt into a governance system that enslaves them, that's voluntary on their part. They want to be a slave.
They want to live like that. They should have the ability and the capacity to do that. But
everyone else should be able to opt into whatever kind of systems they want. In terms of like
Lockean contractarianism, I'm the far extent of that, right? I take that to its logical conclusion
where anybody should be able to opt into whatever
kind of contract or drop whatever kind of contract with other parties and people that they want to.
But who am I to say what the contents of those contracts are?
But don't you argue that just a universal right of exit is all you're really looking for?
Yeah, that's why I'm a 10th Amendmentist. Basically, I believe that, you know, the way the Constitution, the way we originally, it was intended to be was there was no friction to move from state to state.
There was no cross-state, you know, tariffs or anything like that.
And I don't like this part.
It actually wasn't intended.
But, you know, one you could argue is benefit, negative, whatever, is having the same currency.
One, you could argue is benefit, negative, whatever, is having the same currency.
But anyways, that's a whole other topic.
But anyways, that's a whole other topic.
But I would argue then, Sterling, that it's a little bit contradictory because you're saying you don't want governance, but you want people to opt into governance.
Now, couldn't you make the argument that – and I'm not making this argument – but couldn't you make the argument that you have the right to move?
And so you can move to another state.
You can move to another country.
You can move to Liberland. You have the opportunity. I don't actually think that,
but I mean, we kind of have that now. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, so I think that argument is a little bit specious though, because we don't actually have that right, at least not freely,
right? In order to move, you have to have all kinds of paperwork you have to have a passport uh so there's all
these bureaucratic bottlenecks that are directly initialized by the state that is indicative of
not having that freedom so if we really did have that freedom and if it were true sure but it but
it's not so i would say anybody who makes that argument it's a bit of a specious argument but
they're not well and regularly. And regulate the cost of the
transit that requires to get people around the world.
You can't tell me
they have an added cost to airlines by
keeping them well regulated.
They can't even innovate on how
they're allowed to load the plane in a way that would make
it faster.
It's pretty ridiculous.
And this is more of what we'll get,
I think. This is why they ultimately always lose,
because they always make shoddy systems.
So I guess without going into too much technicality on that,
because that's a whole, you could write books on this,
but I will just say that I do believe we should have governments
voluntarily that we can opt into,
and there should be less friction moving between them.
That's why I love the 10th Amendment.
I don't like that federal has gotten so large. I absolutely hate it. I think we should
get rid of most federal, uh, most things that federal is involved in now. They should not be
involved in. I mean, like NPR, why were they funding NPR? I don't know enough about this,
but from my limited knowledge, they were, you know, we pulled funding from NPR recently.
Um, sound, you know, people like, NPR recently um sound you know people like
oh that's terrible but why is the government a lot I think there should be a law that they cannot
fund any news organizations that seems ridiculous to me and then when you look into it it was only
one percent of their funding so like why do they why are they funding NPR one percent so NPR is
living from donations mostly um why do they need 1% from the government? Is it so
that the government has a little say in what they say and can have their thumb on them? I mean,
there's a lot of situations like this. I mean, the Department of Education, schools only receive
like some very small amount, less than 5%, maybe 3% or something colleges received from Department
of Education. So why is it even there?
Is it there just so the government can tell you what you can say?
I mean, like, we just saw Trump pull funding from, you're trying to pull funding from Harvard,
trying to take Palestinian, you know, protesters and deport them from the country for exercising
their right to protest.
These were legal people.
And I'm not, like, being partisan here.
I'm, like, I'm not being partisan here. I'm criticizing
both sides here. I agree with defunding NPR and I agree with defunding Department of Education,
which are both Trump things, but I totally disagree with him defunding for the purpose
of getting people to say what he wants to say. That's crazy. That's why you see how this can go both ways and why the government should stay the fuck out of all these things.
And if anyone is going to do any of this stuff, it should be the states that are closer to their constituency, their people, and know more about what their people need or want.
And the people can vote them in and out more easily.
Yeah.
But I guess the main point there is I do think we should have some government.
I think the most basic things, which is having fraud laws, right?
Like property laws.
I think that's what the government should be there for.
Protect our property rights.
Protect against fraud.
We don't need millions of laws.
Simply having a law that says don't commit fraud. And then, you know,
um, yeah. And, um, yeah. Protecting our borders, these kinds of things. All the rest to me is like,
I'm not sure. Even, even firefighters, even roads, these are all, there's a lot of theory
around these might be run better by, uh, by private companies than the government.
You just don't know because you're paying, you're paying so much for taxes. You're like, but I love having free roads, but they're not free.
If you knew the actual cost of the road, then you would actually know if it's a good deal or not,
but you have no idea because it is one item out of millions of items. And while there's millions of items, your money is just flowing
all over the place to other countries, to bombing brown people, to whatever, you know.
Yeah. Sorry, Joel, I'm just going to make a very quick point real quick,
because I want to say I agree with Rock. I agree with you. I don't think we're too
far apart, and I wouldn't try to argue with you to speak, because it would be speaking past you,
because I also believe in being able to opt into any kind of human community organization.
I mean, we just call them different things. I think you call it government, but I would call
it governance, right? If it's completely voluntary, you opt into it. You're able to engage with whatever kind of rule set that you want that that community has provided. So yeah, 100%.
Yeah, you want a community where you pay 80% taxes? Go make that community. You want a community that is more like socialist and has employee employee owned companies, go build that community yourself.
That's great. Uh, you want a community where it's like, you know, polygamy is legal and it's like,
you know, a gay community or whatever you want to have. Awesome. Have that. I'm, I'm all for all
that. Um, yeah. Anyways. Um, Miggy, did you have something to say? I saw your hand up for a second.
Um, yeah, I just wanted to impose a question, but Sterling kind of touched on it. With the whole government versus non-government, I just wanted to say, can we not have governance without government?
That's a good question. I think if you had some kind of, you know, sort of super stratus on top of a, you know, sort of an atomic unitarianism system, I think you could then have containers that would have, where you could have systems that can keep a compact of free exit enforced as sort of the only federal system,
then you could have communities that were really operating like little atomic experiments of their own and people could just move to the ones they liked.
I think that would be sort of in tune with what you're suggesting, that would let people experiment with whatever they wanted to, so long as they let anybody come and go as they so chose.
This is exactly what the Constitution and the Bill of Rights set.
This is what it was.
And the Tenth Amendment, for those who don't know, is the federal government is only responsible for things explicitly outlined.
for things explicitly outlined explicitly outlined if it is not outlined in the constitution or the
Explicitly outlined.
bill of rights and the amendments uh or any of the amendments then they don't have that right
they need to stay the hell out of it and they need to let the states uh decide and let's and then you
have the free flow of people where i don't like the state i'm going somewhere else
yeah this is a time then the states behave because competition is good for the
consumer or in this case, good for the citizen. Right. Because it would be easy to lose customers
if you could have free exit. That's, that's, that'd be certain. Yeah. Like Cindy, you know,
when I moved to Puerto Rico, you know, Cindy was like, well, what, what if like, what about other
people? They're going to like Texas and helping with their taxes or they're going to Nevada. And I'm like,
yeah, but I'm still, I'm paying 38% to the federal government. So like, if, if you go, if that means
you're, even if you go from a place like California, where I came from that I was paying 54% and I go
to a place that has a zero state, you know, state tax, um, like Texas or others.
Well, I'm still paying, I'm only going from 54 to 38.
So my, my, my vote, my, my voting with my feet is not as strong, but if there wasn't
as much federal, if federal was like 2% just for most important things.
And the States were able to fund everything else.
Cause if you just took away federal funding, the states could increase their taxes.
Now you would have, instead you would have,
let's just say federal is zero or one or whatever.
Now you would have California would probably still tax the same.
They would tax 54 straight now.
It wouldn't be 38 to the federal and whatever, 17 or whatever it is to the state.
It would just be California would tax 54.
But guess what?
They probably wouldn't because you would leave.
So now you'd have one state charging 54, you'd have Texas charging probably just 10 or 20,
because now they would have to manage the things that federal's managing for them.
And it would just be a much better, more competitive system for the citizens.
Right.
So when Kansas gets bright ideas, we can just lower ours even lower and draw everybody kind of thing yeah exactly I mean look at
the countries in the world that have been built on this concept of low
regulation and you know free markets I mean Dubai is moved they only put 95
normally only like 5% of their revenues from oil now they've moved into an
investor economy and a building economy and a tech economy.
