Mark Goodwin Interview - Was Bitcoin A Government Operation & Can It Still Be Used To Fight Back?

Ryan Cristian Interviews Mark Goodwin on Bitcoin, its integration into Tether and other private stablecoins (Potential private "CBDCs"?), its connection to the PayPal Mafia, and its potential for good

Jan 24, 2025

daWelcome to The Last American Vagabond. Joining me today is Mark Goodwin, author, writer for Unlimited Hangout, and former editor of Bitcoin Magazine, to discuss a very important and contentious topic: Bitcoin.

Which is interesting, right? Because this conversation has been evolving for a long time. People have been learning about Bitcoin for quite a while, myself included—especially recently. It's fascinating to see how this has evolved. Those who were once very supportive of it are now suddenly very concerned about it. And I think, rightfully so.

But I’m still trying to navigate this conversation myself. I'm attempting to tackle the same issues we've discussed about many different topics throughout my journey in independent media. A hammer is a tool—it can build a house, or it can bash your head in.

So, is that what we’re dealing with here? Is Bitcoin something that’s a government operation? Was it started by someone who wanted to fight the government? Is it now being used to suppress us? And even if that’s the case, can it still be used to fight back? Will it be used to surveil us? Will it overlap with artificial intelligence?

It’s a really interesting, and quite frankly, terrifying conversation. But I think it’s important for us to understand where this technology is going, and whether it could still ultimately serve as a tool to fight back, even if it’s being used to suppress us.

So Mark, thank you for joining today. It’s a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mark: Hey, thanks so much! Right now, I'm super happy to be here. I can’t possibly echo enough of those sentiments right back at you. A I’ve been in this space for almost a decade now—not quite, but very close. Twenty-four-seven, basically. A lot of those questions, I don’t know the answers to yet. But I’m happy to be here and discuss them with you. We’ll figure it out together.

Host: Well, thanks, brother. And I really appreciate the way you started there. The truth is, we don’t know everything. I’m getting increasingly frustrated today with how many people pretend they know exactly what’s going on in every story when it’s quite clear that most of us are just trying to make sense of limited information. That’s really where most of this ends up, right? So I’m right there with you.

I think there are a lot of people who really want to believe in Bitcoin. I see the positives, and I want to believe that it’s possible. But at the same time, I can’t ignore the overwhelming, non-stop examples of how it could be used in very dangerous ways. This goes beyond Bitcoin itself and extends to blockchain in general. But we can go through all of this today.

Let’s start with the crux of the conversation. Right now, I argue that my audience is more familiar with crypto and Bitcoin than most. But even I feel like we’re still kind of in the early stages of this. That said, I think they’re pretty aware of how things have gone so far, based on our coverage up until now. I recommend people like James Corbett, or even Mark himself, to understand more about Bitcoin’s long-term history.

But let’s start with the main point:

Is Bitcoin, in your mind, Mark, something that was started as a government operation? I want to bring up something you wrote: “Bitcoin, like money itself, is simply a technological tool. This tool has many differing properties depending on whether it is wielded by an individual or the state itself.”

That seems to set the tone for your perspective. If Bitcoin was started with these ideas in mind, that’s an interesting statement. So let’s begin there—do you believe it was started as a government operation?

Yeah, totally. I mean, again, just to get back to the point, anyone that says they have a hundred percent idea of what's going on is selling you something and is lying to you because no one knows. And I think the Satoshi story is a perfect example of that because there's really no direct evidence either way. And hard evidence that either this was released by some anarchist crypto shadowy coder, some young, maybe Western European American guy, it seems like English was his main language, or if it was directly coming out of DARPA, or even like an American fintech. And I think the answer is even more confusing when you go to look at what modern intelligence is anymore. It's not really what it was in the 40s and 50s with guys with pocket protectors sitting in offices doing things, it's really completely gone into and merged, maybe after Operation Underworld, figuring out all of this, the mob basically merged, and Whitney Webb has covered this extensively and written the book on this. Her book actually starts with that: intelligence merged with the mafia in wartime to figure out what was going on at the docks, who’s coming in and out. The people that had that information were the data brokers of the time—the mob, bootleggers, doing all these things on the ports. So intelligence merged with the mob, and there's a lot of paper trail for that. In the ensuing decades, that merger kind of kept going further into the private sector. We saw that specifically with the Internet, which came out of DARPA, called ARPANET at the time, the Advanced Research Project. We saw a lot of the technology built in Silicon Valley accepting grants from the NSA and the CIA through Stanford, Caltech, Harvard, MIT. These things we take for granted as free market capitalism, but there was a large government intelligence influence in creating these projects.

I have a piece coming out tomorrow about the militarization of data brokers. You can look at where these projects came from and how Google was built on computers given to Sergey and Larry at Stanford from funding by the NSA and CIA. Does that mean Google is from the government? It's hard to say. But when you look at how it's used and the outcome, you can make a case for it. At the very least, we should ask that question. Nobody should ever be considering that that's not the case with how clearly that overlaps. Like that’s my point.

Exactly. And I think I get a lot of criticism in the Bitcoin space for simply proposing the fact that we should be able to ask this. There was a thread I had recently where I phrased it very carefully, saying if you can't consider that maybe this came out of intelligence, you need to take a step back. All of these people have invested more than their money, it’s really become a personality. It’s a borderline cult, frankly. I say that with love for a lot of the cult leaders in the Bitcoin space, but there’s so much identity and personality tied to this protocol. It’s hard for them to consider that maybe they were tricked or that this project actually came out of intelligence. It’s similar to the partisan field right now. They’ve identified with this and personalized it, and we’ll get into the point about whether it was this way or could it still be used to fight back. It’s interesting because it’s so personalized. It’s the same with political ideologies. They’re incapable of standing back and asking, as you said, is it at least possible it could be that way? And the wall comes up. I think what we're starting to break through is that people, we all have these walls, but we’re being more open in pointing them out, whether in the partisan field or with Bitcoin. People need to stand back and go, it’s okay to consider that. We don’t have to blindly accept it, but we should consider whether it could be that. That’s questioning everything we do here.

100 percent. And also, it’s like, well, does it really matter? That’s the other thing about Bitcoin. I’ve created this thesis, slowly pushing it since the fall of 2021. COVID was a big wake-up call for a lot of people, the government lockdowns.

Yeah, totally. I mean, just to get back to the point, anyone who says they have a hundred percent idea of what's going on is selling you something and lying to you because no one knows. I think the Satoshi story is a perfect example of that, because there’s no direct evidence either way. There’s no hard evidence that this was released by some anarchist crypto coder, some young Western European or American guy, who seemed to have English as his main language.

Or, on the other hand, if it came directly from DARPA or even an American fintech operation. The answer is even more confusing when you consider what modern intelligence even is today. It’s not really what it was in the 40s and 50s. Back then, it was more about, guys with pocket protectors, sitting in offices and doing things. Now, it's completely different. It’s merged with many different sectors.

Maybe after Operation Underworld, where intelligence and the mafia worked together to gather information on things like what’s happening at the docks, who’s coming in and out. The people with that information were the data brokers at the time—the mob and the bootleggers. So intelligence merged with the mafia, and there’s a lot of paper trail for that. Over the decades, that merger expanded further into the private sector.

We saw this especially with the internet. It came out of DARPA, called ARPANET at the time, the Advanced Research Project. Many of the technologies built in Silicon Valley were funded by the NSA and the CIA through Stanford, Caltech, Harvard, MIT. We often take these private companies for granted as symbols of free market capitalism. But, really, there was a large government intelligence influence in creating these projects.

I have a piece coming out tomorrow about the militarization of data brokers. You can look at how these projects came about, how Google was built on computers provided to Sergey and Larry at Stanford, directly funded by the NSA and CIA. Does this mean Google is a government operation? It's hard to say. But you can make a case that it is, based on how it’s used and the outcomes we see. At the very least, we should be asking the question. Nobody should consider it irrelevant with how clearly it overlaps.

Exactly. And I think I get a lot of criticism for this in the Bitcoin space because I simply propose the idea that, hey, we should be able to ask these questions. And I think there was a thread I had recently where I phrased it very carefully. I said, if you can’t consider the possibility that Bitcoin might have emerged from intelligence, then you need to take a step back. A lot of people in the Bitcoin space have invested more than just money into it; they’ve invested their personalities. It’s become borderline cult-like, honestly. And I say that with love for the many cult leaders in the Bitcoin space.

But there’s so much identity tied to this protocol, and I think it’s hard for people to consider that maybe they were tricked, or that there might have been a Trojan horse here—that this project could have come from intelligence.

It’s similar to the partisan divide right now, right? It’s like another extension of that. People personalize their beliefs, and this becomes a core part of who they are. We’ll get into whether or not Bitcoin could still be used to fight back. But it’s interesting how personalized it is, and it’s the same with political ideologies. People are unable to step back and ask, like you said, whether it’s even possible that Bitcoin could have been created this way. Once they put up that wall, it’s hard to break through.

100 percent. And also, it’s like, well, does it really matter? That’s another confusing thing about Bitcoin. I've created this thesis, or idea, and have been pushing it out since the fall of 2021. Obviously, COVID was a big wake-up call for a lot of people, especially with the government lockdowns.

No, sorry, I was going to say in more than one way, in my opinion, but go ahead.

Of course, absolutely. And that's what's been kind of interesting and fun about the Bitcoin dollar thesis is it's evolving in a lot of different ways. There's a lot of ways that they could do it. And one of the ways that's been kind of thrown out there by senators, Senator Lummis out of Wyoming has, as written, literature, basically waiting to get Trump, Trump to get sworn in and seven days or whatever, and push this forward, this idea of, let's sell all of our gold.

And what that will do is demonetize gold. And then we can use it to set the price of Bitcoin, buy up the price of Bitcoin, all of the countries around the world that hold gold, now all of a sudden, their gold is demonetized and worth less. The US has a serious debt problem. It has $36 trillion in debt. We're at this point right now where the tax receipts are not nearly enough. We're not getting nearly enough money in from taxes.

The interest rate on our debt, so you take out a big loan, you have to pay the interest that doesn't actually go against the principle. You're just paying to service the loan. Just servicing the debt that we have is actually greater than the money we spend on our defense now. That's a very important like Axiom when we pass that point. So we're actually paying more to service the dollar than we are to pay for our military, which is supposed to protect our dollar in this petrodollar system.

So if we demonetize gold in an opportunity where normally we would be able to just say, hey, an ounce of gold is $30,000. We 10X it. we're holding billions of dollars of gold. Now we 10x it and we have enough money in gold. we reset the price in dollars. We can pay off our debt tomorrow. We could do that 100%.

