Bankless - Your Constitutional Right to Crypto | Richard Jackson

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

Do we have a right to own crypto assets? We brought the perfect guest that walks us through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in order to make the case for our already existent constitutional right to Crypto. Richard is the Deputy AG for the State of Oklahoma for Technology & Digital Assets. He’s an economist at heart, turned legal and crypto native, working to make Oklahoma the most crypto friendly state in the union. ------ 📣 SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24  https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠  🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap  ⚡️ CARTESI | LINUX-POWERED ROLLUPS https://bankless.cc/CartesiGovernance  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle    🌐 OBOL | STAKE ON DVs, SCALE ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/obol  🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT  https://bankless.cc/toku  ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/43?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E  ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 7:47 Constitution 101 11:08 The Bill of Rights 16:51 The Right to Crypto 30:23 1st Amendment 42:29 2nd Amendment 50:29 4th Amendment 1:02:20 5th Amendment 1:11:54 3rd Amendment 1:18:51 9th & 10th Amendment 1:27:00 6th, 7th & 8th Amendment 1:30:12 How to Secure Our Rights 1:37:18 Why Fight in the US 1:43:16 The Oklahoma Case 1:46:18 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Richard Jackson https://x.com/RickJacksonOK ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠  

And they said, you know what, the future of the United States, the future of the state flows through novel and emerging technologies. Let's start the process of getting intelligent, getting smart, so that we can preserve fundamental rights of crypto, so that we can have a regulatory environment where builders can come and they understand the rules and we know what's expected. And people can enjoy both their rights and also the technology in new ways. Welcome to Bankless, where today we explore the frontier of your constitutional right to crypto. This is Ryan Sean Adams. We've got a solo episode today, just me, and I'm here to help you become more bankless. If you're listening here and you are a citizen of the United States of America, you have a constitutional right to crypto. This isn't a bold claim.

This is written in black and white in the first 10 amendments of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. In today's episode, legal mind Richard Jackson makes that case. And as a listener, you get to be the jury and decide whether he's right. If you're not an American citizen, there's something here for you as well. This is a look into the source code running America, the parts in particular that were put in place to preserve individual freedoms. Here's how I think of it. If Bitcoin is a freedom protocol for money and Ethereum is a freedom protocol for property, then the U.S. Constitution is a freedom protocol for running a society. Now, it's not to say the U.S. always runs its code perfectly, but at its best, it recalls these freedoms in the future and lives up to them.

And I think it's about to do the same with crypto. because crypto isn't just a right enshrined by the Constitution. It's an extension of the Constitution. Crypto is how we preserve constitutional freedoms in the 21st century, particularly when it comes to the digital world. I used to say if crypto was around during the 1700s, the founders would have written the right to crypto in the Constitution. After this episode, I've realized they already have. Thanks to the sponsors that made this episode possible, including Cracken, which is the best place to purchase your constitutional rights crypto. Get an account on Cracken today.

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and vote on whether or not a proposal should be funded. Make sure your vote ready by staking your CTSI before the vote. vote's open. Bagless Nation, a few months ago after reading a white paper entitled Our Second Amendment Right to Crypto, I put out a call asking for a guest who could make the case for our constitutional right to crypto. Our guest today stepped up. His name is Richard Jackson, and allow me to introduce him.

Richard is the Deputy Attorney General for the State of Oklahoma for Technology and Digital Assets. He's an economist to heart. He's turned legal mind as well, and he's a crypto-native. And he is working to make Oklahoma the most crypto-friendly state in the state. the union. Richard, welcome to bankless. Hey, Ryan, thanks for having me. Glad to join. Okay, I'm just going to share the tweet that kind of sparked this show and just set it up for people. So there's one weekend. I was like actually on a flight visiting my parents. I don't normally read legal

white papers on the weekend, but this time I did because the title of it sparked my interest. It was called the Second Amendment and the struggle over cryptography. And this was a Second Amendment case for cryptography. So for people who aren't familiar with the amendments, maybe you're not American or maybe just kind of like rusty here. The Second Amendment That's the one about the guns. That's the one about the right to bear arms. And we'll get into that. But it was a fantastic, interesting, like, detailed summary of our actual Second Amendment right to encryption and cryptography at the time and cryptocurrencies. So I tweeted this, the right to bear crypto. If Americans cared as much about encryption as they care about guns,

there'd be a much different conversation right now in D.C. And they should. We need a podcast on this. And so I was kind of seeing if there's any other legal minds who would step up to the plate and talk about our second amendment right to crypto in the way that the white paper's author did. And we actually got more than that. So you stepped up, Richard, and you DM me privately and you're like, hey, more than the second amendment case for crypto, I want to give you the constitutional case for crypto. It's not just one amendment that applies here. It's like the first 10 in the Bill of Rights. So first I just want to say, thank you for doing that. And I want to set the scene for bankless listeners. The topic today is Richard is going to

defend the U.S. citizens' right to crypto. And so I know we're going to peel back this onion in multiple layers across multiple sections. We're actually going to go amendment by amendment and actually cover this. But let's start with kind of the preamble here, right? Can you in like, you know, a minute or two, just set the stage here. Do Americans have the right, a constitutional right, to crypto. So in 60 seconds, I would say yes. And when we start to dive into some of the details, I think you will see the thing that is crypto expressed in the various different ways that we talk about it. Code is speech, now the Second Amendment as an arm, things to be free from intrusion from the government, is that crypto has a very neat, elegant way of preserving those rights

and also be the thing that we enjoy, the freedom itself. Okay. Well, fantastic. So that's the case. So let's take this in a few sections. The first is I just want to set some background because I think for a lot of folks it's been a while since their civics classes about the Constitution and the amendments and the Bill of Rights and that document. Then I think we'll talk about this thing

that I just said the right to crypto and what exactly that means? So like what rights are we actually looking for and what can we find in the Constitution? And then I think I want to go amendment by amendment if you're willing, Richard. Let's do it. And to like do a case for each.

And then finally we'll just conclude all of this which is like, okay, so what if it says this in the amendments? How do we actually prove that? How do we get societal consensus? So those four sections. Let's start here. Tell me a little bit about the Constitution, okay? Like explain it like I'm five, you know, do the Civics 101, the Bill of Rights, the freedoms, our founders enshrined in this document. What was the purpose of the Constitution, specifically, the Bill of Rights? Right. So let's set the scene. We're going to go back to the 1700s when our founders were drafting the Constitution. And this is part of the Constitution. of history called the Enlightenment era. And so it's at the end of the Renaissance. And so there's a political movement and intellectual movement about humanity and very specifically about the nature of authority and where power comes from. So to tie it into our crypto audience, we were starting to talk about ideas for new social protocols that we call government. And so our founders, the Enlightenment was a look at classical study. So they were going back to ancient Greece and

all of the things that happened during the Renaissance, and our founders were basically putting together historical influences, and they said, okay, the Greeks and the Romans had ideas, democratia, the people's power. Then there was res publica, the Roman idea of the thing that is public. Then there was natural law that came out of the Renaissance about the idea that there are absolute truth somewhere, and if we can find them, they express themselves in nature. And then at the end of it, kind of a conclusion, the English tradition of law where there was a rise of what we were starting to term as fundamental rights, meaning things that just didn't go away

depending on how the government felt. And also, most importantly, we were documenting those things. So that's the scene that we're setting. And so our founders were especially asking the question, you know, what is the nature of government? And as we as individuals, how do we play into that discussion? And so the documents, particularly the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and then also the Declaration of Independence,

those are three ways of the founders expressing our concepts of freedom. So there's three kinds of freedom. National freedom, which is the right of a people to be free from external control. So the colonies saying, England, you don't have the right to govern us anymore. There's political freedom, which is our right to say, this is how the government should work, right to vote, right, to hold office, right to serve on a jury. And then finally, there is individual rights, which is the freedom to choose to live how you want to as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else. So we have three documents in our main history, right, the Declaration of Independence. That was our national freedom charter. Then there is the Constitution, which is is the political freedom charter, and then what we're going to talk about today, which is the Bill of Rights, which is our individual freedom charter. I like that. And maybe to put this in a crypto nomenclature a little bit, and forgive me if I'm stretching metaphors a little bit, but it feels kind of like the Declaration of Independence is kind of like the white paper. You know, like, hey, this is the intent. This is like what we stand for. This is kind of the

values. This is what we're going to build. And the Constitution, and particularly the Bill of Rights are more like the code itself, the operating system, you know, the chain, the thing that we deployed and the thing that goes live on Mainnet. And of course, we've added different amendments to the Constitution by way of, I guess, like, hard fork, let's say, right, of, you know, validator consensus, let's say. And the first 10 of which was the Bill of Rights, which set a precedent for individual rights. I've got a definition here of the Bill of Rights. I'm wondering if this kind of summarizes it, okay, in your mind, says this. The Bill of Rights is the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. It spells out Americans' rights in relation to their guns. I'm

government. Here's what it guarantees civil rights and liberties to the individual, stuff like freedom of speech, press, religion. It sets rules for due process of law and reserves all powers not delegated to the federal government to the people or to the states. And it specifies that enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people. So this is really a document that spells out individual rights. I understand in the early phases of the Constitution, there was some debate as to whether we needed this document or not, the Bill of Rights, as to whether this should be included and carved out. And do you have any history there? I'm a little foggy on that piece. Yeah. So to understand the Bill of Rights is to really understand the constitutional ratification process. So let's rewind, right? 1776, we issue our Declaration of Independence. As you say, it's the white paper. We as now the United States, these are the reasons we think we should be. separate. We are going to publish a new social protocol chain that we're calling the United States. Well, so we enter into the Revolutionary War. During that period, we issue the first, the beta version

of the United States government called the Articles of Confederation. Intentionally very weak, intentionally very decentralized. We Americans thought of ourselves more as a citizen of the state than we did as a citizen of a country. So I would be in Oklahomaan, somebody from New York would be a New Yorker. That's about as big as we thought. We end the Revolutionary War, and we are left in this tension. On the one hand, the Articles of Confederation are terrible. Nothing works. The chain does not function. We can't run anything. Nothing functions. We can't get it blocks through it. It's just like not coordinated enough. Yeah, there's not enough that's a perfect way of describing it. We just don't have enough to get this to work.