Same with Hong Kong was great up until recently.
I mean, maybe in the last 20 years, China has kind of put a little bit more of a stranglehold on them.
But when they were more free, Hong Kong was one of the fastest growing countries in the world.
is one of the fastest growing countries in the world.
And Singapore went from being a fishing village 70 years ago
to being one of the most high-tech, cleanest, safest,
high happiness amongst the population.
And how did they do that?
By enabling free markets and encouraging businesses to come build there.
I would like to see the states have that ability, but they don't right now, because even
if they try to do that, the federal government is most of the regulations and most of the tax
anyways. So the states just don't have that much say anymore. Yeah. And that's an interesting part,
especially like the crypto legislation where you have places like New York with a bit license.
where you have places like New York with a bit license.
And for example, because of that rotten piece of law,
there's a spending tool that we're debuting pretty soon
that's going to be available for customers in 49 states.
And for some reason, a lot of exchanges,
including Coinbase, you can't buy Dash and Coinbase
if you're in New York,
but in the 49 other states, you can.
So that's like a bad example of that,
like the 10th amendment type
thing but of course you know good amount good examples but then you but no it's but it's a
good example because that's a state that messed up bit license was ridiculous and nobody's out
there i should say that's a good example of a bad thing the whole thing's kind of messed up because
they're going to stuff every single new non-bank entity that they create under
this act with treasuries, and that's going to
get sold off and basically finance
more debt.
It's also kind of funny.
Someone made the point
either on this show
or another that
when you use stablecoins,
you are buying bonds, and you are funding
our debt, and you are funding our debt and you are
funding our wars. It's an interesting point. Yeah, I think it sounds like an Aaron Day kind
of a comment, to be honest, but it's a lot of truth to that. He and I are buddies.
Yeah, I love him. He's on the more hardcore edge of the delivery the the delivery of it maybe but you know we're peas in
a pod as far as like living on crypto caring about freedom and stuff uh one thing i should say
with the whole you know the fast was epic honestly yeah yeah so fast oh go ahead on tell him about his fast oh he did like a 90 day fast whoa uh in defense of roger bear
wow yeah wow and others right like he talked about everybody the whole time so he was talking
about roman he was talking about roger he was talking about everybody who he could find out
about who's getting around you so you know i have my i had my mixed uh like times with roger and we fought
hard on the block size wars but um i donated to his uh to him i found some way i don't remember
how but i donated to some something for his legal or something there was something that popped up
uh because even though i disagreed with him on the bitcoin versus bitcoin cash stuff
uh he's he's being mistreated and it's not right. Thank goodness for you, Rock. Thank goodness
for you. There's so many people who I think they wear blinders because they're so tribalistic
within their community, largely Bitcoin maximalists, that they're unwilling to see the
forest for the trees and actually promote Roger and his freedom. They can't see how stone evil what has happened to him actually is.
So they fight back.
So thank you for your support of Roger Rock.
That's meaningful.
Yeah.
And now that I think, you know, Bitcoin has claimed such a strong throne in a lot of ways,
I actually am a lot more supportive of all these other experiments and
even supportive of Bitcoin Cash. I think they've really innovated a lot. They've done a lot of
interesting, cool stuff that who knows could be used for Bitcoin or could just be used on
Bitcoin Cash and people are happy. And I think it's an interesting concept of forks being either subtractive from communities or additive.
If you think of like, it creates this Cambrian explosion
of kind of genetic mutations that spawn different things.
And then we let the best thing, let everything compete
in the different categories and see what the market decides on.
And so I highly encourage, you know, experiments in all ways now.
I'm a Bitcoin maximal-ish. I think Bitcoin is the greatest thing we have, in my personal humble opinion. But I think it's really great that we do
lots of other things and experiments. And you don't want necessarily just one thing because imagine if bitcoin became the only thing um and then somehow got co-opted someday and it's not as
it's a non-zero chance that bitcoin could be co-opted you know i would totally say this is
that rabbit hole no no this is this is the this is kind of awesome actually actually. You can hear a lot of a train of thought.
It'll come back.
Yeah, no worries.
One thing that I think is interesting with this whole law thing, right?
Obviously, we're looking for decrim so people could do stuff.
But a lot of the industry is kind of being put into a legal context, a purely legal context, I mean,
regulatory capture, et cetera. I guess one other question on that is, first of all,
with the separation between the criteria of what the CFTC is going to regulate and what the SEC
is going to regulate as far as does it have a decentralized governance structure?
Does one entity own more than 20% of the supply?
Like, for example, if Coinbase custody
is more than 20% of Bitcoin supply,
which is like 10% right now,
would that can make Bitcoin now a security, for example?
Like, probably not,
but stuff like that is under the, it's possible.
So do you think there's any, we're talking about how much we hate government and stuff like that,
which is, you know, it's, it's my bread and butter, obviously, but let's talk about silver
linings on this cloud. What do you think about, do you think that the fact that there's these two
different treatments of assets based on the decentralization from these objective metrics.
Do you think that that could have a silver lining effect in encouraging
more projects to kind of move into a more permissionless way than they otherwise could
have? Because now that there's an actual, there's actual consequences in legal treatment,
if you're classified as a decentralized commodity versus a centralized security.
Does anyone want to take a stab at that one?
I think it'll be a lot like it was with Mean Coins, right?
Mean Coins were permitted because they promised
under no uncertain terms that they would do nothing
to improve the nature of the thing
through their efforts later.
And so they avoid the Howie test entirely by promising not to do a thing after it launches.
It's the only thing the law permits.
It's what they do.
So all the things...
They promise to be useless.
All the things...
That's why they never went after any of the meme coins, right?
Because they were not improving it.
They were just letting it be.
And that's where they started to sort of catch people
um and that's why a lot of the projects that we see go away or to get targeted by the sec like
um i i advised on the dragon chain case um because i once upon a time practiced a bit of
law and joe just needed some help to do this theory um and and we what we got to was was
just sort of this dynamic that uh
it kind of repeats itself throughout history when anybody tries to innovate in this space
it's it's sort of the defense system around the transactions and money space and and it started
to get threatened by some of the ideas right um the way it responded is how it's responded with
this legislation it's
going to give people a permission space where they can play but nothing can get too big if it's
destructive and uh that maybe they're undoing because they may be allowing too much in
that's the one thing that i think maybe have some hope for the legislation that's my take on it yeah
i mean the only other take that i wanted to give on it is i think that it's kind of crazy what the roman's doris trials going on during crypto week and all we can take away
was win for crypto so i just wanted to make sure someone talked about that quick data point for you
joel um just if anyone was curious it looks like coinbase went from i just asked a generic time
seven years ago i didn't cherry pick. Um, it looks
like Coinbase used to hold 3.5. This is just according to grok, uh, used to hold 3.5 to 4.7
of the circulating supply. Um, that number went consistently down into 2000 and it looks like,
uh, um, 20, uh, 20, 23 or 24. It went down to like one percent and now it's at like um uh like one to
two percent um but it's actually more because they do uh i think that's not including yeah that's not
including the the etf stuff which is a problem i don't understand why blackrock is custing with
coinbase now weird and i hope that i think think over time, that'll spread out though.
I did ask this question of Grock.
Probably because they don't do full disclosure of reserves.
Yeah.
With the ETFs included, it's 10.4% or something.
And then just for funsies, I said, how much Bitcoin is likely lost or unrecoverable and
then only count the active supply?
Like for example, let's just say there's a quantum threat in the future, and then all
old coins and old addresses can just be stolen, or therefore they can either just be stolen
or they get frozen or whatever that makes it.
Now the dead coins become much more clearly dead.
And then that coin-based custody number gets up to 15 or so percent. Or they become clearly dead. And then that, that coin based custody number gets up to 15 or so
percent. Well, or they become clearly alive. I would argue they become clearly alive. If they
get quantum stolen, they're going to get used. I mean, maybe someone tries to freeze them. I don't
know that that's, it's a clear case of we should interfere and try to freeze these coins. I don't
know if, I don't know if Bitcoiners would get behind that freezing coins. Yeah, but there could, but the point is there could be like a lawsuit of some kind around that that would
allege that this is not part of the total supply because it doesn't count.
Therefore, maybe Coinbase's custody amount is up to like 12, 13, 14% by then.