But what would happen is every other country that holds gold would then be able to come to the United States and sell gold for 10x the price. And they would be able to get out of all of their debt issues too. Exactly.

So what's very interesting about the Bitcoin play is that the majority of it is in the United States already. Significantly through these ties to early Bitcoin, having this heavy, heavy tie to Silicon Valley, PayPal mafia specifically, maybe even coming out of PayPal, we'll get into that. But there's this ability for the US to basically reprice Bitcoin by buying up a ton of Bitcoin and sort of skipping that debt default scenario, which is what typically happens to world reserve currencies every 300 years is normally the cycle that they get to live for.

And we're hitting that right now. And we should be sort of weakening. We should be dealing with our debt problems and there should be some other superpower coming in to sort of step up and take the place. That's why you hear a lot of talk of de-dollarization, of BRICS, of China and Russia doing their own digital plays, their own gold plays.

But, if I've learned anything from Vietnam, from Afghanistan, from the petrodollar system created the US, the US is not going to let the world reserve currency go. Right. They don't care if they have to inflate and actually lose the individual purchasing power of the dollar. They don't necessarily care about that, but what they care about is that the dollar is stronger than everyone else's currency. And it's the de facto currency that everyone wants to hold and save.

I would simply argue that has to do with foreign policy and more so about the potential globalist technocratic encroachment around the world than their immediate benefit off the financial situation. That's what it seems like to me. That's more important to them to be able to financially sanction, for example. That's what that would highlight.

Totally. Sure, sure. And again, getting back to the COVID stuff, I think COVID was really You could argue a very large misdirection operation where they basically set us into these two false narratives, which again, I picked one and I'm glad I did, but basically COVID became entirely about pro or anti-vax.

And I think there's a lot of issues with the vaccine and all that and we don't have to get into that here but really what happened was, in fall of 2019. Larry Fink is meeting with Donald Trump and they're putting together this plan to do this going direct plan which is where they printed. trillions of dollars and just handed it right to Wall Street, BlackRock really specifically with absolutely no ability for that stimulus money to go to Main Street at all.

And then, of course, six months later, they shut down the whole country. Gold, oil, Bitcoin, everything completely collapses. Oil literally goes negative, right? There was that sort of famous moment in the second week of March, 2020, where gold futures went negative, where if financial markets were exactly honest, they were basically saying, we'll pay you $150 to take a barrel of oil from us. Obviously, it's futures markets, so it's a little more nuanced than that.

I'm sort of a 9-11 kid, I'm in my 30s. And, all I've ever known is the U.S. getting into military operations to, perpetuate the petrodollar. And then here, all of a sudden, oil is negative.

There's no buyer. Why is that? Why did demand all get crushed? Why did the working class get crushed? Why did gold go down so much? Oil go down so much? The central banks of the world all coordinate and bring interest rates down to zero. And then what happens is Bitcoin 20X's that year. By the end of the year, it goes from being around $3,000 to $60,000.

The U.S. raises rates faster than ever and breaks all the bond curves basically of the world and create this scenario for the U.S. to have an incredibly strong dollar. And also, have this supposedly internet-based neutral asset that's actually predominantly held in the United States, wildly appreciate. And obviously, now BlackRock has officially come into Bitcoin, Trump has officially embraced Bitcoin, he wants to be the first Bitcoin president, all this stuff.

He lied to us like he does. He’s—everyone always pays attention to his rhetoric and never to his policy, right. And what he did in his first administration, he brought in Steve Mnuchin, former Goldman, to run the Treasury. And Steve Mnuchin brought in his former OneWest Bank partner, Brian Brooks, to run the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is basically the highest—it’s one of the oldest financial institutions in the country, and it's basically the head regulatory position in the U.S. for banks.

And so he signs a bulletin that says banks are allowed to hold crypto assets and specifically stable coins. And he basically sets up this whole precedent for establishing the U.S. as the crypto capital of the world while Trump is going on Twitter and going on this whole thing about, hey, I hate Bitcoin. It’s trying to fight the dollar. The dollar’s king, blah, blah, blah. And everyone is like, oh my goodness. And Bitcoin sells off and all this stuff.

But in reality, his team knew exactly what they were doing. They set up, basically what we’re about to see now with him coming in, Bitcoin’s at 100k. And we’re seeing more regulatory push for, direct action of the U.S. government holding Bitcoin and, all these things.

But if you were really paying attention to his policy, right before COVID actually happened, which of course he leaves, right after a lot of the severe COVID policy starts and Biden comes in, becomes basically the fall guy. And now Trump comes in as this rehabilitated hero who’s saving America and using Bitcoin and literally says, I’m going to cut a little crypto check and pay our $36 trillion in debt.

If you were paying attention, he set this all up, his first administration, while tweeting about how he was doing the opposite. And that’s what he does. That’s politicians in general. But specifically, Trump is a king of misdirection, as much as I think he’s obviously a member of the swamp. But, I mean, you’ve got to give him some credit a little bit here for sort of his debt-based manipulations. That’s his whole game. That’s what he’s always done.

He’s a pretty savvy businessman in plenty of ways. I've always given him that credit for sure. Absolutely. And as you say, in very dishonest ways. And I just want to quickly point out that time in the first administration, you can clearly argue that that was one of the many times that they’ve undermined it, dropped it, and then scooped up the many of the much of the market, more than once to where we are today, and we can get into more of that.

100%. And that's why I think, it all started to kind of click for me. as I was sort of sifting through the COVID mess because it was interesting where I was in Northern California at the time. We were locked down and then even when lockdowns were over because I chose to not take a medical treatment, I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere. So I spent a lot of time just digging and researching and finding out about all this stuff and being like, oh, wow, like Steve Mnuchin should have been persecuted or prosecuted for what he did in the 2008 crisis at OneWest where he worked with Brian Brooks and he was supposed to go to court in California.

Who was the D.A. at the time? Kamala Harris. She just throws out the court. You just start finding all of these—oh, wow, there’s actually this really large, network of people basically behind how we got here. And so I argue that the birth of the Bitcoin dollar was basically that week in March of 2020 where they completely imploded the markets.

And then again, right after that, we pull out of Afghanistan, which is sort of tied to this axiom that maybe we’re moving away from the petrodollar system and towards this new Bitcoin dollar system.

And I'll just quickly explain the petrodollar idea. Money is a technological tool. It’s used basically just to express volatility between two bartering parties. For example, I have an apple, you have a bike. The person with the bike is really hungry and wants to eat the apple. The person with the apple needs to drive somewhere or go somewhere. So they make a trade, and it makes a lot of sense at first.

The person who ate the apple is feeling good. The person with the bike is going to his place. But then, after 45 minutes, the person who now has the apple is stuck there and needs to get home, wishing he had his bike. Meanwhile, the person with the bike is now hungry. So, there are these variable outcomes happening in the barter system that can be mitigated. These unwelcome outcomes can be addressed by using a technology that can act as a way to express the volatility between two bartering people without necessitating a transfer of goods.

Does that kind of make sense? It’s sort of a quick overview.

Here’s the corrected text with the spaces fixed:

Yeah. Or are we touching on, no, you're not, we're not even getting to cryptocurrency yet. You're simply just talking about money, right? Yeah. So, once you bring in the element of time into barter, then those outcomes start to spread. And then you get the guy who just traded his bike, which he actually needed to run his paper route, and now he can't work, and all this. So, as you get further away from the moment of barter, you start to have more issues with successful outcomes. So money was basically invented as this way to kind of scale up human interaction beyond just localized tribes, really. And there's a lot of economics there of people talking about Dunbar numbers and how you can scale the tribe up to more and more, but basically, that's the crux of it. Two bartering parties, they're trying to express volatility because they want something else. The money itself isn't necessarily supposed to be valuable; it's just a way to get something that is valuable. And to be clear, for those listening, he's not referring to the fiat dollar today. He's talking about currency as a historical concept, right? I'm clear. OK, go ahead.

Exactly. Exactly. So, because those outcomes over time would really rapidly move away from each other, where one side of the trade would actually usually end up being in a much better position over time than the other, they decided to tie money to energy. Because it allows it to be harder to be debased because it's harder to be sourced. So, the old idiom "money doesn't grow on trees" – if money did grow on trees, you could just run out to trees and grab a bunch of money, and then your currency unit would really devalue quickly because you can source it very quickly. So, gold develops naturally in many different places around the world, sort of independently, as this thing that's really hard to source and takes a lot of energy to pull out of the ground. Obviously, at the time, energy is literally just pickaxes and people panning in the river or whatever. But it takes a lot of time and a lot of energy. So, the debasement of the currency isn't just pulling leaves off trees; you have to send people to the mine and get these things, and it takes energy. So, the inflation rate of your currency is now tied to basically an energy commodity—that is, gold coming out of the ground—because ultimately, it's how much energy can you put into getting it out of the ground. So, the gold standard kind of becomes the standard for currency because it's a really nice way that, in modern times, 2.5%, 3% gold a year is coming out of the ground, which increases the supply by 2% to 3%. In the 70s, the US very infamously goes off the gold standard, and this thing called the Nixon shock happens. There were a lot of things that happened before then: Charles de Gaulle coming in demanding gold, the London gold pool exploding, go check out a lot of that stuff. There's a lot of interesting things, like the establishment of the Fed, the Bretton Woods agreement. But basically, in the seventies, we go off the gold standard because of the issue. So, they say this was the reasoning behind it: The issue with having a slowly inflating currency based on commodity, based on an energy commodity, is that your growth is now limited in your economy to this 2.5%, 3% of money coming out of the ground. You can't grow your economy more. You can't make more dollars because it's directly tied to, 30 to 1 or whatever ounces of gold. So, you're actually, your growth is limited.

Yes. So, a bunch of people, but it is real.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Well, this is their argument, not mine.

No, I know. I know. I'm making a joke. It's funny. And we're talking about limiting growth, but it's like, well, this is just, that's like reality versus virtual reality. In my mind, that's ultimately what we're talking about.

Exactly. And that's where fiat comes from, which is a Latin phrase meaning "it is because I declare it to be." That’s not exactly the Latin, but the concept is that it’s a decree, calling it valuable simply because it’s declared to be valuable. And so, the fiat standard really takes off worldwide. In 1971, when Nixon officially takes us off the gold standard, U.S. citizens can no longer turn in their dollars for gold. We enter a highly inflationary period in the 70s, where they can just print dollars. There's nothing stopping them from printing dollars because they don’t have to meet any arbitrary ratio tied to gold. But what happens is that we have a highly inflationary environment, and the value of your individual purchasing power is rapidly decreasing as they print more dollars.

