BTC Sessions - Caitlin Long JUST Dropped This Bitcoin BOMBSHELL — Whitehouse PLOT EXPOSED?

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

Caitlin Long just exposed what could be a coordinated White House plot against Bitcoin—and it’s bigger than anyone expected. From behind-the-scenes policy pressure to targeted regulation, this bombshell could change everything for crypto in the U.S.FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS:https://x.com/CaitlinLong_FOLLOW BTC SESSIONS on X/Nostr: x.com/[e-mail] private one-on-one sessions with BITCOIN MENTOR! Learn self custody, hardware, multisig, lightning, privacy, running a node, and plenty more - all from a team of top notch educators that I've personally vetted.https://bitcoinmentor.io/—------------------------------SHOW SPONSORS:BITCOIN WELL - BUY BITCOINhttps://qrco.de/bfiDC6COINKITE/COLDCARD (5% discount):https://qrco.de/bfiDBVAQUA WALLEThttps://qrco.de/bfiD8gNUNCHUK HONEYBADGER INHERITANCEhttps://qrco.de/bfiDARHODLHODL NO KYC P2P EXCHANGEhttps://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSIONDEBIFI LOANShttps://qrco.de/bfiDCpCRYPTOCLOAKShttps://qrco.de/bg5Dvo#btc #bitcoin #crypto

I do have a lot of worry because I watched how the Fed in particular hold the strings of power to close and try to destroy its perceived political enemies. I mean, we were debanked five times. There's so many shocking things. One of them was that the White House got involved. You know, ultimately, Bitcoin and the dollar are going to come into a clash. Right now, there's a symbiosis between the dollar and Bitcoin. That will not always be true. All right.

Caitlin, thank you so much for being with me today. How are you doing? Busy, crazy. It's an interesting time. Never seems to slow down. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I again appreciate you taking the time to be with me today. I've been hoping to talk to you for quite some time here. I've been seeing all of the stuff that you've been working on. And you've been put through the ringer. You've had to deal with a lot and that's putting it very, very lightly. But I kind of want to use this opportunity to first maybe go back to the beginning and, you know, address what you were trying to do, what the impetus was for what is now custodia for formerly Avanti.

So, you know, what was the problem you were trying to solve as it pertains? to the legacy banking system and how does this pertain to Bitcoin? What was the goal here? Yeah. Well, for a background, I am a Bitcoiner since 2012, was on Wall Street during that time, left in 2016, did a year and a half at a blockchain, not Bitcoin startup, so to speak. And then came back to my native state of Wyoming to help in 2017. I had tried to donate, appreciated Bitcoin to the University of Wyoming.

And it was one of three states that had a bad money transmitter law. So the CoinBases and then Circle was an exchange. They had pulled out of the state in 2015. And so I said, let's come. I came back home from New York to help the state solve this. I remember specifically saying to the head of the University of Wyoming Foundation where I had previously been on the board. is Bitcoin thing's going to be big.

You don't want to miss this. And so my intention was literally just to help solve that bad money transmitter law and roll up sleeves as a volunteer and help fix that. But what happened is it ballooned into something much more, which is that a Ron Poller in the Wyoming legislature said, what else can we do? What else can we do? What else can we do once we fix that law?

And that law fixed went through unanimously through the Senate and the House. And I at the time, keep in mind this is 20. Twitter was very different than put out a call for people from the industry to come meet legislators. And it was very cool because a lot of people did come. Like Eric Voorhees came up from Denver to Cheyenne to and brought a team of people from ShapeShift at that time, for example. And Brock Pierce brought people in from his universe. And so like Britney Kaiser, for example, spent a lot of time on the

ground in Wyoming talking to legislators, just educating them. And what struck me was two of the big legislators said things that I remember. One at a time when we had a meet and greet, one said, this is so interesting when we go to these meet and greet or like cocktail events after the legislative session, we usually see the same faces. And here it's a bunch of people I don't know. And by the way, it's skewed young. There was a group, well, it didn't entirely skew young. I'm sorry, I'm throwing a bunch of vignettes at you, but there was a, there were two teenagers that have driven six hours from a tiny town called Newcastle. And they came to meet legislators, and they were still in high school. But then there was also a grandmother who was mining