And then this precedent bumps it up to 20%.
Now the SEC regulates it.
You need to be a securities broker to sell Bitcoin.
Obviously, I think that that's the last asset that would be on the SEC regulates it. You need to be a securities broker to sell Bitcoin. Obviously,
I think that that's the last asset that would be on the chopping block for that. But it's just
kind of interesting how these criteria might cause people to be like, oh, we're going to custody
not in Coinbase because we don't want this fringe threat of too much of the supply being
custodied by one entity to cause this asset we care about to be classified
as a security and therefore have worse treatment maybe yes this happened with the mining pools
so there was a point i forget which pool i'm sure someone here knows uh is a better historian than
i am but there was a mining pool that got up to it was approaching or maybe even slightly went over
50 of the hash rate and everybody just was like, Hey, this is not cool. There was a bunch of community sentiment around it and people started
withdrawing their hash power from it.
And I don't even think that pool exists anymore.
So I think over time, say again, C-E-X dot IO.
That was the one I was part of that pool for a while.
And why did you leave?
Because of the incident you mentioned it was
i mean and this is like i think this happens either from people's own values or it also i
mean it's like right now with the bitcoin uh core versus not people are moving away from core because
of decisions uh that they don't love and and they're like this is not decentralized enough
so let's have more clients i don't know the story there either. Maybe someone else does. But just in terms of
ownership of the asset, not to get too deep into this, but I think we were also concerned for a
long time that there was such a big hash rate in China that solved itself. And now I think it just
becomes this thing where there's so many people trying to get
the Bitcoin, uh, around the world that it just like, I think it's great.
Let's have the U S scoop up 5% of the supply.
Let's have my sailor and his people scoop up 5% of the supply.
Let's have Pakistan.
You know, I'm talking to them about some mining operations right now to their government.
Let's get them 2% of the hash rate or the supply or the, you know, all these different, let's distribute the
nodes. Let's have everybody competing over this. And then it kind of seems so far to have solved
itself over time, like the mining pool thing, the holding of the assets. And I think if it doesn't
solve itself, then you have people step in with a coordinated kind of effort to solve it because
they don't want to, like you said, be classified, Bitcoin to become a security or they don't want, you know, if you're a government
and you see, oh, shoot, China's getting all the hash rate. And now Trump's like, we got to get
the hash rate. Let's get the hash rate. Let's have Bitcoin be, you know, America be leading in
Bitcoin. You just have all the countries competing for it. That never becomes an issue. Hopefully,
maybe I'm too optimistic.
Yeah. So one thing, I mean, I, first off, I don't think anything happens organically in terms of
when something happens in the free markets, because people intentionally make it happen.
It's just, they follow the incentives. But as far as like a good example,
which I guess people who are more knowledgeable
on Solana should be able to give
is like Solana in my view
seems to be something that was launched
in an extremely sort of centralized manner,
very SEC purview-ish
as far as, you know,
who controls the foundation,
who controls a certain amount of validators and on-off switches.
Very much VC coordinated.
Yeah.
Even David Sachs, you know, and a lot of these.
Balaji, I didn't know Balaji was into Solana.
He was an early investor.
Anyway, sorry, go ahead.
But yeah, so like all that stuff, definitely Solana's sales in the beginning
could be considered a securities offering
under clarity, the way clarity is now.
Now, if you look at the way Solana's-
I'm sorry, you're saying with the new law,
it would be seen as a security?
I would say at least the initial sales
would be treated as a security.
Now, here's the interesting thing about the law
that we didn't necessarily touch on is that it does have a, you know, the, like a pathway to
citizenship, right? It has a pathway for a security to turn into a commodity where it's like, okay,
a company can start a completely corporate shit chain, you know, and just sell it. And then that
would be a securities offering. And then based on the Solana Foundation
or whoever else is involved,
based on how they market it and they build it out,
then that would give the value of the token
and therefore it's a security.
But then at a certain stage, you could say,
okay, well, they only hold 12% of the supply,
so not that much.
There's a decentralized voting mechanism
where they control under 20% of the supply, so not that much. There's a decentralized voting mechanism where they
control under 20% of the voting power. The blockchain runs on its own. So if the Solana
Foundation disappears, it still runs. They control some validators, but it's not enough to matter.
And also the roadmap has largely reached maturity, meaning like half of the tech,
like the chains, it doesn't stall anymore for the most part. It works.
Sure, they're still building improvements,
but it's just kind of set to go.
And one could argue that this is where we're at today with Solana.
So according to this criteria,
probably Solana is a very clear commodity today.
Really?
That's your opinion?
Wow.
Well, I don't know if that's my initial take on it.
I mean, I would ask Justin Bonds,
your favorite buddy in the world,
about it a little bit more because he's much more into Solana
in the very details of who runs how many validators
and what percentage of this and all the...
He would be able to get that more specifically on Solana.
But I guess the point is maybe it gives a...
Sal is probably just rolling his eyes listening to all this shit, but maybe it gives a, you know, Sal is probably just rolling his eyes and listening to
all this shit, but maybe it gives an incentive for projects to sort of get their act together
a little bit more and be like, yo, you know, we'd rather just have us sort of control a lot
of the voting power, but we kind of don't want to get into legal trouble. So let's actually
decentralize a little faster than we need to just to avoid legal trouble. I actually think this is, this is a good point. And by the
way, this is one of these things where like post Gary Gensler era, now that we're not being like
all tried as criminals for everything we do, I look back and I'm like, Gary had some fair points.
And this was one of his points was that we could have projects, companies, maybe they start out more centralized,
but then over time they reach certain criteria and become decentralized.
That is one of the things I like to visit also like dyno.
I think it's a fucking great word, decentralized in name only.
So much of our space is decentralized in name only.
It's bullshit.
But anyways, I actually think another way to look at this is, one, you can, yes, flow that direction from centralized to more decentralized or security to commodity.
But I think you could also go the other way.
And I think there should be flexibility in that.
And that is that this is something that was talked about by Perry and Boring and some others.
But is that you could have rules.
And I think some of the rules have done this. Someone else will probably help me here. Even maybe some of these current rules
that just got passed, but is that you can, let's say you're a state, one of the things floated was
like, if you're a stable coin with under, you know, 10 million or 10 billion or whatever in assets,
then you are not regulated by the federal government and you can play and you can experiment
and you can try to get, you know, some success. And then once you can play and you can experiment and you can
try to get, you know, some success. And then once you get to a certain point, now you get more
regulation. So it could go both ways. It could be, you start out, uh, small. And so let's let
you experiment and let's not crush you. And let's let other innovators come in and not just,
you know, create moats around incumbents, but you could also have it be where you are centralized,
but over time you can now move to decentralization.
These are different things, but related.
Yeah, anyone else have any takes on that question?
I do get a little bit.
I think, honestly, with the Genius Act and these new regulatory things happening, for me, there's only really like a two-row pathway.
Either the government is going to do what it says, things are going to be great, the community is going to love it, it's going to work out for us, it's going to help push, you know, more legitimacy, more businesses, things like that.
Or the other pathway is the government, you know, does what the government does, tends to screw us over a little bit.
And so through actual application, you know, we don't really get what we want for the crypto community.
get what we want for the crypto community it doesn't really benefit us or behoove us to
It doesn't really benefit us or behoove us to participate.
participate and so it just pushes the community to do what we do best innovate and continue to
become degenerates in the blockchain and utilize the technology to our own benefit because now
what we see in this time and day is we have options we didn't have those options before
we couldn't do other things we were 100 forced to utilize these systems put in place.
But now people are realizing we have choices.
We have options.
We can go and build our own shit, build our own communities,
and choose not to use these other pathways.
And so I think for me, it's just going to go one way or the other.
Either the government plays nice and we work with them,
or they don't play nice and we don't play with them.
And that's basically it.
It's very hard to tell if, you know, I've
always wanted us, and I've said this for a decade in this industry, it's like, we need a Trojan
horse our way into the politicians and into the rich people and et cetera. But it's very hard to
tell. And it's kind of a dangerous plan to try to Trojan horse your way into the people that have
been Trojan horsing for hundreds of years. So are we Trojan horsing government or are they Trojan horsing us?
Exactly.
Well, it can only be the other way
because the repercussions and recourses
are at their disposal.
They say you have to use it the way they tell you to
and you can't use it without their permission.
And this is what will happen to you
if you do do it without all those permissions.
