Bankless - 172 - DEBATE: Why We Need a Digital Dollar | Rohan Grey vs. RSA

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

Rohan Grey is an assistant professor at Willamette University College of Law and has been involved in the world of politics and government as it relates to our public money systems.  You might remember him as the guy behind the STABLE Act (Stablecoin And Bank Licensing Enforcement) which turned into an episode we did with him in December of 2020.  The topic of CBDC and the politicization of our money system has returned, so we wanted to get Rohan back on to learn about what this conversation from his point of view.  ------ ✨ DEBRIEF | Unpacking the episode:  https://www.bankless.com/debrief-rohan-grey ------ 🪂Airdrop Alpha is waiting for you on Bankless 🪂 https://bankless.cc/AirdropAlphaIsOnBankless  ------ In today’s episode, Rohan helps us understand: 1) Who are the power structures supporting and fighting over the CBDC 2) Why the crypto community might have to support a digital dollar… or else!? 3) Why you should be skeptical about the anti-Gensler politicians 4) Finding the common ground between Rohan and Bankless ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    🦊METAMASK LEARN | HELPFUL WEB3 RESOURCE https://bankless.cc/MetaMask   👾STADER LABS | ETHX LIQUID STAKING https://bankless.cc/Stader  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum   🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku   🎮IMMUTABLE | GAMING ECOSYSTEM https://bankless.cc/Immutable   🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  ------ TIMESTAMPS:  0:00 Intro 7:39 CBDC Fight in D.C.?  9:20 What Side Is Rohan On?  11:07 Public vs. Private Money  14:36 The Political Chessboard  25:11 Republicans & CBDCs 30:22 Anti-Gensler Republicans  34:23 Central Bank Independence  40:15 Elizabeth Warren War on Crypto 51:25 Crypto x Political Alignment 57:50 The Case for Crypto  1:02:52 Public Goods & Capitalism 1:04:33 Digital Dollar & Privacy  1:07:21 The Central Banker Problem  1:16:49 Property Rights 1:22:44 Rohan’s Advice to Builders 1:28:09 Closing & Disclaimers  ------ RESOURCES: Rohan Grey https://twitter.com/rohangrey Rohan’s Previous Bankless Episode https://youtu.be/1ywsNq0XAfE  No Spy Cash https://www.nospycash.com/  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front-run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Why we need a digital dollar, the question of a CBDC. This is a debate that Rowan Gray and I were having over Twitter, I believe, via DMs, a debate, a conversation, a back-and-forth that I knew at the end of this conversation we needed to convert into an episode. so that is what we are doing today. CBDC has been a hot topic. Republican frontrunners are revoking their support for CBDC.

They see it as a threat to the United States. What does this mean? David has called this CBDC Season 2. I think that's what we're in today. And Rowan Gray of anyone on the planet offers the most unique perspective. Some issues David and I disagree with him on, some issues we wholeheartedly agree.

You're going to have to stay tuned to this episode to find out where we disagree and where the common ground lies. A few things that we cover today. Number one, who are the power structures supporting and fighting over a central bank digital currency? Number two, why Rowan thinks the crypto community might have to support the digital dollar or else. Number three, why Rowan thinks we should be skeptical of anti-Gensler politicians. And number four, we talk about the common ground, the common cause between Rowan and the bankless nation and why we are fighting this fight. David, so much in this episode. Why was it significant to you? It's very clear after having our second

episode with Rowan Gray that Ryan, I feel like we are kind of cut from the same cloth. Different ends of the cloth, very different ends of the cloth. But man, we see eye to eye on so many issues. And then as it relates to just this one thing is completely inverted. So it's like he's like our cousin in some distant land, some alternative dimension that we are super aligned with. but there's this one thing that we are completely backwards on. So that's more or less a teaser for the content at large. That is kind of the theme and why we can actually talk to Rowan Gray, who is, I think he would accept the labeling of a statist.

He's a big statist. But also at the same time, fighting the same fight that we are, fighting for the 99% of the world and for public infrastructure that supports everyone else, public money systems that allow humans to express themselves and access freedom and autonomy. economy. Just we approach things from different angles. So this episode starts off with us trying to understand the political chessboard that is surrounding the CBDC fight. There are different

factions. There are different power structures all trying to compete for a specific flavor of a CBDC. And Rohan Gray wants the public sector, the government sector, to create a certain version of a CBDC that he thinks is good. And Ryan and I perhaps agree with some of his takes there. Not all, of course. But I think bankless listeners that have been paying attention to bankless will definitely notice some common throughlines, some things that Bankless has supported from day one that Rowan also completely supports. And we have full alignment there that are just mapped on to the structures that we are building here in crypto that are also structures that you would find in nation state governments. And so understanding taking prior lessons and education from previous bankless content themes and applying them here, I think will be a fun activity for the listener. Yeah, and of course, got to give the political disclaimer. Of course, Bankless is not a political podcast. We're not supporting a political party, either Republicans or Democrats. I think Rowan Gray gives some of his takes here that skew maybe towards one side, and somebody listening to this might recognize that. I will say this. He does speak very candidly. And I think one thing that we're unified on is being anti-corruption and being pro-power to the people, pro-civil liberties. And that, I think also comes through the episode, as well, David, I think we got to do a debrief for this episode because I really want to talk to you about this. All right, so we're doing a debrief, guys. A debrief is the episode after the episode. You get it on the premium RSS feed if you are a citizen. So upgrade to a citizenship and you can access that right now.

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and token payroll operations with Toku. You can reach out to Toku at Toku.com slash bankless or click the link in the show notes. Bankless Nation, we are excited to introduce you once again to Rowan Gray. It's the second time in the podcast. He's an assistant professor at Willamette University College of Law, and he's been involved in the world of politics and government as it relates to public money systems. We brought him on, I guess, a couple of years ago. My, how long ago was that when we were talking about the Stable Act? This was a Stable Coin bill

that was being talked about in D.C. at the time. We did an episode with him that was in December of 2020 is what I'm reading here. But I think it's time for an episode because CBDC season two seems like it is emerging, at least in the political sphere. So we're here to talk about that with Rowan, his thoughts on what is going on. I'm sure there'll be some interesting discussion, some debate, as there always is. Rowan, welcome back to Bankless. How you doing? Thanks for having me. Not too bad. Thank you. Okay. CBDC Season two, here we are. And the reason I think I'm calling it this is because you and I were DMing, because I was asking you your recommendations for a guest to come talk about CBDC and

politics. And as we were having the conversation back and forth, it was just like, oh, well, Rowan is the guest. We should definitely talk to him. So that's what we're doing. But some headlines I've been reading, and here are a few over the past couple of months. U.S. Senator Ted Cruz proposes CBDC ban amid growing Republican pushback. Headline number one. Number two, U.S. presidential hopefuls rally against central bank digital cash, who are the presidential hopefuls in question. I believe it's Ram Swami. This is a Republican presidential nominee, I believe, and DeSantis, of course, so two of them. Number three, DeSantis legislation to protect Floridians from the CBDC. So DeSantis, of course, using his governor authority to protect

the citizens of Florida against the CBDC. This was, I don't know, an executive order, some legislation put forward in Florida. Rowan, what is going on? Is there a fight in D.C. coming over this CBDC issue. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a number of different kind of battlefields or all kind of lines of this fight, but certainly, as is often, unfortunately, the case, Republicans have lent into defining this narrative and defining those lines earlier than the Democrats. And they've decided that they're going to be the party of protecting people from big, bad, scary government. At least that's the narrative that they're going with. So before we get in deeper in this conversation, maybe we should disclaim, do you have a dog in this race? Do you have a side? Are you team R or are you team D?

Well, I'm an Australian and I can't vote, so I don't really care about American politics, other than it actually affects things substantively. You know, these dual party structures exist around the world, and you come to a different country, and there's always one, and kind of getting too caught up in them believing they actually mean, actually mean something is its own problem. But, I mean, I'm certainly not a fan of the Republican Party. I certainly not much of a fan of the Democratic Party either, but to the extent I think there's much politics to be done, it's usually on the blue side.