So, what they ended up doing—and this is just off the record—the U.S. immediately starts going into the Middle East and doing its imperial thing, establishing a relationship with the Saudis and other players in the Middle East to say, "Hey, we will give you military support and protect your refineries if you make it so that every person in the world who wants to buy oil—which was a necessity in the 70s for Europe and Asia—has to first buy dollars." If you wanted to industrialize, which everyone wanted to do, you had to compete on the global stage with these post-war superpowers.

The US is so far ahead of everyone else; you want to compete with the US, you need to buy oil to industrialize, it's just a fact." Not that many people are rich, so we established this political agreement and say, "Anybody that wants to buy oil has to buy dollars first." So what that does is it creates artificial demand for dollars.

Now, as we're in the US just printing all these dollars and all these dollars, and the way you actually print dollars is you make these reserve assets that back the dollars, you sell them to private banks, and they create dollars in your bank accounts. These reserves now have a buyer, a constant buyer, because everybody that wants to buy oil has to buy dollars first.

So Russia, and everywhere in the EU, the Eurozone at the time, all of these countries had to buy U.S. dollars first. We had a buyer. And we were able to essentially shovel the inflationary effects of printing money into the Eurozone and into Asia. Suddenly, we were able to pay our deficits, service our budget, and cover our expenses because we had a buyer—someone who would buy our debt because they needed to buy oil.

So that kind of works for a good deal. We're able to sort of get out of this inflationary period a little bit. Works for the government, for sure, but devalues our currency. Exactly. But the people get really hurt. And that's sort of the story here, as always, is that the US will do what it takes to perpetuate empire and service our debt continually, sort of at the behest of the people that hold dollars.

Now, as we're globalizing the dollar, forcing countries around the world to buy dollars, now we're devaluing everyone's money. It's not just the US citizens anymore, it's everybody's. The dollar gets globalized, and we have this huge dollarization trend. And we actually see all of this, in the 80s. It's kind of the first time we see this coordinated central banking.

We see this thing called the Plaza Accord, which interestingly was, there was a meeting of the G5 at the time in this hotel in New York owned by Roy Cohn, interestingly enough. But I'm sure that's not important. And, and, uh, they all come together to basically, um, make a plan to devalue the yen—or sorry, to devalue the US dollar against the Japanese yen.

Um, I believe it was, um, it was France, the UK, um, Japan, um, yeah, it was the G5 at the time. So this group of, then Eurozone, pre-Euro. And they do this coordinated central banking. And the US actually devalues their dollar significantly after raising interest rates incredibly high throughout the inflationary period that they saw in the 70s.

The way that you fix inflation is you raise interest rates really, really high. You could look at interest rates as if we're paying you more money to hold our debt. The higher the interest rate is, the more you're interested in owning our money. If interest rates are at 10 percent, we're paying you 10 percent to hold our debt over a certain duration, whereas if rates are zero percent, we're paying you zero. So it really changes the whole dynamic of the dollar-based system. It makes lending really, really hard when rates are really high.

Anyway, all this stuff is happening. It's the first example of coordinated, um, central banking that happens in 85 at the Plaza Accord. So everyone's on the petrodollar, they're buying dollars to get oil. we kind of have this good thing cooking.

And then, the next time in history where we really saw that same issue was when there was a global crisis that could really occur if we didn’t get it under control. There were a couple of moments in the nineties where the U.S. did some interesting manipulation with Mexico through NAFTA and a few other things, but really, it was 2008.

Let me know if you need further adjustments!

And that was really the next time we saw central bankers looking at each other and thinking, "Oh, shit, what's going to happen? This is bad." So, of course, in 2008, it was all about taking new financial products based on mortgages and turning them into collateralized debt obligations, then slinging them around in these highly speculative trading patterns.

And then the bubble bursts, and who gets caught holding the bag? It's the homeowners. So again, they devalue and hurt the homeowners, but they bail out the banks, and the US empire is fine, the banks are fine, people that own homes across the world are crushed, the stock market's crushed.

And then what do we see happen right after 2008? Obviously, we see a split between the party. So Bush leaves, Obama comes in. So the Republicans blame Obama. The Democrats blame Bush. No one learns anything. Every time, and then in Halloween 2008, some anonymous person releases a white paper on the cypherpunk forums and it explains the idea of this neutral energy-based asset that lives on the internet, and that's Bitcoin.

So, Satoshi, this figure, releases it in 2008. And, uh, it kind of chugs along as sort of this. Um, it's just for gamblers.

It's just for poker players, pornographers, and drug dealers. Interestingly enough, I was in San Francisco, not quite in 2009, but by 2011-2012, I was there working in bars. That's what I did for most of the time I was there. A regular at my bar was a guy named Blake Benthal, who actually took over for Ross Ulbrich when he was arrested for running Silk Road. Literally the next day, Silk Road 2.0 popped up in 2014, and he took over as DPR 2.0, the Dead Pirate Roberts, which was the pseudonym Ross used. Ross was also arrested in San Francisco, at the library right near my house, interestingly enough. He set up a new drug market. In 2014, Blake actually explained Bitcoin to me, just as a regular at my bar. He never once explained there was an element of appreciation or speculation. It was 100% entirely about peer-to-peer anonymity, which it is not, as they all found out because they went to jail. It was a currency you could use to buy drugs online on Silk Road. I didn’t think too much about Bitcoin. I used it a couple of times around that time, literally not knowing there was a price, not knowing it was something I could appreciate. That was the early vibe of Bitcoin. It was anarchist, about circumnavigating payment processors. PayPal debanked WikiLeaks, so let’s have them use Bitcoin. There was all this cool, interesting stuff going on. I wasn’t really connected in the scene at all, but that was my introduction: "Oh, it's this anonymous peer-to-peer cash system, that's pretty cool."

Then, of course, it gets to the start of 2017. I see a headline that says Bitcoin crosses a thousand bucks. I thought, "Oh, it can go up." I didn’t know it had a speculative, commodity element to it. I literally thought it was a way you put dollars in, get a dollar amount out, and then use it to buy drugs. That’s what I was taught because that’s what I was doing. That was the community. Of course, people understood it earlier on as being something that would be worth millions, but that wasn’t the premise of the community. By 2017, it really took off and became all about speculation. I started to study it, got swept in, and have been involved in the Bitcoin space since. It’s interesting that we saw the speculation bubble in 2017, and then in 2020, the huge bubble exploded everywhere in financial markets with the COVID shutdown, and immediately we saw Bitcoin 20X. There are a couple of things I want to explain about Bitcoin that are very important in regards to why that change happened.

Mm hmm. And a lot of what you're saying is very important, by the way, like this entire this, the background to this really does bring it to a very clear, connected point for people that, half of some of what you're saying, I wasn't even aware of. Right. This is important stuff. And so please continue.

Thank you. So, a very important thing happened that is hardwired into Bitcoin, which was a big reason why Bitcoin changed from being this peer-to-peer cash-like system into more of a speculative commodity. It’s not just that it was hijacked by the CIA and a lot of things that people perpetuate, especially in Roger Ver's book Hijacking Bitcoin. I think Roger Ver gets a few things right, and I hope the IRS doesn't mess with him, but I don't think he's completely right. There are some technical reasons why I don’t think he's right.

But anyway, going back to one of the things hardwired into Bitcoin is this thing called the halvening. We talked earlier about gold coming out of the ground as a good method to avoid currency debasement, because it can only come out of the ground relative to its total supply, with about two and a half percent more supply being pulled out each year. There’s a cap on growth. It’s hard money, even though it inflates technically, because its inflation is capped. Whereas with the dollar system, as we've now found out, you can just print $8 trillion in a year and blow everything up, and it’s fine because there's nothing—it's just political. It's fiat. There's no technology, no math, no sending miners to the ground to hack. There's nothing preventing the dollar from inflating except financial and political action.

Bitcoin has a halvening built in. So, when Bitcoin was launched at the start of 2009, it was inflating. Fifty percent of the total supply that will ever exist in Bitcoin was printed in the first four years. Bitcoin has this thing called the halvening cycle. Bitcoin's blockchain is made up of all these blocks that stack together, and on average, every 10 minutes, every 210,000 blocks, new Bitcoins are issued. Bitcoin miners build blocks, creating new Bitcoin issued by the protocol. In the first four years, the first 210,000 blocks, every 10 minutes, averaged about three and a half to four years. During those first four years, 50 Bitcoin were mined every block. Bitcoin was worthless when it came out—there was literally no price—but 50 Bitcoin were coming out every 10 minutes. It was a highly inflating currency, and 50% of the 21 million Bitcoin that we hear about, the hard cap, came out in those first four years. Every 10 minutes, 50 more Bitcoin, 50 more Bitcoin.

Really quickly, for those that are confused, we touched on this a bit in one of the last interviews as well as some of the things we've, discussed. Essentially, the people mining get a reward, essentially, by solving the cryptographic puzzle for each block, essentially, and the amount they get diminishes over time. And so what you're highlighting there is that the amount that was mined, essentially, is, I mean, that's because there's ultimately a limited amount. Is that what you're getting at? Like in the amount of Bitcoin available to be mined?

Yeah, right. So hard-coded into the protocol is this asymptotic approach to zero, where it starts at 50% in the first four years. Then there was a halvening event. In 2012, there was a halvening—halving, as in cutting in half. The block reward goes from 50 to 25. In the next four years, from 2012 to 2016, 25 Bitcoin were coming out every 10 minutes. That’s a 50% relative reduction of inflation from the previous period. So, hard-coded into Bitcoin is the idea of deflation—it’s a disinflationary monetary system, not deflationary yet, but disinflationary. So, 50 Bitcoin every 10 minutes, then it goes to 25. The next halving cycle occurred in May 2020, right when the Bitcoin dollar system and the COVID stuff were happening. The third halving brought it down to 12.5. The interesting thing about that 12.5 is that relative issuance to the total supply finally brought Bitcoin down to being below the 3% of gold coming out of the ground and below the 2% target inflation the U.S. government aims for with the dollar. The Fed's mandate is to hit a 2% inflation target. So, mathematically, the monetary policy of Bitcoin is becoming harder and harder, with less and less inflation occurring.

So what, give me the relevance of that in regard to what we're talking about. Is that better or worse for the government and better or worse for the person?

What it means is that mathematically, you could argue that from 2009 to 2012, Bitcoin was a highly inflating currency. There's not really any reason to value it very much, unless you're thinking far ahead, because it was highly inflating, with 50 Bitcoin coming out every block. Essentially, about 10 million Bitcoin were made in the first four years.

Right.

But then the next four years, there was only five made 5 million. And then after that halving, then it goes down to two and a half. Then it goes to one and a quarter, 1.25 million are made. And eventually it goes down and down and down and down. After 32 halvings, they just round it down and then they just stop issuing new Bitcoin.