And then people will eventually self-censor and they won't experiment and they won't have to enforce it anymore.
I think we need to educate more people and inspire people to do this stuff as fast as possible.
So like we're still like what, 1%?
I think it was like 700,000 unique Bitcoin wallet transactions a day or something.
Like nobody's using this stuff.
So if they can get inside the people's heads before people can realize like how far they can go with this stuff, they'll never even attempt it.
So they won't have to really do too much.
But that's where I get worried again with these regulations and stuff, right?
It's just the deterrence. It's an inevitable self-censorship. do too much but that's that's where i get worried again with these regulations and stuff right it's
just the deterrence it's it's a an inevitable self-censorship it's the whole fleas in a jar
with the lid on it and then when you take the lid off it experiment that's exactly it that's what's
happening here i just hope we can get as many people building as many kids building and and
playing with this stuff so just like uh i can go to Pirate Bay right now and download a torrent and watch a movie
for free and no one's going to kick in my front door.
Too many kids are doing it.
So they just stopped.
Right.
And I think that's what we need to start encouraging and educating is kids utilizing
this technology.
I love that.
I think that's actually a good reason to say that Solana should be treated as a commodity,
really, because whether or not the project is run in a decentralized fashion, there's
been a lot of adoption and a lot of new developers are cutting their teeth on that chain.
And so while we may not like the particulars of how it exists and might try to push it to be better
right um i think it's worth holding on to for the people who are already building there
just so they don't get a sour taste i think there's an argument though for like
while we want competition if you if we become complac, then the industry will go the way of the internet, which is that, you know, either certain big actors will build moats and it'll become more centralized or, um, um, I lost my train of thought.
Um, but yeah, I think the point is we just have to, we have to fight for what we believe in.
I personally, from everything I see from Solana,
I don't think it's,
it's the greatest thing for our industry.
I think it's kind of cancerous to our industry.
The whole meme coin gamble stuff was really terrible.
And it's, I think most of the people.
Did you get rugged?
I think you're rugged.
I thought it was me, but.'re rugged i thought it was me but yeah i thought it was me can i take this opportunity to sidetrack for a second uh joel
bitcoin ben just messaged me uh he wants me to give you his number he's going to be in
scottsdale tomorrow he wants to take the dash team out to dinner so anybody in the scottsdale
area from the dash team that would be awesome except i don't
think there's anyone in the scottsdale area anymore i have to ask that was um some of the
old team people were there there was yeah that's what he said he didn't know if anybody was still
there i will look it up internally there there's i'm sure there's a few still in the arizona area
that are they're kind of like that but But, um, yeah, anytime you guys are
in the, um, greater new England area, at least I know myself and a few others are here. So, um,
anyway, or Thailand, that's a different story. So anyway, but feel free to send me his number
anyway. I wouldn't mind talking to him on some other stuff. Yeah. Reach out to him. I'm going
to give you his number. Yeah. So not, not that's a site's a site uh mark you want to say something i was just
going to circle back to the solana thing under clarity uh so uh i guess i i have read some
analysis on this the i mean there's two standards for uh within clarity ironically I guess for the name
that determine whether or not it's a commodity
slash security
based on the
superseding standard
which is the quote unquote
maturity of the blockchain and how
decentralized it is
because there are still
it's permissionless but still
there's still like constraints and
requirements on being a node operator
they
expect Sol to
if they adhere to their decentralization
timeline to eventually become a commodity
but current sales
of founder
Sol tokens
would be considered security
sales whereas like
if you've bought them on the open market
or you're trying to sell them as a broker
dealer that would probably be considered
commodity governed
so a more hybrid nuanced approach that's
interesting right right because
it really it depends on who you are
under clarity
within the ecosystem as to how it would be regarded.
Because if you're part of the Solana Foundation, you're selling Sol, that's obviously going towards network improvement.
Whereas if you bought it on the market, you're selling it to somebody with cash, for instance, that would be a CFTC broker dealer governed.
that would be a CFTC broker dealer governed.
I mean, can someone help me here?
Because I feel like Solana is quite centralized
and is a bad example for the rest of the world
on what crypto is.
But please prove me wrong.
I mean, I'm open-minded.
I'd like to be proven wrong.
When I saw Balaji was an early investor
and talks about it, I'm like,
man, it made me wonder, okay, a, either he's, he's less of a, uh, an ideal ideological person
and more of a moneymaker than I thought, or B I'm wrong. And there's something here that I'm not
seeing, but when the network, just like one simple point, when the network can go down or be taken down at will, it does not feel decentralized.
I mean, how do you account for that?
I mean, like Litecoin's never gone down in like 15 or whatever, 14, 13 years.
Dash, how often does Dash go down?
How often does Bitcoin go down?
It went down once for a serious exploit, you know, way, way, way back in the day.
I would tend to agree.
Personally, I don't think you'd find too many people that have been in as long as we have that would disagree with what you just said. But I think back to kind of a movement during the ICO
era that I was a little bit a part of called the token classification framework. It didn't really catch on because ICOs very shortly died out after that,
but it was a group of developers and requirement writers
that were trying to develop a spectrum of decentralization,
specifically as it pertained to token launches and icos at the time
but it could theoretically be used to uh really any project and measures decentralization because
decentralization isn't like binary uh and we've talked about this on the dow spaces that we've
been on here it's it's more like a. How much of the decentralization is in the social layer?
How much of it is on the on-chain layer?
And what is the intent?
Like, what's the North Star of the organization?
Like, so if you're talking about something like Hyperledger
or Hedera Hatchwrap,
like they're at their destination
in terms of where the decentralization is going to be.
They want to be distributed ledger technologies
with light crypto overtones.
Solana is kind of like in that neighborhood.
So I don't think it'll ever be truly decentralized enough
for somebody like me.
But from the people that I know within Solana organizations,
some of the key hires they've made lately
that are people that I would consider
to be strong cypherpunks, it's clear to me that they are at least if they're not trying to cypherpunk
wash themselves they they are trying to move towards something that is could be considered
truly decentralized but there is no way any or trying to do good marketing but i don't know
they're trying to wash themselves in the cypherpunks or they're trying to do good marketing, but I don't know. That's what I'm saying. They're trying to wash themselves
in the thought of cypherpunks
or they're trying to actually be cypherpunk.
It remains to be seen, right?
I got to say,
seeing Bellagio talk about them,
at first it made my stomach wrench,
but then the more I think about it,
I'm like, you know what?
I want to make sure I don't have blinders here.
I got to look into this more.
Maybe I'm fucking missing something.
But for me, I've always seen Solana as, and this is by the way, something very investable
is more of like a Google or an Amazon with a, with token standard and with that's interoperable
with our decentralized networks, but it's more of a company and it could be a trillion dollar
company. Who knows? I don't know. But that's not what I'm here for. I think
there's probably value for things like that in the world, for things like Hedera, which is, you know,
more permissioned and all these kinds of things. And, you know, it's like intranets. You know,
in 2016 and 17, we started talking more about things like Hedera being these permission
blockchains, which are more analogous to, you know, an intranet. And we see the way the world went with that. The world went
towards internet, which is open. But there still exists intranets to this day for military. I think
IBM runs one. There's several companies that have them. They have uses for high security things like managing drone pilot, military stuff.
Sure, it makes some sense, but it's just not the thing that I'm here for.
But prove me wrong.
Rock on this one, the person to talk to is, again, Justin Bond.
Justin Bonds.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure we had a really heated debate about this.
You did on the aggregate.
Yeah, you did.
I've had some interesting discussions with him.
And here's the thing about, as you know, he's very, I guess,
pig-headedly logical on this kind of stuff and super direct and honest I have had
some very long conversations with him in person on kind of more of these finer points and I do
think he has a couple of blind spots on this but it's not like a blind spot that he wouldn't be
able to be convinced he was wrong you know kind of thing but he seemed he was an early solana hater he just was so
tearing up up so much in the early days all the the times they went down all the centralization
aspects everything else that's good to know i i didn't realize that yeah and he just now he's
kind of i mean it's just good to know that he he can take both sides yeah and he ended up being a 180 on it, not because he changed his mind necessarily, but because in his mind, the facts around the situation changed.
And even though I do disagree with him on things, I always trust that he's coming to whatever conclusions from a position of research and of like hardheaded thinking
and not just vibes or bag holder-ness.