That said, I probably have more disgust and scorn for your average Democratic Party politician than Republican because I at least hold them to a higher standard. But I do have a dog in this race, which is that I help draft the e-cash Act. I'm a big supporter of public financial infrastructure. I support Fed accounts. I support a public banking infrastructure at the state and local level. But in the context of new payments technology, new monetary technology, the thing that I'm most interested in is a privacy respecting, anonymity respecting, offline capable, peer-to-peer, hardware-based digital cash instrument, something that can replicate the features of cash that you can use, you know, you go behind the school yard and you buy some weed or whatever else, and it

doesn't leave a trail, it doesn't require some third party to approve it, and it preserves the civil liberties that public cash has had for hundreds of years. And at this point, there are a small number of people who support that, all blue, but not representing the Orthodox Party line of the Democrats. And everybody else is a cop or a spook. So that's the battleground I care about, but it doesn't neatly fall on partisan lines. And you're specifically interested in a state-sponsored version of this, not a crypto-network version of this, to be clear, correct? Yeah, there's two parts of that. One is, I think, public money, that is to say the thing that is legal tender, usable for public Jews, taxes, fees, fines, court judgments is the most important kind of money. It's the most widely used

money, it's the money that is integrated with the legal system, it's the money that any entity that wants to incorporate as a business, anyone that wants to live as a legally law-abiding citizen is going to have to use at some point, and it is the money through which the major socio-political questions about privacy around finance are going to be debated. That is to say, if we lose the fight over anonymity in public money, I don't think there's going to be political and legal space to preserve it in private money. And we can say, well, we'll just build technology and dare the government to come after us. And we had that conversation in 2020, and I think the last couple of years of showing the government, kind of time to come after you when it wants to. And so my view is we need a mass

movement of people standing up for privacy in money. And the thing that they are going to think of, the average person is going to think of that is cash. That is to say, we're dead presidents on it. And so what we need to do is take the fight to public money and say we need the same kinds of privacy in digital money as we have with physical money, we need the same thing that cash does, but digital. The other reason I think it doesn't work with crypto is because it's actually a kind of technical issue, which is with public money, what you have is centralized issuance, but decentralized payments processing. So with cash, you have this question of how much should you issue, to whom should you give it? Those are questions of public policy. They're questions of budget policy. There are questions

of macroeconomics and questions of monetary policy. But once you actually inject physical cash into the economy, it circulates in a decentralized peer-to-peer way, right? You can transact with two people offline without any centralized intermediary. Now, you might not like the value of the US dollar, but the actual payments processing is meeting 100% of the criteria of what I consider to be privacy respecting anonymous, offline, capable peer-to-peer cash. A ledger-based system doesn't let that happen, because by definition, you need to be connected to a ledger. And the reason you're connecting to a ledger in that situation is to try to solve the double spend problem. And that's why you have Bitcoin, et cetera.

But with a public currency, you sold the double spend problem through the centralized issuance layer. And that gives you actually more flexibility, more freedom on the payments processing layer. So I'm a big fan of secured hardware over a ledger because I think that's the only way that you actually get true offline peer-to-peer capacity. There's so much to unpack here, Row. and that's why we love having you on. And I'm going to let David grab the kind of the next question, the transition here. But I did want to make one thing clear for bankless listeners. When Rowan talks about public infrastructure, he's talking about nation state, not in the way that people in crypto or David and I, you've heard David and I use the term public infrastructure, which I think

Rowan would say that's more permissionless infrastructure. It's more like anyone can use it, anyone connect to it. I think we have an argument that that is still public infrastructure, but we'll leave that aside. The definition, Rowan has just used means nation-state sponsored public infrastructure. Public is a word by the nation-state for the nation-state, right. And I think bankless listeners that were just paying attention to Rowan's values in what he wants in a CBDC makes sense as to why we bankless can't actually talk to Rowan. I think we have a very large overlapping Venn diagram in our values, except we just differ on this one thing, which is like, all right,

who issues it, though? And I think that's why this perspective, this episode I think is uniquely interesting and why there's going to be a bunch of fun productivity here, because I think we are both similarly cynical of the politics and the political games. And so, Rohan, as we dive into this conversation, if your version of a CBDC came out, that'd be great. I'd love that version of a CBDC if I had to select between all the versions of the CBDCs that are out there. But I'm going to go ahead and guess that there is not consensus as to that is the version of a CBDC that ought to exist from the power structures that be. And that's what I hope to unpack here in this episode. But I'm wondering if you can help kind of just like lay the landscape. Politics is a

game of chess. What does that chessboard look like? Who are the players? Like how do we even like come to understand the landscape that we're operating inside of here? Yeah. So I'll start with my favorite thing, which is probably the least significant from that larger chessboard perspective, precisely for the reason you said, which is there isn't a consensus yet. And I want to make a little plug, which is two things. First of all, I'm a lefty. I don't really care about nation states, but I do care about public governance, and to the extent that there was something larger than nation state, I before that, too. It happens to be that the nation state is the largest form of explicitly democratic governance we've managed to build at this point. But the entity that I

would start with is the Treasury, right? When we have a global financial crisis, when we have some massive problem, you bring together a bunch of different government agencies, you know, the FDIC, the Fed, the OCC, you know, FTC, whatever it is. But it's usually the Treasury that is leading that. There's a reason Alexander Hamilton builds a tiny little White House look at an entity right next to the White House and says, hey, if I can't ever be president, I want to be Treasury Secretary. So I think the Treasury is the largest, most important financial-related government agency. It deals with not only, you know, technology and payments, but also everything related to financial crime, national security, the IRS, etc. And if you look at the monetary history of the United

States, the Treasury was historically responsible for making paper money. It was historically responsible for making coins. It was historically responsible making government bonds. All the most important financial instruments and then the Federal Reserve, which was only created over a century after the United States was found in 1913, nowadays manages the bank account side of things. But if you were talking about trying to create a cash-like instrument, the entity with the experience making cash is the Treasury. And ironically enough, the same Mint director, Philip Deal, in the 90s, who created the statute that authorizes the platinum coin, which is now also, or in vogue given we're about to have a debt selling crisis.

He actually testified at a congressional hearing in 1996 or seven on the future of money where he said, look, everything's going digital. We make cash like instruments. The coin is the most privacy respecting instrument we've ever made. It doesn't even have a barcode like the paper money has a barcode. So we should be looking at the mint to creating a digital kind of card that does that kind of thing. So he was sort of 20 years ahead of this whole debate. So whenever I hear the word CBDC, I cringe a little bit because what is a CBDC? It doesn't tell us anything about the actual instrument itself. All it tells us is that it's issued by the central bank. And if you listen to Central Bankers, when they started talking about this stuff, and I was following it maybe eight, nine, ten years ago, early on, they were trying to work out what they wanted. And they would say, we don't really know what design we want, but we know we are going to issue it. And from a political perspective, central bankers are a very particular breed when they're

the government. They like to consider themselves highly independent. Most of them are trained in macroeconomics, and by that I mean a very particular kind of macroeconomics. Most of them are statistical modelers. They don't have any understanding of law. They don't have any understanding of civil liberties, things like that. They've spent their entire life looking at data sets and spreadsheets. And most of them are relatively comfortable people. They're earning $200,000 a year at the Fed, and they go home at 4.30 p.m. Not like every other public servant. And most of them consider themselves culturally and intellectually, much more loyal to a international class of central bankers than they do to the rest of the government. So the place where you actually start, if you want to

understand how central bankers think, is not the Fed, it's the Bank of International Settlements. And the Bank of International Settlements is where they build a consensus internationally, long before they ever ask an elected member of any government. They go to those places, they read the reports, they all talk to each other, and they decide this is what a kind of sophisticated technocratic consensus view is. And what the central bank has come up with over that eight, nine year period is a set of principles, which is a rough consensus amongst them. One is that it is not going to be retail. They do not want to provide retail services to people. That sounds like bloody socialism. So they are going to do what? They're going to hand it over to private intermediary banks.

They're going to set up the back end wholesale infrastructure and they're going to leave the last mile to private for-profit banks because that's how they're entire infrastructure is set up today. The second thing is they don't want anonymity. Why? Because they don't care about civil liberties. They're all very comfortable well-off people who abide the law. They don't really care about your average person who might want to deal with political dissidents or sex workers or drugs or whatever else. And so when somebody says to them, hey, we just got a phone call from the NSA or the FBI saying we need a back door to catch the terrorists, they go, sure, that's fine, we get it. So that is who they have loyalty to, or at least who they're

willing to defer to when it comes to privacy issues. And then the last point about it all is that they don't really care that much about the accessibility and inclusion elements of cash. Because for them, anything that doesn't have four to five to six to eight zeros behind it is irrelevant. It's small fry. The people that deal with cash are poor communities, people who don't have access to the internet, people dealing with very small sums of money, mostly. And those kinds of people are a rounding error in their conception of the world. So when we're looking to map out the internal government agencies, the actors involved, the starting point are the central banks and the international central banking consensus.

