The Epstein Files: What They Reveal About Bitcoin & The Dollar System | Mark Goodwin

Don't lose focus. Where is Bitcoin going? Who is it going to benefit? Is this actually going to unlock this freedom, the greatest change of the global order, maybe ever, and maybe the final one? Or will it sort of unlock and enable, you know, the same networks that were running the dollar system to have a really neat way to get out of their debt problem and, you know, kick the can down the road? It was designed to kind of have this disinflationary asymptotic approach to zero issuance. That has not been co-opted. That will not be co-opted. And because of that, Bitcoin will win, but it might not win carrying along the carriage behind it of peer-to-peer-on-sensurable cash. If there was something that was co-opted, it's the Bitcoin culture. It's the people. It's the community. It's the discourse. If we're not ready to onboard billions of people onto Bitcoin and give them sovereignty, a permissionless network like it was when we found it years ago. If we can't give that to our kids, then we failed, even though we're going to be multi-millionaires. Let's go. Mark Goodwin, what a terrible time to be a conspiracy theory denier. Holy shit. Yeah. Yeah. The only one who's down more. If you wanted to go in the last week. Yeah. The people that are down more than the Bitcoin holders right now are the conspiracy short sellers. Yeah, it's been interesting. It's been fun. Twitter's on fire. We're in the fog of war, the eye of the storm, whatever crappy metaphor you want to use. But yeah, files are some of them are out. There's some people that are now having to accept the reality that they've denied for years. You know, here we are. Bitcoin gets wrapped all up in it. So very, very fun for folks like me who've been sort of yelling for a while about this stuff. And obviously, many times spoken on this show with you, with Peter, about a lot of this stuff. So, yeah. Waky, waky. Welcome. I hope you had a nice nap. Welcome back. I mean, I feel like you're an apology from some people over this. Is it like you said, you've been banging this drum for so long. I do want to get into the Bitcoin and Epstein stuff a little bit later. But can we start on just the Epstein files like more broadly? Because I know you've been paying a lot of attention to this. It's been impossible to not see this on Twitter for the last couple of weeks. But I don't even know where to start because there's just so much in this. Like, where do you think we should start with this? Well, I think just, you know, zooming out quite a bit and just looking at, you know, what is the real Epstein story? You know, for starters, anybody that says they know the whole Epstein story is full of it because there's just so much we don't know. And from what we do now, there's so many tangential connections. And the web of it is just very insane. No pun intended, of course, with Whitney Webb's wonderful book that sort of broke down, you know, all of this years ago about as thoroughly as one could. So I highly recommend checking out her work both online and one nation under blackmail for the real story. I'm not an Epstein expert. I just work with one who's like the premiere. So I get a lot of, you know, osmosis, you know, thinking about Epstein. But I think the main thing for me that I think people miss with the Epstein story is, yeah, there was sex, blackmail and illegal, you know, trafficking and prostitution and a whole bunch of disgusting stuff with real victims and real people and it's, it's so sensational that it's hard sometimes to remember that there were real people involved, not just the bad people, but the people that, you know, were hurt. And it's a really sensational story. And I think by design, the story has always sort of focused on the sensationalism of it. You know, he's got this crazy island and they're doing a cult rituals and, you know, using code words and eating jerky and pizza and all this insanity. And I think there's a ton of truth to that stuff and it's really disturbing. But to me, I think the story and maybe it's just because of where my interest lie, but, you know, the technology angle, the science angle and the financial angle of the Epstein case are just severely under investigated, especially the financial angle. So that's where, you know, if I have any right to speak on this topic, you know, surely where the Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency networks, you know, combined with the Epstein network and why someone like Epstein would be interested in, you know, a technology like Bitcoin. You know, he, he, he's the money man of, you know, that network of that, you know, power nexus that obviously has pretty significant control, if not influence over American politics. And it seems to be a lot more than just that, but sort of this worldwide, you know, power structure that influences world governments. And, you know, you look into some of these emails, there's some really telling things and, you know, that relate to that. Like Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary, referring to Epstein as Mr. Money, you know, I mean, this is a guy that was running, you know, the, you know, the Treasury at the most important financial powerhouse in the world, sending an email to this, you know, guy with, you know, very few credentials in the, you know, academic sense. And he's emailing him, asking him questions and calling him Mr. Money, you know, I mean, it's like this guy was the money man for this currency speculation network. That sort of, you know, grew out of the mega group, Robert Maxwell, Golan Maxwell's dad, Jimmy Goldsmith. And then of course, Leslie Wexner, who is, you know, kind of the main financial beneficiary, a benefactor for Epstein was one of the main ways that he got the majority of his money. And Epstein was sort of the money guy for these, for these people. These people have billions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. And you know, they have to figure out a way to deal with the tax code to, you know, launder successfully to figure out how to hide illegal money, to wash illegal money, to put it in legitimate ventures. And Epstein was the guy. I mean, he was the guy for this network that understood the tax code better than everyone else, which is interesting as it relates to him talking about Bitcoin, a lot of his Bitcoin discussion was talking about tax code. And you can't say that. I, you know, try not to use coin when doing ICO stuff because, you know, it brings up a bunch of legal gray areas. And, yeah, yeah, but this guy, he was the money man for the people behind the control nexus. And you know, he was heavily involved in what developed in 2008 and 2007 with the financial crisis at Bear Stearns. And he had this, this firm, I believe it was called liquid holdings that was, that got liquidated. But they were one of the first people that was really working on these collateralized debt obligations and doing these synthetic mortgage plays that obviously developed and spiraled out of control, which led to the huge crash, which of course, again, Larry Summers was one of the main guys behind the deregulation, you know, in the glass legal era that led to, you know, this stuff being able to be, to be legal that people could split up these mortgages and play with them and take these huge risks. And this, you know, this new way, this new kind of evolution of the junk bond that Mike Milken kind of created, you know, a decade prior to decades prior, the modern iteration in the 2000s, you know, a lot of it was, let's play with mortgages, let's cut them up, let's create synthetic versions of these mortgages and speculate all over them and just blow it out into this big bubble. And then it popped and, you know, there's people in the network of Epstein were, you know, pretty responsible for a lot of what went down at the great financial crisis. And, you know, for the listeners, if you've listened to me on the show before, you know, I've talked a lot about how it is absolutely not an accident that Bitcoin came, you know, right when the US, you know, a monetary system needed a relief valve for the economic stimulus that came downstream of these great financial crisis. You know, obviously it's very convenient at the start of 2009 that, you know, this white paper comes out of nowhere and here we go. And then of course, what happened in COVID in 2020, you know, Bitcoin was, was ready right before the happening that brings it down to its relative issuance below the rate of gold below the target inflation rate of the dollar. That would be in May in 2020. So right before that, we see, you know, the going direct reset with BlackRock and Donald Trump kind of putting together this plan of how do we deal with this stimulus? How do we get it into the right hands and they created this whole plan, you know, months before there was any whisper of a virus. Again, very convenient place for Bitcoin to be ready waiting to take on that, you know, be the debt sink basically for that massive monetary stimulus. No, Epstein, you know, prior to 2020, obviously he's not around by then, but in 2008 he's right there. He's right in the smack of, you know, really everything that was going down in 2008. And very interestingly, you know, what these emails have shown is that he was speaking in 2009 to John Brockman, who was the co-founder of the, you know, the Mindshaft Conference in the Edge Foundation, which were these kind of like gatherings of scientific minds, you know, kind of the best of the best, you know, Epstein kind of collected smart people, whether they were, you know, doctors or scientists or, you know, money people themselves, like summers or like a Brock Pierce. And in 2009, he, you know, obviously after the network had launched, but I believe it was in August of '09, he sent an email to John Brockman saying, you know, it's time for a new financial, you know, system. It's time for a new alternative currency. This is what PayPal set out to do initially. You know, this was, this was what they set out to do in New World currency, which of course, again, listeners that listened in, that was kind of the finishing blow of the chain series that was, you know, hey, maybe Bitcoin and stablecoins are the final culmination of PayPal's quest to create a new world currency. And he was talking about it right then, you know, in 2009. Now again, let's just, we have to be very clear when we're talking about this stuff. He never specifically says he's talking about Bitcoin. You know, these are unencrypted emails. They're just, you know, he's probably shooting it off from his blackberry at the side of the pool, you know, doing sketchy shit. And, you know, you can, you can look at the way he types and, you know, they're very casual emails, but the implications are very, very big. So to me, like that was, that was kind of the one that blew my brain open where I was like, "Ah, like you just connected all of these tropes that I've been trying to connect." And I'd say I did, for the most part, but trying to connect, you know, how does the Epstein network combine with the PayPal network and culminating all together at the same time as the Bitcoin network is launching off, who really had the power, the technical chops, the economic chops, and the influence, the political influence, and the banking influence to pull something like this off. And it's that network to me. I don't think there's any other network that could, if we want to sort of, you know, let's moonlight the idea that it was just the shadowy coder in his basement, you know, just a single guy who did the Bitcoin white paper and the coding. You know, if we ignore that possibility, which is, of course, an absolutely valid possibility, again, if anyone's talking in absolutes here, they're full of shit. I mean, we just, we don't know. There's no evidence that the Bitcoin network came out of PayPal or the Epstein network, it's like there's actually no evidence that it came out of a single solitary guy writing code in a UK basement or a California basement or whatever. There's a lot of speculation, lots of good research that's been done trying to pin it down, but there just isn't and there never will be. And to me, you know, the fact that there never will be is also very telling, you know, we know the state that we're in, the surveillance state that we exist in and operate in. And if Bitcoin was this grand, you know, threat to this group's power that it was, I think we would know who Satoshi is or certainly they would know who Satoshi is. And Bitcoin would have been dealt with in a way that never would have allowed it to become a trillion dollar asset and be, you know, borderline too big to fail as it relates to like American consumers and, you know, the American citizenry. 