And so that makes me kind of like say, oh, we should, I would, if you just have free
time, just look on in the search bar, just do Solana and then from colon at Justin underscore
bonds and just see everything he says on and just come through it.
And the arguments are probably there as far as how many.
How do I find that?
You're saying Solana what?
Say it again.
So in the search,
but there's just an X hack in the search bar type in Solana space or Solana
space.
And then from colon at Justin underscore bonds.
So from colon and the at handle is all with no spaces.
Justin underscore bonds is his handle.
If you click that in,
it'll just show anytime he said Solana and you could filter by time by top
thing.
There's a ton of crap out there and I'm sure you have to filter.
But just,
just to like,
if you want to get into the subject a little bit more,
a little bit more knowledge than I have, he seems to make some interesting points.
One point that I made against Solana that he's not, he definitely doesn't disagree with, but also
he, it's not, doesn't really factor as big into his estimation as it does into mine is,
it's not, doesn't really factors big into his estimation as it does to mine is,
as he pointed out in the early critiques, the founders, you know,
lied about the coin supply and were caught about it.
And eventually they basically pushed fake metrics,
which his arguments are, yes, like it's a big chunk of the metrics are fake,
but if you just choose, pick the ones that
are definitely not fake, it's still better than everyone else kind of thing. That's kind of his
point of view. That's a very technical argument. My less technical argument is if the people
involved in faking until you make it and being dishonest to promote this thing are still involved
in a key position of leadership, While this is not a technical scientific type
argument, I think that that is a liability that will rear its ugly head sooner or later if it
hasn't already. So that's just like my kind of disagreement point on that. But I would definitely
encourage anyone to do a today as in not a few years ago today, deep dive into Solana and
critically evaluate not just the vibes and
feelies of oh corporate evil scammy bumpy shit but like what does the technology do and what
is it used for and how distributed is supply etc but that's just like a that's just kind of a big
old overview kind of thing i appreciate all that insight joel i i guess one of my other issues
there and i'm reading through his stuff is he actually makes points against it too so I like to see that it's he's not just like you know kind of pig-headed
you know but um you know one of my big concerns with Solana is just like the type of people they've
you know attracted with the gambling and and people that just like I've had lots of conversations
with people who when I talk about the decentralization stuff, they're like that, I don't care about that. I'm here to make money. And I think it more,
more than being a negative for Solana, I think it actually was a negative for our whole industry
to expose that so many of us in this industry are not here for the right reasons that are,
you know, like, I think the people that were so excited about DeFi in the last cycle and were,
the people that were so excited about DeFi in the last cycle and were, you know, DeFi was like
going crazy and you had these like, you know, farms that were just Ponzi's and, but like the
good thing is, I always say is at least some good things came of that, right? We invested in a bunch
of stuff that we thought could change the world. A lot of it was Ponzi's, but some of the stuff is
actually changing the world as opposed to, you know, when I see people just investing in these
meme coins that they know, everybody knows these aren't changing anything. These are just pure gamble.
And you see like 90% or something of the flows of the industry move to that for some period of time
or whatever. It makes me go, wow, all these people who were talking about changing the world,
they really were just in it for the money in the first place. Or maybe it's not about our industry.
It's more of an insight into humanity. It's definitely all of the above. And again,
you're making, as I am, the kind of non-technical arguments, the human sorts of arguments,
whereas Justin's approaching it from pure tech kind of standpoint. But in my opinion, like,
if you think about BTC specifically, and a lot of people have these very spirited debates on that BTC is not,
well, you could say it's not the best tech out there,
but certainly it's not,
it's value is not because the tech is unique because so many like Litecoin,
for example, have copied the tech over and over and over again.
It's just what it represents for ideal,
the people involved with the capitalization, the company,
like all the other stuff that's
around it is what gives it this value.
And so it's interesting to see those two sides of things.
And it's lack of innovation is, is its feature, not its bug is just how I look at it.
And also the trust that it won't innovate ironically enough.
It's like this thing is a, this thing is a dyno.
It's going to be a dyno forever.
It's like the trust that it will not get better,
but it will not get worse.
It will stay the same.
If we want to innovate, do it on top of it
or do it somewhere else.
It's a reference of implementation that people maintain
in perpetuity,
which has some
real value to it when you think of it that way.
Satoshi would not
have made it open source if he didn't want to fork.
Obviously.
CK Cardano, you've been having your hand up.
I'm sorry, I've been rude. Why don't you chime in?
Yeah, man.
Look, this has been such
a dope-ass conversation.
This to me is so bullish
because we're even seeing it like I'm seeing toxic
maximalism dial down.
And it meant there's just a lot of good here. I've got I had to take notes because the conversation has been so vibrant.
I love just the maturity and the academic nature of this discussion.
We can have disagreements. We can, you know, examine ideas and move them forward.
And then we all go home tonight.
And then we all go home tonight. It's like when you're studying for exams, learning your engineering. Right.
It's like when you're studying for exams, learning your engineering, right?
When you read the books and you go, oh, and you even get spooked by the tests.
But then you go to sleep after throwing it in your brain.
Your brain does the work, that beautiful novel synthesis.
Then you wake up and then have this conversation tomorrow going, wow, what if we did have the ability to go from you're a commodity, but now you're owned by BlackRock.
So now you're a security.
So now weaving into these notes that I have, that was such a mature, I love what you were saying there, Rock, like, kind of like an anti, whether you bought the anti BlackRock,
Wall Street suits take over, whatever, protection, where yeah, if we designate some of these,
I call them sovereign digital assets. I give that designation only to
UTXO-based blockchains, right? Because for folks that know, like, you know, the snow globes with
the snow in them, right? And you can shake it up and you can follow all the little snowflakes.
Imagine like an hourglass. Imagine that globe. Imagine that it can't be broken. Now imagine there's 21 million grains of sand in this globe, in this impenetrable sphere.
Each of these grains of sand can also be divided by 100 million units called Satoshi. Now suddenly with this, right, if you're like, oh, wow, everyone that's validating the blockchain ledger is looking into the impenetrable sphere, watching the 20 million grains of sand, right?
dribble sphere watching the 20 million grains of sand, right? Now, when we all know, oh, that's
right, they all follow the rules and built into the protocol is 21 million grains of sand and look
how they move. And so the division of the grains of sand by virtue of mathematics can be followed
and we follow where the grains of sand move to the addresses, right? So, and when we know that
the 24 word seed phrases in that order constitute the mathematics. All the addresses are rapsodys
on the mathematics that are derived from those 24 words in that, right? So anyway, I know I'm
geeking a little bit deeply, but this is why when we discuss accounts, Solana, Ethereum,
and I think you hit the nail out of the rock when you said the Google of it, right? We know we're
not trusting Google. Our shit on google is ours insofar as
google says it is and the same is true of solana right so utxo based blockchain sticking the landing
on that utxo model if you understand that grains of concept that that the impenetrable sphere
with these discrete units called utxos right so those grains of sand are utxos right unspent
transaction outputs and so once you once you realize that, you go, oh, shit.
So these 21 million units that can be governed by math that the protocol agrees to, right?
Freedom is built in.
That's not so with Solana and Ethereum, quite frankly, right?
So UTXO is very special, you know?
And then we can, you know, talk about this.
Anyway, back to the notes, landing the plane, not going.
So Solana is 400 terabytes, ladies and gentlemen. Bitcoin been running longer, as we all know, still less than a terabyte. Ethereum, just a tad over a terabyte. Cardano, laughably under a terabyte. Also, they all have supply limits. 21 million Bitcoin, 84 million Litecoin, 45 billion Cardano. All of them are UTXO.
So as Rock said, we can allow Bitcoin to ossify.
We don't need to have core and nots arguments.
Bitcoin can truly be Bitcoin.
And guess what we get with that?
We get privacy.
We get scalability.
Guys, this isn't taking your pie.
This is growing it.
This is creative interference, guys.
Sure, there's instances of creative destruction, but the creativity outweighs the
destruction by orders of magnitude if we get a little Jesus energy and Buddha energy going,
and we love each other and make of yourself a light, bro. And I do want to say, Greg and Rock,
you have posited the most mature and balanced, also, again, argument I would say for on the
pro side of Solana. And I'm one of those that goes, oh, guys, you know, it's yours insofar as the Solana
folks say it's yours.