Wow. See, that's interesting. I haven't heard that before. I was actually just going to make a point about this, that it's, I was like a philosophical point because if you're only ever having something forever, it doesn't ever really go away. Right. Smaller, smaller. So is there, is there actually a point where the decision, two questions, there's a point, is there a point where that it goes down to zero? And was that part of the original Satoshi white paper plan?

A hundred percent.

Interesting. Yes. Explain that.

Yes, there was. So, Ryan is exactly right. It’s like the whole frog jumping analogy: If the frog jumps half the distance of the table, how many jumps will it take to reach the end of the table? It will never reach the end of the table. This is the asymptotic approach to zero. It will continually approach zero and get closer and closer, but it will never technically touch zero. Bitcoin does a funny thing. It’s a protocol, right? It’s software. So there are a lot of numbers that are generally used in software because of how bits and bytes work. Thirty-two is one of the more commonly used software numbers because it’s a nice, even number of bits.

It’s a bit of a terrible explanation, but I hope that makes sense. This number was chosen because it works well and is easy to code. In the 32nd epoch, we reach the final stage, where there is technically issuance, but very little—so far below a Bitcoin that it’s like 0.01, or even a tenth of a Bitcoin, coming out every block. It's incredibly small. As the halving happens again and again, it gets so close to zero. Satoshi made a decision at epoch 32: we just cut it. When we hit the 33rd epoch, it goes to zero, and Bitcoin will sustain itself entirely from financial transaction fees. Miners, instead of receiving new Bitcoin issued, will only receive the fees from people trying to include their transactions in blocks.

How does that work, though, for the miners who are involved with the actual CPU-powered mining operations, who may not, unless I'm misunderstanding something, be involved with the actual transactional aspect of it? How would they make revenue from just mining? How does that work once that goes down to zero?

Um, well actually, very soon, in the next eight years or so, uh, maybe 12 years. I mean, I would certainly argue that that will probably happen already where, there's a thing called the block reward, which when Bitcoin started, it was 50, then it was 25, then it was 12 and a half. Now it's 6.15.

Um, that's what I was saying before about the prize for kind of solving the puzzle for each block.

Exactly. But, but, um, as that shrinks and shrinks and shrinks the amount of transactions that are going in the block, if you want to send a Bitcoin transaction, what you're basically doing is trying to hail like a taxi. Like you're like, Hey, minor, put me in the block, put me in the next block. The block size is limited. Right? So each block. every ten minutes a new block is added is around two to four megabytes, depending on how you look at it. Technically it's a megabyte, they introduced these new weight units. It's this whole thing, we don't need to get into that. But basically there's a limit to how many transactions you can fit in a block. So if you want to make sure that you get in the next block, because it's very important for you to make this transaction, you pay a higher fee. So as you pay higher fees, you basically are bribing the miners.

Oh man. That seems wildly complicated. I can see so many ways in which that screws up the entire process. Like where you maybe, like eventually if people start, because I had an issue a while back and this is not really the point of today's conversation, but where I got kind of stalled in trying to cash something out because the fee was low and it was, everybody was going higher than it. And it just kind of continued that way for almost like a month. And I was like, I'd have somebody actually help me fix that. And so if hypothetically you get to a point to where people are bidding above it, it just caused complications for like the actual transactional aspect of it. Because this is where it gets into the point of whether this was, this is so far away from the original vision of peer to peer without a financial institution now to the point to where you necessitate those things like you have to have this coordinated financial middleman or arguably anyway the point is just that seems wildly more complicated to me. Do you see that as as I mean let me ask it like this do you think how did Satoshi see that going forward especially if the mindset again under the guise that or I guess the considering this as maybe not an origin point from the government or however you want to see it, designed in a way hypothetically that was meant to circumvent financial transactions or financial institutions rather, how did he see that going forward after that point? Because it seems like you need something like that, unless I'm missing something.

Yeah, well, I think the idea was either Bitcoin is going to be worth a lot of money and people are going to want to transact and settle on it, or they're not. So either there's going to be a user base that are transacting. And if that's true, then those users will, sustain the miners by paying them enough that you are actually encouraged to stay in the system.

There’s a lot of debate about this. Some hardcore Bitcoiners think Bcash and BSV are stupid and believe there's still an issue here. There are also hardcore Bitcoiners who think we should add something called tail emissions, where a slight reward is added at the end of the protocol. It would be something like awarding 0.01 Bitcoin every block, or whatever it may be. Technically, the supply inflates, but relatively it would still be deflationary or disinflationary because, relative to the supply, if you’re adding a stable amount at the end, the overall supply is getting bigger while your amount stays the same, causing the percentage-wise growth to shrink.

So there's this sort of tail emissions idea. There's a privacy coin called Monero that's decently popular, even with some Bitcoiners, although they won't tell you that, that uses tail emissions. Um, it's very controversial though. Um, there's also this idea of Demiurge where they actually take, um, coins that have been sitting in wallets that haven't moved in 15 years. And then they start to break those down. And I, I disagree with that entirely. But again, this is, this is also a really good point here to break and say, this is an experiment.

Yeah. This really is an experiment. So there's a lot of people that should experiment and try different things, right? So that's where you get the Bcash element and the BSV element. Bcash says, hey, Bitcoin is supposed to be a peer-to-peer. It's the first line in the white paper. Why do we have a tiny block size that makes it harder for Bitcoiners to spend and have cheap transactions? What is actually truly world changing about this is we can do Bitcoin transactions that don't require a trusted third party. And so let's increase the block size, but we'll increase it, but limit it.

And that was the original vision from Satoshi's original white paper. Well, that's what the B-cashers say. Everyone is trying to sell something, right? That's the thing that's really hard about this is that everybody has their bags and they have things, but that's what they claim, right? But then the B-cashers split off again, and then the Satoshi visionaries come in and they say, no, no, no, no, no. Satoshi actually never wanted to have a block size at all. Let's have dynamic blocks that the size is only limited by the amount of people that want to transact at that moment. So fees will basically be zero forever.

Right. So there's a fork that occurs where, the B cashers go to, I forget exactly, maybe like five megabytes or something. And then BSV comes in and forks off that and they go infinite blocks and we can go huge. Right. Yeah. Which, which can rival Visa as far as I understand it, if you really wanted to implement it in a real transactional process.

But there's an issue with it. Which is, the thing that's interesting about Bitcoin, is that you can run a node by myself, I can run one, and I can validate all the way back to the first block that has ever existed, and I can with a Raspberry Pi, and very soon with a smartphone, verify every single transaction with 100% fidelity back to the very, very, very beginning. And I don't have to trust a single fucking person.

And I can look at every single transaction and every single block, and I can send a block or send a transaction and put it in the next block. And I don't have to worry about a single point of failure because I can do it on a tiny bandwidth cell phone service plan with a tiny hard drive and a really shitty computer, a really bad CPU. And I can process all of these tiny one megabyte blocks And I can process all of them back, all the, 800,000 blocks or whatever, go all the way back to, to Genesis with complete fidelity. And I don't have to trust.

Uh, internet service provider. I don't have to trust basically complicated hardware. Uh, I don't have to have a really awesome computer. And so you have this sort of, anybody with a smartphone basically, um, or slightly better than today's modern cell phones can, can validate and run their own node and don't have to worry about anyone when they want to make a transaction.

As you increase the block size, that's no longer as true. Because you now have to have, if, say, like a BSV, every block is a gigabyte, you have to store every single block.

800,000 blocks that are a gigabyte big is a humongous strain on hardware and, probably more importantly, bandwidth. Because you have to download an insane amount of gigabytes every day. That is not necessarily something that an individual can do. Right. So there, when you increase the block size, you actually create more opportunities for centralization because who actually has a super fucking computer that can crush and validate gigabyte blocks and download them every 10 minutes? A very small amount of people.

So the BSV blockchain has a very small amount of validation sets. There's a very small amount of nodes that can actually do it. Bcash as well. It's a little bit easier, but still pretty bad. Bitcoin has a ton of nodes. It's very easy to validate. And now again, it's an experiment. It's a choice. I understand why people are interested in exploring that. But I think that those centralization points, especially bandwidth, are absolutely worth talking about.

And I think that people kind of skate over these things when they talk about BSV, because they're like, well, we can compete with Visa. Sure you can. But you're centralized like Visa when you do it. Because blockchains are clunky and they suck. They're really shitty technology on purpose. Like it's a really difficult thing to create a blockchain. it's really, it's slow, it's kind of slow on purpose, because you want to have this trans, this distributed, decentralized, immutable chain of data that can't be, rolled back.

It's a bearer asset; no one can just come in and mess around with it. No party can come in and centralize the protocol. There are still a lot of issues with small blocks, but I understand why Bitcoin has stuck with that. I also want to mention one more thing before you jump in—I'm sorry. In 2017, there was the block size war, where the issue was that we were starting to hit a point where it was becoming difficult to get transactions into blocks. We were looking ahead and seeing that we'd face a choke point with throughput.

So how do we maximize throughput? So they established this thing called the Lightning Network that allows you basically to create a payment channel between two people. And then you can infinitely send transactions back and forth. And then you can close it when you want. And you can trustlessly close back to the main layer. And it gives you this transactional throughput that's almost literally infinite within the channel.

But then, of course, there are still a lot of issues. For example, you still have to send a transaction to open the channel and another to close it. So if there’s heavy bottlenecking or traffic, it can become really expensive and have a lot of issues. Lightning has some challenges, but it’s still very interesting. During the block size war, a whole group of people got together. There were many closed-door meetings, with miners forming one group and businesses forming another. These different factions came together.

What the thing that's lost is that people think that it was small blockers and then big blockers but in reality it was big blockers and bigger blockers because what ended up happening is we did raise the block size. Objectively, on Bitcoin, BTC, the block size did increase with the SegWit soft fork. Block sizes or increases are the only provable way we know to really scale blockchains and BTC has done that themselves.

So I'm not ruling out that there might not ever be a block size increase in the future as Moore's law kind of hits and the idea that the cheapness of storage space and of computation space, it gets more efficient and cheaper. So you can now buy, right, like a three terabyte, like, like micro SD card. I mean, it's insane what you can do now for like, not that much.

As that continues to happen as bandwidth transact, a throughput continues to increase on the whole, whether it's through satellites or broadband fiber optic. We might end up seeing a block size increase because it wouldn't actually cause a centralization choke point because the technology that is dispersed around the world with ISPs and with hardware providers is at a certain point where it's okay.

So we could see that. Now, there are also people in Bitcoin that argue, let's lower blocks so we can transact with ham radios, I mean, it's an experiment. It's a philosophical thing. This is so fascinating to me. Like, it comes down to the idea of what you truly believe this is meant to do, even amongst the people that are really of the mind of the, the origin, peer-to-peer transaction with no financial institution.