And at the same time, there is an intense distrust of anything that we would call a central government. They do not like the state is the highest level of government. And so what was became the constitutional convention. We were supposed to, the now people's attending this convention, we're supposed to just revise the articles. And what they said is, look, we've got to start all the way back at zero. It was almost like they, tell me if this resonates, we started a blockchain and we realized it didn't accomplish the things we wanted. And so we rewrote it to an issue and new one. And so that was the process. That was the constitutional convention in 1787. They distributed the constitution and what they found was nobody liked it. It was not popular.

there was a very, very, again, strong fear of people who had just fought for their freedom to then just give it right back to a what was considered central government or strong government. So the Bill of Rights was a political concession that they said, look, if you will ratify the Constitution, we will amend it to change a few things that will address your distrust. We want to make it so that the federal government, what would become the federal government, wasn't too powerful, and also specify some individual rights. So three main functions. Protect individual liberties. limit the power of government, and also alter the nature of government, where it used to be, like the span of governmental authority was this, and we'll just chip away individual rights. They said, no, no, no, we're going to invert that. The government is very limited, and we will approve the things that do not restrict freedom inappropriately. So you're as small as we give you, and we'll only expand the government as opposed to the government as big as it is, and we will find freedoms from that. That's really where the Bill of Rights kind of comes in. That makes sense. I think for the bulk of this podcast, we'll be talking about the Bill of Rights. And the Bill of Rights is

comprised of 10 amendments that were added to the Constitution. And the Constitution itself, if you read through this, I don't know if you've had the chance. This is actually a long document. Like I've read through it at one point or another. And it's really more of an operating system for the government, right? That's where you get like separation of powers, executive branch, judicial branch, legislative branch. You get, you know, kind of terms of presidency and all of these things that set the context for how the government itself should run, but it really, without the Bill of Rights and the subsequent amendments that were added, it doesn't really specify too much by way of individual, you know, citizen rights. And that's what this compromise in the Bill of Rights was added to basically

deal. It's just to say, as an American, as a citizen of these United States, here's what freedoms you have that are enumerated. And by the way, if it's not covered here, default, it goes to you as an individual. I think we'll get back to that point a little bit later. So that is the Bill of Rights. There's your civics 101. Let's get to another definition here. I said in the intro, the question on the menu in today's episode is, do Americans have a constitutional right to crypto? Let's talk about the right to crypto portion of things. When we say a right to crypto, what exactly do we mean? And this is not defined in the Constitution. This is just sort of like, I guess for the purposes of this podcast in crypto in general, what are the rights that we mean? What are the rights that? we're actually talking about. I'll give you one kind of definition to maybe work from, and then let's play around with it. So it was interesting that the Republican Party, the GOP platform paper came out, and they have this very tiny section about crypto. So this is the Republican Party platform a couple weeks ago. And it's under the title of Champion Innovation says crypto. And it says Republicans will

end Democrats unlawful and un-American crypto crackdown. So very polarized language, of course, say this is politics, you know, one party versus another. But let's get to the actual. rights and oppose the creation of a central bank digital currency. I'm not sure that's what we're talking about here, but we will defend the right to mine Bitcoin and ensure every American has the right to self-custody of their digital assets and transact free from government surveillance and control. There's a few things there I like in the latter part of that definition, the right to mine Bitcoin, so you can mine if you want, you can validate transactions, and the right for Americans to self-custody their own assets. So you don't have to.

to hold crypto in a bank in exchange, you can go bankless, private keys in your hands. You know what we say, not your keys, not your crypto, okay? That would be part of the right to crypto, I would imagine, and transact free from government surveillance and control. So respect the blockchain's ability not to inject OFAC sanctioning. There's something like this, I would say, as part of that. Anyway, what do you think is a good working definition of the right to crypto when we say that? Yeah, so I'll start with the rights part, and then I'll move to the kind of what is crypto part, because they're two separate related questions. So when we talk about rights, we have to understand them in the context of freedoms. So freedom is what you are. The right is how you have that freedom. So if you have the freedom of speech, that means you can express yourself, the right to freedom of speech means the government cannot restrict that freedom. So when we talk about freedom, at least in the context of the Bill of Rights, there's one major element, again, it's individual right oriented, where we say there's two very important things. freedom of conscience, which means you can think the way that you want and express yourself

the way that you would like to. And there's also an element of economic freedom, which means commercial activities. So the right to engage in the businesses that you would like to do, the right to retain the fruits of your labor, the right to retain property. So they are expressing kind of the more economically oriented elements of it. But crypto is obviously bigger than that. And so I will define crypto when we talk about it in three ways. There's one, the code that is crypto, whether that's encryption technology or blockchain technology, the actual zeros and ones that we express ourselves. There's also the act of encrypting, so by the virtue of behaving in a certain way, the act of encryption. And in third, there's digital property. So the ideas of crypto,

the act of encryption, and the things that are digital property. So that's the three ways we can talk about it. So what do we mean when we say the right to crypto? In the abstract, in effect, it is the right to and the means to our freedom. So the tools and the subject of our freedoms. The right to enjoy freedom and the way that you can assert those rights. So you can have crypto, you can express yourself through crypto. And you also have the right to use crypto, as they say, to make sure that you are free from what is unlawful or unnecessary government intervention. That's what we mean when we say the right to crypto. I really like that definition. Okay. So then what we're talking about when we say crypto, just to recap that, is

The code itself, that's like kind of the noun. Maybe that almost corresponds a little bit. We'll get into this. I don't want to step forward too quickly, but maybe that corresponds to something like speech, right? Code speech is just something that's sort of written down and put out there. The act of encrypting, so this is a verb. So, you know, like individual citizens would be able to encrypt. Businesses would be able to encrypt.

Like, that's part of the preservation. And the digital property itself. So the, like, I guess that implies maybe the crypto assets, the tokens, that sort of thing. And the right to crypto is like even broader than that kind of like DOP party definition. You're broadening it. And this is why I appreciate a legal mind thinking about these things and just like not me is just all of the tools that allow for crypto freedoms and the right to fully enjoy crypto in its various use cases.

I think that's a good definition. It does feel broad. Let me ask you, though, what would not be included in this type of a right? Yeah. Okay. So like, let's take the inverse of this because this does feel broad. And I can hear some people listening and saying, well, like, what? Are you crypto bros asking for, like, the right to, like, you know, launder money or to evade taxes or to fund terrorist organizations? Are these the rights that you're really looking for in this broad definition? So what is not included or implied by this right, would you say? Yeah. So that in summary is all of constitutional law in one question. Oh. What is not included, right? So even the founders understood that while we are describing what they termed as fundamental.

Right? So the rights that we as humans enjoy because we exist, even though we're talking about those things, they do say that those rights aren't absolute, right? They talk about the restriction of rights without due process, without just compensation, unreasonable searches and seizures. So really finding that dividing line is all of what constitutional law is about is what is included and what is not included. So a very easy example is you do not have the right to fund terrorism. That is something I think it's a pretty bright line rule that I think we can all agree to. The question is is now, do you have the right to use something like tornado cash, which is not in and of itself the funding of terrorism, but it gets associated that way. So is publishing the tornado cash

code? Is that a right that an American gets to enjoy? Is the use of tornado cash, something that American gets to? What purposes do you use it for? These are all very fundamental questions that a court, especially the Supreme Court, would have to answer in the relationship to the question, what is or is not included in your right to crypto? This is why. why we have an entire judicial branch. That is the whole purpose. This is why we have a Supreme Court. This is why we have lawyers.

It's because the amendments themselves are very short. Like, we'll read out some of them in today's podcast. There's, like, not a lot of detail. And so taking your example, and you said, like, what's not included by these rights is the whole of constitutional law, that process gets worked out in the judicial system over years and decades and precedent is set. We have a common law system. So the precedent gets cemented, almost like proof of work, and it becomes hardened.

over time and it, you know, like, adds more social legitimacy. That is the entire, like, I guess, realm of constitutional law and the entire judiciary, and I guess in a nutshell. And like another example that comes to mind, like just for me, is freedom of speech, for example, right? So, you know, it says, we'll read this out a little bit later, but the actual First Amendment is, you know, Congress will make no laws respecting, establishing a religion and it goes on or bridging the freedom of speech. This does not give you, the courts have decided, the right to yell fire in a movie theater. This is precedent that's been worked through the judicial system. So there are some limitations on these rights. And the way we figure out what the limitations are is by it working through

the court system and ultimately the Supreme Court deciding. And if there's some more ambiguity needed, then I guess the legislative branch, you know, it hops in and creates a new law. And if we all decide we really need to change something fundamental, what do we do? We pop in another amendment. Is this in a nutshell how civics works in the U.S.? Yeah, that's a great microcosm for the way that we have addressed this question of what you've described, again, is very abstract concepts. So the Declaration of Independence basically says, you know, we're free. And then the Constitution says, this is how we're going to be free. And then we get into the reality of it's like, well, are you free to, as you say, yell fire in a theater? It's like, well, you don't have the right

to threaten or scare somebody. So that's out. And again, we're just sort of like, we are refining the social protocol to more accurately accomplish the objectives of freedom. And so this is in, that is out. Can't yell fire in a theater, but you can go outside of the White House and say, you know, with approval, that I hold up a sign that says, I disagree with blank policy of the government. So again, it was basically as soon as the Constitution was written and the judicial branch was established, the first cases were, well, what does this actually mean? So we've been asking this question basically since the document was written. Well, that's a good question. It's a fantastic question. And the beauty of the way the system works and the reasons lasted as long as it has is because it has some

flexibility with respect to what point on the freedom versus tyranny spectrum you kind of fall, right? So the American hard fork from the British Empire was like a new chain that would like, you know, be I guess a more freedom embracing chain than the monarchy type system. But if you go too far in the spectrum of freedom, you get something that is undesirable where you can't coordinate a society and you get anarchy, right? This is a little bit elements of the articles of Confederation, I suppose. It's a little too much anarchy, right? And, And so this is a microcosm of individual rights. If you have too much freedom, if everyone had the freedom to say, like, own a tank, you know, and blow up their neighbor's house.