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I think these emails give us kind of the closest glimpse into that, but we'll never know. We will never know where Bitcoin came from. Obviously what is infinitely more important is where it's going. That's always been the case. We have a lot to talk about here today, but I think that's the main point of why I was excited to come on while. So it's just always great to talk to you, Danny. The main thing I was really excited about to talk about now is just like don't lose focus. Where is it being pushed to? Is this actually going to unlock this freedom kind of utopia because we have sound money that can be used on the internet? Or will it sort of unlock and enable the same networks that we're running the dollar system to have a really neat way to get out of their debt problem and kick the can down the road 10 to 15 years, maybe 40 years. At a very important time when technology is really hitting this kind of parabolic breakthrough with autonomy, with AI, with robotics, just drone satellites, just internet architecture, kind of breaking into the world of the bits breaking into the world of atoms as it's sort of happening. Let's focus on that. Where is it going? So the question of was it Epstein? Was Satoshi Epstein? I think it's kind of a ridiculous question on its face because he very clearly wasn't a coder. Very clearly was in the emails buying books in 2018 that was like Bitcoin for dummies and this. I think a bit of that is sort of him being a curious guy and wanting to see what was, what is the Bitcoin for dummies? How do we reduce this for dummies? Let me check it out. But obviously he knew very much about it. I mean, he was reaching out to Gavin and Dreson in 2011 to ask about what was going on with Bitcoin at the time. Again, that email that John Brockman saying it's time for a viable alternative currency. His connections with Amir and Adam Beck. Amir Taki and Adam Beck. He claimed multiple times in multiple emails that he met with the founders of B. Bitcoin and you know, they're these kind of crazy guys that are willing to go to jail for it and I'm not And you know, so it's very clear pretty early on in the network cycle He was hip to Bitcoin and had a pretty good understanding of it You know, there's some pretty pretty interesting emails in there where he where he talks about this So the idea that he was there at the very very very beginning is unknown I don't think he has the technical chops who have created it But I do think he knew the people that did have the technical chops to create it and you know The chain series sort of concludes with this idea that you know the most likely People that would benefit from it and have the ability to create it would be the PayPal guys would be Peter Teal and Max Levchon specifically and we know how close they were with with Epstein specifically Teal And there's even emails with Peter Teal talking to Epstein about you know the coming anti-bic coin pressure in 2014 Which I think again everybody read it wrong everybody read that email being like look Epstein and Teal are here to take down Bitcoin like they're talking about the coming pressure It's like no they're sitting on their tower Looking at like oh, there's a new front developing in the in the Bitcoin space and here comes the legislators that don't know that it is this You know that is designed to beat the system and it'd become the new reserve currency a reserve asset really I think they're sort of like we're expecting it and waiting for it and then they saw it and they're sharing it with each other and Teal's like Oh, is this the start of what we thought was gonna happen which is like Actually the incumbent system pushing back on Bitcoin That's how I read it. I don't see how you could read it any other way I mean, I don't think the Epstein network or Teal. I mean PayPal was playing around with Bitcoin by then publicly Teal owned it a lot of those guys owned it You know, Belagie and Co were working on their mining you know their ASICs and a lot of the people in the Bitcoin network You know had intense connections to the PayPal network Max Levchin was an investor in that Belagie You know ASIC Project so no, I don't think he's Satoshi. I don't yeah No, I I've seen clearly not Satoshi and but I do think we should dispel some food here because I think there's a few things that are in the emails Like one saying he met the creates a Bitcoin. I think that could really be easier easily be explained by he maybe he met like a Mirtaki Gavin and Dreson or spokes Gavin and Dreson and put like chalk them up as the creates the Bitcoin which they clearly weren't Just like developers in the space early. I think in 2009 to 2010. That's kind of an understandable take but like the really interesting thing here is that there's Becoming this connection like especially on Twitter maybe people who are new at the Bitcoin who think that this is kind of an issue that Epstein was In Bitcoin very early maybe like had something to do with the developers back then, but really that doesn't matter Do you want to explain why? Well, it doesn't matter and it does matter. It does matter in the sense that it is very clear that this network was in on Bitcoin in the first epoch Which is the epoch that 50% of all Bitcoin were issued and that's something that the chain looked at as well You look at Charles Cascarilla of Paxos he talks about running a mining operation out of a failed bank in Manhattan where he got free electricity and he had enough GPUs and an early A6 where he was actually running You know, he had 25 over 25% of the hash rate of the network During the first epoch, right? You know, you look at when says Casar is who was incredibly involved in the in the PayPal network and You know formed Zapo he has a hot wallet that's linked to his name that he published online that had a million Bitcoin flow through it Right, so these guys were there at the beginning this idea that Bitcoin was this complete immaculate conception and there were not bankers or intelligence or Scummy people at the beginning is Ridiculous it they were they were there The difference though is that it was designed so that the issuance was not controlled by any of these people specifically unlike You know in a theorem or something like that where there's a pre-mine and the stuff is distributed You know, there's at least the idea the concept that this was distributed fairly And that's important I think for it to kind of get the Treatment from the market as it does as being kind of a commodity versus you know XRP that printed a hundred billion tokens and in the Genesis block if if it even is a Genesis block But you know what I mean? It's like they just printed it distributed yes, they locked half away But you know they were all created at the beginning Bitcoin isn't like that It's infinitely more like a commodity and you have to kind of put in work to get the bitcoins out But it is important that this network was there at the beginning because they probably hold a shit on a Bitcoin But they can't do anything with that Bitcoin they can't change the rules because they have a load of Bitcoin All right But also it shows that if this is going to become the new reserve asset of the world They might have 25% of the supply that we don't know about and what if it's like you know We're seeing consolidation within that network. It's not like these networks are perfect and there's not infighting within them you know Who knows where all that Bitcoin went and who knows who has control of Satoshi's wallets You know all we have is these little data points these little emails these little things the little bit of architecture that people have Have kind of designed to look at the blockchain and try to make guesses But like we don't really know and if this is going to be something that you know is a true social post away from becoming a 10 trillion dollar market cap Well, you know some of the worst people in the world might hold 10% 5% of the supply and we and we would have no idea So to say that that doesn't matter Is ludicrous in the sense that well we just made these guys some of the richest people in the world and If this is going to plan out or pan out the way that we as big pointers think it will Bitcoin will continue to appreciate immensely And of course have boom boss like we're seeing now at Bitcoin looks absolutely terrible right now But you know like like these guys have a lot of power I mean if this becomes the next reserve asset of the world like it of course it's important But does that mean that they control consensus moving forward? Like not at the protocol level. I mean, it's not a proof of stake system holding a bunch of Bitcoin does not mean you can Sensor the next person or restrict a transaction from going through or You know my favorite foot. I guess is you know this idea that they'll make more than 21 million It's like why would someone that controls that much of the asset want there to be more I mean it makes absolutely no sense And so but but yeah, I mean it of course matters You know if if if if gold that had a had a fair launch like that but had a limited supply and there was someone that held You know, let's say even 2% 5% of the of the supply You know, it's a big deal. I mean they can find ways to paperize it and not have to sell it They can find ways to financialize it and make You know make that work for them without actually moving the asset at all Which is one of the big things that worries me about where Bitcoin is going as this like treasury asset By the way, love your interview with sailor. I thought it was great. I really enjoyed it That was a fun one but and and I'm not you know I don't really care what happens to strategy, but I think the idea of like okay, so this network has X amount of the next reserve asset and it is going to continue to inflate like crazy And it's not going to be distributed necessarily It doesn't matter who is there at the beginning and now we have proof that this network Was there at the beginning? It just was maybe not before the white paper came out Maybe they weren't there. I think that's a good point that maybe they came in and saw it and went We were you know experimenting already with alternative currencies You know, that's something that's really important with this nexus that again I talked about quite a bit in the chain is the Steve Bannon Brock Pierce IGE company that you know goldman took a big share of that Brock Pierce started after he left the digital entertainment network It blew up in flames because of a sexual assault pedophilia scandal Um, and he was really into world of work craft and they developed a virtual good system Where they were you know finding value in these multi You know massive multiplayer online games like world of work craft and Literally mining gold in the game With these you know paying people minimum wage to or way less you know But paying people to to farm gold virtual gold in the game and then consolidating it and selling it on ebay For tons of money and then ebay started to shut them down paypal said you can't you know process your You know, we're not letting you process this money and they had to look for An alternative currency to sell the alternative currency, you know But these but this this network, you know It's not an accident, you know Pierce talks about this as which