But I love what Greg said when Mr. Lang said that right now, having folks building on Solana,
one of the beautiful things I think about like kind of Bitcoin and this emerging blockchain
technology is it organically advantages the millennials and Gen Z that have been fucked
the most by the legacy
system. They're the most positioned to go, shit, I can create value. And I understand this faster
than the boomers. Meanwhile, the boomers are lining up their wallet. This is crypto week.
So to answer your question, it's very good, right? Because now Wall Street's going, oh,
shit, we blew up the dollar over the last 50 years or so. And now the young are like, hey,
guys, you took our houses. We can't afford families in 40 hours.
Doesn't cut it. Right.
Our economics is broke.
Our money's broke. Guys, we printed a last I checked, which is 48 hours ago,
136 billion new units since in 32 days.
All right. So we hit 37 trillion like 35 days ago or something now.
In 32 days, we printed 136 billion.
That is 15 times the market
cap of Litecoin, for instance, only 84 million years. So again, when you're seeing that Bitcoin
is creating the new world and you understand the math and you understand, oh, wow, we actually get
expressiveness with Cardano and UTXO. And we don't have to cross the, I'm going to land this plane
here. We exponentiate our value, Greg, amen. We even if Solana eventually, whether it lives or
whatever,
I think it's going to be around for the cycle, right? I think I'm not mad at anyone making
money in Ethereum, XRP, Solana. I like to have the conversation though, guys, if you have a
right just come up in a meme, please lock that value into Bitcoin. Please understand that UTXOs,
your right to spend that unspent transaction output is built into the protocol.
Right. So, you know, one of the advantages Solana can be.
Oh, oh, oh, yeah. When I was talking about blockchain sites, Solana is 400 terabytes.
That was a very important thing. Right.
How many people have 400 terabytes lying around to host the Solana blockchain?
Right. Because it's a monolithic way of storing the data.
So when you realize, wow, you need more than a quarter million US dollars to be a part, and that's to get the party started. And that's
like, that's actually underbidding now, right? So it's more than a quarter million dollars to
be a meaningful validator in Solana, when you look at hardware and stake requirements. So it's
laughable. So when you realize, oh, shit, this really is running in a billionaire's garage,
now it's maybe eight billionaires garages, but make no mistake. Right. And they're folks that have money and, you know, the powers that be trad fi, you
know, but right. Google exists, Apple exists. Right. And I think we can be mature and acknowledge
these things for what they are just like casinos. Right. But I also really think it's important for
us to educate Solana retail and understand, you know, how a lot of these liquidity flows work and
who's winning in these, these, these mean coin casinos, right? But I do believe in free markets. So I'm going to land the plan
on this. I love the way that the technology advantages the younger generations, because
that is free markets, truly free markets. That is what Bitcoin gives us, guys. It is for the first
time a universal state of economic fair play. What an awesome conversation um thank you for having me up dash uh just fucking loving it loving it cool stuff thanks for that um lots of nice positivity on that
before we kind of you know wiggle on we're probably getting close to the end but i just
wanted also i threw up on the jumbotron and it's in the commented here um there's the bit angel
space which i think is starting like now or something.
Yes, sir.
Let me see. Is it even live right now?
Shout out to BitAngels who was in the audience there. I saw some other BitAngels members
in the audience, but it looks like they just left to the other show.
I put it in the
Jumbotron, but
QuickSwap also posted something, so
it's the second one, so if you scroll to the right
one, if you guys want to come over there I don't Joel are you gonna continue the space
right now are you wrapping up or I'll probably wrap up for a few minutes just
see if with anyone else has to the wrap-up stuff while you go on but then
I also shout out the quick swap space that's Friday tomorrow at 11 Eastern
and I care about speaking of that, we are looking for more speakers tomorrow.
It's at 3 p.m. UTC.
And the topic is macroeconomics.
So if anybody here would like to experiment, please, you know, either just show up.
Or if you want a guaranteed speaking spot, you could just DM me and I'll add you to the roster.
Cool. Nicole's making moves, helping organize this show, organizing the aggregated, et cetera.
Um, awesome. Yeah, guys, I am so addicted to this show, by the way, this one right here. Um, I,
I don't, you know, I don't know. I, I, I spend a lot of my week just like listening to content and absorbing and I do do some
spaces and I do a lot of business calls, but it's this show where I really can let loose
and we can all just like really go into some amazing topics.
Honestly, like I feel like, cause here, like on the aggregated, we have, you know, like
specific topic and there's more of like a structure and things.
And I love that show too, don't get me wrong.
And same with BitAngels.
But here, I feel like we just hit some more no-holes barred.
We can really just explore and dive into topics and the philosophy of it.
And everybody's so open-minded.
There's like super intellectuals on this.
And this is like, yeah, I'm addicted to this space. Thanks. Thanks
for always having me. We're rebranding to rock uncensored, by the way. Just kidding.
But I mean, I told that crazy story that I've never told. So, you know, let's see if that gets
used against me when I go into politics or if it's for me. You should have a five minute
segment called get yours Off, bro.
Sure.
That's called the whole thing.
But just before you run off. New TikTok series, Rock.
Yes.
I like that.
Next week's Crypto Quorum show, which is like episode 17.
Wow.
Which is why aren't you living on crypto yet?
Finally, something that's just like entirely my wheelhouse.
But if you want anyone to talk about basically just, you know,
living on crypto, why aren't you personally,
or why aren't people doing it?
And just sort of like a live workshop as far as like, you know,
discussion of why aren't people spending?
Is it capital gains, not enough spending tools?
Oh, this wallet sucks. Well, I like this one. Oh, that one now. Well, I'm missing this. All the, you know, all that kind of stuff. Just basically, why aren't people actually using
crypto yet as real money? Why do they still have their GD bank accounts and stuff, right? Just
general subjects. So come there. Anyone you want to be on, you guys are obviously invited, but definitely suggest other people. And so then the BitAngel space is coming. The aggregated is tomorrow. Rock, if you're taking off, why don't you give the first, I guess, parting shill and then take off and then we'll just sort of simmer down from there and then I'll pop over. Is that good?
simmer down from there and then I'll pop over. Is that good?
Yeah, sure. I'm going to shill. We're raising for LitVM, Litecoin Layer 2, endorsed by Litecoin
Foundation and Charlie Lee and Luxfolio. We just closed investment with them, a nice, pretty big
check. They just raised and they're raising another 25 to 50 mil for the next round. They're a publicly
traded Canadian stock that is like micro strategy know, micro strategy for Litecoin.
Another company just raised 100 mil.
And like two days later, a pharmaceutical company raised another 100 mil for Litecoin.
And so I think we're going into Litecoin meta.
But yeah, LitVM is raising now 5 mil at 50 mil valuation, 10K minimum check size.
If you want to learn more about that, you can DM me.
But yeah, that's it.
Maybe, Nicole, if you could pin something from LitVM
so people can see what I'm talking about there.
So why was the settings on the pinning so tight that I can't,
but I will forward him something that he can...
Oh, I was able to...
Were you? Okay. Maybe i just don't know how
to do it and darren darren was from quick swap as or you were someone was as a listener
wait how did that happen well no also i i i pinned bit angels in quick swap so oh okay
but oh i thought i did but it was you okay cool i think any speaker should be able to but here's
the trick that i noticed, especially on desktop,
is it has to be the same window
that you have the space open in.
It's not like a new tab.
And then you go under the share button for any post
and there's a share to space icon you could press.
That should be how you get it done.
Sweet.
All right, fellas.
Thanks so much.
And thanks for letting me shill.
Okay, bye-bye.
Bye-bye. See you in just a couple of minutes.
All right. So first of all, before we start like the wind down and everyone shills,
it's almost shill o'clock. I checked my watch, by the way. Before we start that,
any other stone unturned that we have that we didn't hit on one part of the subject
that you wish we would have just let anyone think about that.
Um, I'll just sort of mention something that maybe we didn't a hundred percent get to,
but it's not big.
And anyone feel free to chime in after that is we talked about the decrim decriminalizing
crypto versus legalizing crypto um are there any realistic
prospects for uh going backwards in that in that good way where you have um like let's just say
all right we we legalize something like we created a legal framework for stable coins for example
these ones must do xyz is there any like deregulation in the future that
could happen feasibly? Like, obviously it could happen, but as in, is it realistic to be like,
let's just open end the collateral requirements or let's just open end some things and make it
more decrim style at a later date? Or is it once you sign the deal with the devil, that's just
kind of where you're at. Who has some ideas on this one? Mark's starting to talk,
and then CK Cardano,
you can chime in after that.