Then you have the Treasury who is more politically accountable because the Treasury is directly under the president. So they are concerned about the winds of politics. they're concerned about coordinating with Congress, and then we're going to do Congress, which I'm happy to talk about. We can stop there if you've got more questions. But there's a sort of bunch of different factions in Congress. But if you're thinking about the different main actors here, I would say the main actors are the Treasury, the Fed, and Congress. The Treasury, the Fed, and Congress. Okay, I want to pull that apart. I'm seeing kind of different parties, maybe a collection of stakeholders that you emphasize. One, want to make sure I understand it. One is kind of the e-cash lovers, the people who would actually be on the side that you articulated earlier.

And you think that is most likely to come from Treasury. It's most likely at this point to come from Congress. From Congress. Okay. It's representatives from Congress who actually care about the public. The Treasury, of course, there are individuals within Treasury who care about that. But the Treasury Department as an entity is towing the official administration line of the Biden administration. Yeah, yeah, because, yeah, I was confused when you bring Treasury into that because I think maybe some members of Treasury and maybe even leadership, Janet Yellen, et cetera,

who's just recently banned, you know, tornado cash, a smart. contract, OFAC sanction list, right? And certainly Janet Yellen has her history on kind of the central banker side of the equation as well. But in general, we understand that there's this group of people, of which you would call yourself one of them, kind of an e-cash supporter that wants to bring about digital cash, cares about civil liberties, cares about inclusion, cares about protecting privacy and anonymity. And then there's another group. And this is the bulk of people that we generally, crypto at least, sees as supportive of central bank digital currencies. You're calling these the BIS, the Bank of International Settlement.

So these are the central bankers, really. So we got the e-cash lovers, we have the central bankers. There's another group which we can call the liberals, right? These are people who like public infrastructure, but they don't really care that much about civil liberties. Wouldn't the liberals be in kind of the central banker category or not so much? They mostly are, but they are a little more supportive of public infrastructure. So they might be okay with postal banking. They might be okay with giving someone a bank account.

But in their view, they can trust the law. to protect them. That's what makes them a liberal rather than, in my view, a leftist, right? So they would say, well, we'll just have a law that says, don't do anything bad with the data, don't violate people's rights, and that'll be fine. And so you have these debates with people who do want to give everyone a government bank account because they don't like private for-profit banks. They think those people are exploitative, which they are. But in their view, the most important thing is to make it non-private, is to do the equivalent of taking it away from private health insurers and making it public health insurance, right? That's the biggest fight to have is to get away from corporate greed. But they aren't

thinking about the bad elements within the government who might actually hurt people once they get their hands on that data. So, yeah. But I feel like that group, Rowan, would just kind of collapse under their being okay with the central bank consensus policy on CBDC. So I sort of group them under the BIS central banker category. The difference with the BIS is the BIS considers itself fundamentally committed to a private public intermediary. So on the privacy thing, I think they are on the same side of things. I see. Because they're bankers.

They want private banks to kind of run things where the liberals are okay with kind of just like nationalize all of it. Yeah, public option or something like that, right? But on the privacy element, the other thing is I would say that the central bankers would be the kind of people that would say, well, maybe it's good that we catch bad guys. Whereas the liberals will say, no, we should probably have some privacy. but we'll put a law and it'll be fine. Okay. So they might actually have a difference of opinion, but on a policy or on a technical level,

they might end up at the same place. So I understand those two groups. But there is a group which we just kind of started this episode with, which seems to be like some Republican frontrunners, that are pushing it back against, I don't think they're pushing back against the e-cash lovers. They're pushing back against the central bankers, this kind of consensus BIS group that we're just talking to.

Where do they fit? These people who just don't want a central bank digital currency, but have not recommended e-catch. as an alternative. Who are these people? And well, this is where I'm extremely cynical. And you just heard me. I've got no love for the liberals in this debate, and I got no love for the technocrats in this debate either. But the Republicans, I think, are the probably most deeply cynical at all on this front.

Because, first of all, the people that you mentioned, 100% of those kinds of people vote for the Iraq War and the Patriot Act. 100% of those people vote for being tough on crime, which means the death penalty, and who cares about due process, and who cares about public funding of defense attorneys and those kinds of things, right? So these are people that have never met an authoritarian system of government they didn't like

as long as it was punching people they don't care about. But they love to consider themselves small government people, which usually means less taxes and letting private property rights trump everything, right? They love the idea that they get to beat their wives, they get to be behind closed doors doing whatever they want. They just don't want the cops telling them what to do on their own property. So they call themselves small government, but they love the US military. They love spending huge amounts of money.

on surveillance machines when it suits them. But it's very helpful to be a Republican to claim that you're anti-big government. It's a very good narrative. So they call themselves anti-CbDC when what they really mean is, I am going to take as much money from every private financial lobbyist to make sure that the next generation of public infrastructure is owned and run by private actors for profit. That's what they actually mean. They will put up a shield of civil liberties and privacy, and that will crumble the minute that there's some law and order electorate to win, and what's going to be behind it, as it always is, is some company funding them to privatize the whole thing.

That's what that position is in this debate. Ted Cruz doesn't give a shit about your civil liberties. He gives a lot of shit concern for the people that fund his campaigns, and those people say, we don't want a government bank account for everybody. We want to provide that infrastructure. It's square, it's stripe, yeah. You're a cynical. You are more cynical than most crypto people,

right across on this part. I've spent enough time among Republican politicians to know that when they talk about small government, all they really mean is big government for Halliburton and for Blackwater. I mean, this is who they are, right? When is Ted Cruz ever voted against a military budget increase? He doesn't do it. So let's not pretend that he's Mr. Small Government. He's just Mr. Anti-Public goods. And by public there, I mean anti-goods run for free for poor people. and what we are talking about here is a bunch of people, some of them in the crypto world, some of them in the regular finance world going, there is a gold rush right now to build a new infrastructure.

Someone's building the telegraph line. Someone's building the new internet pipes, right? Is it going to be the US government for the public, or is it going to be Bill Gates or Elon Musk or whoever else? And that's who people like Tom Emma and Ted Cruz are putting a huge flashing neon sign saying, I'm available for sale. Buy me, please. And I will convince these dumb hoi-po-loi

that I care about them while I'm raking in money for you. Yeah, the image, the choice it seems to be that it's which ball do you want to be kicked in because you're kind of damned if you do, yeah, damned if you don't. Yeah, exactly. Then there's a couple of people that go,

hey, you know what, we should make this thing that should work like cash. But the problem with cash is it's boring, right? Everybody loves cash. Even actual everyday Republicans, most of them like cash. guns and cash. It's a thing, right? But when you hear people like Tom Emma and Ted Cruz say, we care about privacy, where's the cash? It doesn't exist. It's not there on their radar.

I've spoken to people who are trying to get Tom Emma to care about e-cash. He doesn't care. Why? Because all this stuff about privacy is actually about making sure that there's some private company that gets to build the infrastructure. We've got to get back to this, Ron. Have you considered the possibility that he thinks it's not practical or possible? to do an e-cash alternative, and this is where the crypto argument comes in. He won't even fund a pilot. He won't even fund the research to see whether it's possible. So I get that that's a potential good faith way of interpreting the guy, but at this point, there isn't a single actual privacy-respecting instrument out there. Now, he can say he's for

crypto, but as I said at the beginning, and we can have that technical conversation if you want, crypto does not solve the problem with cash. There are a third of the country doesn't have high-speed internet at home. There are millions of people that do not. have access to an internet connection, there's still going to need some form of lo-fi digital cash instrument. And a ledger-based system doesn't do it. Ron, I don't know how closely you've been paying attention to the crypto world and our fight with Gary Gensler and the SEC. I teach securities law somehow, so yes. Ah, okay. You're familiar. If we went back a year in time, the topic of conversation that we were having here at Bankless is like, oh, crypto, it's so bipartisan. It's going to be so great

moving forward. Like the Democrats and the Republicans love it equally. Fast forward to now and the grilling of Gary Gensler in the last hearing that he had in front of the Senate Finance Committee, it was very obvious that the Republicans had taken the lead here with being very pro-Crypto, anti-Gensler. And so like we talked about this, me and Ryan talked about this on the podcast a handful of times. Like, man, Republicans are really stepping up to protect crypto and go after Gary Gensler. Now, I'm wondering if we are being naive with support of the anti-Gensler Republicans and what your take is. on that. Yeah, first of all, again, what is being supportive of less securities regulation? It's being supportive of huge amounts of money getting to make huge amounts of money, which again,

if you're trying to get lobbyists, you know, donor dollars, that's a good position for a Republican to be in. Gary Gensler is rogue. I don't particularly support what Greg Gensler is doing, and there's a lot of people within the Democratic Party administrative structure that don't support what he's doing either. Why? Because Gary Gensler is looking after Gary Gensler at this point, right? He is looking to get glory for himself and for the SEC. and he is doing so in a way that is not actually playing nice with the rest of the administrative agency structure. And so, for example, when we put the Stable Act out, what did we say about Stablecoins? They should be regulated as a banking product.