If they want, like that level of freedom would lead to anarchy. And so we're trying to find the optimal position between tyranny and max freedom, because if you veer too far in the freedom line, you get anarchy. And so this is the entire project in the process. Let me ask another 101 question to you, Richard, which is this. And this is just a very basic question. we have said we're trying to make the case we're about to make the case that americans have a constitutional right to crypto okay people read the document the entire constitution all the amendments crypto is not mentioned once it's not mentioned once not at all so how is it that we can

confidently go into this episode and make the case that americans have the right to crypto it's not even mentioned here richard yeah so that is one of the great things about the document and our english common law tradition is the constitution doesn't mention a lot of of things, right? It doesn't talk about the internet. It doesn't talk about cars. It doesn't talk about any particular implementation of the rights and freedoms we're describing. But the founders, collectively as a group, were some of the smartest men, you know, if you're talking about like the Manhattan Project and the Constitution Convention, this constellation of intellectual power coming together to address these questions, these problems, we're talking about people

who were philosophers, historians, they were business owners, they were inventors. So they understood both their historical context, where we are in the grand scheme of the thing called humanity, and also that things change. So they reference things that are general like speech or press. They didn't say you have the right to get on a soapbox in the town square and give a lecture, or you don't have the right to pin in ink, right? They talk about your freedom, which is an expression. And they also provided justifications for the reason why. So the federalist papers, the kind of the discussion, they took notes, thankfully, they took notes during the Constitutional Convention so we can understand that. We pair that with our English common law tradition, which allows us to do a little

bit of interpreting, reasoning by analogy, where we don't have to specify every single detail. We can, in effect, say, well, we knew what they meant. And that gets into rules of interpretation and judicial discretion and standards. But we can say, well, there's words on a piece of paper, and then there's what the words mean. We're more interested about what they mean than what the actual connection of 26 letters. That's kind of where you live. And then also, There is the constitutional expansion slot that is the Ninth Amendment that we'll get to. And the Ninth Amendment says, look, just because it's in the Constitution or not in the Constitution does not make it any more or less a fundamental right.

So just because it's in this document does not mean that it is the only fundamental right. And just because it's not in the document means it does not mean that it is not a fundamental right. So this is, I guess, a living, breathing document in some sense. And so when a new thing happens, a new event that is unprecedented, or common law is based on precedent, but sometimes there's new things. I mean, there's never been crypto before, before 2009 crypto didn't exist. So there's a new thing. And there was a new thing called the internet. So then the Constitution needs to be interpreted and the ideas and the themes and the rights in that constitution need to be interpreted for the new thing, the new event, the new case

that's popped up, the new technology. And that's essentially what we are doing in today's episode. So let's get to it. Okay. Let's start to make the constitutional case. for crypto using the Bill of Rights, which is the first 10 amendments. Let's start with number one. Oh, personal favorite. The First Amendment here. You know what? I'm just going to read it. I'm feeling patriotic today. Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or of the right of the people to peacefully assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. That's what it says. That's a plain text. Man, just an awful lot packed into one single paragraph. Okay. So,

what is this right and why do you think this is linked to crypto in any way? What's your case here? Sure. So let's summarize what the First Amendment does. The founders were very, very interested in making sure that there was the freedom to discuss governmental affairs. So as a citizen's relationship to the government, you have the right to think as you will and to speak as you think. So freedom of thought and freedom of conscience. We the government do not get to tell you what to think. We have the freedom to tell the government what is wrong. We have the freedom to discuss ideas. is about how it works. So how do we tie that into the right to crypto? I think, again, something else that will resonate. Early justices have said that order, which is, you know, good, lawful existence,

not anarchy. Order cannot be secured merely through the fear of punishment for its infraction. So regulation by enforcement gets us nowhere is effectively what they said. We need to have the ability to talk about what the government does. And so the freedom that is embodied in the First Amendment is the freedom to discover and spread truth as it relates to the government. It's the ability to prevent bad ideas, referencing the Republican, the platform, right? We don't want CBDCs. We're allowed to talk about that. We citizens, we the government, get to talk about CBDCs and whether we want to have them. And then it also embodies like we want to have a freedom to make sure that people are active in preserving their own rights. And so where does crypto

tie into it? Well, we have the right to self-governance, right? That's back to the Declaration of Independence and then into the Constitution. So we say, well, we should be allowed to discuss candidates. We should be able to influence government policies. So again, breaking out the idea of crypto or the active encryption or the property, we can tell the government we like to have these things. We ought to be able to do this. So even in just the pure abstract, we are able to, through the First Amendment, make crypto something that we can talk about. So we can use it as a tool. So if I don't particularly fear of reprisal or fear of discussing unpopular ideas, I can encrypt my communications. I'm allowed not to be spied on. I'm not doing anything at least.

We can talk about ideas that may not be popular. In this marketplace of ideas, I am allowed to express myself, and I can do it also. There's a constitutional right to express yourself anonymously. So I can use tools of crypto to communicate with one another. So you talk about encrypting your communications. I can use crypto to make myself anonymous. We can talk about the idea of crypto, even just in and of itself. And so you get into the freedom of speech.

I have the right to code. That was the original crypto wars in the 70s and 80s. Phil Zimmerman with pretty good protocols. call, MIT publishing a book. They say, look, we have the right to talk about these things, simply because we have the right to discuss things. You, the government, do not have the right to impinge on that freedom to just discuss. The idea of crypto is something that we're allowed to talk about. So you can't shut that down. We also have, again, the right to speak anonymously. So there's your encryption technologies to secure your communications. So not just against

the government, but other unlawful actors. We're talking right now over the internet. We don't want someone injecting themselves into our communications. We've preserved and secured that. with cryptography. And there's also the conduct as speech. So the things that we do as an expression to the government saying, I am doing this thing to communicate to you, the government, my feelings about what you do. So wearing t-shirts, waving flags, tying back in, buying crypto, holding crypto, spending crypto, talking about crypto as a political expression or as a commentary on government conduct is, without exaggeration, I'm very confident in saying this, something that the founders would have considered to be quintessentially American, saying,

I'm buying crypto because I, as a citizen of this country, do not like what we are doing with respect to blank. Any number of government policies, you could talk about monetary fiscal policy, you could talk about freedom of expression, you could talk about the subjugation of rights, like just having crypto as a platform, as a technology, that's within the right. And so I think First Amendment is one of the easier ones. It's already been adjudicated, not at the Supreme Court level and lower courts, but we've already touched. on it again in the original crypto wars that this one is where the rights probably the strongest case to make because we are so protective of the freedom of speech with

relationship to communicating with and to the government so in particular one summary of this let's focus on the speech because there's also the right to assemble the right to petition these other things that may have a crypto kind of like a component to it but the right to speech even code as speech how ironclad is that right so again of course framers like the founders did not have, there was not the concept of code. There's not the concept of software that didn't exist, but the courts have interpreted the First Amendment to allow for encryption. Like, do citizens have the right to encryption? I think maybe we're recalling some history of what you've just called the first crypto wars and Zimmerman and some of the things that were fought for. But like, what does the

precedent say about the question of is code speech and our citizen rights to encryption? Well, so let's go back to our founders. Our founders encrypted their communications during the Revolutionary War. So they would have been intimately familiar with the idea that there are things that we are talking about that we don't want the quote unquote government to read or find out about. So they have known about that since quite literally the founding of the country. And so we say, do we have a right to these things? Do we not have to these things? Again, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is primarily oriented with the citizens' relationship to the government. And in the context, well, do we have or do we not have? The freedom of speech, and what's embodied in the First Amendment, the Supreme Court has very, very early on and very, very strongly said that we will interpret this to the utmost degree. This is the most fundamental right as it relates to a citizen and its government.

So we want to make sure that the freedom of speech, whether it be to communicate anonymously or things like this is one of the most important because dialogue between citizens about the government is what keeps this thing we call America going. That's the whole fundamental point. But how far can you stretch the First Amendment is kind of my question. When I say stretch, I don't know if it's stretching or not. Maybe you could

argue this is not stretching at all. So there's like when I think about the internet or when I think about code, I think about two categories of communication. One is what we traditionally call communication, you know, TCP IP, right? This is text message. This is email. This is like a website, any form of like a written communication. And I think we have precedent, you've talked about it a little bit that we have the ability to encrypt that. We have the right to encrypt that. That's the correct interpretation of the First Amendment, okay? But there's another category of communication that hasn't yet been tested in the First Amendment. And I would still argue, or one could make the argument, that this is another different form of communication. That is the transmission of value.

Value is just another communication protocol? I mean, one could make the argument that that's the case. It's certainly in the blockchain, crypto context, It's certainly code, you know, the same code that allows me to kind of like encrypt a message inside of a Bitcoin or Ethereum block, I can encrypt some value and send it to you. And like, what makes it valuable social consensus? We could go into that. But like value over internet protocol is another communication. But can we say that the first amendment, does it just apply to the first type of communication

or can we also say it applies to value? Or is this something that really needs to be tested and, like, argued? in the court system to establish that precedent. So we can reason by a somewhat looser analogy in that the court has already asked the question, is the idea of spending money? Is that itself speech? So if we're talking about the transmission of value, which is me giving money or you giving money for any particular purpose, is that in and of itself the act of speech or is it the conduct of speech?