I'll make a prediction,
and this is an optimistic prediction.
So it means it's colored with my opium
and not necessarily my black-filled brain.
But here's the scenario in which i think we get more decrim
out of this so we did we did get a tiny bit of decrim and i've talked about i won't rehash that
um but mostly what we got was legalization the problem with all the legalization is that it is
absolutely going to limit innovation in certain ways.
Right now, we're not going to feel the effects of that
until the end of the Trump administration.
And probably if we can get another crypto-friendly
Republican administration after that,
we may not even feel effects for another four years.
But at some point, we will get another G gensler at the sec or the cftc
assuming things don't assume i mean you know you're not you're not going to get blue skies
forever so the the next time we get another gensler type regulator at the head of one of
these organizations people are going to see all the
flaws laid bare in clarity and genius and these are these are flaws that i don't even necessarily
know what they are yet because we won't know how the state will exploit this legalization
to our detriment until they do it necessarily um and so when that happens, you will get a pushback
from the industry of people that were thinking they were innovating in good faith and then
finding out that they are now under the heel. And at that point, we have an opportunity where
people will go to jail or people will get their businesses crushed like library did,
and we'll have some martyrs, and then we'll push back for decriminalization in those sectors
the same way that we push back for decriminalization in the P2P sector.
And just to give you an idea of the timeline that we're talking about,
this is a far future prediction, right?
This all assumes that the United States federal government holds together
that long,
which I guess is a big if as well,
but like the,
you know,
my case,
I caught my case in 2020,
right?
And basically from 2021 or two to present,
every possible opportunity,
Tom Emmer could put therim on the agenda to prevent
more people from going to prison like me he did right so it took that long with that staunch of
an advocate with that much power in congress to get that tiny little bit of decriminalization after 330 people went to prison so uh insane yeah that's that's the
that's the slog that we have in front of us for decrim and other sectors of crypto and i'm saying
that this is my copium right this is not the black bill the best case scenario let me do the black pill and then i have to run sorry i i have to go see a house because i have
to move do you mind oh wow yeah go for it real quick so uh i think that anybody who has studied
like the history of government or sociology or money knows that there is no going back. It has always been the case that the
rebels become the establishment. And so there's the black belt picture. Once regulation happens,
it doesn't roll back. And I don't think it's reasonable to think that it will.
And I don't think it's reasonable to think that it will.
Interesting, unless there's like a big, and I guess that's kind of what happened with crypto to begin with, right?
Where financial regulations never got better, they got worse.
And so people just made a new technology that kind of ratted around it.
And then now they're kind of doing that.
So maybe the only way to deregulate is to keep on innovating.
Start something brand new, but it's not crypto.
It's something else
right like maybe it is crypto but we call it something else or you know what i mean right
but yeah that's the only way and with that i have to go thank you joel for having me as always and i
you know thanks for producing yeah always talk to you soon all right awesome um ck i was going to
call you casey cardano but ck is better i guessK Cardano, what did you say what you want to say?
Yeah, man.
So super awesome conversation.
And kind of to that point, that's where I think the open source freedom, right?
And the fact that now the quiet kids, it's like in university when your professor would
give you an assignment and they'd be like, hey, guess what?
The first step is learning a coding language you've never learned.
And then assignments do Friday, you're like, we're proper fuck. But then the quiet kid's like, oh, I know this. And then six hours later, you're days ahead. So shout out to
the quiet kids. Everyone is building the way forward. And now that we understand those grains
of sand, this is why I think when I say the only way to make
Bitcoin a CBDC is to cook the Max Keiser recipe. And now I know things evolve and whatnot, but I'm
referencing like when folks were truly arguing to give Bitcoin an advantaged position in legislation
and in traditional finance, it's like, are you really suggesting we're going to trap retail on
the Titanic with BlackRock? That's like being trapped in the ring with Ali the night he fought Cleveland Big Cat
Williams and thinking you have a chance, right?
I mean, it's so absurd, right?
And then when you actually understand the technology and it's publicly auditable, it's like, great,
man, you've literally done the only thing that you could do to make Bitcoin a CBDC.
Fortunately, now that we understand UTXOs, I believe the era of magic is real.
No longer is it, did your daddy go to the right school or are you from a rich family?
It's, do you understand your power?
Do you understand UTXO?
Do you understand Bitcoin?
And now suddenly, right, we have open source things like Maya Protocol, ThorChain, that
are allowing us to have the capability of a Binance and a Coinbase, but in decentralized
manner, right?
No KYC. the capability of a binance and a coinbase but in decentralized manner right no kyc and then right
as these powers that be as the the the the intelligentsia those with the magic right the
era of magic is real magic you know spells are coming back and those spells are like 24 magic
words right or telling you about a decentralized protocol suddenly cnt a potentia s our knowledge
is is what empowers us. And so
I think we are going to have a bifurcation of people that understand UTXO and store their value
in Bitcoin, Litecoin, Cardano. Even if Bitcoin is corrupted, we know that we can go to Litecoin
using Maya protocol. Nothing can stop us. I can move a billion dollars of value easily right now
today using Maya protocol or ThorChain or what have you. I can also access now. So speaking of as
someone was saying, anyway, so I think that's the future, right? And then Cardano, 45 billion,
et cetera. So the freedom, that's the crypto rabbit holes in event horizons. And I think
she pointed out brilliantly that the rebels become the establishment, but the free minds,
the resistance among the rebels go, thank you, Bitcoin, for allowing me to be free.
among the rebels go, thank you, Bitcoin, for allowing me to be free. And I will take this
UTXO and then suddenly, boom, right? It's a thousand Litecoin and a hundred thousand ADA,
and I'm free. And then we can talk about midnight and all this Roman aqueducts of privacy that,
you know, speaking of shilling alpha, midnight airdrop is coming. You already qualify if you
do. I'm not going to unwind that right now, but there's so much shit in the open source realm,
guys, that I think that's the key,
that even if Wall Street got hostile because Max Kaiser didn't win and because when Saylor
was pumping his bag saying all these lobby, you know, they didn't win.
And that means freedom is still free market still are the game.
And I think we're going to have freedom liquidity pools.
Speaking of these Maya protocols and these basically decentralized DEXs allow us to do swaps with no KYC. I think we're going to have liquidity pools
with assets like Obemare. Most people may, it's launching soon. It's basically an open source.
It's the in and out burger of stable coins. There are brilliant incentives for if the price goes
above a dollar, below a dollar, and everyone can participate, right? Now, whether that gets regulated, I don't give a fuck, right?
Because mutually agreed upon medium exchange, store value, unit of account, this is consensus,
right?
If the people create a trillion dollar freedom liquidity pool that also has crypto rabbit
holes and events horizons to tether and circle in the powers that be, right?
Suddenly, we're free beyond capture.
So landing at the ticks in a jar uh the achieving
escape velocity exceeding a k factor of one that's open source freedom and uh it's already begun so
um huzzah and yeah dash this is the best room bro like i mean these are the best conversations this
is true value creation and human liberation which is just carrying forward the torch of Satoshi in my humble opinion.
Yeah, awesome. It's great that you mentioned the Maya protocol specifically. I know they're going to add Cardano relatively soon, and Dash was the first new chain they added, but we actually
did have a Maya-related announcement today, which was that LeoDex is allowing QR code swaps now,
where you don't have to connect the wallet. You can just send it to a QR code from any wallet and swap dash for anything.
They, they think they started that with Zcash at first,
but now after they iron out those bugs, now we're alive as of today.
So that's awesome.
Try it out.
If you haven't, if you've been intimidated to try to use that.
Congrats.
That's awesome.
No, no, thank you.
Did you want to say something other than is that your hand up to just say congrats? No, I, I, no, I, I just, I just wanted to throw that in because it's awesome. No, thank you. Did you want to say something other than, is that your hand up to just say congrats?
No, I just wanted to throw that in
because it's awesome.
Yeah, and shout out to Leodex.
I think they're really nailing
the stable coin liquidity place.
So to the end, right,
if we use Maya protocol
to swap between Bitcoin, Litecoin, Cardano, right?
You know, units that hold all their value.
And then we go, oh, cool.
Thanks, Leodex.
Now I'm in the stable game, right?
So yeah, I'm just so bullish on all this.
And yeah, congratulations, Dash.