And at the time, that was a crazy out there position in December 2020, if you remember. I got a lot of flack for being completely out there. But fast forward, eight months, 10 months, the Treasury Department releases a report on behalf of the White House saying exactly that, saying that stable coins should be regulated as a banking product. And I got to go, well, that's very nice. But what is Gary Gensler saying? Gary Gensler is saying, no, it's all a securities product. We don't need to work with the banking authorities.

We don't need to talk about it as a banking product. We can do it all. Me and my agency, a little short guy with a lot to prove with his big agency, right? He doesn't want to play nice with everybody. And he is saying that to other regulators, right? The banking regulators, people trying to put together a comprehensive piece of legislation to divide up the different pieces of the crypto ecosystem where they should. should go, oh, this is a new banking product, put it with the banking regulators. This is a new

security, put it with securities regulars. He is saying it can all be done by securities regulation. It is an inferior way of dealing with those problems, but it is a way that aggrandizes his agency. And he is explicitly not working as much with the rest of the Democratic administration as he should be. So I think it's a very easy target to attack, and there is some stuff to actually attack, but again, I never assume good motives with those Republican actors because they're not actually proposing anything constructive on the other side. All they're proposing is let us keep making money, let us keep doing whatever we want without any accountability. And I know you've got probably very different opinions on this, but there are a lot of things in the crypto ecosystem which

meet the definition of securities. There are a lot of things in the crypto ecosystem which meet the definition of a banking product. And the question becomes, what are we actually going to do, are we going to simply let the inertia of technological change undermine the entire financial regulatory regime? Or we're going to do something about it? And we aren't having those conversations now because the people in Congress are terrified of doing something. And the minute a regulator like Gensler comes along and says, don't worry, I've got it all covered, then they get to go home and not think about it again. And so I think it's actually doing us a disservice as an administrative agency. but I think the criticisms coming from the Republicans are not, hey, we should do this right.

It's we should do nothing. And I don't like the fact that Gensler is the only one doing something. Yeah, I don't know. Crypto's in this difficult place where we're not sure which politicians will stick up for crypto civil liberties, of which I think some of the civil liberties you mentioned are certainly a part of and a subset. And so we have to kind of go with whatever politician is willing to kind of resist the BIS. at some level we're kind of choosing our poison here, right? Because I feel like if nothing is done, Rowan, then central bankers kind of win. It seems like they have the authority, they have the power, they have the politicians, they have kind of the establishment, they have the structures, they have the institutions, and that will be the de facto. It will be something rolled out akin to the Chinese

central bank digital currency, right? And that's what will be left with in the United States. And so the gut reaction from somebody in crypto is when you hear any politician talk about being anti-CbDC. What we hope we're hearing is they're being kind of pro-civil liberties, pro-inclusion, pro-sum of the core values that crypto represents, though I understand, and I don't think people in crypto are naive enough to assume that these politicians aren't out for their own political power. We certainly don't trust them. So I acknowledge that there are hypocrites among the books. I'd almost throw out, it's like, what else are we supposed to do?

We have to win somehow in Congress. Who's going to resist the rogue executive branch and rogue regulators? Who's going to resist the central bank digital currencies? So I'm not asking maybe for a solution here, but it's just like, what do we do about this? Because I feel like it's inevitable that a state-run central bank digital currency enforced by the central banking community will become the standard in the U.S., and I don't know how to resist that. Well, so here's a good question. I mentioned before that they love donor money. ask your average Ted Cruz or Tom Emmon what they think about central bank independence.

They will defend it to the death because central bank independence means that the fiscal authorities, right, the regular Congress budget, doesn't get to make money, spend a lot of money. That's what the Republicans hate more than anything. So what is central bank independence? Central bank independence is you can't do that. You can't spend money on health care, on education and whatever else because you cannot run deficits because the central bank gets to control interest. rates, and if you run too high deficits, the central bank's going to raise interest rates. And the entire Republican Party is united in favor of that. They don't want to get rid of that. Maybe a Ron Paul wants to get rid of it because he wants to replace it with the gold standard.

But nobody wants to say, hey, the Congress gets to actually spend its own money. They want to let it hand it over to technocrats because that means, once again, no public goods, no public money. When there's less public money, there's more private credit. And that means people go into debt. That means the people who sell debt, make money. etc. Historically speaking, the two groups who were supportive of Wall Street were the entire Republican Party on one hand and the Clinton machine, the new Democrats, the Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Timmy Geithner, all those people who are all worth $100 million and think

that makes them part of the party of the working class, right? Those were the two groups, high finance, dems and pro-business Republicans. The actual group that does care about this stuff is the Labor groups, the people who care about black communities who use cash. There are groups in Philadelphia, New York, that have organized with working class people to pass laws requiring stores to accept cash. I understand that from your point of view, public cash fiat is debased, it's all that stuff. But my suggestion, or my kind of pitch would be, hold your nose on that for a second, on the privacy, civil liberties thing. The only place where we're going to win that fight in the public's heart and mind is in the

cash that they already use. And the people that are standing up for that are Rashida Talib, AOC, even some moderates like Stephen Lynch, who is from a working class community in Boston, walks around talking to average people on the street. When we pitched his office and we said, hey, it's probably bad if you can't ever make a private transaction again. He went, yep. And we said, we should probably make sure that if we're going to build another generation of public infrastructure, we don't let that happen. He said, yep. But Rowan, so here's the thing. I think you find a common ally in most crypto people who care about, you know, private, civil liberty preserving cash. But then where's their support for the E-Cash Act? So that's my pitch. That's my coming

with an olive branch is support us on the E-Cash Act. That's a great pitch. So have an unholy alliance where you support it. Because I'll tell you what, I was with one of the founders of the tornado cash the other day. We got along like a house on fire. I support them. Thank you. I think the spooks going after the people who founded tornado cash is terrible. I'm a big free software advocate. So I will support that private currency, but I do not think the way we are going to get the average person on the street to stand up against the central banking class is to convince them about tornado cash because you have to convince them about libertarian monetary theory. And with all due respect, the percentage of the population that thinks that stuff is valid is like single digits. Most people have accepted public money is the way that things work. So if we want privacy, we start with public money.

I think the crypto community could get around that battle for e-cash and preserving civil liberties and preserving private money. And also, though, here's what I want to make sure of, though. When you talk about someone like Rashida-Teleb or AOC or someone like that, I don't know what their specific platform is with respect to cryptocurrency. But I do know some leaders of the Democratic Party, namely, Elizabeth Warren, is one that comes to mind often, are very much anti-crypto. Like, they want to ban this stuff, Rowan. So what we see is if you want to actually degrade the power of the banking class with the central bankers,

if you want to restore that power to some other power structure, right, we need an alternative to a fiat only apparatus as well. So cryptocurrency can be that alternative. People can store their value in it, and it does not win the advocates in D.C. who are in favor of e-cash, it does not win cryptocurrency community support when you say e-cash and then let's ban crypto. Let's ban citizens' ability to hold assets like gold or like a cryptocurrency and to own their own private keys, right? I would like to see some more movement from those in D.C. who are on the side of e-cash and on the elements of crypto that preserve civil liberties

and anonymity to speak out about that. That's like the equivalent of the olage branch being passed back and forth. We need this. I think that's entirely fair. I have spoken out against that stuff. I think Elizabeth Warren, now, when she ran, of course, you know, there was her and Bernie. They looked like similar from a distance. They were quite different, right? Elizabeth Warren was a Republican most of her life. Her whole platform was America first, which for any actual leftist is incredibly imperialist. It's incredibly nationalistic in a way that I am

not nationalistic, and Bernie certainly wasn't in that way. And in recent times, it has been very pro-cop, right? The only people who use anonymous money are criminals. This is stuff. that's coming out of the Elizabeth Warren playbook. It's bad. I've said it's bad publicly. It is bad. I'll say it right now. It is in her zealusness to go after private power. She is aligned with the cops. And that's not a good place for a progressive to be. Right? So, yes, it shouldn't be to ban that stuff. However, the flip side of that, and not to defend her, because there's no but to the criticism of her. The other side of that is, when she looks at the crypto community. She doesn't look at people that care about civil liberties. She looks at people