There's even deviations within that community about, like, for example, especially today, as I think you've covered, where it intersects with the Trump administration conversation, where you got people that are saying, no, no, no, let's use this and just digital gold, let's just hold it forever. And that will directly kind of contradict the main point of how the system was meant to work. But the system was never meant to be like, you have to transact, it's just that you could, but it's like an interesting deviation between the two.

But to the point you're making, Like you made excellent points right there. And even what the more I learned about this, the more I completely and I already did when I first stepped into it. But day by day, you see why this becomes so contentious.

Like there's so many different billions and billions of dollars behind. The choices I mean it's it that's the thing that that really colors a lot of this philosophical. I agree it is philosophical, it's also technical, but it's also economic and investing in speculative and there's people that have put huge amounts of money behind one for the other, there are people that have lost tons of money supporting one and not the other.

So anytime you have a philosophical conversation about an experiment, and then there's billions, if not trillions of dollars involved, I mean, it's very hard to know for sure. And I think this digital gold argument is really interesting because this is where I have now kind of formally split myself from where I'm like, I don't think Bitcoin was hijacked at all, I think it was designed to do exactly this. And it was designed and it was released exactly at this moment.

I mean, we did a very abridged, the Goodwin abridged economic history from 71 to 2008. But this idea that it just pops off in 08 after the US has this huge mortgage crisis that basically spills out into everywhere, it's hard for me to think that that's just an accident. And then now that we're seeing this huge pivot, I think Trump is very obviously this sort of, he's a Trojan horse kind of candidate himself where people just sort of ideologically, you're like, oh, that's my guy.

But then he's ushering in, I think, this technocracy at a rate faster than anyone has done in the past. And so I think when you look at how Bitcoin has now become an essential part of his platform and his answer for solving the biggest issue that the US empire faces, which is its debt problem. And he has created a narrative that these Bitcoiners that we're all about and the Fed are now literally saying, mend the Fed. Let's fix the US debt problem with Bitcoin. Let's cheer that BlackRock is pumping our bags.

And a lot of the, I think the ethos of the community was hijacked. But I don't think the protocol was. I think that that, that deflationary disinflationary monetary policy, it was supposed to become this asset, this neutral asset that we could use that we could inflate the dollar into while we hold all the Bitcoin, and then we become the bitcoin winners of the world and we basically extend our hegemon another three hundred years maybe even longer.

I'm at the most important technological axiom crux whatever moment in history as a and and all of these things are popping off. It's like I don't believe in multipolarity anymore, really, after COVID. I really think that it is. We are in a one world empire context, unfortunately. And I think the US Silicon Valley tech oligarchs are that group. They run the Trump administration. Frankly, I hope I can say that. And yeah, sure.

And I definitely agree. Came out. And then, 14 years later or whatever, it's solving the US's debt problem. Like, I don't think that's the US, if there was really a threat to the United States Empire, there's no way they would, they would just literally be assassinating people. They would be doing much more extreme things, they'd be flexing more levers that they have over the supply chain of hardware and over their internet service providers.

Who owns all of the fiber optic cables under the ocean? It's Facebook, it's Google, it's Amazon, it's Microsoft, it's Silicon Valley. They surround Africa with fiber optic cables. Who owns all the satellites? It's the same group of people. If they really wanted to make it really hard to use Bitcoin, they would and they wouldn't just use lawfare. They would do other things and I think that the fact that they haven't really done that is another feather in the cap of, well, maybe this is to their advantage.

And if they're really gonna start buying millions of Bitcoin and not millions of dollars, but millions of Bitcoin and selling gold to do that. I don't think there's any doubt in my mind that, I don't think they, there's no way they just woke up and went, hey, we can use this, this is good for us. No, I think they created it.

I tend to lean, I mean, it's hard because I agree, everything you're saying is completely accurate, but it's like, the picture you've laid out really well, is that clearly it is still, even with what you're highlighting, something that almost seems to in a way, which we'll get into, I think next, undermine what they seem to be building. But as you highlight very well in your chain series, as these two things that seem to be different come together, it very much creates this new monetary system, which is, as you highlighted very well from Trump's administration forward, or even before that, it seems very coordinated with the very people that seem to be pretending to fight back right now.

Which, that's where I was really getting, the philosophical part of this is so important, because as you're highlighting, like, let's just even say for sake of conversation, and we'll get into next, like the whole PayPal overlap and what you're highlighting right there, is that this is clearly something that is, if not the very beginning, has immediately been used and hijacked and manipulated the size and everything to keep it in a place that would lead to this point.

And so it's very easy to kind of just throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? But it's clear to see like with the blockchain, the forks with Bitcoin Cash and BSV, and the differences between all of them, it feels in a way like each one is striving in its own way to try to meet that. But I get the sense that like Bitcoin BTC itself is ultimately the least close to that mindset.

But at the same time, you pointed out that there are different aspects of it that could benefit in other ways. And, so at the end of the day, it's kind of the same open point. So, I mean, at first, I felt like in BSV being Bitcoin Satoshi Vision. So clearly, they feel like that's the original idea. But as you highlighted the idea of that the lack of rather more centralization potential, as you highlighted after that, though, is like we seem to be rapidly inclining again in a technological direction that I'm afraid of.

But where, moments ago we had little flip phones and now we have phones that have more capacity than we went to the moon with, in that conversation. The point being clearly that we may very shortly be able to do that. And so it's just so convoluted. And so I want people to walk away with this, at the very least, perhaps so far, with the idea that,the same idea here is that it seems to be without question being utilized by the government.

Wonder whether it started that way as we're going to react. But please do not think you, even like Monero, for example, there are ways that it seems that we could start to fight back on this. And I think that's very important.

And I just want to jump off that really quick before we get into the PayPal stuff is that you are 100% correct. Again, this is an experiment. I like to look at it as a game. I think finances, financial systems are games. If you look at John Nash's kind of work that he was doing at Princeton, you look at Von Neumann, who's supposed to be running the Manhattan Project, is releasing books at the height of the Manhattan Project about game theory via the Princeton Press. That sort of established a lot of the sort of idea that grew into the game theory field of study. All coming out of America, by the way.

But all these people kind of coalesce into Princeton, Albert Einstein's there, Neumann's there, Nash's there. And they start working on all of these game theoretical works. And John Nash, specifically, had done a lot of work on things that you really directly could connect to Bitcoin, which I think is very fascinating. And that's sort of its own and becomes a protocol that we sort of can encourage. It doesn't necessarily have to be transactional throughput. We don't need to spend Bitcoin every day to buy our coffees and all these things.

I don't think we necessarily need to do that. We can use other protocols to do that. But if we can still monetize Bitcoin and maximize the amount of people that can hold Bitcoin, that's really the issue of the throughput. To me is that if there was all the reason in the world, if there was currency failure, mass currency failure across the world, and billions of people wanted to come to Bitcoin, they wouldn't be able to tomorrow. They wouldn't be able to hold their own coins without a trusted third party because there are limited amount of transactions that can go in a block.

If you want to onboard 8 billion people onto Bitcoin, you damn well better have some really clever ways to do it because maximizing block space is very difficult. So the way that the Bitcoin system is set up right now is there are these things called stable coins that basically work as the liquid money market, the transactional money market for Bitcoin for people to trade, for people to transact in. And so these stable coins, which are very importantly backed by US debt, treasuries, they are the fastest growing market for US debt.

They are rapidly outpacing national buyers of US debt in these things called T-bills, treasury bills, basically securitized debt that the US government sells that backs dollars. Things like Tether now have $150 billion of debt. Um, they've only been around for a few years. They only crossed 10 billions of dollars of debt in 2020. Now they have 150 plus billion. Um, for reference, China and Japan historically are two largest debtors, uh, or creditors rather.

Tether is sort of, I mean, it's called tether. I mean, come on, but tether is basically this, this mechanism that allows the petrodollar to evolve into the Bitcoin dollar. And when we saw in March 2020, six weeks before there's another happening and Bitcoin, its relative issuance goes below the dollar, 2% target inflation rate goes below gold coming out of the ground. We see COVID happen. We see oil go negative. We see Bitcoin go to $3,000 at 20 X's that year.

The stable coin market explodes. It goes crazy. They tack on $140 billion of treasuries in the last four and a half years. They're now, I think it's like, I don't know. It's crazy. They're so far up and they're gobbling up of treasuries. It's well past almost every nation state in the world, which is typically who you would think you would sell your debt to. Now we're selling it to little tech firms.

And so if we don't allow Bitcoin to become something that billions of people can hold, we are going to see people get forced onto these systems where they are centralized. They do have blacklist capabilities. The CIA, the Secret Service, private versions of the CIA, like Chain Analysis, which was funded by In-Q-Tel, which is the CIA's venture capital firm, are all onboarded onto Tether's system. So they can seize and surveil,these private issued government backed stable dollar stable coins that are on public blockchains.

It's the worst of all worlds for us. It is the CBDC. We are all so afraid of CBDC is coming from the government. Because why? Because we're afraid of programmability, surveillability and seizability. Well, guess the fuck what? Right? It's that but worse because it's private entities. They don't have constitutional protection saying you can't do this to a person. They're private companies. They can do whatever they want. No shoes, no shirt, no service. They can do whatever they want.

So I think that there's this sort of sly roundabout way that they've created this Bitcoin dollar system where if we don't push Bitcoin to allow it to be something that can service billions of people, who does it actually service and who does it empower to bring this back to the top of the conversation? It empowers the U.S. empire. And it has now become a way for us to service our, the hour, meaning the U S government, not that I really identify as a U S government member, but Hey, the U S government is allowed to service their debt by the stable coins, buying up, um, all of these treasuries.

So if Bitcoin goes to be a hundred trillion dollar market, and then we have 10% of that 20% of that, um, being met in treasury demand from stable coin providers, because that's how you make it liquid. That's how you, transact with Bitcoin. There we go. We've got $20 trillion. We've basically solved our debt crisis by selling it to this one tech firm. Then you go to look at the tech firm, perfect transition into PayPal. Then you get to look into the tether firm and you look at these people and they have incredible connections to the incoming Trump administration and the PayPal mafia.

So yeah, I'll pause there.

Well, no, I mean, that's pretty much where we're going to go next at this point. But so, what's interesting is, so, I think the background of Tether is connected to this very conversation. I was kind of just going to get into briefly about, what is you think is kind of the background of Tether? Because I don't believe that this is some, like, same with like the Bitcoin point. Like, I believe there's more going on around these things than just a company that starts up to try to make some money.