is noted in the chain that they were working with I missed to try out things in In online games because the you know the The outcome was was the game so it didn't have real world effects if they inflated the supply of a rare item If they only created one of a rare item and they they'd basically ran experiments on the players in the user of the world to figure out, you know, okay, how do we not piss everybody off, but create scarcity? How do we, you know, do XYZ within the digital space? And that network was very interested in that. I mean, they understood that the world was digitizing and that, you know, that there was an exceptionally good chance that the world economy would run on internet rails, whether that's the dollar or some other alternative currency. And again, that email from Epstein in 2009 to John Brockwood was like, now's the time this was this was PayPal's original vision. The technology is there. We can actually do this. And there's actually a super telling email. It's probably my favorite in the whole bunch. It was, it was, it was released actually in November. But it's an email from, from Jeffrey to Steve Bannon in 2018, talking about, you know, should we get rid of power or get rid of minution, you know, kind of talking about the Trump administration, you know, right before the going direct happens, right before COVID, you know, was December 2018, like the end of the year. And Bannon asked them, you know, should we get rid of power or minution, which is very strange that Bannon, who is, you know, a political advisor to Trump, you know, very early on as a big part of the campaign, but he kind of at least publicly sort of looked like he had kind of taken a step back from the administration. But you know, there were reports as this email notes, you know, like the hill was reporting that Trump was discussing firing power because of interest rate hikes. And Epstein says, no, minution is okay. It's simple. 15 years ago, the geriatrics understood that the internet was like telephones connections only. Then my nerds taught them that cyber is a weapon. Same with the Fed. It's a weapon to be used with sophistication. Inflation is a concept from the 50s before the internet sent instantaneous info around the world. So dumb. Great Epstein, you know, banter there. I mean, it's pretty funny, but I think it really sets up this idea. Again, this is 2018, he's had extensive connections with you know, the Bitcoin space by then Bitcoin really had its big pop in 2017 where it really became kind of indisputable that it was going to be around for a bit. That was really the, you know, to me, I mean, I got into it in 2017, but it seemed like that was kind of the okay, we're we're we're crossing 10,000, you know, we're we're going to be here for a bit. And I think he understood he was a technologist, an interested in technology and a money man and he knew that inflation was is an outdated concept and we have technology and algorithms and instantaneous information that can collude and create a monetary network with zero inflation. Interesting. Um, you know, these were his people. So he's being asked by, you know, a close advisor to to Trump, you know, do we need to get rid of some of the most important bankers in the world? Then he's like nah, now cyber, cyber is the weapon and this is how we're going to do it. Um, and again, he doesn't specifically say we're going to use tether and Bitcoin and we're going to create the Bitcoin dollar and this guy, Mark Goodman's going to write a book about it. No, he doesn't say any of that shit. Obviously. But what the fuck else is he talking about? I mean, that's it's very obvious that the, um, you know, the the fight for the future of the financial system and the global economy was was through digital rails. It wasn't through these analog connections like early telephones. It's through packets. Um, it's through creating a monetary ledger, um, and an asset that lives on it. And he understood that and he understood it early and early enough, um, to probably help guide it along. I mean, he's advising Treasury Secretary. He's advising, um, you know, the people at, um, the digital currency initiative at MIT that were helping, you know, take over the void left when the Bitcoin foundation exploded, you know, um, you know, helping developers get money. I mean, he, he really did understand, um, where this was going. And I think he helped connect the people that needed to be connected to do it. He connected Larry Summers and, and Brock Pierce at the mine shift conference like really early on 2011, I think. He, um, uh, you know, he was obviously in the band and sphere and, and talking with banan, he was talking with the MIT guys, he was talking with a mirror, he was talking apparently with, with Adam back. Um, Gavin and Dresan, at least it seems in the emails said no, which is, which is very interesting. So hats off to him. Um, but, you know, he was all over the space and his connections with Teal are pretty immense. Um, and he was quite literally putting his money where his mouth was. He wasn't just coming up with these ideas or connecting people. I mean, he was investing in these, in these companies. Um, there's tons of portfolios and things strewn throughout. I mean, you, I almost kind of feel bad for some of the people that whose names are just in the files technically, right? Because it's like, you know, here's all the cryptocurrency partners like the early version of blockchain capital Brock Pierce and, and the Stevens brothers, you know, really the first VC firm that, you know, it was kind of behind all the early Bitcoin companies, you know, they have all of these investor decks, just like all over the, the, um, you know, the files because they emailed them with with with Jeffrey because they were, um, you know, investing with him and, and Jeffrey invested in, you know, in Coinbase. Um, and was divested from it, you know, pretty quickly on. Uh, slight tangent here. It is kind of funny. Actually, you look at the block stream emails, you know, he was conversing a lot with Austin Hill of block stream. And there's actually a, you know, so he was working with Reed Hoffman who was another PayPal Mafia guy, the founder of LinkedIn, who was, you know, we know was, was one of the, the seed investors, um, of block stream. Um, and they were really good buddies, um, Epstein and, and Reed Hoffman and, but it's funny. There's this email with Austin Hill where he talks about like, hey, I see that you guys are putting money and like stellar and ripple. And like, there are competitors and we don't want like, like, like, what they're doing is very bad for our ecosystem. Like, we don't want this competition. Um, and basically ask them to divest because they were investing in competitors. Um, so like, that's another angle to this. That's very interesting. To me, it seems very obvious. Bitcoin is created to be the commodity that it is. But like, it wasn't always a sure bet. It's pretty sure now, um, that it has the, you know, mostly has the regulatory clarity of the only jurisdiction that really matters that it's a commodity. But like, that wasn't true back then. It really was, you know, a fight to see who would win and who would, who would, you know, stand the test of time and actually have a chance at becoming an alternative currency. Um, and so it was a bit more of a battle then between Bitcoin and these alternative, um, these alternative ideas that even, you know, some of the most important people in the space at the time were like, don't you can't put money into our competitors? Like, what if we lose? Um, it's so funny to think of that. Um, but yeah, I mean, Epstein was all over this space, uh, all over, uh, with Brock Pierce, um, who, you know, tether is the most important, maybe the most important company in the world. Like in many ways. Like, yeah, okay, they're not creating AI that's going to take over so much of, of, you know, you know, jobs and, and how people interact with each other and interface with companies. Okay. But they are investing in it. Um, they're not creating the chips that, um, are going to run all the computers that run all this stuff. Like sure, maybe in videos up there, obviously Apple and Microphone. Soff, you know, there's the software and hardware companies that are stalwarts that are exceptionally important. But like, what's more important than the digital Federal Reserve? I mean, like the, like the company that prints dollars and gets 4.5% or whatever, 3% to issue dollar tokens. I mean, it's, it's incredible what the way that tether has squeaked through. Um, where they're bag man now who's all over the files as well. How we let Nick is like running commerce. Um, you know, for years and years, right. It's been bitfinexed and, and a lot of these truthers who are like 99% correct about everything about tether except the most important thing. To me, which is that it's not a fraud in the typical sense where it's not this Ponzi scheme that's going to blow up because it's too important. It is way, way, way too important for dollar, uh, hegemonic advances. Um, for, um, for the US government to let tether die. And so I don't know, maybe I'll eat my words. Maybe it will. Maybe it finally will. This will be the cycle and, and I'm totally wrong with all this and tether blows up. But it's like tether resembles so much more of an intelligence operation. Then it does a fraud. And I think that tether truthers for years and years have really done the research about how nefarious a lot of these people are. And how they are working at the behest of the government in so many ways, freezing funds and this and that. But like now they're like the largest private holder of gold in the world. They have 100,000 Bitcoin. They can, they're, they have a money printer. They're, they've basically. got in the okay from at least the current administration. We'll see if that stays. And they have a big enough head start in the in the stablecoin space that, you know, I don't see the market cap being challenged imminently. Yeah, they're one of the most important companies in the world. And they-- -Which is wild. -Which is crazy. Obviously, some of us knew that that was coming a little earlier on than others, but I mean, the gold thing is-- I know I've been aranting a ton, but the gold thing is crazy. I don't know if you have any thoughts on it, but it's like they're the lot like what's going on here. This is an interesting development. I remember Ansel, who you know, I used to work with a bit at Bitcoin magazine. He runs some pretty good financial market stuff. And you know, he had a tweet about, you know, pretty early on in the gold bull run that was like, what if the gold story is actually kind of accidentally a Bitcoin story. And it's really about tether buying up tons of gold to get ready for the expansion of the tokenized gold system. You know, wouldn't that be kind of funny? And everybody was like ripping them apart and be like, you're so crazy. They're not buying enough. You know, this is a central bank. And this is this is a huge-- this is China. And sure it is, but also, no, he was right. Like this, this is tether. They bought us fucking shit on a gold. And they're getting ready. I mean, they are the prime company set up for, you know, if this financial system, you know, goes into place, which like, I don't know what other choice the US government has. Why would Trump let himself go into the midterms, you know, with a collapsed economy when there's like an alternative where he could theoretically sort of do the things we've discussed for years and use Bitcoin as this debt sink and print a bunch of money at zero rates to the stablecoin issuers and have the new buyers of debt issue stable coins who hold a lot of Bitcoin and pump it. I mean, to me, it's sort of a no brainer versus like, let's lose all the midterms, get everything off fucked up, have the economy crash, have the world, you know, take over US dollar hedge fund. And we lose it to gold back stablecoins from China. You know, I don't think they're going to let that happen. They definitely don't know if that happened. And so Tether has emerged just too big to fail again. This episode is brought to you by AncoWatch. The thing that keeps me up at night is the idea of a critical error with my Bitcoin cold storage. And this is where AncoWatch comes in. 