who she is on the other side of the aisle to, like Tom Emma and Ted Cruz, who the crypto community is going, these are the good guys. And she says, these are the most cynical pieces of shit I've ever met. They do not care about civil liberties. I'm the one trying to actually bring the average person's life back under their control by going after concentrated private power that these people are literally for sale to. And I don't want to be told to care about civil lividies from people that don't care about anything at all, right? The Patriot Act, etc. And so if somebody comes to her and says, I care about public goods, here's how we can make a public good that respects the little guy. They listen to that. I've had serious conversations with her

office. I wish they cared enough about the cash stuff, but it is too hard for them to navigate right now because the minute they say that stuff, it sounds like they're pro-crypto, and there isn't this e-cash narrative. Rowan, she's declared a war on crypto. That's part of her office's message, right, building an anti-crypto army. What she means by crypto there isn't civil liberties, right? What she means by crypto is a new generation of private financial grift. And with respect, the crypto community has not separated those two things very effectively. So I am not defending her not being more nuanced in her critique and creating a space and saying, you know what, it's not tornado cash that's the enemy. It's the Sam Bankman-Feeds and it's the Michael

sailors and whatever else. She hasn't done that distinction. But Neither has the crypto community in its defense, right? I mean, we are trying, Rowan. I mean, we want the grifters out as much as you do. It only counts for so much. Yeah, it only counts for so much, right? There is still a thing called crypto, and that word carries connotations of both. So the war on crypto is the war on what most people think of in crypto, which is get rich,

quick screams by scammers. That is a war that should be fought. But when we did the Stable Act, if you remember, people said, oh, he wants to ban this, that meal, I said, I don't want to ban anything. You didn't want to ban die. You didn't want to ban the decentralized staple coins. Is that correct? Nope.

All we wanted to do was regulate things that were trying to be public money, trying to look like a dollar, trying to be as stable as a dollar so that you use them in a way that the public couldn't even tell the difference between a regular dollar and that. If you want to make a Bitcoin, you want to make an ether, go for your life. It's not my problem. It's the things that are trying to use the US dollar as its baseline because it actually affects the US dollar, right? If I create a store next to McDonald's and call it McDonald's and I offer burgers called

Happy Meals and Big Macs and people get sick, they're going to blame McDonald's for that. And McDonald's going to go, I have a problem with this, right? It's almost a trademark issue. So my problem was always the things that we're trying to walk and talk like the Fiat currency. If you want to make your own private currency, let's see how many people use it. Good luck to you, right? Now, whether that's going to impact securities laws is a different question. Frankly, I think most of securities regulation regime is weak shit anyway.

The state laws back in the day when we first had securities laws in the early 20th century were all merit-based. That is to say, there was an explicit acknowledgement that you should show a public purpose before you create it. The federal laws that came in the 30s gave that up entirely. We lost the debate before we even started. What is the securities regulation regime? It's all disclosure.

It's like saying, hey, you want to shoot meth at the age of 12? Just let us know. We're nice parents. We'll let you do whatever you want. We'll buy you the smack. Just let us know. And then the kids going, I don't want to let you know. And that's the debate we're having.

So I would love a debate about whether we should have a bunch of these complex financial products, whether they're actually useful. But the securities regime isn't even trying to have that debate. So why should I give it any credit for it? It's doing this other thing. And people like Gary Gensler, when the time comes to do real regulation of actually important monetary products, they're part of the problem too. So a pox on all their houses in my mind.

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States. And so when private crypto monies latch on to that dollar and then can do destructive things to it. Understood. We've seen that. While there are legitimate builders building decentralized and robust products in the world, there's also those, but understood that there's also nefarious actors, which we've, like Sam Bankman-Fried wanted to issue a stable coin, like two weeks leading up to the blowup of FTX, right? So. And Tether is somehow still alive, but let's not pretend Tether or Binance is the face that crypto wants, like the hill that crypto wants to die on for its legitimacy, right? Like, this is a bad thing to be the lifeblood of the entire ecosystem, and it still is, right? It's still the dominant trading coin. It's still

the main exchange on which everything else is happening. Like, kill Binance and get back to me. Then we'll have a conversation about credibility, you know what I mean? Kill tether and let's talk, you know? And that's, I think, the narrow difference between your philosophy and our philosophy is like, hey, we would like free market experimentation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I actually want to go back out and go to the conversation of like the actual olive branch between the crypto people and who actually is my first question. Like, who is the political tribe that would be the most aligned private money, CBDC?

Because in the Ethereum world, the bitcoins want all flavors of CBDC to die. The Ethereum world, Ethereum culture, and outside of the Bitcoin Maximus, are more pluralistic in our acceptance of new forms of money. So, like, I am super happy to accept a CBDC built under certain parameters, and I can totally be convinced that there is a CBDC version that's out there.

sponsored by certain people that I could get behind in a rally to support versus others. Yeah, totally. And it doesn't mean we're going to store our value in everyone. Right. We don't have to. Right. By all means, store it in yen. I'm not American. I don't care. So I'm wondering if you could actually just paint this picture of what this like crypto alignment with whom and would this look like. How do we formulate this future? Yeah. So first of all, the E-Cash Act was sponsored by, I think about six legislators. It was led by Rashid Tlebe and led by Stephen Lynch. Stephen Lynch was a moderate. And Rashid's leaves, obviously, a radical lefty. And I'd love to to have a Republican on board. We try to get McHenry on board. We try to get Emma on board. They weren't interested, right? It wasn't substantive. It wasn't that they had disagree with the

provision. It was that the idea of any public good was a non-starter for them when what they really wanted was to kill the whole thing. The second thing is, let's not call to CBDC. It's a digital dollar. Fuck the CBDCs. That's the central bankers world. Every time we use that world, they get more power and authority. Take them out of it. It's a digital dollar. It's treasury issued. But the coalition that we're starting to form, and I said this, you know, seven years ago, and I feel really like, oh my gosh, it's nice that we're actually in a different the world now. I was like, where are the privacy advocates? Where are the civil liberties groups? And now we do have that group. In part, no, you know, not to kind of to our own horn too much,

to my own horn, but in part because of the work that we did behind the scenes, they have come to the table to their credit. So the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, fight for the future, which is, you know, probably the one that I would suggest crypto people can come through if they want to because they're really pretty pro-crypto. Demand progress, signed a number of other groups, wrote a letter to the Biden administration saying any digital dollar must preserve the anonymity features of cash. The ACLU is writing this stuff up. I was in a call with people at the White House with those groups just a few days ago talking about this stuff and they were all making these points to people there and the, not the White House, sorry, the Treasury. And the Treasury's

point was, well, do we really need this? You know, is this really necessary? Is there enough people that care about this? You know, surely we should want to be able to keep this stuff as surveillable, you know, collect data for good purposes. You know, and that was not the only position. in Treasury, but that was a pretty dominant one, but we had actually a whole room of civil liberties experts saying, no, that's not good enough. And so those are the people I would start with, right? You can find it. There's a website they just put together called no spycash.com, right, sign up for that, drone forces. One of the big things, frankly, and this is one of the problems that I've discovered, I'm the lawyer, my job is to help with the legislation, the policy

side, is that it's actually very hard to build the technology. You know, it's really easy to build software when you can just spin up a server, you know, spin up a Linux server and start hacking away, it's a lot harder to build open source hardware. So getting a device where you can have a payments card, right, that works the way your transit card works or something like that, it's actually very difficult because most of the secured hardware elements, the trusted executing environment elements that we actually need for this to work. And to be clear, I know they're not perfectly secure, but they're secure enough in the way that cash is secure enough that if you add multiple layers and regulation, et cetera, it will work enough.

We have a secret service to deal with counterfeiting, et cetera. But to actually get a working pilot is a catch-22. Because we go to Congress and we say, we should have e-cash. And they say, okay, what does it look like? We say, well, we need to build it. And they're like, so it doesn't exist yet. You're like, well, parts of it exists, but I can show you the pieces of the elephant, right? But to actually get a working prototype, I would say if you had 2% or 1% of the total market

cap that goes into crypto, going into building a, open source white label hardware-based cash card. A cash card rather than a phone just so that it serves the population who doesn't have the phone. That's right. You could do it in a SIM card. You would want it to work with a basic phone, not a smartphone. But the best way in my view would be to have a card that you could tap onto the back of a phone, right, have the chip on something that you can send out. The best example was when the COVID happened, right, the cash relief that was sent to everybody. at the time we said, Rashida Talib's office that I was working with, said, make it a prepaid debit card. Why? Because it's the only kind of instrument that's actually going to get to the vast

majority of people. If you're undocumented, you don't have a tax form. If you're homeless, you don't have an address to, if you don't earn income, you don't have a tax filing, right? If you are dealing with an abusive spouse, you don't have your own bank account. So the first round of checks, they did it mostly through bank accounts. The second round, they switched over and did mostly through prepaid cards. But the prepaid card could be generic. You could load any kind of value on it. It could be for crypto as well. It could be for any private localized currency. It could be a complementary currency at the state level, the local level. Detroit used to issue paper dollars in the Depression. So you create

the generic white label card and all you need is to upload some sort of value onto it. That's why I'm saying if you separate the issuance question from the payments question. Most blockchain-based systems or mining-based systems and things are trying to solve those two problems at the same time. The monetary policy question and the payments processing question. Focus on the payments processing, leave the monetary one for a separate day, and have a card where the two cards can transact value directly peer-to-peer. Localised currency. It could be a complementary currency at the state level, the local level. Detroit used to issue paper dollars in the depression. So you create the generic white label card and all you need is to upload some sort of value onto it.