And so, I think in this case, like you mentioned, Dr. John Nash, going back to the, what, the 50s and 60s, it looks like, and the conversation of that through, like you said, like, game theory and, like, the conversation throughout using, I guess, as he frames it, this bad money versus, like, even, like, an interesting reference to, like, the Kensian conversation, like, this, like, Malthusian mindset. It's very interesting. You guys could read through that, but we'll get, this will be a five-hour interview if we go through all this.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. To start with the PayPal point, I'll just briefly lay it out so that explain, how PayPal in your research is connected to Bitcoin, , BTC, and how Tether plays a role in that, ties to Peter Thiel and the current Trump administration. So it's a great thread. I'll include in the show notes, by the way.

Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, I think, yeah, the John Nash is its own podcast on its own. And I think it's extremely interesting. And just to leave a breadcrumb for everybody. He's a little bit of a difficult person sometimes. But there's an incredible writer who I think is one of the best economists and writers and thinkers in the Bitcoin space. He goes by Jal, his handle is soaker underscore patoshi. And he has basically written out this sort of, he's really set the standard for the Nashian view of Satoshi.

Whether or not he is John Nash is sort of irrelevant. And I think he would say that himself. But he really establishes where all of these points that Bitcoin draws from really can draw back down to Nash. Um, and his work with the Rand corporation and the NSA, um, and his work at Princeton. So I highly recommend checking out his stuff. Um, and then just read Nash. I think Nash is one of the most, it's scary to read game theory and mathematical stuff because you think it's going to be really difficult. He's so smart that he, you're able to read it and it's very accessible. So I highly recommend checking that out. There's some links obviously in this thread.

They have just under a trillion in debt. So, already, Tether, this tiny firm with about 50 employees, holds over a tenth of the share of the largest nation-state that holds our debt. Howard Lutnick, the incoming commerce secretary, owns a percentage of Tether. We're seeing the possibility that Bitcoin is not only a Trojan horse for the new petrodollar system, but that we create this Bitcoin dollar system where, instead of forcing people to buy dollars to buy oil, we force them to buy dollars to use Bitcoin.

I've always been very well not always but since looking at a lot of the stuff last few years I've been very wary of Peter Thiel and the PayPal mafia, but I hadn't really looked into early PayPal history. And I read this book. I actually have it right here. I will show this guy Eric Jackson. He was an early marketing employee at PayPal, and he wrote this book called The PayPal Wars. That's a book that just explains kind of the foundation of the formation of PayPal.

And in it, he talks about this meeting that he had as soon as he got hired. And Teal calls the group together. There's like 20 of them at that point. And he calls the group together and he explains why PayPal, like what PayPal is going to do. And what he says is that we're going to establish this new world currency. And the way we're going to do it is we are going to allow people across the world using the internet and the digitalization of the dollar to give citizens of the world of other nation states, the ability to opt out of their national local currency, which is, hyperinflating or having all of these issues, debanking issues, we'll allow them with an internet connection to have access to the US dollar system.

And we're going to give, it's going to be this altruistic, amazing thing where we're going to, for the first time ever, give the citizens of the world financial freedom. By using a centralized US dollar, right? I mean, it's totally insane when you really think about it. But there was this idea of, hey, this is an altruistic thing we're doing. And yeah, we're going to make a shit ton of money. But really, we're here to save the world from fiat currency, which is so bad and is waging hell on all of these people. Well, the dollar is fiat, obviously. And PayPal is the centralized system where they can seize your funds and when you peel back a little bit more the foundation of PayPal max legend did this very illuminating talk with Charlie Rose recess when I was making PayPal I worked with every three and four letter agency and they were some of the most fruitful business partnerships I ever had.

So, um, really started digging into early PayPal, but immediately from that meeting that is talked about in this Eric Jackson book, I realized how similar that was actually to the, uh, proposition of Tether. And this is something that the stable coin issuers say that they're like, Hey, any of your criticisms about Tether or just your financial privilege showing. And people around the world want dollars because it's the best currency. And you're in Argentina and you're going to tell an Argentine that they don't want to have dollars because the U.S. empire is bad or blah blah blah.

Like, how dare you? It's kind of the same argument. this idea that dollarizing the world is like an altruistic good because we're allowing people to be onboarded to U.S. banking systems and use the dollar. Well, I reject that premise entirely. I don't think it's unbanking the bank. I think you're charging the citizens of the world a fee to use your bank account that you just onboarded the CIA and the NSA and the Secret Service and chain analysis on, and you can seize their money at any point.

Um, and it's not like the dollar isn't debasing rapidly too. So what are we talking about here? So I noticed this really crazy parallel between early PayPal and this idea of creating a new world currency and got this great hit from this great hint from Stavrola to look at this. Um, so I did, and I dug more into the founders of Tether, specifically this guy, Brock Pierce.

Who's kind of this infamous figure who, um, he has a really dirty history. Uh, he was connected with, he was the youngest member of, um, this group of three guys that started the digital entertainment network, which you guys might've heard. I believe there was a pretty famous documentary about it. Um, like the secret or the open secret or something that about, about kind of Hollywood pedophilia and abuse cases and so these three guys, this older gentleman, Mark Collins Rector, his basically groomed boyfriend, Chad Shackley, and then Brock Pierce, who was this former Disney star, he was in Mighty Ducks 2.

The first kid or whatever was Sinbad and some of these early Disney movies he like moved into this mansion with them and they started this early streaming website. Before there was broadband in any of these things invested in by Microsoft, it was an Enron connection, all of these kind of strange weird connections but. The older two gentlemen ended up getting arrested for, um, abuse and huge stashes of child porn and a lot of things. And Brock was, was implicated in some of it as well. He managed to sort of escape the stink of that.

When he was basically under house arrest, he got really into online gaming, particularly EverQuest and World of Warcraft. He ended up starting a new company called Internet Gaming Exchange (IGX), which was the first well-known and successful digital assets market, where he was selling gold from World of Warcraft and EverQuest for real money, goods, and items.

So him and his crew basically created this ability to farm, get people to work for them and play hours into this game, kind of like Bitcoin mining, and have these people mining and mining gold in Warcraft and establishing these huge amounts of in-game currency and then selling it for real dollars. So what happens is he's really young when he establishes this, Steve Bannon of Goldman comes in and buys up the company and becomes the CEO of the company and becomes Brock's right-hand man basically and they established this kind of empire in the digital assets space.

Interestingly enough, he becomes the largest merchant on PayPal for three years. And while working there, he's on the PayPal advisory board and he actually gets PayPal to develop. Um, so this is early two thousands. He gets them to develop right after they went public, they sold to eBay in 2004. So around like 2000 to 2004, this is that era. And he gets them in those three years to develop what's called project IGE, which ends up being their credit card processing system. So he's heavily connected with.

PayPal, again, their largest merchant for three years. So they know damn well what's going on. The Goldman is in there, which Goldman is a heavily associated intelligence, speculation firm. And obviously, Bannon has huge connections to Trump administration and Cambridge Analytica and through Facebook and a lot of other things. But he establishes this like, kind of chokehold on the digital asset space and becomes really connected with PayPal, ends up starting in a digital gaming venture firm called Clearstone Gaming.

Clearstone is actually a spinoff of an incubator in California called Idealabs that was started by Bill Gross and this guy, Bill Elkis, who were the first institutional investors in PayPal. Interestingly enough, Bill Elkis was also a trustee of the Jay Epstein Foundation. But again, that's a conversation for another time. Brock Pierce ends up becoming this really important player in the digital asset space before Bitcoin happens.

As the years go, Bitcoin happens, and he happens to be one of the first Bitcoin evangelists and happens to be someone who gets connected to Bitcoin before it has a price even, basically, in the 2010, 2011. At the same time, he's going to the Mind conference with Epstein and is connected to a lot of these currency speculators, which Teal was. The real first investor of PayPal was Teal himself from Teal Capital taking, I think it was like $100,000 from his currency speculating that he was doing at Stanford.

Stanford, of course, was one of the members of this MDDS group, which was where the CIA and the NSA and DARPA were funding. they funded Page and Brin to start Google. And so Stanford was a part of this group. So, all of this stuff is kind of kicking off and the digital asset space is really popping off. And Brock comes out basically as one of the early Bitcoin evangelists and very quickly on comes up with this idea for creating other assets to exist on Bitcoin.

Um, so he does this thing called master coin, which ends up developing into tether, um, and him and a couple other guys. One of the guys, um, is Craig Sellers, who was sort of the CTO, the technician. Um, I generally think he's a pretty cool guy. I think he's okay. I like his takes. He seems to sort of understand the stakes here. But some of the other guys in there, William Quigley, who is connected with Clearstone and some others, not so great.

And they ended up establishing Tether. So kind of even before Bitcoin is really monetized at all, the first real pump of Bitcoin where it really kind of got monetized and people paid attention was in the 2013-2014, which is right when Tether comes out. And they established the first dollar stablecoin. And it actually literally runs on Bitcoin at first. It runs on this thing called the OmniLayer.

So within the blocks, there was such a little transactional output on Bitcoin, because no, there was, 10,000 people using it, that they were able to put other assets, within the ledger, basically of Bitcoin, they could store other assets in there, you can still do that. But it's harder, because there's a lot more competition for block space. But at the time, they were able to basically bootstrap a digital dollar, right on Bitcoin itself.

And this is a company that Brock Pierce starts. Again, I think Tether was another one of those. It's an infamously hated business where it is routinely made fun of for not having audits, routinely being referred to as money for human traffickers and launderers. It's Chinese real estate paper. they've never passed a formal audit in the Wall Street Journal. Just New York, just everybody is always sort of attacking Tether for saying that they're not legitimate and they're going to pop at any moment.

Once they do, Bitcoin is going to collapse. And they've been supporting Bitcoin because every time Bitcoin goes down, they print, a couple million dollars of tether and pump the price of bitcoin back up and that's been this gambit for, a decade now, right? That is going to implode once it does, Bitcoin implodes. What actually happened? The largest primary dealer for the New York Fed Cantor Fitzgerald, which was started, uh, actually not started, but the most important person in the company's history, who's run the company essentially the entire time.

Howard Lutnick, the incoming commerce secretary, uh, runs this, this primary dealer Cantor Fitzgerald. They're the largest trader of US debt in the world. Uh, well in the U S anyway. Um, and, uh, it turns out that. They're holding all of the paper behind tether and not only are they in the most legit place custody that they could in the entire world he owns a stake of the business and now they're coming in with this amazing opportunity to basically get.

Any legal action that had been taken against them or they can be basically read on the side, into the regulatory arm of the United States, due to this political coziness with the incoming trend. So they painted this incredible picture that tether was this incredibly fraudulent operation. But now they're crucial and critical to the survival of the US debt system.