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So I didn't guess they were going to buy a massive amount of gold, be the largest private holder of gold in the world. They're just behaving like a central bank. It all makes sense. They are just doing what all the other central banks are doing at this point. I think the tokenisation of gold is really true. I don't really know what that game is there. Can we go back a little bit? That was an insane run. I do want to ask a question about the PayPal mafia still. There's tons of people that got into Bitcoin in 2010, 2009, super, super early that are going to get rich. I'm not like. There's nothing I can do about that. Nothing I should do about that. But do you think there's a non-nefarious answer to why the PayPal guy's got into Bitcoin so early? In the sense that they were trying to build a monetary system for the world. They were obviously going to be paying attention to anything like Bitcoin that did come out. Is there no explanation where they just spotted it early and thought this is interesting? I should buy some while it's really cheap. Well, I think the answer lies in the words of Teal, which is interesting because he says a lot of things that are obviously not true. I'm a libertarian and blah, blah, blah. It's like, no, you work with the state. You're on the Bill of Berks steering committee. What are you talking about? He talks about how competition is for losers. That is how you lose profits is entering an environment with competition. Find something that no one else does, create it, build it, offer it, and dominate it. Become the monopoly of the thing that you offer that no one else does. That is what PayPal did. You have to tip your hat. These guys are the ultra spooks of the modern world, but you have to tip your hat sometimes and be like, "Okay, PayPal did it." Levchin studied distributed systems in cryptography and he meets up with Teal. They have a breakfast one morning and he tells him I want to build the cryptography for sending money using palm pilots. That was the initial idea. He jumped on it and they were like, "That's an amazing idea. I'm a currency speculator. That's what Teal did." His first fund was a hedge fund that dealt with Forex currency markets. They knew right away that, "Hey, actually, we can blow this out." I shouldn't say right away. It actually came when Reed Hoffman joined and when David Saxx, now running crypto and AI for Trump, when they both joined, they weren't founders. It was mostly Levchin and Teal. But they decided, "Hey, we are in Silicon Valley. This is where all the palm pilot users of the world are. If we build this thing as a palm pilot native thing, great. Our target audiences, like 40 bros that live in Silicon Valley, whereas if we use email, everyone has email. Literally, the PayPal idea of emails was just the backup. That was just the way to access if your palm pilot got lost. They had a backup system that used email where you could send money if your palm pilot infrared do hikki wasn't working. It was literally just the backup." Then they were like, "Let's focus on that and let's grow it out like that." They were correct. What people never understand about PayPal is they were the first people to dollarize the internet. They made the dollar via PayPal and eBay who later bought them. The native currency of the internet was the dollar. That's extremely important. As it relates to these, again, these are decade-long plans. The dollar system new technology is coming. A lot of this communication technology will lead to new ways to spend and transact. Financially, PayPal understood that. They dominated it. They took over. They not only dominated it within the US, but throughout the world, they made the US dollar, the de facto currency of the internet. How does that relate to your question? They're already saying that they're not going to let competitors into the space. You find the space. You dominate the space and you kill the competitors. Why would this group of people that understood that there was a viable alternative currency that was being born that was now starting to get a little bit of a market cap and get a little bit of a network? Bitcoin was a lot more fragile than it is now. Rather than embracing it, they could have done things to try to displace it in line with this idea of, "Let's not on have competitors. and they didn't do that. I mean PayPal flirted with doing Bitcoin stuff in 2014. There's deleted commercials that they made, that reference Bitcoin payments that they ended up taking that out and not delivering that option. There's a lot of interesting interviews with David Marcus who's at Lights Park now, who is that PayPal then talking about how they were interested in using Bitcoin early on and Teal and Epstein are emailing about Bitcoin in 2014. He bought it then, that whole network is all over it. They would not let it blossom. They wouldn't invest their money into it. They wouldn't be pushing it as this altruistic good or this potential commodity replacement. If they thought it was a real threat to their model rather than something that could extend their dominance. I do think it's very possible that they weren't behind it and they saw it and they went, "Actually, we can use this better than everybody else by tweaking a couple things." Actually, there's an interesting email there. Let me just find it here, where he's talking about, he's talking to Bill Gross, who is the guy that founded Ideal Labs. Ideal Labs is this Southern California incubator that was the first institutional investor in PayPal. PayPal was initially funded with a million-dollar fund from Teal himself, from his hedge fund that he gave basically to him and Lev Chintis to start the company. But the first real investor was this incubator Ideal Labs. Bill Gross, one of the co-founders with him, was Bill Elkis, who was the guy that led the investment into PayPal. He was the Sineon. He also turns out he was the co-sineve of the J. Epstein Foundation and was very close to Epstein. They had known each other since '85. There's this exchange between Epstein and Bill Gross, where he talks to Jeff and they get connected in 2013. He says, "I'd love to talk to you about my new currency idea." They talk about Bill Elkis and they have this little bit of an exchange. They literally bring up, "Are you thinking of doing this with Brock Pierce?" Bill Gross says, "I don't know Brock Pierce." It's very interesting that he says that because Brock Pierce, at the time, was actually running a fund with Bill Elkis under his clear stone ventures, which was a spin-off from Ideal Labs. Pierce was running this fund with William Quigley. That was the clear stone ventures gaming fund. That was a spin-off from when he got replaced by Steve Bannon at IGE when they were doing the World of Warcraft stuff. He got sucked into this world and he started this online gaming fund. Bill Gross is reaching out to Epstein as like, "Hey, I have this new idea for a currency." He brings up, Epstein says, "You should talk to Brock Pierce." Bill Gross says, "I don't know Brock Pierce." Obviously, it's very close in his network that he could get to know Pierce very well because he's working with one of his best friends, Bill Elkis. In this email, after he says, "You should talk to Brock Pierce," Epstein writes to Bill Gross, "It just randomly turns and starts talking about Bitcoin." In 2013, after discussing, "I have this new idea for a currency," "You should talk to Brock Pierce," and then it just randomly cuts to discussing Bitcoin. Epstein says this. He says, "This is May 30, 2013," Epstein to Bill Gross. The good is that Bitcoin uses an algorithm to limit supply, unlike the variable of goal there are other commodities. However, two main issues. One, the government doesn't like it. Money laundering, money transmitting, aiding and abetting all types of crime, etc. Two, all transactions are arguably taxable and therefore extra tricky. The Bitcoin guys came to see me early in the process and made it clear they were all willing to go to jail for their ideas. "I'm not, but there is a way to do it, but it turns the Bitcoin model on its head." Talk to you soon. So that's 2013. They were talking about, "Hey, how can we flip this model on its head? I have this idea. You got to talk to Brock Pierce, whose buddies with Bill Alcus, who we're both buddies with." And Tether gets formed the next year in 2014, founded by Brock Pierce and Reeves and Sellers. But then the kind of fourth guy that joins on, technically I've been corrected by Craig Sellers personally, that William Quigley was actually not a co-founder of Tether, but he came on pretty promptly after. Him and Brock Pierce worked on that fund together under Alcus at Clearstone and he comes on and William Quigley considers himself one of the founders of Tether, but apparently the other Tether boys do not. But then they go on and they create Tether, which kind of flips the Bitcoin model on its head and sort of this new idea of a currency that Bill Gross had. Bill Gross is like an incredibly important guy in the tech space who was kind of an uncle figure for a lot of these pretty important companies early on, paypal, absolutely included. And he went on to then form near intelligence, which became one of the largest data brokers and trackers of human and data in the world. It's this huge kind of thing like a primordial pound here. But these guys are, I mean they're just discussing very openly in these emails. Like how do we flip the Bitcoin thing on its head? How do we create a new currency? Hey, you should talk to Brock Pierce. Oh, you know, Bill Alcus and it's like they're the paypal guys. There were the money behind paypal. They were the incubators behind paypal. You know, these guys are all there. They could see, you know, to your point of, okay, maybe they didn't start it, but did they try to co-opt it? You know, to me, the tether model doesn't work unless there is extreme belief that Bitcoin will monetize excessively because it's sort of this play that the dollar will continue to depreciate relative to Bitcoin. So we have this huge Bitcoin holdings and we can use tether to not artificially necessarily, but to by creating more dollars of these digital tokens, what else are you using them for other than trading and going in and out of Bitcoin. So it becomes this way to generate more liquidity in dollars in the Bitcoin space and quite literally tether the Bitcoin price to the US dollar price. To me, that's not a necessarily a, like a mutilistic, bad relationship with Bitcoin. You could argue that it doesn't a lot of people do a lot of the hijacking Bitcoin people talk excessively about how tether is this big fraud and it's, you know, well, you know, really only started doing this in 2017 when it picked the winner of the block size war. It was tether that did it. But to me, I think the story is a lot deeper than that. And these guys understood that there was going to be economic debatement that would threaten the US dollar system because of just the math of of extra million dollars of debt. It's obviously gone up exceptionally since these systems were even put in place. But to me, it doesn't seem like tether or PayPal has any interest in killing Bitcoin because it actually helps them a lot because they own a shit on of it. And so why would they hurt this system? How can we try to monetize it and create a, you know, a profit model around something that doesn't have a profit model other than just hold and watch the asset appreciate, you know, you have to sell, you have to distribute, you have to, you know, find income. And so PayPal and tether and this group that is immensely connected at its origins understood how they could build the system that kind of flipped the Bitcoin thing on its head. When you look at what tether