That's why I'm saying if you separate the issuance question from the payments question. Most blockchain-based systems or mining-based systems and things are trying to solve those two problems at the same time. The monetary policy question and the payments processing question. Focus on the payments processing, leave the monetary one for a separate day, and have a card where the two cards can transact value directly peer-to-peer. This is why I think that really your initiatives are own do benefit from some crypto-adlies, because we're building a lot of this infrastructure, you know, the public-private key,

cryptography, secure... I'd love the cavalry to come up, yeah. Okay, so this is the case for crypto. And it's like to you, I'd like to make. And I'm wondering what you think about this, right? So there's two points I'd make. One is we're sort of building the infrastructure you talked to. It's like, so if you have a e-cash, for example, or a digital dollar, it's a bare instrument, right? So you get into these troubles of, let's say you issue a card and someone loses it. Well, then how does it get refilled? All like all of these problems. I mean, this is what crypto is actively solving through like smart contracts, for instance, where you can have a social group of people helping to restore your crypto should you lose it. Like we're building some of that infrastructure here, and I feel like there's a link there. But I guess I would make the point to you, Rowan, that's like you're going to Congress and you're talking about the digital dollar and e-cash, and you don't have the product built, right? I know crypto doesn't have adoption, but it does have some of the product built. So, right, that's a benefit. The second thing I would say, probably the more pernicious thing, or the thing I worry about most about your e-cash initiative,

because I think most of the crypto community who are not the same bankman-freeds and the doquans will get on board and would be supportive of digital dollar e-cash type initiatives. Doesn't mean we're going to store our value in this thing, but like the same values you talk about privacy, anonymity. We just don't think that the Treasury is going to allow you to do this. We don't think the nation state is going to actually allow you to do this. Look, the banning of tornado cash. I mean, that came through Treasury. O-FAC sanctions. My colleague, David, is actually on a lawsuit against Janet Yellen and Treasury because he was a user of tornado cash. somebody sent proceeds from tornado cash to one of his Ethereum addresses. And so he's somehow maybe implicated in this kind of like OFAC legislation. So we're actually using the court system

to push privacy via that method. How can we trust these people? My argument to you, Rowan, it's like, we have to build this and try it and push it through. We're not going to get it top down because they don't want this. The surveillance state does not want this. So while we're very supportive of your initiative in general, and we encourage it, think it's good. And let's give it a good old college try. That sounds great. We're also not going to put all our eggs in that basket. And you understand why. We have to have a backup. And that for us, that is crypto. What would you say to this? Yeah, look, I think this is a productive place to be. I think this is a productive space, these two questions. The first question, I actually disagree.

I don't think you're building this spec. Because when I look for this spec, it isn't out there. And I think that the reason it's not out there is because, as I just said, you're trying to solve two problems at once, which is to say you're trying to solve decentralized monetary issuance and decentralized payments and you're trying to solve it with the same tech. And so where you end up with is everything has to be online. Everything has to settle online with a ledger because it's only through the ledger that you can have some sort of decentralized consensus preventing the double spend and the issuance from being problematic.

But if you have a centralized issuance, you can have offline capacity as long as you have a hardware secure element. So I don't actually think that there's many people in the crypto ecosystem working to that spec. If there was, if it was even 5%, if it was even 5 to 95 as a ratio, I'd probably be okay. But it's like zero to 100. Everybody's working on decentralized ledgers or distributed ledger tech and offline hardware capability is just DOA. So that's a really big problem for me is that I don't think the spec is there. And then on the second point, I do have a deep skepticism. I don't think you trust them. I don't think you ask permission. I think you have to build power.

but you need to build power to the point where there is a mass movement in the streets, right? When's the last time there was actually a serious group of people that wouldn't let the government spy on them? It was the people that remembered World War II. It was the people that were getting tortured because their friends and family members were being dragged out of their beds at night and they remember, right? That's the kind of mass movement that we actually need. But again, what is the crypto ecosystem saying? The crypto ecosystem is saying you have to believe in billionaire grift, you have to believe in libertarian. You have to believe in libertarian monetary theory, and you have to believe in a complete nihilism about the state, which means not just money, but healthcare, public education, roads, schools, the kinds of stuff normies actually like.

Fuck all that stuff. It's either Ron Paul or bust. For what is worth, I would actually describe that to a narrower, more extreme parts of crypto that I actually don't care to scale out in the slightest. But maybe the loudest, to Rowan's point. Definitely the loudest. But there isn't a group of crypto people going, we believe the government can provide good public schools. We just don't trust them with the money, right? That isn't a crypto narrative I've ever heard. We should have Medicare for all. Actually, hold on. We definitely don't do the whole like same services as the government, but there is a very strong cohort of people that are here to build public goods that are net new, new public goods, new public goods funding for things that have not been funded by the state. But not for free. And there's usually some guy who gets filthy rich in the provision of that service.

No, I would disagree with that. How many crypto people are earning a public sector salary? I mean, I'll tell you my salary right now. We can go salary for salary if you want, but I don't think that we're talking about people for whom this is an entrepreneurial capitalist venture first and foremost. And that, I think, is not the same as the spirit of a public service, right? The people who are pushing for Medicare for All are not seeing themselves making millions of dollars on that ecosystem.

The people who are pushing crypto are, and that's the thing that we don't turn the volume up on that, but that's always in the background. That's why you do this stuff, right? because eventually you get to stop being a temporary embarrassed billionaire, and you get to be the billionaire that actually saved the world. But I think, you know, when it comes to what you're trying to ask permission for or what you trust the state about, my view is, I very much agree with you. I think the odds of winning on this are extremely slim, like less than a percent, right?

But, and this is maybe what the last couple of years have hopefully maybe half a point to me. I appreciate you give me a point earlier. And point to you, which is you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket. But if the state crushes Fiat cash, it sure is hell going to crush crypto's privacy. You're not going to win a court battle to say, you know what? You don't get any privacy in public money, but we'll let you have it in crypto. So you're saying if we don't win the battle for digital dollar and e-cash privacy, basically we become an underground group of renegades or we don't have privacy on our chain.

So it's basically illegal to use tornado cash, as let me remind you, for Americans listening to this, it currently is. because the hearts and minds debate is not about public versus private instruments. It's should we be able to make an anonymous transaction? If we should, of course the public should allow us to do it with the public's money. If we shouldn't, why would we let it do it with private money then? Ron, one comment on this. I think that in your battle, in your framing for e-cash and the digital dollar,

I think one way to frame this to the crypto community is you are fighting for private forms of cash. And that could include tornado cash, something like Zcash, any crypto-native element, and also the digital dollar. If the tent was widened a bit, I think you'd find more support from crypto. And maybe that's part of the reframing that you're kind of doing for us today. Yeah, absolutely. And this is why meeting people like Amin Solmani from Tornado Cash and talking to them about this stuff is so important. I did not expect Amin Solmani's name to get the doctor. I had a great weekend with him in Portland every day.

No way. Yeah, yeah. But this is part of why, but my view is that the public conversation is the one that hits 98% of the population, right? Like, I understand you're deep in the crypto, you're deep in the kind of like corner of the corner of the corner of the cutting edge, right? But for the average person, they are still trying to work out how to use their bank account, right?