And so that really ties into what the court has addressed around campaign financing. And they have said, yes, that the expenditure of money on campaign, is the expression of your value, so personal values, monetarily towards a candidate who's expressing that value. And so we say, well, let's get a little kind of tongue in cheek. They say, well, do you have the right to write a check to them? Do you have the right to sign a notary? Sign a transaction. Just sign a transaction. Right. It's so we can say, well, if I send an electronic, if I pay with my credit card on a website to a political candidate, I am using one form of electronic technology to communicate value as an expression of my support for the, we're talking

with relationship with the government, for my expression of my support for the things that that candidate stands for. The founders, the court, you and I would understand it's not about the credit card. It's not about writing the check. It's about the fundamental abstract concept of communicating value or approval that that's where we tie in. So I would say that, yes, we already have precedent for saying the transmission of a thing of value is already, and so we're just now looking at a new way of doing it, where the communication

itself is the value being transmitted, just in the same way that all of crypto is the preservation of private keys. Well, the thing and the idea and the code are kind of one and the same. It's a very neat, elegant system that is crypto. That's why I'm so involved with it. It's so fascinating. But yes, to answer the question, transmission of value, communication of value, it's all wrapped up. And they would say, hmm, you're communicating to your government, something that you feel or express. And so, again, economic, freedom is one of the things that we have as a personal right. So they'd say, yeah, the right to spend money or the right to have a certain type of money, as long as it's legal, is within the

boundaries of what we've described. This argument may have way more teeth on it than I thought, and the First Amendment is a fantastic case for crypto. Just one quick side quest, though. So, like, what is the constitutionality of something like the Bank Secrecy Act where banks can kind of freeze your money? Yeah. So here, and this is where we're getting into the courts having to ask the questions that are in the gray, that we say, well, we have a right to these things in the abstract, how do we implement those? So we have the freedoms described, what do the rights look like? And so we are now into, as we say, uncharted territory where the citizen has the ability to protect a freedom or a right in the way that they've never had before. So the constitutionality

of something like the Bank Secrecy Act, what right does, either a bank or the government to, I don't want to use the word, they would say intrude, the right to intrude on our transactions to filter and to screen? And that's a question that we're going to have to answer. We're going to go back and we're going to have to have discussions like this to say, well, what do we really mean when we say to have the rights to something? What is it they're trying to accomplish? And then the course we'll take all of those arguments and all the things is being done. Right. So Coinbase has been sued. They've issued a brief. People who have supported Coinbase have issued brief saying, we interpret all of these rules and these laws and freedoms to mean these things.

Here's the reason why I support it. Now we're just going to have to go through the unfortunate legwork that is the protocol of the judicial branch and say, okay, well, let's start having those questions about where do fundamental rights lie in the context of this new thing called crypto in the world that we live in with crypto. Second Amendment here. This is the right to bear arms. Second Amendment is a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state. The right of people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed at the time that probably meant muskets, various weaponry in war. This is interesting. I kind of opened the podcast describing sort of a white paper I read on this and how it's associated with crypto. I think on

first hearing people will say the right to bear arms second amendment how in the world is that related to blockchain and cryptocurrency give us the case here yeah so this is again where we're going to have to kind of flow between our abstractions and the realities and so when we talk about the second amendment ultimately the second amendment is about the self-defense or the defense of the populace from unlawful acts and so it's primarily oriented in this context as unlawful government actions but it's also the tyranny of the unlawful so tell me if this resonates, right? The right to self-defense is most associated in the minds of the early decision-makers with the idea of the frontier, right? So it is on the frontier where the right

to self-defense is most applicable. Where the government can't help me, I have the right to defend myself. I have not lost my fundamental right to life just because the government is capable or not capable of doing something. And also, I have the right to be free from tyranny. So unlawful government actions. The Second Amendment rights of actually saying these are the tools that you are allowed to have in defense of those two freedoms. I think it's really fascinating that you're talking about this right, the right to bear arms as a defensive technology or a defensive freedom rather than an offensive freedom. Because I think a lot of people think about the right to bear arms. They think about guns and they think about offense. They think about, well, it's in the same

sentence as a militia. They think about it. And it certainly is that, right, a militia to kind of like, I suppose have the power to revolt against the government. That's part of it. But I really want to focus on this defensive characteristic of the right to bear arms because that's what crypto is. That's what encryption is. It's a defensive technology. And I remember one of the analogies in the white paper that sparked my interest and set off something that I had not thought about before is thinking about an arm as what about a Kevlar vest, right? Do you have the ability to like wear a Kevlar vest in your home? Should the government restrict that and say, hey, no Kevlar vest, no defensive technology? Of course not. It's a defensive technology. And what is cryptography, if not a defensive technology? It's a way for

you to encrypt communication such that any third party actor cannot take it from you, cannot steal it from you. That's a way for you to vault your assets in such a way that a third party can't take away your private property. It's defensive. It's not an offensive technology. And so that is a distinction here that I don't think is clear when people first, you know, read it and think about guns only. Yeah. And so that's again where we get into this idea of judicial interpretation and the role that the legislature plays, is that when we use the word arm, the first thing a judge is going to go to is effectively, quite literally, the dictionary and go, well, what does that word mean? And so when you look it up, an arm is, as we've described, a weapon of offense, but also armor of defense. That's literally

the definition of it. And so there's also-armor. It's armor. It's quite literally that. And so also defined as ready for defensive action. And so the word arm, and I think that's probably the reason why they used it. You have the right to the offensive tools of liberty, but also the defensive tools. You said, Kevlar vest, let's go even, like, the digital house. You can put locks on the digital house, right? We're allowed to exclude. The lock on my door is a defensive technology from looters, from people doing illegal, right? It is a weapon of defense. It's an armor. I feel safe at night because I've locked my doors. Nobody's just going to be able to walk into my house. And in the same way, we can describe crypto as effectively the digital version of an arm. It is a different. It is a

defensive technology, and it's totally within the bounds of the idea or the concept of an arm to say that crypto as a defensive technology is among that tool. And that gets into even the history of it, right? So the crypto war was about this idea that we should be able to have the discussion of ideas that at the time, the United States government classified as munitions. They were restricted from export because they were determined, deemed to be weapons. So, right, this is where we get into. Well, what does it mean? What is it defined as? We've been having these discussions since the beginning, and it also, I think, is open to interpretation. We just happen to choose to interpret it the way that we have. So you're saying if the government ever put some mandate together and it banned the custody of your own private keys, for instance. Imagine that happening. So you can only hold your Bitcoin inside of a license and regulated exchange, no more private keys, no more kind of like going bankless. You could walk into a court, like if they allowed you, the Supreme Court, let's say, and make a case that no, this is like locks on your house. This is a defense.

technology. This is like a Kevlar vest, and we have this right embedded in the Second Amendment. It's in the right to bear arms, the right to armor, the right to some defensive technology. And so you can't take it away. It's unconstitutional. A lawyer could make that argument. Again, it's our common law tradition allows you to reason by analogy or to reason by inference and to extend the metaphors of government. And so to your point, well, are you allowed to have this versus that? Well, we've already discussed that at the Supreme Court level, they say, well, you're allowed to have something like a shotgun in your house, but you can't have a handgun in your house. And the Supreme Court has said, no, no, no, it's about what you're using it for. It's not necessarily the particular implementation. Right. And so a, I hope, competent lawyer standing in front of the Supreme Court would say, speaking to the judges, your honors, the reason that crypto is allowed under the Second Amendment, in addition to what we've already described in the First Amendment, is that this is nothing more than a defensive technology used for the preservation of life and liberty. in the digital world. And so we talk about things like, well,

you know, is it in common use? They'd ask those questions like, well, how novel is. Like, well, we've had it since the founding of the country. Online banking, that uses cryptography. So you'd begin to have to give them examples and analogies about why this is, in the one sense novel that we've never discussed this in the very particular instantiation of the very particular way of asking this question, do we have a right to crypto?

But you say, well, Your Honor, would we have a right to secure bank transactions? Would we have the right to secure video calls? Would we have the right? And they'd say, hmm, okay, interesting. And then it would be incumbent on the court and the other lawyers to kind of hash out who wins that argument. How about the right to buy a vault to secure my precious jewelry that I own and store it in my house? Do I have that right? And that's one of these great things about crypto, I find, again, the fractal expressing itself once again, is that crypto is, it flows back and forth.

It is speech and that it is code and express. It's an arm in the Second Amendment. And what we're describing now is kind of some of the later amendments. They say, well, how am I allowed to exclude people? How am I allowed to preserve my rights as to not interference? My rights to be secure in my property. And this is just the next iteration of how that works. And so it's a digital lock.

It's a digital vault. It is the same technology that we use in bank transactions. That's the argument. That's the thing that you'd have to articulate to a court to say, it may not be a musket, but neither was, you know, the internet to the freedom of the press. And then you'd start to extend the analogy. And then it would be up to the judges to interpret the law and the facts in the particular case as they would deem appropriate. Well, we are racking up some amendments. So I'm going to skip the third. We're going to hop to the fourth. We'll come back to the third in a second.

This is the one on search and arrest. So this is the fourth amendment, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, oh, the probable cause thing that's here, supported by oath or affirmation, particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons are things to be seized. I have to imagine the framers were thinking about, like, you know, governments invading people's private property and going through their stuff. This is surveillance, certainly. This is, you can imagine soldiers, like invading someone's personal effects and reading their letters and correspondence and all of these things. Anyway,

Give us kind of the rights preserved here and why this is also a case for crypto. Right. So not only would the founders have been thinking about it, they would have experienced it. So some of the things we articulated in the Declaration of Independence, the reason why we wanted to start a new government is we said that the powers that the British government had were being abused. They were sending soldiers into our businesses and going through business records. They were going through our inventories. They were going into our houses and they were searching our papers and effects. The Fourth Amendment is effectively saying if the First Amendment is all the rights that we have and the Second Amendment is how we can preserve it. The Fourth Amendment is how we can exclude unlawful interference into those spaces. So the right to be secure is effectively where the right to privacy comes in.

And what they mean is the right to be left alone, the limitations of access. Can I put a door up? Can I put a lock on my door? It's the right to secrecy of information. I don't have to give to the government everything that I do. a little bit of a preservation of dignity, right? I don't need all of my private affairs out in public. And so that's the tying into crypto is we're reestablishing what the court would call the reasonable expectation of privacy in the digital world. Why would I say you have a right to crypto as relates to the Fourth Amendment? Is that crypto is the way that you can secure your right against unreasonable searches, unreasonable seizures, that you have to have a warrant for the place to be inspected. All of those things described in the amendment, crypto allows you to exclude the government when they are not within their legal purview to do the things that they're trying to do. So that's really where the Fourth Amendment right to crypto comes in.