is today, it has, I mean, it's an important part of like the Bitcoin story that is now has like regulatory clarity in the US at least. But go back to 2016, 2017, it didn't at all. It was under massive scrutiny. Do you think that was sort of, well, that's what that was going to be my question. Do you think the kind of Epstein PayPal mafia connection is what allowed it to kind of get through that period where like I think it was at the New York Fed, we're trying to suit not the New York Fed. Sorry, the New York DA suit. Yeah, that's the NY. Yeah. I think it's theater. I think a lot of this stuff is theater. I think the other big story that was going on at that time was Facebook's Libra and they were going to create this basket of currencies and it turned into a stable coin a US dollar stable coin. And, you know, immediately upon Facebook, which again, we know so much about their intelligence connections at their origin as well. This idea that the US government wouldn't want the most active website with the most active monthly users to create a US dollar, you know, asset that is totally available and feasible and freezable and used by the world like the fact that the Senate like called them in like immediately upon the announcement of it and did this whole you're threatening the US dollar system and doing all this bullshit. It's like, why the hell wouldn't they want that? You know, why wouldn't they want that? It doesn't threaten the power structures of the Fed at all. Well, was that not when they were trying to do it with like a basket of different things or what it had like. gold in the different currencies. - Well, yeah, it was gonna be, you know, the Euro and the pound and, you know, I think there was a bunch of different discussions. And the part part of talking about Libra, is it literally like changed names and changed ideas and changed lead developers and it just moved around so much. It's hard to say specifically, but initially when that first happened, the first white paper and getting called to Congress, it was a basket of currencies. And it's hilarious to me that the US government would pretend that they didn't want that. Now I get other central banks not wanting it, which is also true. I mean, there was a lot of talk. I think Mark Carney, who's now the president of Canada, was like running the Bank of England at the time. And he talked about, you know, how this is a threat to, you know, if it gets put in this basket and then we create extreme monetary velocity because it's a digital asset and then they have 200 million active users. And, you know, this could become a threat to like our financial, you know, sovereignty basically. And I understand everyone else being involved in the Libra Project, the basket of currencies pissing their pants. But the US government, it's like, you guys obviously created Facebook and why wouldn't you want this? It, to me, it was just a lot of theater about like, okay, well, if there's gonna be centralization. - We've gotta go back. - You say so many things that I've got questions on. - Okay. - You say, like the US government obviously created Facebook. Is that true? - Yeah, I mean, the life log story of kind of this idea that, you know, the day the life log project was shuttered, which was this DARPA project that basically was to create a database, an ID pictures, a life log, you know, of every person, of every citizen in the United States. The day that was shuttered was the day that Facebook was launched. And there's an amazing article by Whitney Webb about the military origins of Facebook. And it is a crazy, it's a lot to like accept, of course, this idea that like, is intelligence really in the private sector like this? Like doing social networks and like, is the remnants of DARPA and the CIA like, you know, actually the company that Mark Zuckerberg is running. And there's a lot of like suspension of disbelief to sort of accept the premise that maybe it's true. But when you read about it, I mean, definitely I urge everyone to read it and make the decision for themselves. It's like pretty undeniable, I think. And, you know, again, does it matter who created Facebook? Just like who does it matter who created Bitcoin? Like, no, it doesn't really. But at the end of the day, where is it going and what is it doing and what is it enable? And it created the first, it created consent for, you know, the digital ID. It created the first kind of web of interconnectivity between all these people, these spokes of people on the internet. I mean, it's, it's absolutely proven that they have IDs for people that don't even have, you know, accounts on Facebook. Like they were able to just sort of map everybody that's interacted with each other and create, you know, through our consent, right? I mean, I was all over Facebook when I was like a child and in high school and came out and tagging yourself in photo-takes over people. They were able to upload it. Putting like pick like squares over my face and being like, this is me and like, this is my grandma. And this is my best friend and now I'm a camp and I'm this, and just the web of connections that that whole network created plays a huge role in, you know, like the Bitcoin to pseudo-anonymous, but if you have all of this just crap laying around that you were kind of careless about all over the internet, it becomes a lot easier to sort of, you know, analyze and do heuristic analysis to figure out, you know, what everybody's doing on the internet. And the internet's really hard to be private, like, not because there aren't technologies to be private on the internet, but like there's so much lossiness in the process of trying to be private. And when you've created so much evidence and breadcrumbs through social networks, that you consented to giving your information to and didn't really think about why that would be a bad idea. Yeah, and so anyways, I think it's pretty proven that there was a military origin to the background of Facebook and there's more to it. I haven't read the article in a little bit and I don't exactly remember, but there's a lot more to it than just the day that it shuttered was the day that it opened that shared some advisors and some people left from DARPA to then go and work directly at Facebook. But regardless, right? Like the US government understands the importance of Facebook being basically the face of the internet for like billions of people. I mean, at least a billion people, like a lot of places in the world, like that's how you, it's kind of the American online portal. Like that's how you get on the internet is like you use Facebook. It's a lot of times it's free. You can't access the internet, but you can access Facebook like with the phone. And so like why wouldn't the US government want there to create a US dollar asset that runs around on its rails that users in Africa can send to each other for free with their smartphones? Like why wouldn't they want to extend dollar headwind in that way? Of course they would. But to me, I looked at it as this sort of like, well, this is how we create consent for what we really want to do. And we have to create the regulatory environment and use the government as the enabling environment to create the system that we really want. So we'll hoff and puff and make a big stink about, oh no, like Facebook is becoming too powerful and it's too centralized. And so it basically creates this perfect opportunity for what we're seeing now, which is the proliferation of privately issued stable coins. That, you know, because of the Genius Act, that was really the evolution of the Gillis, or the LUMMAS Gillin brand bill that had so much to do and talked so much about the Terrelluna implosion, we can't have alcohol in the back stable coins. They need to be backed with US Treasuries. We need to be very careful because it's very dangerous. And they just created all of this consent and for the perfect opportunity for them to just enshrine. US debt has to back stable coins. These are the people that can issue them. We don't really care who issues them, as long as they're backed with our debt and they uphold to these KYC and AML and all these things. And they really just set, you know, the perfect gumbo for the US dollar to just spread all over the world and just infiltrate like a virus every other national sovereign central bank. Why would you keep your money in a local currency if you can just use your cell phone and get a US dollar token? And, you know, it's a total domination. The US is in perfect place, you know, the dollar's overlavered against itself, but every other currency looks like shit too. And the US dollar is having a technological breakthrough whereas really nothing else in the world is having that technological breakthrough by any means. And these rails are there to create enough liquidity for the whole world to use dollars. I mean, stable coins are the big, you know, they are the big kahuna of what's happening. Whether it's gold backed or US dollar backed, like that's the fight. And it's really interesting to me that Tether now is the largest private holder of gold in the fight. - Yeah, it's a show down between US dollar back stable coins and gold back stable coins. And the winner is already determined. It's Tether, thanks for playing, have a good time. So I don't know where we started there, but I think there was a question I probably didn't answer it, but I don't remember either, but I haven't a question anyway. 'Cause so last time we spoke, we talked a little bit about, well, we talked a lot about the idea of Bitcoin being co-opted and whether Tether, what role Tether plays in that. - Sure. - I've also since then, I did an interview with Brent Johnson where we talked about his dollar milkshake theory, which Tether only accelerates to like a crazy degree. - Oh yeah. - Like that is the way that the world dollarizes. - Yep. - Do you think that Bitcoin is co-opted at this point? - No, I don't actually, which I think is probably surprising to a lot of my independent media friends because I think they would just assume that I think that because I've talked so much about the Epstein network and Bitcoin and the PayPal Mafia and Tether, it's a lot of these things being ultimately bad for sovereignty and privacy and human freedom. But I don't think Bitcoin was co-opted because I think it is doing exactly what it was designed to do. I don't know if it's better that it's not co-opted or that it, I don't know if it's like a worse thing that it was created under these perfect altruistic scenarios and then got co-opted by the baddies. Does that feel better? Is it better for us to think that way? I don't know. I don't know what's better or what's not. But Bitcoin was designed to do exactly what it's doing right now, maybe not literally this month, but with the down. But I mean, it's just very clearly proven itself to be a very strategically important asset at a time where the economic debatement of the US dollar is about to create the debatement trade when the world currency, world reserve currency begins to debase. You just want to get rid of it all of your dollars and throw it into assets. And that has not happened yet. I mean, despite goal-going gangbusters and silver having that crazy blow off top there, and I'm very happy for my silver then gold. bugs, friends, I own some and great. And I do think it will appreciate immensely eventually when it gets it shit back together. But no, I don't think Bitcoin was designed to do exactly what it needs to do to win. I don't think it was really designed to fight. It was designed to win and be the most mathematically astute investment you can make during the debatement trade. And I think it's very clear that it is being embraced by the very administration at the very time that it needs to be embraced to allow to get the regulatory clarity and have the inbound action, you know, have enough ability for people to get their money in more so the institutions maybe then retail. And that's kind of already happened. I think if the US government really didn't want Bitcoin to win, they wouldn't let