Yeah, and that actually gets to the point
that I was going to raise on going out here
with this topic.
And I think this is really key,
is the space that they've left
has plenty of room for patterns
that become uncontainable.
And there's plenty of room to build decentralized
infrastructure from the ground up. And all of these things can still happen. And as long as
we get them in place before somebody else who is hostile to it gets back power, we ought to be okay.
But we still have to build with purpose. I think that's probably the number one thing we can do.
So that'd be my two cents on the thing. I don't think it stops us. I think it's probably the number one thing we can do. So that's, that'd be my two
cents on the thing. I don't think it stops us. I think it should embolden us though, because it
could be, if we wait too long, the thing that eventually kills us. I love everything you said,
putting a quick little button on that, Greg, one of the also the crouching tiger hidden benefits of the invisible hand in the same way that this technology advantages the young, which is a free market organic solution to income disparity from like the old and the young.
I'm shit.
I almost got my own thing.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The side hustle, guys.
The side hustle.
Think about this.
The ways that the young have been forced to
become the infrastructure. We are the delivery. Suddenly we can do a hostile, a whatever on
Amazon. We are the Amazon drivers guys. So if we can suddenly directly pay each other, right?
Mutu agreed upon medium exchange towards the value of an account. We become the farmers growing the
food, running the restaurants, growing the honey. And then we have things like Palm economy that are allowing the advantages of vertical integration, like how Amazon killed the mom and pop.
What Palm is doing is using blockchain to use coordination, like a broad ability to coordinate, unify and exponentiate capability and value creation with blockchain and crypto.
That was the note that I left myself.
Disintermediating the people from banks.
Oh, that was another random note.
But yeah, so basically what I'm saying is a lot of this sad shit that 48 hours doesn't
cut it. So you're an Uber driver and you're delivering and da da da da.
Suddenly, guys, we can light switch this bitch with a fun social thing.
You go, oh, my God, we're storing our value together and we are the Amazon.
We are the local mom and pop store.
And suddenly, over the course of four or five years, as we become liberated by the flows from the Black Rocks in the old system, we are starting these small businesses that tell all of our friends, say, hey, come to my donut shop.
I accept crypto, right?
And then, uh-oh, what Greg said, we're too free.
We're too free to be stopped.
And then when Caesar, I'm going to land the plane on this. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, right? what Greg said. We're too free. We're too free to be stopped. And then and then when that went when Caesar, I'm going to land the plane on this render into Caesar.
What is Caesar's right?
Let's go.
I personally look forward to the first person to make decentralized autonomous scooters.
I think.
Fucking yes.
RWA is man.
Anyway, Shilla Clock, who wants to wrap up and shill o'clock who wants to wrap up
and shill
like maybe xano
I'll pick on you first because you've been quiet the whole
time probably because it's
very a lot of very US centric
things and also a lot of
gas bags up here just talking
constantly myself included
of course
xano do you want to just quickly
shill xano yeah sorry yeah it was
very us-centric but um i think i'll have a lot more to say on the next next space um but yeah
still thank you for having me and um yeah and if you're interested in building
other stable coins or tokens in general that have privacy built into
its core and synergy resistance check out Xeno because that's exactly the
platform we're building
very nice good stuff Mark do you want to give us your little outro and chill I
don't know if you have anything to show.
Yeah, no, man.
I've got more stuff to show than, uh, I had last week.
So, uh, we're, we're still, we still launched our first spin out, uh, from free ops down
called this Lord's a PR podcast, uh, a podcast PR company, uh, that's AI driven and I launched my
AI operating system
today called Sanctum
so sanctumowaste.org
so yeah follow this lore
at this lore PR or just follow me
or whatever yeah
all good
cool good stuff
yeah Miggie what do you want to show
Ghostbusters
he might be at work
sorry I was in the middle of biting my
breakfast biscuit
alright sorry
so yes appreciate it
man this has been a great space
as always
a couple things I guess i'd like
to show is um you know like i mentioned in the beginning i'm co-host of not another bitcoin
podcast so any of you guys who would like to join our show as a guest to talk about
your project um things you like the things you hate in crypto you know whatever you want we just
want people that want to talk to us on live stream and show the world what's going on so definitely reach out to me uh we're also looking
for show sponsors as well so if you are a project and you're interested in getting some more brand
recognition and brand awareness let us know and then last but not least uh crypto club las vegas
is going to be opening august 2nd so if you guys are in town for rare evo in las vegas in the next
few weeks definitely reach out to us we're going to be doing some fun things at the club and then we're doing an official
after party with rare evo and so if you're interested in bitcoin ben's um crypto clubs
around the country definitely hit us up uh it is a private club uh we are pma based so
we don't follow the same rules as everybody else we play with our own we play by our own rules in
a sense and so we definitely love to have you
as a member and uh talk about all the benefits you can get and you know again it's a bitcoin
social club so dig into crypto as deep as you can but love the space i think everybody was great up
here i learned a lot for sure so thanks for having me man awesome yeah and really good having you up
here um always welcome back in fact at least you or Ken should probably be on next week about the whole living on crypto thing because Ken at least like that's kind of my bread and butter for the last decade. But Ken's one of those people who I run into. I still like find out new stuff I didn't know. And I'm like, what the hell? Why do you know more than me? So that's always good.
Greg, you want to show something here?
Yeah, sure.
I just finished writing and sort of pseudo self-publishing.
I'm actually seeking multiple publishing options,
a book that is in audio form on the top of my feed.
So anybody who wants to check it out,
it attempts to get at the heart of why our institutions turn on us um i think i may have
uncovered something useful at least as a tool so i encourage people to check it out
all right casey quick shell
nice yeah greg um if you haven't heard of book.io and stuff.io if you are still looking at some more
uh places to sort of get your work out
there that that would allow you to just sort of like publish it on blockchain and so then you're
you're distributing it amongst the blockchain community and a utxo based chain so that's like
it comes to you yeah yeah man no i'm like a new like a first fastest everywhere like next the
next thing in front of me is kind of how I'm approaching getting it out there.
So I'll just check it out.
Yeah, bro.
Yeah, my understanding is Mark Cuban
is actually a Crouching Tiger hidden investor,
but do your own research on that.
But yeah, book.io.
I'll follow the post.
I did follow you.
So I'll, yeah, I'll leave a comment with the ads.
My only shill here, first of all,
thanks so much, Dash, for the time and just the community and the vibe.
Truly, like I'm better for this conversation.
I'm going to make better moves in the market.
All the shit, all the shit.
Midnight.gd.
Midnight like the time, like a website, gd for glacier drop.
That's midnight.gd.
On June 11th, a snapshot was taken.
20% of the 24 billion night supply
will be airdropped to Bitcoin holders, guys.
So if you were a Bitcoin holder
and you held Bitcoin in self-custody on June 11th,
go ahead and visit that website.
Freedom has something for you.
That's what I got. Thank you, Dash. Let's go. Awesome. Well, thanks. I think that kind of
wraps up everyone here. Thanks everyone for listening. We hit basically the three and a
half hour mark, which is always how we know it's a good space. Too bad I had to be, you know, be on the BitAngel, you know,
give the BitAngels a little bit of run around,
but I'm going to be jumping in there
for just a few minutes at least.
But yeah, thanks everyone for being here.
It's been a great space.
As always, check out the big,
everything we pinned on the Jumbotrons,
all good stuff, right?
Download the Edge Wallet.
Obviously it's a fantastic multi-coin wallet.
Supports Dash.
It is a part of the Dash Investment Foundation's portfolio.
So the Dash decentralized DAO legally owns a part of Edge, the company, which not many know.
Edge is a great wallet.
Multi-coin and SportsZano as well, of course.
But I can't not shill the Dash Pay wallet.
the Dash Pay wallet.
So just look up Dash Pay, Android and iOS.
So just look up Dash Pay, Android and iOS,
because not only are we getting
these cool username features
to just be given a Venmo style experience,
but there's some awesome spending tools
that are live in there right now
that lets you spend it in just about everything.
And we're going to be really coming out hard
this quarter on that because, yeah,
that's a lot of like kind of the teaser
for the next week's space of why aren't we living
in crypto yet it's probably because we don't know about tools like this yes so that's just the
ending shill um follow this count and make sure you show up to the next week's space
thanks everyone follow the speakers too because they're cool people um and i'll see you guys around. Bye-bye.
See ya.
Cheers.