Does this imply that we have the right to privacy on crypto as well? So right now on a open network like Bitcoin or Ethereum, of course, the transactions are pseudo-anonymous, but they're not private. That means if you know that I am associated with a given address, a Bitcoin address or an Ethereum address, you can kind of link it together and know who I am. There's entire data surveillance companies that basically do this for the government. They provide this service to the government. Now, there are technologies that can be deployed, of course, one of which, many of which have been deployed, C-Cash, you know, Traneitya-Cash, which we've already talked about, that make it such that it's not just pseudo-anonymous, it's anonymous, it's completely private. So these transactions

cannot be traced. Does the Fourth Amendment further stretch in, not just to our right to, like, own crypto and our constitution, but also to have a private value flow transactions. Would you take it that far? Well, so again, this is where we get into where the right and the freedom bump up against our reasonable restrictions. And so we have a reasonable expectation of privacy. What the court will kind of go back and forth on is something in plain view or would you have an expectation that it's private? Well, we can say, but again, the act of encrypting, that's kind of me saying, I have the expectation that the data or the value that I have encrypted should be free from unreasonable or unlawful searches or investigations. The right to communicate pseudo-anonymously or anonymously

by encrypting my communications or encrypting my address or where a message may have come from. I'm saying, like, I don't need to justify to you government that I have this right. The government has to say that they are the ones who are right to be able to invade into that. And so I think what crypto does is it is a reset for the digital age where warrantless spying, where it's easy to collect data where there's just a, right, if you went to the post office and you wanted to read everybody's mail, you'd have to open all the letters, you have to do all those, you know, there'd be a lot of work. In the electronic world, the collection of emails, it's as fast as, right, the speed of light. It's as fast as processing functions. And so we've kind of gotten

into a little bit, in my opinion, imbalance with relationship to our digital rights, our digital property, our digital effects and papers, as it relates to the ability to search those things, to collect those things. Crypto is reestablishing kind of the balance of power and the digital world in my opinion. And so you say, yes, I have the right to reasonably exclude you from my communications. I have the right to prevent you from knowing my transaction or happening. They would talk about the plain view of stuff. You say, well, I don't have the right to you not know what the email address is, but the thing in the container is preserved. Well, crypto is the container. It is also the message. We get to flow back and forth. And so we're at one of

those junctions where a new technology has radically redefined our understanding of fundamental rights with respect to technology. So we're going to have to ask those questions. We're going to have to ask those questions. How far does it go? How can we reason by analogy? Are we able to exclude in the entirety in the back and forth? And so that's kind of where we sit with kind of respect to what you quote just asked. The Uniswap extension is here. The self-custody wallet created by the most trusted team in DFI Uniswap Labs designed to make swapping feel effortless. This extension lives in your browser's sidebar, letting you swap, sign transactions, and send or receive crypto without ever losing your place on the internet. Plus, with human readable

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Maybe it's all of these reasons all put together. So if you're a dev and you want to build on one of the best foundations in crypto or your user looking to claim some ownership on Mantle's Defi apps, click the link in the show notes to getting started with Mantle. This is a broader question, but I'm going to ask it here because it feels just so relevant maybe to the Fourth Amendment, but it's just overall relevant to the entire discussion today, which is like Fourth Amendment, this implication for citizen privacy. The reality in our digital world is that we don't have any privacy, like whatsoever, like none of it. The government

has already infringed upon this through lots of third-party providers. We did an episode on citizen surveillance not too long ago. Edward Snowden, the government has massive data sets, not only about like non-Americans and foreign citizens, but domestic. You like, knows so much about me and knows so much about you right now, Richard. And the Fourth Amendment hasn't protected against that. So maybe there's some future court case that will curtail the surveillance, communication, surveillance of the government, but so far we haven't seen it. And so I want to ask the broader question because it just like feels this way, particularly on the Fourth Amendment when we talk about privacy. Is the document, the Constitution, are we just starry-eyed,

dreamers here a little bit. And are the rights that we are talking about, you know, these hundreds of years later, has it gotten toothless? Have they been eroded away? Do you know, I don't want to inject some cynicism at this point in the conversation, but just privacy, man. Fourth Amendment stuff. I don't know that they care what the document actually says and what the rights actually are. They've just been co-opted and corrupted and our rights have been taken away so gradually, particularly in the digital realm that like does this even matter? Well, and so this is again where the, I think we've gotten to a place where the tools of surveillance have gotten so powerful that they've made this question to your point,

the kind of the fundamental nature of, you know, what do our rights do? And now with crypto technology, encryption, cryptography, we've effectively established a new tool for the preservation of right. And we're back to this kind of tension between rights and government activity where we can now reassert that expectation of privacy, where we can encrypt, and we're effectively making the government reassert its action. And when we use the word they, right, it's more like the inappropriate actions of government. They're lawful, right, lawful activities that they do. But how do we as citizens of this nation express our or preserve our personal sovereignty

and personal freedoms in the digital space? Well, we didn't, up until 2008, 2009, we really didn't, we didn't really have a good way of doing that. In some respects, encryption has existed on the internet for a lot longer than that. But now we're finally coming to the place where we as citizens are sophisticated in our understanding to say, hmm, actually, you know what? There is a Fourth Amendment implication into this. So it takes some time to kind of get to that place. And so now because you say, well, that rubs me the wrong way. I bristle against this is we wouldn't have been having this conversation 20 years ago because we just didn't have the concepts. And so now we're catching up, right, the ideas in popular discussion, the reason that the First Amendment is

so important is we're catching up to the reality that the digital right of privacy, the digital right to be free or to be secure in our property, places, and effects hasn't really been respected in the way that we think it should. Encryption as a code, encryption as the act of encryption, is, again, a communication back to the government to say, I disagree with what you're doing. I would like to have a discussion about my Fourth Amendment rights. Let's do that in the court of law because you are asserting your ability to do something. I'm asserting my right to be free from that action. And this is where the Fourth Amendment comes in. Well said. That's why we're doing this podcast. And that's why cryptography and crypto gives me such hope. All right, let's bounce to the Fifth Amendment,

which is a pretty strong case as well. This is a longer one, so I'm not going to read it verbatim, but this is about the rights in criminal cases. So is this the double jeopardy one and some other things? Describe what the Fifth Amendment is and how it applies to crypto. So it will, you know, very quickly can speed run the Fifth Amendment, right? It's the right not to double jeopardy, so it can't be tried for the same thing twice. It's the right to have a grand jury, which means someone other than the government have to say, actually, you know what, I think there's been wrongdoing done. There's also, again, probably the most closely related to crypto is that you're not compelled to make a case against yourself in the court of law. So where the first amendment is the right

to speak, the right to communicate, the fifth amendment is kind of the logical inversion. It's the right not to communicate. I plead the fifth. I plead the fifth. And that's what they're meaning. You're saying, I am asserting my right as it relates to the government, not to reveal the contents of my mind. I have the freedom of conscience. The First Amendment allows me to express that. Interesting. The Fifth Amendment says, you can't put me in a court and tell me, you have to tell us. Because, right, there's the implication that compulsion in a courtroom becomes compulsion in a dungeon. And we don't want the government to be tempted by torture, to, you know, the Inquisition. It does us no good as a people. Again, the purpose of government,

as the founders would have said it, is to preserve rights, to ensure that we live under the law. They mean live under the law as opposed to live in anarchy or live under tyranny. We have our rights respected. And so the Fifth Amendment is basically saying sometimes people will do things in the name of the government that we don't think are right. One of them is compelling you to testify against yourself because there is such a temptation to use that just to get the conviction, just to put somebody in jail, just to be right. And we say, you know what, there's a bright line rule. You do not have to communicate those kinds of things in the context of a criminal case. Okay. So how does that directly apply to crypto? There's this line about private property cannot be taken from public use. So I guess that would imply they can't take my crypto and I don't know, use it for a government treasury or something like this. And then there's also this line not be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process. So does this imply that the government can't come and just confiscate my crypto assets without some sort of due process in the court system? And there are

cases, I believe, where this has actually happened? Has government seizure of crypto assets? Like, I'm just kind of like bringing to mind some of the tornado cash cases, like, at least in the Netherlands. This is, you know, not in the U.S., but none of his assets were confiscated, I believe, before due process. And in the U.S. would this be allowed? Anyway, how does this amendment apply to crypto? Yeah. So let's first talk about the right not to speak. So that includes the, or as I'd be translated, and we've already had cases on this. That would be the right not not to decrypt. You know, a great example, one that the court has seen. Your phone, if you have a password on that, if you've encrypted the data, you have the right not to be forced to decrypt it.

So the government can't wrench attack me in their torture chamber and, like, steal it. Yeah. And to like force me to decrypt it, basically, or give you my seed phrase or whatever. Absolutely. So they would not have the right to decrypt communications. You would have the right not to enter into a device. You'd have the right not to decrypt your communications. You've described network analysis where they say, well, there's been communications back and forth between these two nodes. We know they talk about, they can't sit you down and say, okay, what did you talk about? You can say, I have a Fifth Amendment right not to tell you that. So the government has the right to search, right, says unlawful search or seizure. They have

the right to search, but it doesn't mean they have the right to an effective search. The court has said, you don't have to make it as easy as possible. And the Fifth Amendment is one way where we say, well, we don't have to decry our data. We don't have to decrypt our devices. We don't have to do the digital unlock without the process being respected. Or if you're giving testimony, I can say Fifth Amendment right. I don't have to give you that communication because it's saying something about me. It's an insertion of fact or belief that I'm not going to give in the court of law. So that's one element. It would also, I think, be the right not to escrow private keys. As you say, look, I have the right to the code and I have the right to my activity and I have the right to the property.

I would articulate if it were me. I would say, well, that's an unlawful search. Right. It's like giving you the keys to my house. Right. I don't have to tell you what I'm doing in my house to know that I have the right to exclude you without a warrant, without kind of all those things. So that's the speech element. And then when you talk about the unlawful deprivation of property, it's like the court or the government can't come in and say you're guilty. There's summary judgment against you. We don't have to give you a trial. We know you're guilty. We're just going to take away your property. Well, if I have it stored in a private wallet or personally secured, I can say, well, not exactly. I'm preventing unlawful deprivation of property. And then the last piece you've talked about, they're called takings. It's not a criminal act, but this is unlawful where they make it lawful and then take it anyway. So think, of rights of way on a highway. We want to build a highway. So we're going to take, we're going to pay you for it, but we're going to take your farm to build this highway through what is now your property. Well, now we're moving that into the digital world and we're saying, we the people, we the citizen have the right to ensure that there's no unlawful taking without just compensation.