micro strategy do what they're doing, which is obviously a speculative attack on the dollar. It's just there is no other way to put it. And if Bitcoin was truly co-opted, it wouldn't have gotten this far. It would have died a few years ago. It wouldn't have had the COVID expansion that it saw. COVID was the perfect opportunity to kill something like Bitcoin when we sought crash down to 3000. If the powers that be wanted Bitcoin to die, they would have killed it then. And they didn't. And they didn't because it is very useful to them. And that does not mean that it was co-opted useful. It means that it what it is what it is. And it is the only digital commodity that can and will ever exist. It will never happen again. This idea that you can just carbon copy and create another one or increase the 21 million. I mean, these are things that will not happen. They can technically happen, but they will not happen economically or socially. I can create a fork right now. I can increase the supply of Bitcoin on my node. Neither of those things matter at all. Bitcoin was designed to be a liquidity sink and be a reserve asset at the time when economic debasement goes gangbusters. And it is mostly centralized within the United States power system within the Western power system. It is mostly it even within that power structure. It's mostly centralized within Silicon Valley from a technology standpoint. And now from an institutional standpoint, there's enough held in private companies or rather public companies that the US government doesn't actually need to buy Bitcoin at all. They can basically just use reserve capital requirements and tell these publicly traded companies that hold millions of dollars of Bitcoin or millions of Bitcoin. You have to have a dollar for every dollar of Bitcoin value you have on your balance sheet. Here we'll we'll link you up with a stable coin issuer that will lend you a stable coin so you can hold for every dollar of Bitcoin and we'll charge you a little fee. And Bitcoin goes up to be a 10 million dollar market cap. We generate 10 million 10 trillion dollars of dollar demand. Bitcoin goes to 50 trillion. We create 40 trillion more dollars of dollar demand. There's so many ways that the system can use Bitcoin that are just innately baked into what Bitcoin is that the idea that this was hijacked by Roger or sorry by the Epstein group and Roger Ver was right and he totally wasn't wrong about anything. And I think this bifurcation that's occurred within the Bitcoin space is also part of the design of the Bitcoin project which was to keep us all sort of on the on the reservation and infighting between the ideal logs and the technologists and not really paying attention to what's going on outside of that. And instead of focusing on scaling tools and privacy tools and and and and and and and you know local economies and and getting you know people that can actually you know really benefit from the monetization of Bitcoin getting Bitcoin we're instead cheering on an administration that is incredibly corrupt and has been proven in these emails to be incredibly corrupt and is trying whether it's Latinac or Trump and you know trying to basically get the US government to pump the shit out of our bags rather than focusing on all the things that you know we as people can use like Bitcoin is an amazing idea it will never happen again why do we want to let it be centralized entirely into some of the worst people in the world holding the majority of Bitcoin if we could keep this message going and everyone just keeps bike shedding on who won the block size war should it be two megabyte block should it be four was bsv the right choice maybe ripples the right choice was it xrp was it was it ethereum you know all these these things that were just in this little box and they're just shaking it and laughing at us and we're just infighting instead of actually building something that will create you know freedom and success and and and what have you at the local level it's become zoomed out and it's this big you know it's it's ridiculous i think the amount of time we've wasted um whether you believe Roger ver's book is the bible or you know the block size wars the bible i think you miss the bigger picture that like Bitcoin was actually probably designed by an intelligence group early on to create this exact environment and be there when monetary debatement happens and and sort of push us along into the new financial system and and it Bitcoin is the only digital commodity and we're fighting all of this time wasting all of this amazing human capital and human energy on infighting and i'm not saying that like we should reach out this big olive branch to you know Craig Wright or whatever like or even Roger like i think these guys have done some pretty dumb things that don't deserve forgiveness i mean you look at like whose costs more people more Bitcoin in the world like Roger ver is right up there with mount gocks and be cash i mean it's just unfortunate it's true but a lot of the people that went over there thinking this guy was correct because he said a lot of nice things like aren't necessarily bad people and they haven't done necessarily bad things on becash development like it's not a terrible idea increasing the block size was something that most people in bitcoin agreed with we don't need it yet because no one's fucking using Bitcoin to transact we're just holding it and hoping that we become billionaires and i think the real freedom that humans could find out of it is a unsensorable peer to peer cash like that is that is the ultimate goal not because the white paper says it not because Roger ver said it but because that is actually what it would be helpful that i could have an unsensorable monetary good i think that's that's the greatest but but to be fair bitcoin economically you know it was designed to kind of have this disinflation area asymptotic approach to zero issuance and that is what it is that's what it was designed to do that has not been co-opted that will not be co-opted and because of that bitcoin will win on that metric of being the reserve asset it will win mathematically but it might not win carrying along the carriage behind it of peer to peer unsensorable cash and so can we create an environment where we understand okay it's going to win it's going to monetize that's going to happen the governments there black rocks there all the worst people in the world are there the Epstein's there teals there you know okay like they're not going to just blow this up i don't think it's a giant Ponzi scheme i think it's something a lot more important can we come together and understand that we do have human power and human capital that we can lever against these institutions that hold all the bitcoin but can we create tools create way to spend bitcoin privately create you know education and marketing and ways to get people into bitcoin understanding all of the faults of it and that it that may be this dream of peer to peer unsensorable cash may might may fail but the monetary side will will definitely win can we fight that battle knowing that it probably almost definitely was designed to win the reserve asset battle and if we can kind of get our shit together and stop infighting and wasting more time on did Epstein hijack bitcoin what size should block and just focus on like what the fuck do we want because so many of us made it i mean so many bitcoins made it and we have all data sit on pods and sit on spaces and talk about fucking jpegs and talk about bullshit and nothing is happening there is no push towards scaling solutions there's very little work on privacy stuff we're not developing cool alternative ways to like you know create dollar denominated value and send it you know we're we're we're just recreating old shitty systems on top of bitcoin over and over and over again that are centralized in shitty and that were doomed to fail on the peer to peer cash element for eight billion people if we keep bike shedding and fighting the block size war every three years when there's a bear market it's fucking stupid and it's probably by design if there was something that was co-opted I'll leave it at this it's the bitcoin culture it's the people it's the community it's the discourse and it has been co-opted by people that have alternative motives that are not expressed and they sensor and they promote and they tweak and they tweak the discourse towards specific ways so that we're all wasting our time talking about bullshit and not fighting the giant elephants in the room. And the block size war is not the elephant in the room. It's not important. It happened. Here we are. Move on. Like figure it out. I can't send Bitcoin to you privately easily. Can we solve for that? Can we get people to open a million lightening channels in a single transaction? Can we onboard 8 billion people onto Bitcoin? No. Does that mean we need bigger blocks? Maybe. But there's probably a bunch of other ways that we can do it too. And if we just continually to get baited by fucking spooks in the Bitcoin space that have terrible motives and are probably taking money from certain entities to push certain narratives to push certain books, you know, we're not going to get anywhere. And so Bitcoin culture in my opinion has been co-opted. And you know, I can hear people already thinking like there is no Bitcoin culture. You're just projecting because you're at the Bitcoin magazine. You're talking about Mr. Huddledhead. Yeah. How the fuck did you know? I'm exactly thinking about Mr. Huddledhead. And I disagree. I think there obviously very clearly is like a multi million dollar Bitcoin culture industry. But that is also not necessarily representative of what Bitcoin culture could be. And like eventually it's just going to be money. It's just we're all going to be running around with shirts on that just say money on it. And it's not going to be cool or interesting. That's already kind of started to happen. But if we're not ready from a technological and ideological standpoint to deal with the transition, which has not happened yet, the economic debatement trade has not happened yet. If we're not ready to onboard billions of people on to Bitcoin and give them sovereignty and and and give them a permissionless network like it was when we found it years ago. If we can't give that to our kids, then we failed even though we're going to be multi millionaires. Like that sucks. I don't I don't want that world. I want I want people to be able to use this technology and have access to this monetary policy in a self sovereign way holding their own UTXOs rather than having to go through some paper eyes Bitcoin bullshit where there's there's third party trust. There's custodial risk. There's all of these issues. Surveillance censorship, freeze ability. I don't want that to be how everyone interacts with Bitcoin knowing that it's probably almost definitely designed to win the economic debatement trade. How do we make it a useful technology for everyone else that doesn't hold it? Because frankly, not a lot of people own Bitcoin. They just don't. You know, you got me fired up Mark. We need to do better. This has been awesome. Is there anything else that you want to talk about when it comes to Epstein and Bitcoin? I have one more question about Epstein. There's got nothing to do with Bitcoin. I don't know. I talked about a good amount of stuff. I think the tether stuff is super interesting. There was yes. There is one more thing I want to talk about. It'll be quick though. I know because we've been ripping for a bit. But hey, you don't have to be quick. We go all the time in the world, Mom. Right on brother. Well, in 2014 August, Epstein emailed a group of people or at least one person. It's redacted. A lot of people speculate it's Austin Hill from Blockchain, but I don't know. It's hard to see. There is a red action there. But he messages in August, August 14, 2014. I'm going to Treasury to talk Bitcoin questions, which a that to me is extremely interesting that well after he was arrested the first time, you