They are more interested in the $2,000 check they got from the government and whether or not that has interchange fees on it and whether or not they can spend that money on sex, toys and drugs or not, right? That's the actual cash that they're thinking about when they think about cash. New York City and Philadelphia, even while the Attorney General in New York's putting crypto regulation out there and going after stablecoins, is passing laws forcing cities to let them use cash, right? That is the thing when we talk about cash that most people think of. They don't think of some online Bitcoin, you know, derivative like Zcash. And part of that is because, to go back to point one, it's not actually the same.

something that requires online settlement is not cash, in my opinion. It's a bank account, and it's good. Zcash is trying to shield bank transactions. That's great. It's trying to distribute a bank across multiple entities. That's great. But what you are offering is fundamentally an account. It's not a bearer instrument that I can hand to somebody else. It's a ledger that I have to move money around on a ledger. It's not cash. I think you're making the case here, and I like the case, and I think we've reached a point. I'm hopeful bankless listeners and people, and crypto community who are hearing you, or hearing the common ground here. And I think the point made is like cash itself, just actual physical cash, is an original form of bankless money. It's not

an IOU in a Wells Fargo account. It's not traced and tracked by all of the various side chains of J.P. Morgan, Silicon Valley Bank, and the surveillance state. It is a peer-to-peer bankless money system. And if the journey to going bankless is basically we want to become more bankless over time, those in the crypto community who support that journey and that mission, and I would include myself as one, and David and the wider bankless community should be supportive of an e-cash. Okay, so we got that ruin. But I have to ask the question, okay, here. And this is where we might depart a little bit, which is tell me about the central banks, though. All right? So bankless money. We've got commercial bankless money. It's peer-to-peer physical cash and the digital

instantiation of that and crypto provides some of that and what you're proposing provide some of that too. We haven't solved the senior age problem. We haven't solved the problem of like irresponsible central bankers, another layer of bankers at the root of this who can do whatever they want with citizens store of value assets with their money system, right? And that's the piece. You talk about being supportive of democracy and that sort of thing is the most scalable, you know, voice of the people type of infrastructure. What about free markets as well? Like, where does that come into the picture? And I understand that there are flaws with free markets and externalities and, you know, capital pooling, all of these things.

So I'm not, you know, naive to that. But I would say is this is the people voting. If they're saying, hey, dollars degrade over time, they're worth a lot less this year than they were five years ago. And you call this a savings account? That's laughable. I'm losing money every year. and they choose individuals of their own volition to exit that system and go to another system, maybe crypto, maybe some other store of value. That seems pretty democratic to me. It doesn't use one person, one vote, which is important in a democracy. Free markets were essential in the founding of democracies as well. And this seems like a free market reaction to this. I don't like that money, so I go choose this money. In the past, you've been much more kind of anti-crypto as a store of value.

in this conversation, you're sort of saying, well, let it live its own life. It's fine. I don't want to ban. Just leave it to the side. But tell me, what's your problem? Or do you have a problem with this argument? How do we solve the problem of central bankers inflating away all of our currency? Okay, so I've got one little reframe in my own story as a kind of olive branch to you first, and then I'll try and answer the question. So that is right now the paper cash, right? Anyone can make a wooden coin or whatever else. But paper cash is issued by one company that's been doing it for like a century that makes, you know, some nice stable profits in Virginia. No one talks about it. No one knows about it. It's like some family that's been running this company making the paper that

they're actually minting the coins. Yeah, the people who are making the kind of potten that goes into the dollar bill, right? It's like there's one contract that the government's had for a very long time, right? That's a closed source version of paper money. What I'm talking about with e-cash and what we put in the e-cash act was make it open source. Make it open hardware. Make it generic white label, which means anyone from a local community, through to a private company could take that technology and make their own version of e-cash with their own value put into it. So I would love to break the monopoly over the paper money itself. That doesn't mean everyone can put the US dollar on it and call it a US dollar, but it does

mean that you could make an ether paper currency or a Bitcoin paper currency or whatever digital cash instrument, right? So I would love to break the stranglehold over cash as technology and not have it only a government thing. When we talk about having a government cash instrument or having a public bank account, central bankers hate it for the not to do with privacy. They don't give a shit about privacy. They just give that to the spooks. They say, whatever you want, that's fine. What they actually lose sleep over at night is the idea that people will take their money

out of bank accounts and put it into even a central bank account. So when progressives, even these and the Liz Warrens of the world say, we want to give everyone a Federal Reserve account, the central bank hates it because it would mean all the deposits would flow out of the banking system and flow into individual accounts. They would store it like it was cash in a vault. What does that mean for the banking system? It would have a huge liquidity drain, right?

Suddenly banks would be having huge outflows. It would be like a bank run like we just saw with Silicon Valley Bank. How is that going to be dealt with? The central bank would have to provide them that funding directly, like it just did. What that means is the central bank's balance sheet explodes. The central bank is lending billions of dollars. There are no individual human depositors serving as that liquidity, and the central bank would have to own and be very explicit about the fact that every time a bank makes a loan, it is channeling public money. The central bank is behind the scenes lending the money to lend to the person. That is the closest thing to Soviet communism we've got in the United States, right? It is the closest thing to a public system of credit allocation that we have. So if we have a system of government cash or digital cash accounts or a 100% insured government account,

what you are doing is separating the whole issue of money and payments from the question of private credit supported by the state. That system may have a role. It may be drastically smaller than it currently is. But at the moment, whenever we talk about inflation from too much demand, which for the record is only one source of loss of purchasing. There are other sources, including poor management of the economy. So I think one of the ways to ensure the value of the dollar is good is to actually invest in good public infrastructure, is to stop underfunding the roads and the hospitals and the schools so that we actually have a robust economy to build stuff, and then the dollar is strong. But a lot of the people who are so afraid of debasing the dollar

are the kinds of people that oppose public investment because they think any new dollar created must be inherently bad or inherently devaluing, whereas in fact, if you invest in productivity enhancing things, it can be good for the dollar. It's just a question of whether you think the government can ever do that or it's always going to get stuff wrong, which is much more about that libertarian kind of liberal slash lefty divide. But to your point, I think I have no problem with people storing value in other things. Storing in Beanie Babies for all I care, right? Create ether for all I care. Go for it. And if that ends up becoming... so big that people want to leave the US dollar, the US dollar lost its own game, right? It had all

home court advantages and it still lost. Fine. I am deeply skeptical of that for two reasons. One, I think the US dollar is still by a long shot, the most useful thing that you can store your money in because the biggest thing in my experience is liability risk. It's not the ability to buy coffee. It's not the ability to store value and see its number tick up. It's when shit goes wrong, can you use this thing to get out of the problem? Whether it's jail, whether it's a lawsuit, whether it's the plumbing in my basement that just exploded, right? The plumber is not accepting crypto. The dollar is always the thing that is most widely accepted because the legal system is everywhere, right? Legal liability risk, you walk down the street, someone hits you

with your car, you hit them with your car. It's the dollar that the court is going to put that court judgment in. If it wasn't a dollar, if it was something else, whatever the court forces, that's what most people are most worried about. But to your point about free markets, and this maybe goes back to that earlier point, that original thing about public versus permissionless. I use the word open. And for those interested, I had a long conversation with Peter Van Volklenberg at Coin Center, who, shout out to them, they have been pretty supportive of e-cash. Jerry Brito wrote some of the best articles about digital cash. I had a long conversation on their podcast about the difference in public and open with him. We have.

had a kind of good faith difference of opinion there. A free market is predicated on property rights. It's predicated on someone enforcing your property rights, right? Even if you've got a stick somewhere, the reason that I can't send people in to take that stick is because there's a police force, right, unless you're Murray Rothbard. Even Milton Freibin says you need a police force, right? And you need contractual enforcement. So a free market still has a state in it. And the question is, you know, how big do you want that state? Do you want that state to do only courts and police? or do you want it to do courts, police plus schools and healthcare. And then you're back to just the same state that we're talking about.

So when I hear free market, what I think of is layers and layers of legal institutions that are necessary to make that work. And I like smart contracts as software. I don't think they're contracts. Because if I have a dispute about a smart contract, I take you to court. I would love to go back and listen to kind of you versus Peter on the question of open versus public. But one thing I'd say is there is a form of property right and settlement assurances

that network like Bitcoin or Ethereum actually provide, right? Which is just basically if the code kind of settles the transaction, then it's settled. And they do this without guns or police or, you know, a legal system. This is kind of part of it as well. Well, I'm not sure if we're talking about a different conception of property rights then, because for that to work, you have to have a server, which has to be in a place. Somebody can't take that server. There has to be electricity being provided, and that electricity can't be taken away.

that person who's holding that can't be put in jail, that person can't be put on the death penalty and killed. So you have to have a property right in your body that's protected. You have to have a habeas corpus right and a Sixth Amendment right and all that kind of stuff. So you can move things around on a ledger, but I don't think that's the same as a property right, because a property right is you can move things around on a ledger and nobody gets to stop you. But you could try to move things around on a ledger and OFAC is going to come and do what it does. You don't have a property right in that. What I will say is I do think that some people in crypto forget about sort of the power of violence and protection, kind of the meats base layer and sort of the wrench attack. And you want your local police force, you know, making it such that burglars can't come into your house and wrench attack you and beat you for your, you know, 12-word seed phrase, right? And you very much want that and you'd very much value that. We'll just beat you to death.