They say, well, you know, your Ethereum is actually worth a dollar. That's what we're going to pay you for it, right? We saw the Mount Gawks liquidations. They are selling Bitcoin for X price. That's what we're going to give you. And you say, well, hold on, fair price should be this. And basically, again, this tension of preserving the right. Didn't they do this, by the way, in the 1930s FDR executive order with gold? Was that, you know, unlawful constitutionally? Did that get to the Supreme Court at all? Well, so now we're talking about the rights in peacetime and the rights in wartime. And so again, we're now in a unique period where the tools and technologies and abilities of a citizen can't be surmounted by the government just by fiat. They can tell you

you have to turn in your crypto. But can they show up to the physical place that is your wallet and take it from you? Can they knock down the digital vault and steal the digital, take the digital gold? We're in a new era where the right and the ability of the citizen to preserve their rights is equal to the government's ability to invade that space or to take or to do any unlawful act of tyranny. And so we're going to have to hash that out. Where does this right extend to?

What is the proper rule of government? What kind of things can a government do in the context of the digital property? or the digital ability to preserve your rights, and how do we navigate unlawful takings, unlawful deprivations, the right to a fair trial, right? It says fair trial, not the right to no trial. It's a fair trial. So again, this is why it's endlessly fascinating this intersection of crypto and fundamental rights. Yeah, for sure. I guess maybe a few observations. One, I suppose, during kind of like wartime or like whatever someone says is emergency, right? It's kind of like all bets are off, rights get eroded during those times. And this is, and this is,

is why I kind of like authoritarians or those that are seeking power. It's always war time. You know, there's always a crisis. And that is something that the civilian population has to be very wary of with respect to leadership and political leaders. I guess another comment, as I'm picturing, like a government trying to take away an individual citizen's private keys, just like how important these amendments really are and how glad I am that we have the Bill of Rights because we just think about it with all of the military professionals and surveillance and armies and weapons and drones and the vast amount of government resources, the asymmetry versus one individual citizen in that relationship.

Like it couldn't be more stark, right? And so what these rights do is they try to equalize, rebalance a little bit of that asymmetry. And they say, nope, you can't do this. There are barriers to what you are able to do. And this is another reason. I am an enjoyer of crypto is because this also restores when you have the right to encryption. And for example, you have the right to private non-disclosure of your crypto assets to the government.

They come looking for it in an unlawful way that breaches the Fifth Amendment. Well, like, we have some resistance technology. And we have the ability to decentralize it. and we have the ability for that kind of regime to pass and to live to see another day. So it's fascinating when we dive into this. Let's talk about the Third Amendment here. So I think the amendments that we've talked about so far, the first, the second, the fourth, or the fifth. These are the big ones when it comes to defending crypto.

But the third has something to say, too. And maybe this is almost an implied right to crypto. What is the Third Amendment and how does it relate? Well, so the Third Amendment says in effect that the government cannot put soldiers into your home. during a time of peace. And in a time of war, there has to be rules around it. And the rule is not so much concerned about who's sleeping on your couch or who's, you know, in your kitchen. It's more about the ability of centralized power to impose itself. Okay. Through some type of activity. Can they invade this space? So there aren't any Supreme Courts about the Third Amendment. It's one of kind of

one of those, like it was probably written in a place in time for a very specific purpose that doesn't translate so well. But I think what's great about crypto is it allows us to revisit it to the discussion that they were having back then in the new digital world. So crypto can read as the right says, in quoting now, you have the right to piece and a quarter in your any house. Well, now

we're redefining. Crypto helps us redefine the word house. It redefines the word owner, redefines soldier, and quartering. So are we talking about when we say house, do we mean any form of property that you can go into? So things like my network, a node, a wallet into the blockchain

itself, is that or how we redefining it? So again, this is less about establishing kind of what the government isn't allowed to do. It's about kind of reestablishing our concepts of things that were described elsewhere. So we've never had, to extend the analogy, we've never had locks on the digital house. So it's very easy to get into my emails. It's very easy to do all these things. Crypto, by locking the digital house, now reestablishes that delineation. Right? We talked about in the Fourth Amendment about your right to be free from intrusion. Well, we have to define where. And so the Third Amendment basically says, this is what we mean when we say the there in the digital space. It's your home. It is the house. That's where kind of the Third Amendment and Crypto kind of will come back into stuff, is that crypto is a segue into the conversation that just really haven't been necessary up until, you know, now. It's such an interesting amendment. Quartering of soldiers. It's just like one that don't have a lot of context for. No soldier shall in time of peace be quartered in any house without the consent of the owner nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law. And that's

the third one. Must have been a real problem back. then. So it really was. I mean, you talk about when the states were still colonies, the federal government of England was stationing soldiers and they were quite literally going into people's houses. They were going into businesses, right? They were invading the privacy that the founders understood to be fundamental that the government doesn't, like anybody else, doesn't just have the right to be in these places. And so this is giving kind of definition to what they meant by those things. Yeah, you can't just take your private property, do what they want with it for military purposes. That's what it's saying.

In effect, and you're absolutely right. So, again, it's defining, we're going to have to ask, what does it mean without consent of the owner? Well, if I don't consent at all, then, you know, you can't get into my email, time of war, time of anything. So there's so much to unpack with kind of where fundamental rights and crypto kind of intersect, but it's good that we're having the conversation. And I think, to your point earlier, so imbalanced, it's necessary that we start to have those conversations.

Okay. So that's five. We got the five. And those are all compelling cases for crypto. So let's talk about the ninth and the 10th. These feel like system defaults almost for rights and individual freedoms. And I think they augment the first five amendments that we talked about in a way that bolsters the case. It's like an amplifier effect.

Let's get into them. So ninth amendment and 10th amendment, what are these? So the ninth amendment basically, again, we've said kind of earlier on, is that just because something is written into the constitution or just because it's not, in the Constitution doesn't mean that it's either necessary or excluded. So quoting it, right, the enumeration of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage the rights retained by the people. Just because it's in the document doesn't mean there aren't other things. It is effectively the expansion slot in the code that is the government. You say, look, we've documented enough of the way the government functions. Here's how the way that we want you to interpret

where the tie happens. So when you're not sure that the default is that there should be more included. And so they talk about things the Supreme Court likes to use analogies. They talk about penumers and emanations, basically the shadows of rights. So our right, the right to exclude is up to a line, but there's also like this kind of hazy element. We're going to extend it a little further than the bright line because we have preserved a fundamental right. And the freedoms that we have, those are a little brighter. So they extend a little further than just what's written. And so it's effectively the tie goes to the citizen and we can add things in because we're not excluding them. Wait, okay, okay. So this is basically the miscellaneous category. Basically, the founders were saying,

hey, if it's not here, if it's a right that's not talked about explicitly here, the default goes to the citizens. And the citizens get that right and preserve that freedom. Like, isn't this the only amendment we need, Richard, to argue for crypto? It's basically like, hey, they didn't mention crypto or encryption in the Constitution. So by default, we get it. Yeah. See you later. Like, that's the case. Fully wrapped. We don't even need the first five. Yeah, and it would be nice if it worked out that way. And obviously, we're being a little tongue in cheek and saying, well, you know, ha ha, you know, we've got the cheat code. Sure. And so this gets into right again, where the founders even then understood that there were

some limitations on fundamental rights. So this is kind of like saying, well, there are limitations, but there's not exclusions. So let's make sure that when we, again, we had already articulated, we had fundamental rights. Why are we writing them down in the bill of rights? It's like, we want to be extra certain that you know that when you interpret the right to be free, you know it means this. And the Ninth Amendment says, well, just because we didn't write it down doesn't mean it's also not included. So the right to crypto, ninth amendment unlock, ninth amendment unlock to the Second Amendment, to the Fourth Amendment, to the Fifth Amendment. And even in and of itself, right, we talked about very early on, the government is limited and we're finding ways that they're allowed to not infringe on freedoms. This is basically articulating that and saying, look, there are things that we haven't discussed that will change it to the future. You government have to be mindful that there are more rights than we have articulated.

Okay. And the 10th is sort of closely linked, I guess, to the ninth. It's almost like a copy and paste only for states. And it says the power is not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, respectively, or to the people. Or to the people. It's not just states or to the people. Okay. So what is this adding? So this is, again, when we talked very early in the podcast about, you know, we used to think about government being big and then chipping away to make freedoms. This is kind of the documenting the other way around, that it is small and we're adding to the things that don't. don't take away from a freedom. And it is also where we get the concept of dual sovereignty. The founders, when they were ratifying the Constitution, were very, very concerned about the federal government, not respecting the government that they liked the best, which was their states. And so they were saying, if you want us to agree to the federal government in the form of the Constitution, you have to agree that we are going to fundamentally alter the nature and the relationship between the federal government and the states. And this is where that comes in. This is where dual sovereignty

federalism where the laboratory of democracy lives. It basically says the states are their own sovereigns in their special spaces. The federal government is sovereign in its own spaces and where there is confusion or an ambiguity, the tie should go to us the states or more broadly to us the people. Maybe this is a broader question, but what happens if the federal government puts in place, a Congress puts in place like a ban on encryption or a ban on custody of your own crypto assets? You can't have your own private keys. And the state of, let's just name a state, how about Oklahoma. Does that sound good, Richard? Sounds like a good one. The state of Oklahoma says, no, we are preserving that right for