know, Epstein is going to Treasury to discuss financial things. You know, Mr. Money is strutting into Treasury. That obviously should be a huge red flag about our government. And by our government, I mean the United States government that financial decisions and counsel is being had with, you know, convicted sexual abusers. And so that's a very interesting. But also the fact that he is being brought into Treasury to discuss Bitcoin, you know, you could argue, is he doing it to discuss how do we stop it or how do we embrace it or, you know, or just, hey, did you make this thing? Like, I don't know. No one has any ideas. But the response is very interesting to me. And I think it really sums up kind of everything that I've sort of speculated regarding stable coins and Bitcoin. And the response is, I'm more interested in planting some seeds of thought. Ecuador is working on a nationally approved cryptocurrency. Looks like we will have a pilot in the works with India to do a digital rupee to phase out grafting grift and corruption. Canada is also looking at doing a digital Canadian dollar. I'm more interested in what Treasury thinks about doing a Fed Reserve back digital USD, especially if they felt like they could embed AML and KYC policy into the coin. It's one of the few legitimate approaches they have to change the adoption use cases of Bitcoin. A digital USD wouldn't suffer the volatility of Bitcoin and could gain wider adoption and allow them to have a seat at the table as opposed to regulating Bitcoin and driving innovation overseas and criminals underground. Any insights on this will be great. That to me is sums up so much about what we have discussed about, you know, sort of the perception of stable coins. And, and that interestingly, I think you could make an argument based on that that, okay, maybe this is a co-option play and the stable coins are part of this co-option play of how do we coax, you know, the Treasury into playing ball. And here's how and here's how they can co-opt and do it. But to me, it seems like a really clever plan, especially if this did come from Austin Hill, that it is them saying, here's how we trick Treasury and the US government into thinking they have a seat at the table and they get a seat at the table to ensure, you know, US dollar hedgedmen East lasts. But in reality, us Bitcoiners are actually really playing them and playing the the uninitiated into the Bitcoin scheme. And we're tricking them into thinking, yeah, if you use stable coins, you don't got to worry about Bitcoin at all. But in reality, we obviously know that that's not true. And there's this incredible symbiotic relationship between stable. Now, let's talk about it in 2014. I mean, there was no stable coin industry. Tether was founded then. I mean, we're talking, you know, at most when it was master coin on Omni layer, I mean, it, you know, we're talking millions of dollars, well under a billion dollars. I mean, it was just this tiny little, this little thing. But this seed being planted, like as this email says, like, this is how we get Treasury, which again is bringing in Epstein for counsel to talk about Bitcoin. This is how we get them to be comfortable with the growth of Bitcoin, which of course, we saw a massive growth of Bitcoin in that era. You know, this is how we get them comfortable as we tell them this. And they think they're playing this game when in reality, we're playing this game, which is the Bitcoin. And that to me, I think is like such a perfect summation of a lot of the questions I have about like, which came first, the stable coin or the Bitcoin, like the chicken and the egg thing, like where it like, was it just to trick the government? Was it created as a as a ploy? Was Bitcoin created as a ploy to extend the dollar? Was it actually created by a bunch of insiders to make a breakaway financial system that mathematically will win as as as like we see the economic debasement? Like, who knows? But I think the reality of that situation that Epstein is going into Treasury, the talk Bitcoin, and he's coming in with this idea in his head after he just discussed and emails previously a year ago with Bill Gross about how he had this idea to flip Bitcoin on its head. And you should talk to Brock Pierce and found this new, you know, alternative currency, which very likely became tether. And then he's going into Treasury. And then this guy is saying, trick them with this. Tell them this. You know, we don't want a force innovation to go overseas. Like you hear so many of those talking points in senators today talking about stable coins. We can't drive innovation overseas. That was in an email from this guy to Epstein on his way, probably looking at his blackberry, walking into the fucking Treasury to talk about Bitcoin in 2014. And he's getting fed this. Yeah, that's a pretty good idea. I actually might have just helped create tether. And you know, that's a pretty good idea. It's just so crazy that, you know, we think of we think of these technologies as like inhuman and sort of, you know, especially Bitcoin is like, you know, not having been created or pushed along by humans. It's like a very like, you know, the philosophers of Bitcoin about how Bitcoin was wasn't invented. It was discovered in the fires of math and the proof of work and just like absolute slop ridiculousness, although I sometimes I do think it's fun and I get it. But like, no, it was obviously invented. Bitcoin was fucking invented. Grow up. It wasn't discovered. There are elements of math that of course will always exist. But like, yeah, it was invented. It was invented by people. They coded it. They released it. They created supermarkets. They did like Satoshi was a human being he might have been multiple human beings, but he was a human being or they were a human being or whatever and it was this this is a plan that was done. It was done very carefully. It was done at the specific time it was done to do exactly what it is doing now. It was not co-opted tether didn't co-opt it coin. The big blockers didn't lose. It isn't some whatever conspiracy. You think it is. It's like the conspiracy is actually simpler and that it was a group of people came together and went let's do this and let's do that and let's tell them this and we'll release it here and we'll do that and we'll sit back and we'll make billions and billions of dollars and we'll have a whole new alternative currency network where we can launder and we can pay for nefarious things and do a whole bunch of crazy shit and take over the world global economy and the fact that at the very beginning these discussions were being had with the Epstein network deserves a think it deserves a thought to think about what does that mean does that change my relationship with Bitcoin do am I selling all my Bitcoin because I think that there were bad things bad people involved at the beginning or it might be this big trick like I'm not and I know people probably don't get that like how could you you know I've been called crazy things on Twitter because people sort of assumed I was someone other than I was by saying that there's a lot of issues with Bitcoin and a lot of bad people and blah blah blah but like it was designed to do what it's going to do and I want to be there for it when it doesn't so I can use that my asymmetric you know information advantage of being early to Bitcoin to go do cool things with my family and help and help people and hopefully build things because ultimately the final play of the Bitcoin dollar stablecoin hoopla blah is is not a decentralization to monetary policy it's a centralization of the US dollar policy over the world and then that versus gold and versus Bitcoin and that trifecta will play out and if I had to choose between Bitcoin gold or US dollars to hold long term to be able to give something to my kids I would certainly put some in gold but I would put the vast majority of it in Bitcoin which is what I'm doing which is what I'm living I'm not lying to you I going down with the ship with all of you if this goes to zero two you know like that's just the reality and it will be painful but it is what it is but if I had to pick between those three things I'm picking Bitcoin for the long term for the for the most appreciation and in the most sovereignty and I hope that the Bitcoin space can stop arguing and fighting like Don Quixote style the windmills of the block size war over and over again and we can come together and be like okay maybe we were fooled maybe we were bamboozled who gives a shit it is what it is let's fight what do we do how do we build how do we put this money towards Bitcoiners like suck at supporting stuff as it relates to development like there's a lot of cool stuff going on but like in general all their spaces because it's it's a much less hard money you know there's so much more money in the theorem and in these shit coins to to slosh around to buy influencers to do this stuff Bitcoiners need to sort of to use sailor talking to you like not eat their own and and and support their own because there are a bunch of true Bitcoiners that don't give a shit about state power and and and want the US dollar to not necessarily and go up and flames but like you know do a controlled demolition of the power structures that are up held because of dollar hedgemon and and I think Bitcoiners can do it and I hope they do but either way I mean I'm pretty sure Bitcoin is going to succeed because it was designed to succeed and you know how how that success is distributed is up to us and I think there's a lot of demoralization in hearing about all these bad things like oh my god Epstein was talking about Bitcoin and maybe 2009 like this is so bad like it's not the money of pedophiles like sorry that's the US dollar maybe the pound I don't know but it's not it's not Bitcoin and certainly we can get rid of that moniker and get rid of that stickiness of these bad people by using it as a tool that empowers you know local trade and economic freedom that doesn't touch status government bags so yeah long story short that's that's that's about it okay last question on that team did did this document drop unearth anything about who he exactly was and who he was working for how well where he kind of fit in the power structure yeah I mean nothing that I think wasn't already pretty you know expressed by a lot of great Epstein researchers but obviously Whitney web has done excessive amounts of work and research on this but no I mean he talks about how he basically is a representative you know a representative of the Rothschild banking dynasty which is also very interesting because Trump himself was bailed out by Wilbur Ross who later worked in his first administration when he was a banker at Rothschild Inc you know when he got into a bunch of gambling debt you know so he was very likely an asset of Rothschild banking dynasty as well obviously Rothschild like when you talk about them it like devolves really quickly into you know like I don't know like Luciferian anti-Semitic crazy I mean it's just you can't like say Rothschild without going into that place which I think is probably by design where you like can't actually talk about them because if you do you're like this crazy guy and and you're like hate Jews or whatever and it's just like no that's has nothing to do with that it's like this is a banker banking dynasty that has controlled you know humongous like areas of the world global financial system for centuries and it's interesting that you know I think a lot of people when they think about these banker families they think of you know gold silver like Napoleonic era which is true that's where they were there as well but like these banking dynasties these these infrastructure dynasties the Rockefeller's these you know they don't they don't just disappear they didn't lose all of their money they got guys like Epstein to hide it and that's what Epstein was doing I mean he was he was the best at finding these offshore banking communities using Cayman you know fronts and and washing you know billions and billions