It's a similar. Similar the way the devil did quite right where they are up until the moment it was clear was gonna become the thing it was being we're all being told by those same people that it was a bubble that wasn't real and it's the same dynamic that's that's important exactly and so when you see these things happen in parallel.

And you see that literally PayPal wanted to create a new world currency. They come out and say, Bitcoin survived or successfully created a new world currency where we failed. That's a quote from David Sachs. Guess what? He's the incoming AI and crypto czar for Donald Trump. He was the first product manager or yeah, I think product manager of PayPal, COO, excuse me. Yeah, so, he's now one of the most important people theoretically in the government for setting the policy here. For both crypto and artificial intelligence, by the way. Exactly. Exactly.

And so there's a lot to get into with the chain series. And again, that's a whole other chestnut. And we don't have time for that. But you look at that, that there was this, this sleight of hand, this misdirection of Bitcoin specifically, and then of tether of this, Trump is coming out there being like, you will never get a CBDC under me and all the little seals are clapping in the front row being like, yeah, hell yeah. But what is he doing? He's pushing private bank issued stable coins, which, again, we've already covered are just as programmable, surveillable, feasible, and actually worse than if it was directly a government, arguably because constitutional protections don't exist.

So we're seeing this total PayPal mafia takeover of the incoming government. And there's this weird sort of dynamic where. the US intelligence community basically went into Silicon Valley and established the internet, established PayPal, Facebook, Google. Now they're coming back to roost, to Pennsylvania Avenue. And these people have billions, if not trillions of dollars of reasons to promote Bitcoin and Tether.

Or what I think is really going to happen with stable coins is PayPal just released their own stable coin that was issued by this issuer, Paxos. It's a very interesting company. Um, but they're, they're going to do their own stable coin. So what I think is going to happen is. We're going to see banks, um, and these FinTech firms, but really banks adopt stable coins as the underlying, um, currency of their, uh, their whole financial system, internally. So we're going to see Bank of America and Wells Fargo and JP Morgan.

All of these banks have cryptocurrency plays here, right? They're all doing their own little private things, whether it's a fork of Ethereum or whatever, but all these banks are going to issue stable coins. We're going to see all these private banks come in and do stable coins. I think ultimately Tether probably won't be the biggest one, but they certainly set the standard and quite literally tethered Bitcoin to the US dollar system and perhaps fatally so, not that Bitcoin will collapse, quite the opposite, but probably prevented in a lot of ways.

A lot of the social capital and just literal capital is now going into developing Bitcoin-based stablecoins and how do we get dollar instruments on Bitcoin. And that's sort of just seen as the way to scale Bitcoin rather than scaling Bitcoin itself. So if they're successful in that operation, basically, then I think the US has found a way to pay off their debt, a way to create a CBDC in effect without creating a CBDC and dealing with that headache.

And find a way basically to extend hegemon while other countries scramble to buy up Bitcoin and infrastructure. To mine Bitcoin and have some sort of say in the validation of transactions on the network. So when I really look at it really zoomed out, I mean, I think the U.S. government played one of the best misdirections possible and are really set up to dominate, again, the most important sort of technical evolution that we certainly will see in our lifetime.

I think it's an important time, having just said that to sort of, well, does that mean we should just sell off our Bitcoin and say, fuck Bitcoin and become anti-Bitcoin activists? And I don't think that's the right answer either. Well, before we go there, though, before we go with the I mean, we did in a way start with the, it can still be used in good ways, but we can I'd like to end on the positive note, too.

But let's make sure we talk about I want before we go to the surveillance part of it, because I don't want to miss that. I think it's super important to where this, again, the point we're making today in general is that I think it's clear that what you just laid out, it's a very valid question to ask whether or not this was started as a government operation. I mean, it's kind of hard to not see how clearly you just put that together with Tether, with PayPal and the PayPal mafia and the current administration.

And I would like you to show me how Teal falls in with that and how that connects currently with what's going on and what they're rolling out. And even with like the technocracy direction, but I think what's interesting is to see that even though that is kind of clearly the case, it is still as you've made many arguments for something that can still be used potentially to push back on what they're doing.

And I think that is a lot of the ways they're trying to set this up. So that becomes. Impossible. At least that's how I'm reading the way this goes forward. So, so go ahead and tell me about Teal's connection to all of that and how Palantir, which was a, essentially a CIA cutout is kind of worked its way into that conversation. That becomes kind of the AI connection to all of it. And let's, end on that. How is this potentially going to be used if, worst case scenario with the way that the Trump administration, or really in my opinion, for those paying attention, or maybe new to the platform, whatever puppet president was doing this, it's not sure. But what they might do with that worst case scenario for surveillance, for tracking, carbon tracking, artificial intelligence kind of dynamics. Walk me through that. Sure.

So I think there's two important things there. One with the AI, which I think is really interesting, is that Bitcoin is arguably the first financial system ever created that you do not need to be human to use. You can have self-driving cars that have a Bitcoin wallet that you use your app and you order an Uber and the self-driving car, probably a Tesla, comes to your front doors and you get in the car and you pay them Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general, but Bitcoin started it.

And you pay them bitcoin in the car itself has a wallet and it drives you to its place and then when it drops you off if it needs gas or charging it can go to a place and pay. I'm directly it's a self-contained agent it doesn't need a third party you could actually have a car basically that's a corporation on its own rather than a fleet or whatever so from the standpoint we basically. Given them being AI, a financial system that they can use.

So you could theoretically have an AI that puts out an ad on Craigslist that pays a developer in Bitcoin to make it better or develop more things for it. Can't even begin to talk about the, how my, there's 150,000 different directions that could go in right now. It's terrifying. Go ahead. Absolutely. But, but I don't, I don't necessarily think that's like the, the main fear of Bitcoin, right? Like I think theoretically they could find ways to do that anyway, but it isn't exactly, it isn't interesting.

Like, as you pointed out, it's interesting that David Sachs is the crypto and AI czar. It's intriguing that they're combining these two fields, but really, if you look at the two pillars of the incoming technocracy, they are AI and digital currency/cryptocurrency. I think one of the things that triangulates these two pillars is digital ID. If you look at Teal's involvement with a lot of this...

Palantir really is a very advanced AI system that is fed the best data sources possible. And who created the first digital ID? Facebook. It really was. It was essentially a sly, roundabout Trojan horse method for creating our own digital identity system. We created a profile, uploaded our picture, tagged the squares on the faces to train the LLMs, added the things we liked, tagged where we were, and essentially built the monster ourselves.

Teal was obviously introduced to Zuckerberg, I believe, through Ron Conway, who is kind of the handler of Sean Parker, the Napster creator and a big part of the file-sharing revolution. I've written a decent amount about that, considering whether file sharing might have also been a way to create bandwidth on the internet to launder our surveillance. If there’s a microphone in our computer recording everything we do and uploading it, but we don’t have any peer-to-peer uploads on our system or routers, it would be very easy to see.

But if we're all downloading, uploading, and sharing streaming videos, with massive amounts of content being sent around, it becomes really hard to detect the data being sent from our devices. Perhaps the system was established to launder surveillance data through the pipes of the internet. That's kind of a separate conversation, but it's interesting to think about.

The first identity systems online were really Facebook. You could also argue Google with Gmail and some other services, and even PayPal to some extent. When you look at how you sign into websites, you can use your Gmail, your Facebook, or your PayPal to sign in on all of these different sites. This highlights the intersection between digital ID and surveillable financial systems and how we created that on the internet. Stanford University was certainly there at the beginning of all these things, alongside the Google guys.

Can you even go a little generation back the Sun Microsystems guys that really built Eric Schmidt came out of Sun Microsystems but Sun Microsystems was, they took the counter path to Microsoft. Microsoft is personal computing Sun was networks they were like it's all gonna be a networks are never gonna process anything on your own computer it's all about network switching so we're gonna go build up the modern internet.

And then they did and Andy Beckelstein I think is his name who was the founder of Sun Sun stands for Stanford University. I forget what the N is, but the Sun in Microsystems is from Stanford University because it was from a research project that was created on campus and he was the first person to fund the Google boys. So Teal is kind of doing all this stuff. Add Stanford and is pulling all the best and brightest David Sax wrote for the standard review for him and all that so he creates PayPal and then.

What they find is that the main thing that you have to deal with when doing digital currency. Is all the fraud it's just an incredible amount of fraud so human max legend who is the founding CTO. And in my mind a very possible Satoshi candidate he's a very big cryptographer who spent his entire time at college in Illinois working on distributed. Networks and literally there's a quote that you pulled up earlier of.

Teal going to the beach in Angola basically saying I met Satoshi there and well at that conference legend did a talk where he showed the math of creating an open transparent financial system and that the way to do digital cash isn't transparent or sorry isn't anonymous it's transparent and then that was kind of what they did with with PayPal.

They are creating all these anti-fraud algorithms, like the CAPTCHA you use to get on websites. This really came out of PayPal in a lot of ways and was popularized by PayPal in 2004. They realized they had something really big there. They created an anti-fraud algorithm named Igor, after a Russian antagonist who kept taunting PayPal and stealing money.

And so they created this like whole system to keep one upping him. And eventually they did. And they built this really incredible anti-fraud system. So in 2004, they basically, Teal was like, Hey, why don't we use this system to like go track down terrorists? And so he privatized basically this DARPA cutout, uh, total information awareness. Yeah, sure.

I think that's actually what you think that was just, he's like, Hey, let's start a business. Or do you think you actually think this was more of a, CIA facilitated direction. Of course, of course, of course, of course. Don't know. I don't know what your research shows, because I just I mean, it certainly could be that he just thought of it. And then he got co-opted by the CIA. But do you think it was?

No, I think it was very direct. Whitney Webb has written a lot about this, about a person named Point Dexter, who essentially came to them and said, "Hey, we've been working on this stuff, we call it Total Information Awareness (TIA), and then we changed it to Terrorist Information Awareness to align with the post-September 11th narrative." The idea was to build the surveillance state but frame it as being about terrorists, so the public and national security groups would support it. And it worked really well.

And so I think there's basically this privatized version of this otherwise shuttered DARPA project, I think there's a lot of evidence of the paper trail that really connects directly there. Whitney also wrote this amazing article about the military origins of Facebook that's kind of the same thing that there was the start of a project called life log that shuttered the same day Facebook started. Both of the universities that these companies came out of were connected as part of this MDDS system that I'm releasing a piece on tomorrow.

But regardless, yes, I do think it was directly from the CIA. Their first clients were the CIA for a really long time. It was mainly CIA-driven. And so to basically created this, can I take on basically in the private sector at the whim of the US intelligence community that now had basically a digital federal reserve with PayPal behind it, a big part of intelligence.