Oklahoma citizens. You have the right to custody your own crypto. Who wins there? Yeah, so I'll give two kind of bright line, kind of the big ideas that inform that. So there's one, there's federal preemption that the federal government gets to say where we have the right of the ability to do something, the states have to kind of fall in line with that. And at the same time, judicial precedent has said the federal government cannot force state actors to enforce federal regulation. So they could not say there's a ban on encryption and you, the state police of Oklahoma, have to enforce this on our behalf. The federal government would say, no, you can't do that. You could send the FBI. You could send federal resources,

but you can't tell the state authorities that they have to enforce it. There's also that they cannot take state resources themselves to pay for regulatory programs. So they say, we're going ban self-custody, you have to take it with a custodian, and you, the states, have to pay for the custodial services in your state. So the federal government or the Supreme Court would say, no, you can't commandeer your state resources to do that. So that's where the tension, again, this dual sovereignty, is that the states can push back against the federal government, say, well, you've issued a law that we disagree with. We are not going to enforce it. So if you want to take private keys, come and take them. You're going to have to be the ones that do it. And while

you're trying, we are going to file a lawsuit. And that's where, again, the judicial branch. Separation of powers comes in is that the states, the people, and the federal government will go to court and articulate why they think they have, why we the people have a fundamental right to what we have, why the government is conducting itself inappropriately or unlawfully, and then the states kind of get to jockey themselves in whether they want to preserve that. So Oklahoma, glad you brought it up, Oklahoma has written into law that you have the right to own and possess crypto. Really? Well, if there's a federal law that said you don't, we have that right. It was passed in the most recent session. We've said you have the right to own

crypto, you have the right to self-custody, you have the right to mine, you have the right to transact, and you have the right to be free from a discriminatory regulation. So noise ordinances, for example, if you're going to run a Bitcoin miner, you can't be regulated differently than a data center. Noise ordinances are noise ordinances. It's not about who's making the noise. And so now you're seeing that kind of flow up into the Republican kind of their platform. It's just saying, hey, wait a minute. Again, we're starting to have these conversations. we're more and more familiar with the ideas in the abstract and their implementations. And so now you're seeing that filter into government is slow necessarily.

So we don't want to be in all over the place. But we're starting to see the articulation of these fundamental rights and say, you know what? Digital property is property like anywhere else. Wyoming said that back in 2019. And now we're just starting to filter up in through the government, getting familiar with the idea. Again, why the First Amendment is so important, the ability to call your representatives to say, look, there's a new technology, a new idea, a new property. this is why I think I have the right to it. This is the way that I use it and how it impacts my relationship with you, the government.

We should preserve that. You should not pass laws, right, the CBDC. You should not pass laws that infringe on my rights. That's where all of this comes in, where all of this ties together. And again, crypto is so elegant in navigating the abstract ideas of fundamental rights and the actual implementations of the tools of preserving those ideas and those rights. This is really cool, too. I think it was a Supreme Court justice.

I forget, you called the United States. one of my favorite properties of the United States is he called the states like 50 different experiments in freedom, right? And it's very cool to see states like Oklahoma, states like Wyoming, basically crypto-friendly jurisdictions setting state law in the United States. And I would say there's probably like five to ten of them that are really like pushing this forward. And they are setting the precedent for the rest of the United States. And if the feds, you know, take a more dim view on our crypto rights, the states are going to have something to say about it. In fact, they already are, and they're already starting to enshrine these rights. So that's

effectively what the 10th Amendment gives us. I remember when we were talking about this episode, Richard, jumping back to the Ninth Amendment for a minute, you said that basically your case, if you were, you know, like fighting this in courts and part of the kind of the legal defense for our constitutional right to crypto would be you'd use like the first five amendments, right? You'd say Amendment 1 plus 9 because 9 means we get rights retained by the people. And like by default, factory settings, U.S. citizens have a right to crypto, or it'd be, you'd make the argument about the right to bear arms, the Second Amendment plus nine, or the Fourth Amendment plus nine, or the Fifth Amendment plus nine, because nine is really the amplifier for all of these amendments, right? It's kind of like

the extra bonus that we receive. And I guess the cherry on top of the case for the other five. Is there anything you would add to that? Yeah. So I would say that, again, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments were written specifically for two purposes. One through nine was a preservative. of rights and the 10th Amendment was the fundamental alteration of the nature of a central federal government. And so 9 and 10, as you described, ninth says, just because it's not written doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And the 10th says, and where you're not sure, we still retain that. We retain those right. We retain those. So you're right. When you say, first amendment, well, I have the right to freedom of speech. Well, someone says, well, crypto isn't speech. We say,

well, actually, ninth amendment says, just because it's not written down doesn't mean it doesn't included. And 10th Amendment says, if there's a tie, it should go to me. So let's argue, let's respectfully, right, let's argue about what the First Amendment includes, knowing that these system defaults, these boosts to my argument are that the Ninth, Tenth Amendment say, in very real terms, that the tie goes to me and you should assume innocent until proven guilty, right? It is incumbent on the government to prove that there isn't a right. It is not my responsibility to prove that I do have one. And that's really what the Ninth and Ten Amendment, as you say, in combination with one, two, three, four, on through all, it allows us to make that argument and

kind of springboard. It's the boost to the arguments that we have, is that we have kind of the ace in the pocket, as it were. This is a pretty cool document, I've got to say. Pretty cool freedom protocol. Well thought through these 10 amendments, but we skipped three of them. So number six, number seven, number eight. These amendments are all about, you know, trial law. So maybe not as relevant to crypto, but like we should just talk about them briefly maybe to finish this out. Yeah. So six, seven, and eight are more about the process. So if the first amendment is your right, Second Amendment is how you can preserve it. Third through fifth is how the government can interact. Six, seven, and eight is basically saying, well, once you're in the process of a due process,

this is what those rules are. This is kind of the high level of due process. For courts, common law or that kind of thing. And so this basically says, right, the Sixth Amendment, do you have the right to a speedy trial? You have the right to confront your witnesses. It's basically this is your right to fair trial. So the government can't just like throw you in jail for 25 years and then say at the end of 25 years, all right, now we're going to give you a trial. You say, no, no, no, I have the right. If you're going to say that I've done something wrong, and it unfortunately feels very, very slow, but we have the right to a speedy trial. You have to present the evidence that you've said proves that I've done this. You don't

get to just walk into court and say, hey, I'm the government, believe what I'm going to tell you. The courts will say, no, you have to prove that. That's kind of the Sixth Amendment. The Seventh Amendment, this is about the venue. So it says if there's certain value, like dollar value at stake, you get a jury trial. Well, crypto may or may not play into it, but you say the industry is, again, a forcing function for revisiting these rights. So SEC versus Jarkese, that was basically the Supreme Court said, in administrative law cases, if you're going to impose a civil fine above the threshold, you have to take that to a trial by jury. The administrative state does not get to be law writer, prosecutor, and judge in certain things. And so it's like, hey, this is a check on your ability

to just do things as you please. It's got to go before a jury for certain values above that amount. So that's what the Seventh Amendment is really about is the right to a try-by jury. And then the Eighth Amendment, this is again kind of the punishments that can be given. And so no excessive bail. So they can't financially imprison you because you can't afford bail. There's no excessive fines, no cruel or unusual punishments. Another defense against wrench attack by the state, I guess. Right. And so, again, this gets into the idea of crypto as a new form of digital property is going to require us to refresh on our understanding of these constitutional concepts. Well, what does it mean to have an excessive fine? What does it mean to have cruel unusual? If you require me to surrender

my private key for, I've basically given you everything. Is that unusual? Is that unfair? So we're going to have to revisit all of these things within the context of crypto because, again, the implementation of a freedom or an expression of right is different now with regard to crypto than it was before. And so we're going to have to go back through. Revise the soft fork of the social protocol of government is going to have to take an update based on the new technology that we're introducing into it. Love it. And that's how the system works. That's how it's intended to work. I think you've given a fantastic case for why the Bill of Rights really support our constitutional right to bear crypto, to have crypto, to hold crypto, and all the freedoms that that implies.

Let's talk about kind of the last piece of this as we wrap up this episode, which is it's not enough for you to believe this and for you to make the case, and for me to believe this, and for me to respond to the case and say, yep, that makes complete sense, or for bankless listeners, or for the wider crypto audience. We have to somehow bake this into this social consensus mechanism that we call government and realize that's composed of multiple parts. I can think of at least a few. One is the courts and the law and the interpretation of that law. It's basically everything we've been talking about. So it basically requires you or someone like you, some lawyer, some legal mind to take cases through case precedent to the various court systems, all with the Supreme

Court as necessary, and get this enshrined as, yep, this is the correct interpretation of how the Constitution applies to crypto. So we got the courts. Then there's also legislators. So there might be some gaps. There might be some like courts who say, I don't know, like, you're like, we don't have a law about this, right? And so what's a security? What's a commodity? Congress, go figure that out. We got legislators to convince about some of these things, those in government, and then the executive branch as well. And so that's all of our regulators.

That's the administrative state. That's kind of the president. And they factor into this as well, as we've seen recently. There's one other, kind of a fourth that I wanted to mention. That is individual citizens, hearts and minds. Right now there's this take, I think, about crypto. If you talk about crypto to the American, to the person on the street, let's say, they are not going to immediately recall property rights and like freedom of speech and code is law, they're not going to think about that.

They're going to think about NFTs and SBF and scams and frauds and isn't that a big casino and doesn't North Korea do things with crypto assets? A lot of the bad things, right? Like not bad. Well, some of those are clearly bad, but some of them are just like orthogonal to the digital property rights that we've been talking about today. And so we have to somehow convince the person on the street, the average citizen, like, win over the hearts and minds to this cause, too. Why? Because hearts and minds are voters. They elect legislators in the executive branch. They also become the court system. Don't they become the jurors. They become, like, Supreme Court justices as well. And so there's a whole societal consensus, hearts and minds machine. Anyway, that just sounds like a lot of work to do.

Yeah. And I guess my question to you, Richard, is, like, we're starting in a small way with this podcasts and, you know, like talking about this and that kind of thing. But how do we actually win to embed these freedoms into the operating system of the United States of America? Because we're not there yet. We haven't done it. I don't feel safe and secure with, like, my crypto rights right now. I feel like we have a claim on those rights and a constitutional claim, but I don't know that everyone else, all of the other validators in the network, have not necessarily legitimized that and verify those blocks and those claims. Yeah, and so I'm glad you brought up both of the three branches of the government and

also the people itself. And so, you know, what can we do? What can we enshrine it? Well, it begins with exercising the rights that we've described, right? You talk about legislatures communicating, make it easy for them. So talk with your legislators, talk with your representatives about the things that are important to you, why they're important, how they translate into these fundamental rights.