of dollars for the wealthiest people in the world and he so much as says that in in the in the docs that he is a representative of them he obviously isn't only a representative of them I mean he obviously has humongous ties to Leslie Wexner and you know a lot of other people and obviously had his hands in you know he was distributing money for Bill Gates you know who also invested in MIT on behalf of him he was obviously all over the PayPal mafia through Peter Tiel and Reid Hoffman and you know was investing money in Tiel's valor you know his fund there like I don't think there is one answer of who he worked for I think he was the best at you know brokering power and blackmailing was a part of it but I think it was mostly a money manager and finding ways you know working with the brothman's finding ways to hide humongous amounts of money for these families that had so much money and he was better at it than anyone because he understood the math he understood foreign exchange you know and currency plays and the tax code and he was just so good at what he did that you know we get we get treasury secretaries calling him Mr. Money you know but I don't think there's one single answer I don't think we'll ever have a single answer we'll never know why he died or if he died or how he died or you know why he got into this network in the first place although there is a lot of speculation about his connections going overseas and meeting up with Jimmy Goldsmith who formed the mega group and there's a lot of interesting conversation there especially with the Dalton school and William Barr and his connections with the Trump administration like looking at the life of Epstein I mean this guy is everywhere everywhere you want and don't want to be and there is not one handler he had he had multiple projects where he was working on specific people he had multiple people that were working with him I think he was taking directions from multiple intelligence agencies from multiple countries I think the the answer to like who runs the world is it's not necessarily a fun answer because it doesn't really answer anything but it's a trans fraternal trans national transgenerational group of people so it doesn't really narrow down you can't just say oh it's the city of London oh it's it's Israel oh it's the US oh it's it's all of those things it's it's it's it's so much more simpler and more complicated at the same time and again I'm not an expert on Epstein I just work with one and I've read the books and you know I've done a lot of reading myself but you know like we'll never know the true answer even the things that we got, the Epstein files, like how can you possibly trust this administration at this time, why are they dropping it now? What is the point? I'm seeing people say that it's a big sting operation and Q is real and Trump's gonna, there's a thing and he actually blew the whistle on him. And it's like, I think they're gonna do some sort of play like that where they'll try to make Trump the hero. I think it will probably work on a lot of people. It won't work on me. I don't trust this guy. I never liked Trump. I mean, I think he's hilarious. Like early on, Trump was very funny and I living in a super liberal area. I thought it was very funny when he won, watching, you know, the Californians just lose their minds. It was fun. I enjoyed that, but I also knew what was coming was very serious that if they're gonna put in this sort of very compromised chaos agent to run the most important government in the world, that like very intense dramatic things were going to change and we're gonna happen. I mean, you look at that election. It's like Hillary was obviously made more sense as like an insider and the continuation of the status quo of the Obama years and bringing back a little bit of Neocon, hawkishness there and a little bit more Bush era than Obama, but you know, let's continue on this path. And then Trump comes in and he's a wrecking ball by design. And he set up everything that we're seeing now, legislation wise, all of these things that we were talking about of like, how do we set up the Bitcoin dollar system? Like he set all that up in his first term, created this scenario to print tons of money, worked with Fink and created the going direct reset, leaves for four years and it's just, we have this, you know, a cadaver as president and it just doesn't even make any sense the Biden era is like a dream. It's like it didn't even happen. Then they run Kamala and Waltz, which is the most obvious, just poison pill. They know they're not gonna win candidacy ever. And Trump comes in, you know, number 47 and he's here and now it's just absolute insanity by design tariffs, gold, silver explosions, you know, Bitcoin at least at first did break all time highs. I went to 126. I mean, that was only October. The stablecoin market exploded. There's way more stable coins now. The tokenized gold market has exploded. Tethers down the largest private gold holder. Like all of these things are, you know, are being done basically under the guise of a chaos agent of chaos, but in reality, I think it's a lot more controlled than that and this trans fraternal, trans generational, trans national group that is very possibly behind all the, you know, the most important players in the Trump government, you know, Trump himself, Besson is this longtime Soros guy. Lotnik is an Epstein affiliate and is the bad guy for Tethers. We're having Kevin Marsh come in as the, you know, most likely coming in. He's been picked anyway to be the new Fed chair. He was an advisor to Anchorage Digital up until a week ago, to they took his name off of it. I mean, alongside Max Levchin of PayPal, alongside Stanley Drunken Miller and other Soros guy. And, you know, Anchorage Digital was the bank that the Trump administration gave the first bank charter to as Brian Brooks, who was like a founding, not founding, but very early PayPal VP, or sorry, Coinbase VP. He was like their head legal guy that set up all the legal environments there to let Coinbase become the publicly traded, you know, company that it is. And on his last days in office, when Trump's leaving, he sends them a bank charter. Kevin Marsh, you know, Bill DeBurg Steering Committee member who worked with, worked with Teal there. And he's advisor to like the one bank that the Trump administration gave the bank charter to up until a week ago, and now he's gonna go run the Fed and is gonna come into theoretically cut rates to zero and let the, let the real economic debatement begin. Again, I don't think that's an accident. I don't think that's chaos. That to me sounds very deliberate. - It doesn't seem like an accident. - And when you look at how, it doesn't seem like an accident. I don't believe in coincidences. They do happen, but I think what we're gonna see is wash them in and cut rates. And we're gonna see tokenized gold explode and we're gonna see Bitcoin explode and we're going to see the debatement trade begin. Stocks are gonna go crazy because why would you hold anything in dollars? Real estate probably will go crazy. And then we'll see these crazy boom busts all throughout the system at the same time. And what will be the outcome? I think it will be the US finds a way to basically force demand for dollars and pay off their debt. They'll still be way in debt, but they'll find buyers to service the old debt that they have. And basically things will turn on for another 10 to 40 years. And then we'll see what drone warfare, AI, all the crazy scientific sci-fi future, how that affects power structures. Do we live in a multipolar world? Or is it already one world government already? And it's just a bunch of theater. We'll find all that out in our lifetime, which is exciting, but it's gonna be insane because they don't want us to feel like it's by design. They want us to feel like it's chaos. So they will generate social chaos. And if you are engaged all the time and you're online and you're getting the stream of slop and you're looking at YouTube shorts and you're on Twitter and you're doing the thing, you're gonna be this very gradual thing and then you're suddenly, oh wow, every commercial at the Super Bowl was about AI. Ring Doorbell was using AI to find dogs and they can track everything that they see and all the neighborhoods in the world. I mean, it's insane where we're going. And if you are involved in looking at the screen, like it'll be so gradual you won't notice. But if you're not looking and then you check back in every once in a while, like it's so crazy and so insane how fast everything is moving and they keep you on the edge of your seat. I mean, it's like, what's going on in El Paso, Texas? Oh, they closed the border. They closed the airport for 10 days 'cause are we going to war with Mexico? Oh no, it was a balloon and they shot it down and they're already, like that story happened and ended like this morning for me, you know? The chaos of that is like, they're just, they're creating, you know, they're wagging the keys and you're looking and then you miss that Brian Brooks handed anchor as digital a bank charter on the final days of the administration 'cause you're still wondering how the fuck buy it in one. You know, it's like you look away 'cause the keys are so shiny and dangly and jingly and then it's like, oh holy shit, we're in a new financial system. And so like enjoy the ride, have fun, be safe, don't fucking lever up, like you're gonna get fucked. Like Bitcoin could go to 40, 35, who the fuck knows? It could, it could absolutely go down another 50% for like a second and then shoot the fuck back up. It could go to zero, but I think long term, if you hold spot and you chill, buy some metals, buy land, get yourself so that you're not dependent on anything. I don't want anyone listening to this to be a stable coin slave or surf. I wanna see you have assets and have land and live a nice life. And you know, at least you'll be able to write a cool memoir 'cause you saw the greatest change of the global order maybe ever and maybe the final one. - Damn, I'll go all the way to end the show. You're fucking awesome. Where do people go to find all your writing? What do you wanna send people? - Yeah, thanks brother. I think you're the man too, man. I really appreciate these conversations. It's very fun. It really means a lot that there are places where we can have these conversations and, you know, who the fuck knows what's gonna happen? But the only thing that I care about is people are informed enough to then go inform themselves. So there's a lot of things we sprinkle out there. Go look them up. I'll send the email link so you can post them if people wanna look at those emails or everything I talked about. But you can find me on Twitter, Mark, good, W underscore, I-N. I try not to be there as much, but then when something like this happens, I have to go look at what everyone's finding and spend a couple of days being in the slot with everyone else. But I've been writing for them and hangout for a couple of years now. And we actually just started a new publication called Paper Cut Publishing House, Whitney, myself, and my dear friend AB. Very excited about that. Our first book is Out. It's just Chipping Now. Call the Technocratic Dark State by Ian Davis, who's the man who, you know, has been writing for UH for a long time too. So find me out on the minute and hangout. We got a whole bunch of new stuff coming, website redesign, maybe some video content, a whole bunch of shit we wanna thank everybody for taking care of us for a while and we got a bunch of cool shit coming, a magazine, all this good stuff. So it's been a little bit of a dormancy period for me 'cause I've been dealing with a bunch of health issues, but feeling so much better in the live and excited to make a bunch of more articles for you. And so that's all coming. So yeah, find me on Twitter and on live and hangout. - Well, let's go. Thank you Mark. This was really cool. I hope I'll see you in person again at some point soon, but I appreciate you, man. - Cheers brother. [BLANK_AUDIO]