Um, and certainly why a lot of intelligence went out into the private sector is because funding is really hard to come by, um, when you're doing black book operations. Um, so that's why you see a lot of drug running and gun running. Um, because, that's a really easy way to get cash that's off the books. Bitcoin really fills that role in a very interesting way and digital currency fills that role in a really interesting way where you can pay people. Just like it's cool that like I could pay you right now and no one could stop us and that's sweet and you could go pay it locally with something and there's literally no one that could stop you.

An intelligence broker could buy a cache of data on something like Etsy, such as information on people who are making purchases. They would then have a whole set of users and could feed it into an AI or whatever. Bitcoin works in a similar way, acting as a black book currency. But ironically, Bitcoin is a transparency technology. There is no encryption in Bitcoin. Everything is open. You can see every transaction on the blockchain forever. Every single transaction ever made on Bitcoin is stored, and I have a copy on my node right over there—every single one.

So I think there's a great use case for… Let me say one more thing. I have every transaction on a node over there on a hard drive, but it's useless to me because I don't have, uh, intelligence level analysis capabilities of being able to triangulate using other data of IP addresses and other things people posting on social media being like, "I bought bitcoin today," and then you go and you look at when and then you say okay, they got this much and so when combined good when this transparency technology is combined with a program like Palantir, every single transaction that gets made on Bitcoin, 99.999% is able to be parsed by these chain analysis companies.

In-Q-Tel, which was a funder of Palantir, also funded Chainalysis, a data analytics firm for blockchains. If you don't have nation-state-level analytics of the blockchain, it doesn't necessarily mean much. I can't really do anything with the blockchain on my own. I can look at some things through a block explorer and check things like Ukraine donations from FTX, but I need to understand a lot about the data provided by other sources. There's no way for me to really triangulate who initially sent it or all of the related details.

But a group like Palantir and a group like this government intelligence chain analysis, they really can do a lot of damage with Bitcoin at the ISP level. So Bitcoin being a transparency technology, when combined with AI that can parse all of this stuff, and when combined with data brokers like Palantir that have huge caches of information on not just American citizens, but the world, your privacy is nil to none on Bitcoin.

There obviously are a lot of people working on stuff. There are ways to scale in layers that can be more private. You can use e-cashments. There's a couple of interesting things. Generally, as Brian McNeely from Sun Microsystems once infamously said, "get over it. Nothing's private on the Internet." And he's kind of right. And it's a scary position when we go to see that, oh, actually, digital ID and their future financial system is going to be entirely online. It's very scary.

So even if it's not a CVDC and the system actually does play out, as I've outlined with the Bitcoin and stable coins, It's one of the most transparent financial systems that could exist. It is way worse than cash. And they're pushing cash away at the same time as adopting these private issued tokens on public blockchain. So I think it's really important for Bitcoiners to just like, or anybody really, if you understand this change is coming, Bitcoin will probably monetize like crazy if the U.S. government wants to pay off their debt with it. It will have to appreciate immensely. I'm not, this is I'm not a financial advisor like I don't think, do whatever you make your decisions for yourself.

But there's a great possibility that Bitcoin could appreciate immensely, but it doesn't necessarily bring a lot of freedom to the world. It may bring a lot of freedom to the U.S. empire and extend their economic hegemony, which might not be good for me, you, or some other people. So it's important to understand the risks of Bitcoin, including that it's not private. There are many ways it can empower the state and the surveillance apparatus, paying Black Book operators, AI agents, and privatized intelligence data brokers. In effect, it could make our entire financial system a buffet, serving our data on a silver platter to them.

Yeah, I mean, it really, it's, you answered a very big question for me right there that I was kind of going to get to after you explained all this, which is ultimately the concern about the privacy aspect. And, my point has been, and now you've evolved my understanding of this is, that yes, it's transparent. And that is, that's actually one of the reasons the system works the way it does, but it is private when it comes to who is making the transaction because of the cryptographic address and whether that's able to be circumvented with something we currently have.

I think the argument is basically no, but what you highlighted, is that when you intertwine these things, which it seems you laid out very well, that that was almost the way it was designed to be, the intersection with, , also Tether, but with Palantir and artificial intelligence, that they can use outside sources. What I'm doing online, what I posted about, and of course, if I stupidly post my, this is my new address, which I've done, but because I want it to be public, right? That connects it with your name online, but they could use this to find out that information.

Now, that’s just an early step toward privacy. But as you’re highlighting, the way these systems continue to intertwine is striking. You’ve highlighted the most obvious example, the one that makes the most sense to our minds right now. But as I’m sure you’ve explored in other work, this can expand into areas like artificial intelligence, carbon tracking, and the horrifying overlap with what you just outlined. We’re watching the administration, whether they know it or not, pretend to fight the very thing they seem to be rolling out, which appears to be a common tactic at this point.

All of this becomes very clear back to the kind of the point we started at that I think it's very obvious that this is being used against us and you have really opened my mind to a few different points that make that even more clear right now of even the one thing some of the things I thought maybe were positives but at the same time the real positives still seem to exist, whether you want it with Bitcoin or Monero, that these things still seem to have a way to eventually circumvent this, maybe even right now.

So I just think this is such a fascinating conversation. And really some of the stuff you went through today, I think a lot of people are going to benefit from the way you laid it out to understand the timing of it, like the very clear track of how this came together. And whether you want to think that it was designed that way, or like I said, with teal or not, or ultimately just used after the fact, it is still ending up in the same position.

And so I think what you're… coverage today is going to help a lot of people and I really hope people continue to check out what you've done so far and I think we should do another follow-up to this if you'd be down in like a couple of weeks or more because I think there's so many more ways we could get into how this may be used and how it goes forward but let's just go ahead put a pin it there for now because I think the real picture here is the way that this is going to go forward and then I think we should be standing up in droves to try to fight to maintain I mean I know we all have different opinions on how it should be but I think collectively the community still has a generalized idea that this is not supposed to be pro-government, pro-US dollar outside of those that just want to make money off of it.

So I say we lean into that and try to find ways to use what you're presenting to push back. So thank you for being here today, brother. And anything else you want to lay out, last notes or upcoming events or anything you want to discuss before we leave today?

Yeah, well, thank you so much. It was a lot of fun. To leave on a positive note, I do think this is still a game, and it’s still an active thing. A lot of people, including Vanina Moose, who wrote The Bitcoin Standard, have said that what you're doing is preventing people from getting involved with Bitcoin, which is really the only thing that can save them. It wasn't an attack—just a critique—but the point remains.

And I think that that's wrong. I don't think anything is a silver bullet here.

There's a lot of things that can save us, depending on what we're looking at to be saved in. And I think, again, it's exit, build, and find a life that is really fun for you and really fulfilling. And I would not literally be here talking to you or in my life or where I am if the Dread Pirate Robert 2.0, the Silk Road guy, didn't come into that bar and explain Bitcoin to me. And it's opened my world and my mind in a whole ton of ways.

I've learned so much about financial, economic, and monetary things, about myself. I personally was at the time working in bars, I had a lot of substance issues and a lot of things. And I finally found something that I wanted to put my money and time into that wasn't just partying. And, there was a lot of really good things that happened to me because of my exposure to Bitcoin, including being able to say, see you later when I came up against some issues with my former employer. I can have a beautiful life and a beautiful family and I'm very excited about that.

I think the Bitcoin game should not be ignored. It should really be considered—just do it safely and correctly. Understand that everything is a tool, and money is one of the biggest tools that can be used to control or empower and free people. I feel very empowered and free because of Bitcoin.

And I understand that that's not going to be the case for everybody moving forward. The next eight billion people that probably won't be true for. So I think that it is my responsibility as someone that was able to take advantage of this sea change to warn and hopefully push this game towards a direction where I can leave it as permissionless and as empowering as it was when I found it.

So I think that, there's a lot of pushback now, especially, I think, since, a lot of independent media people have been kind of pushing back on the Bitcoin narrative since Trump pushed it back, that it's like, hey, it's this terrible thing, ignore it. I think it can be a Trojan horse and all of these things, and also still be something that's really important to consider.

Because you can use Bitcoin as a way to exit the system, even though it is now becoming the new system. So it's just an important axiom to consider, and I hope people do. And yeah, Ryan, thanks so much for having me. It was an absolute blast.

Yeah, thanks, brother. I think that’s a great way to end it. It's like cash, for example, which is clearly a tool, or any other element like that. You can still use it to find ways to free yourself from it, as you eloquently put. I think that’s something we should always consider, as you've pointed out.

And I will end with a point that I think is important here, guys. As Mark's laid out, as Whitney's laid out, as plenty of other people have pointed out, whether with total information awareness or Palantir, it seems to be a pretty obvious common game right now for them to transition some... I mean, it seems to be consistently a DARPA project, but a government project, into something that is now, public face, totally not the same thing.

In this case, literally, xAI, explainable AI from DARPA ending in 2021, Musk buys Twitter in 2022. Months later, names, I guess, right out of the gate, calls it X, like x.com, then starts XAI, a totally new artificial intelligence program. And if you, if you read into this, it is exactly the same program. This overlaps with terrifying things of using social media to train it, using conversations like digital twins.

And by the way, something we should talk about next time we talk, you. But I think the point here, guys, is to see how this is clearly this game. I might question everything, including that I could be wrong, but I'm just, like Mark is saying, just ask whether you think some of these people are unwittingly rolling you out into something that may not be in your best interest, or maybe even that they know that.

When you see Thiel and Karp and the rest of them actively involved on either side of whoever won the election, now you have a Zionist technocrat-packed administration all rolling out all the things that we, 30 seconds ago, were telling the world were the problem. and just ask yourself whether you are being, it's a shell game or, whatever, whatever you want to call it that you're being played.

So thank you, Mark, for really laying out some fantastic information today, and I'm looking forward to talking with you again.

To your same, Ryan. Thanks.

And as always, everybody out there, question everything. Come to your own conclusions. Stay vigilant.

Sheryl

Feb 21

https://needtoknow.news/2025/02/must-read-trump-administrations-digital-control-grid-coming-together-at-high-speed/

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1 reply by Etienne de la Boetie2

Tom Karnes

Jan 29

The king of Saudi Arabia and his finance minister were vehemently opposed to the 400% spike in oil prices and both wound up dead, that was the protection racket on offer and when I posted that on PentagonTube last year, I was banned from posting comments unless I acknowledged "Hate Speach" rules, and that's when you know you are over the target

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Mark Goodwin Interview - Was Bitcoin A Government Operation & Can It Still Be Used To Fight Back?

Ryan Cristian Interviews Mark Goodwin on Bitcoin, its integration into Tether and other private stablecoins (Potential private "CBDCs"?), its connection to the PayPal Mafia, and its potential for good

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