It's about expressing your political view as it relates to crypto, saying, you know, the stand with crypto group, right? putting your name down as saying, I am a person who aligns with these beliefs. That is a political act communicating to the government that this is important to me. And so whether that's legislators, whether that's the executive branch, right, that's communicating. So in one part, it's a communication. When you talk about the judicial branch, right, court cases are expensive. There is a risk of loss of freedom and liberty, but you have to be willing to fight that.

So when companies like Coinbase say, you know what, we're not going to just pay the fine, we're going to go to court on this when Crackett gets sued. And they say, you know what, we're going to go to court on this? That's again, right? The donation of money to a legal fund. That's a political act. You're saying, like, I'm supporting this discussion in the judicial realm. So participating where you can appropriately in the judicial process by either defending your right,

by helping someone else defend their right, or even contributing. Like, this is where kind of where more lawyers and maybe people who are more familiar with the process can say, you know what, I'm going to write a brief on behalf of this articulating why I think that we have a right to crypto or why the government's behaving inappropriately. And then to the fourth group, you know, the people on the street, it's kind of a, again, it's just a reflection on all the others. It's can you meet people where they are and talk to them about the problems that they are having in a way that translates. And so here in the United States, you know, we are very fortunate that the rule of law, it's hard to describe, right? It's the cleanest shirt and the dirty laundry. It's, you know, it's terrible except for all the others. Well, it's very easy for someone who's just come from a country where the political freedoms or the individual freedoms are not. respected. And so you can say, just in the same way, right, cross-border payments, well, should I be able to send money to my family in another country? Someone who does that could very, very easily understand, like, what happens when the government says no? Or let's go to historical examples, right? What happened in Cyprus? You wake up one day and your pension is gone or your bank

accounts are gone. Like, those people very, very acutely understand what the right to be secure in your person's places and effects would mean, because they've had it taken away. So it's having the continued conversation. It's about articulating reasoning by analogies. It's about engaging in the discussion. It's about continuing to the builders out there. Keep making it easier. You know, the UIUX experience. Everyone has a role to play if they want to promote this. But it is, again, the cost of freedom. It's a heavy freedom to carry. So we got to carry it. You just got to put it in. It's the proof of work. You got to put it in. But it's, I think, important to continue to have those conversations. And we have them every day.

And this, you know, whether it's a podcast or a conversation or asking the coffee shop that you like to go to, do you guys take crypto? It's just, it's, there's it. And when they say, no, what is that? Helping them walk through, set up a wallet. And so it's again, meeting people where they are, helping them into it. And eventually we're all, you know, no one has to explain the internet to you or me or to my mom, but we all use it and we all understand it. Eventually, we'll get there if we continue to have the conversations. Yeah, absolutely. Well said. I'm really hopeful we kind of awaken a new generation, kind of a crypto generation to care about these things. I mean, I got to say, Richard, this is the first time I've gone through the Bill of Rights so exhaustively.

And it's, you know, used to be, to me, just kind of like a boring document that I took for granted. And I think a number of Americans probably feel this way. When you sort of reinterpret it through the lens of crypto as an asset and a new form of private property, it's so much more exciting and so much more interesting. And particularly in the backdrop of, I think, where we find ourselves in the 21st century of this, like, creeping digital authoritarianism. where I don't care where you live. You live in the United States or you live in Europe or you live somewhere in Asia. It's there, right?

You see it creep into your everyday life. And I'm hopeful that we as the crypto community can kind of take back some of the classical liberal values, let's say, kind of the rights and freedoms and the fighting by the people for the people that this movement's all about. Because a lot of times, you know, the speculation and the SBFs and the price number go up gets all the attention. But the true route, the reason why we're here and the reason why I can, you know, I can say confidently, not just that I'm excited about investing crypto, I obviously am. And it's a

fantastic asset class. But I think it is a good asset class. I think it is net beneficial for the world. The reason I could say that is everything we've articulated today. I want to leave you with one last question here. I've sort of long thought that, you know, there are those who look at the United States, particularly its unfair treatment, let's say, an administrative state of crypto over the last few years. And they're like, forget this country. I'm moving, right? I'll go somewhere else. I've long thought that that is not the best approach, right? I've long thought that if we should fight, and this might be kind of an American exceptionalist view, which I can get away with because I was actually born in Canada, so I can say these things maybe. But I've long thought

that the U.S. is like one of the best places on Earth, if not the best place on Earth, to actually fight for these freedoms. And the reason is because we have this document that we've gone through in 90 minutes that goes all the way back to the founding story. It's literally written in the operating system code of how this nation is supposed to work. And to the extent this nation has strayed away from these core principles, right? It is off charter, off course. And there have been many different awakenings in the United States history that is just like recall the constitution. You know, the ending of slavery, recall the constitution. Let's get back to the rights that were actually written down that were just left unfulfilled. And so this is another one of those rights

that are actually written down here, the right to own crypto, that is not fully fulfilled yet. that we need to fight for. But the reason I think the U.S. is a great place to do it is because we have this document, we can have this discussion, we have hundreds of years of precedent, where we've talked about it, we've got legal minds,

we have a rule of law here, and we have a social layer. We call this on bank list the layer zero, you know, because like, you know, main net is kind of like a layer one, which is code, but this social layer that respects what we just talked about today.

And the hearts and minds battle is easier to win when you can say, hey, this is what was intended for the nation. This is why we are a free society. If we want to preserve that, we have to preserve these freedoms in this new frontier of technology. So I've long thought that the United States is actually the perfect place to fight and win. And if we can't win here, I don't know. I don't know other countries so well, but it's difficult, I think, in another jurisdiction to do it. So let's fight here. What do you say to that? What does that spark in you? Yeah, so I think I accused you of stealing my notes on this because in researching, right,

I did the history of the Constitution and did kind of the legal research, but also kind of the classical re-evaluation of the concept of freedom, the history of freedom, how do we arrive from, again, ideas that stretched all the way back to antiquity in Greece and Rome, how they flowed in through history to the point where, right, the founders sat down and inscribed them into a document. And I would agree with you almost entirely wholeheartedly is that if we talk about, about the unique balances of freedom, then the ideas of national freedom. So being free from outside influence, political freedom, and individual freedom, that the traditions that the

United States embodies, that the precedents that exist in the United States, our history and our understanding, the idea and the concept of freedom is not preserved anywhere else better than it is here. And so a counter to a guest I think you had on a show or two ago, it's like, well, if you don't like the jurisdiction, just go find a new one. That's when things, right, that assumes things are going right. The best place to be when things are going wrong, is in the United States for the reasons that you've articulated because we have a history of freedom. We have a precedent of freedom. We have traditions of all these things where we can confidently say on a podcast like this, we have straight away from what the proper relationship between a government and its people is and ought to be.

I have the right to discuss that. I have the right to propose solutions and I have the right to protect the freedoms as I understand them. Nowhere else in the world has the unique balance of those three freedoms as there is in the United States. And I would agree with you. If I'm going to take this fight to any jurisdiction, I want to be the one where I have the best chances of winning. And in the United States, the concept of freedom, the history of freedom is nowhere more embodied than again in our Declaration of Independence, in the Constitution, in our Bill of Rights, and then all of the law and history that we've experienced to get to the place that we are. Well, if there's enough of us thinking this way and saying these things and willing to fight for it, we basically cannot lose this right to crypto. So I think this conversation has really galvanized me and made me excited to continue the fight in the United States. I hope we're successful. As we close this out, I introduced you in your role for the state of Oklahoma. You're part of the deputy AG and you like lead technology and digital assets. It's a very unique role. So you're actually in the state of Oklahoma government. How did you land this? Like, what is this gig all about? And like what do you do? What's Oklahoma doing? How are you like able to put kind of like

the energy into topics like this? Yeah. And so it is a, I think, kind of where we would, looking more kind of on the technical side of crypto, is that we're at one of those unique periods in history where there's going to be fundamentally transformative changes that are technology-driven. And so how did this job come about? I was actually originally approached to do just cybersecurity. And I articulated an expansion, right? You said, let's talk about Second Amendment. I said, you know what, there's actually probably a constitutional case. In the same way when I was approached about this job, they said, well, you know, we'd like to do cybersecurity. So consumer protection, basically. I said, well, you know, there's something about advanced and emerging technologies that I think we're going to want to be smart about.

Nice. And so can we expand the scope of this because this is October, November of 2022, not the best time to be promoting crypto as it relates to the government, especially law enforcement. But right. So then Attorney General elect getting her drummed, you know, you set down, you made the case just in the same way that we've described today, that we have fundamental rights to these things. I said that the government or the Attorney General's office is going to want to be smart about these things. They agreed. And they said, you know what? The future of of the United States, the future of the state, flows through novel and emerging technologies,

at least in some respect. Let's start the process of getting intelligent, getting smart, so that we can preserve fundamental rights of crypto, so that we can have a regulatory environment where builders can come and they understand the rules and we know what's expected, and people can enjoy both their rights and also the technology in new ways. And so the state of Oklahoma is catching up, and I think more broadly, where the United States is waking up to the reality of what's being described. And as you say, it's maybe a straying from the kind of fundamental understanding of what it really should mean for the United States government worth its relationship with its citizens in the digital world. That's great. Investment by Oklahoma and some foresight there because now we're, you know, in 2024, we're blessed, I think, to have crypto be a national conversation at this point. It's definitely an election issue and a campaign issue. And so I think there will be many folks tuning into this episode to hear the constitutional case for crypto. And you've you've made it quite adeptly, Richard. So thank you so much for your time today.

and the work you're putting in to set up this episode. Thank you again for having me, and I would echo it back. Thank you and David and the whole bankless team for continuing to express yourself and to continue the conversation in this form about this very important idea that is crypto and encryption technology and all the things that you guys talk about. What else would we be doing? It's the most interesting thing on the planet, I think, right now. Let's end with this, of course.

You guys know our typical disclaimers. You know that crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is certainly the frontier. it's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.