Sure. On the other hand, I will say that crypto is in using Ethereum or something like this as a property rights layer, there is a layer of privacy, anonymity that you have, the ability to kind of transport money, value inside of your head, just with this seed phrase, the ability to kind of settle that on chain. That is something. If you're saying it's not full property rights, it is something. There must be layers of property rights that we're actually talking about here. And I'm not discounting the value of kind of like at the base settlement layer, yes, there's kind of violence and, you know, secured by nation state protective. there is something that crypto is providing in the digital that is uniquely different here.

And I guess if you're not going to call that property rights, I don't know what you'd call that. First of all, when I say there's a state involving property rights, it's not a hundred zero thing, right? Like you can't, right now, the state can say you can't speed, but that doesn't mean that it can stop me speeding at two in the morning on a deserted street, right? But it does mean if everybody is speeding all the time, the state can do something about that, right? So there's this idea that you don't need perfect enforcement for it still to be something the state has influence over. So when you say a seed phrase and that's it, it's not that's it, right? It's electricity. It's boxes. It's chips. It's all those other things, right? You need to trust

that the Intel chip that that AWS server running your client is not compromised with some code in there, right? You need to be able to inspect that code. You need to make sure that there's silicon being shipped from wherever to make that chip, right? So meet space is always the fundamental layer, even of conceptual space. And I care enough about the internet and the internet infrastructure to think about what it actually means to regulate that stuff, right? To regulate the cables, to regulate the telecommunication spectrum, right? If you can't send signals because I put you in a Faraday cage underground, then it doesn't matter if you know the seed phrase. That seed phrase is useless, right? That's what Guantanamo Bay represents.

And that's where OFAC will take you, right? Eventually. So you can have a seed phrase in the woods and it doesn't help you change the blockchain, right? So I think starting with the idea that you need to take the full stack, right? You need to take account the full stack. You want a property right. A property right is that full stack is on my side. At every point in the stack, I am protected. And if you are not, then yeah, you've got your seed phrase.

That changes the power calculus, but it doesn't actually get you all the way to being protected. And that was kind of, you know, when we had this first conversation three years ago, I was like, they can cut at you, right? Like, around the world. It's like, you've got 50,000 nodes. That's really cute. Do you know how many guerrilla movements the United States has crushed that had a million people in it? Like, in Indonesia, they killed three million communists in one day.

Sorry, in one weekend. Like, you need a lot more nodes than that to be outside of the power of the state if it decides it doesn't value what you're doing. And that's to me what the big fight over the cash is, is we have 300 million people in the United States. We probably need 100 million of them supporting physical cash in the streets before we are going to have a chance to go up against the cops and the spooks. because what did Snowden show us? They lied to Congress to their face, and everyone was just like, it's pretty bad, right? It's going to take probably some genocide before everybody remembers

that their grandparents fought for this stuff. And I don't think knowing the past where in your head is going to be good enough. And if it was, I mean, tornado cash would be in a different place. Like, when I spoke to me, like, what they're doing with tornado cash version two is they're trying to compromise with the Treasury. They're white listing certain accounts in North Korea, you know, doing all this stuff precisely so they do. don't find themselves being a rest in the middle of the night. So I agree with you that it is something.

I just don't think it's enough. And I know it would be really great if it was enough, but it isn't. And that's a harsh truth. I think we have to like eat at some point. I think Bakerless listeners can see why we were excited to have you on because this conversation, I think, is just intellectually curious at the deepest level. And it goes down to the very root of like what makes social structures and social systems. And so I think that's why, like Ron and I find these conversations is very compelling. And I think also why you were able to find camaraderie in people like Amin Soleimani and the Coin Center guys and us here as well. While we could have this debate for hours probably, and we probably will at a future point in time because we enjoy these conversations,

I do want to zoom back out and remind the listener and all of us who the real enemy is. And so what I'm worried about is that your version of a digital dollar, along with our version of a private crypto money that's inside of the internet, both. offend the powers that be, and the powers that be are the ones that have Wall Street and other power structures behind them. So I'm wondering how we can pivot this conversation and what we need to know about, because that is also the fight, right? If the totalitarian CBDC comes on the scene and is brute force down everyone's throats, I'll take your point that crypto's not going to do well in that industry. We will need crypto more than ever, but the legality of crypto will also be

in question more than ever. And so how do you have any advice for us as crypto people as to how to fight this fight and make sure the Overton window goes in the direction that we wanted to. I think we need to come to some consensus on the spec on what we actually need to build. I don't have the only answer on this. My view, and I'm open to being convinced otherwise, my view is it needs to be offline, capable of final settlement offline, not just Chowmy and eCash where it then settles back on a ledge or a week later or something. It needs to be final settlement offline, which means to me it needs to be hardware secured.

So I think we need to have some consensus that as a spec goal for the ecosystem, like, You've done a fair bit on chain, right? You've done a fair bit on ledger. We need to do off-ledger. We need to have no ledger for a while. Like, we need to work out what that tech looks like and work out how to put infrastructure into that in a really serious, like, resources into that in a serious way.

Because I completely agree with what you were saying earlier, Ryan. We need that technology, the proof of concept at the very least, before even the people in Congress, right? The imagination gap is huge right now. And we need some way of, being able to switch code. To your point, I am not saying everyone in crypto needs to love the state. Like, loves Fiat. Fuck Fiat. Fine. Do it. But make that white label cash instrument, use it for your own stuff and just make it open source. And then I will take it to Congress, right?

But like, let's find that instrument that we need to build that could have any value put into it. And let's build that thing. And then we can go to Congress and say, this is what your money should look like. and then you can say, that will never do it. We're going to make on our own. Great. That will be the first stable coin I will support. 100%. You make a cash stable coin, and then you say, hey, there's $100,000 in a vault somewhere and we're making this cash card.

Let's do it. But at this point, that's my biggest concern is I don't have the technology army. I don't have the developer army because it requires not just some good coders. It requires, like, a factory making chips. You know, like I follow Rajby Pye, I follow Pine 64, I follow, you know, Bigelbone, I follow all these small board computer manufacturers trying to develop some open source hardware. But when we get to point of sale devices, when we get to trusted executing environments, the stack

is always completely closed at this point. There's layer after layer of proprietary tech. Even the best digital cash tech I found, which was whisper cache, 85% of what they're using is proprietary. So we need an open source hardware-like smooth. like yesterday in that stuff. That's probably the first point of consensus. And the other one is, I think, A, being skeptical of the Tom Emmers of the world, or if you don't want to be skeptical of them, appeal to their better nature, appeal to the version of them that you believe they are and say,

hey, Tom Emma, support E-cash and see what he says. And if he says it can't be done, say, will you support us trying to do it then? And if he still says no, then start to be a little suspicious. But push him to it, right? Hold him to it. If there's Team Red out there convincing those people, because if we had the state skeptics on the right and the state skeptics on the left uniting in this stuff, nobody could claim that was a crypto grift. Nobody is going to claim Rashida Taleb is in the pocket of crypto. You will have instant credibility on that front, right? Elizabeth Warren is not going to say, I'm sitting my crypto army against the squad. So find whatever that point of commonality is around protecting the little guy. Leave the libertarian debate over

debasing the money for a different day. In the same way as the people who come together and form a constitution, the most important thing in that room is what you don't talk about, because you know if you start talking about it, you'll blow up the consensus. So leave the debate over monetary issuance to another day. We can have a gold bug versus soft money debate any day. Let's work on the payments tech together and get something that actually can be uncensurable, but not online. Rowan, it was a pleasure. I think you've left the bankless community with some next steps. That was definitely a call to builders. And on the social layer, I can say we will support all bankless cash initiatives that preserve civil liberties and privacy. And so you've got us there. If we're going to raise 100 million people in the United States who care about this, I think one route for you to consider, Rowan, is the

crypto community. There's a lot of us now, and we're growing. And hopefully we can make sure that entire community cares about these values we've been talking about today. We appreciate your time today. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It was a real pleasure. Wow, action items for you. You know what? You guys can go down memory lane and go listen to the original episode we did with Rowan Gray around the Stable Act, which was his legislation at the time. That would be pretty fun to see the evolution here. That's all I got, though. Maybe I should lead out with this. Risk and disclaimers, of course, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. None of this was financial advice. Never is on bankless, but we are headed west. This is the

frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.