Bitcoin in her garage, and her granddaughter drove her to the event. Okay, so it really did skew, you know, from an age perspective. But the point is it was new faces. And the other thing is another legislator said, this is really interesting, because usually, the top performers in schools from Wyoming end up leaving because there's not a city in Wyoming. And usually they end up going to Denver or like in my case I went to New York. And he said, what's interesting is they're now coming up from Denver for this. So those two things, like new faces and then people coming to Denver instead of going the other way, really captured the imaginations of the legislators.

And then to answer your question about custodia, what the specific problem informing custodia as opposed to changing the laws we were trying to to solve is the debanking problem. Because Wyoming had been targeted by the first Operation Choke Point. The firearms industry is pretty big here in Wyoming. And that was one of the targeted industries. And there was a legislator I'm distinctly remembering in a small committee hearing who talked about his business almost going under. He was a firearms dealer in a small town and he almost lost his business when he lost his

bank account. And so there was this concept of people didn't necessarily understand in the legislature the details of the technology, but they didn't have to. They understood viscerally that there was something wrong with the debanking strategy, that this whole new technology was a way for people to take their sovereignty back. And they just got it. They saw those sort of qualitative things like fresh young faces and people coming up from Denver as opposed to going the other way around. All those things really mattered to getting Wyoming to enact the first of now more than 50 crypto enabling laws that have been enacted since that 2018 legislative session. Wow.

Very cool. It's really cool to see, again, the inflows of people that are willing to not only move mountains, but move across mountains to get to. to get to these, these, uh, you showed up. Yeah. I just put out a call on Twitter and I had never met most of these people and they just showed up. I mean, there were dozens of people who showed up and I can't thank them all enough. I only called out a couple of names, but I'm missing a lot of people who were part of this, right? This was so much bigger than one person and, you know, a lot of people would put the focus on me because I kind of de facto became this spokesman, but I was never a gatekeeper.

And so people would ask me, how many jobs have been created in Wyoming? And my response is, I don't No, we don't want to keep track of that. We don't want the government keeping track of these things. We just want to enable and people can use these laws as long as they comply with them. They can, to do lawful things, we want them here in Wyoming. And so that's what was also fun about it. It was not like, you know, Delaware, very strict with registration, right? In Wyoming, yes, you actually have to register to take advantage of the laws,

but it's not like the Secretary of State is trying to keep track of how many crypto companies have come to Wyoming to register. It's thousands at this point. But I can't define it. And I'm glad that I can't define it because if the government wanted to have that level of data, then you wouldn't have the privacy and freedom that you have. Yeah, 100%. Now, I want to touch on kind of the tactic here because some Bitcoiners would just say,

you know what, screw it. Just build outside the system, right? And so I want to get your take on, you know, why you believe that, yeah, like the banking infrastructure and the regulatory environment, why is this so, so critical to, you know, broader adoption, but like just economic freedom as a whole. Is it, obviously, I don't think that you view it as like bending the knee or anything like that. How are you kind of framing it? And what's your mindset when you're going and you're going forward with these initiatives? Well, it's really just a nod to reality, right? Because the vast majority

of your financial transactions for literally everybody, maybe a handful of people on this planet, is still in fiat currency. You still have to pay your vendors. You still have to pay most of your employees in fiat. You're not using Bitcoin for everything you do every day. And in particular, if you live in a country that taxes you, you're paying your taxes in your local currency. So we can't just flip overnight. I never thought that hyper-bitonization was going to be something that would happen overnight. In fact, I remember talking to Savidine in great length right after the Bitcoin Standard came out.

And one of his early podcasts, he and I were really debating, you know, is hyper-Bitcoinization going to come about because of a big bang where this over-leveraged fiat system just dies. And we talked about and we agreed, we didn't think so. We both agree it's going to die more by a whimper than a bang, more likely. And we actually hope that it's not a bang because I don't want to live in a world where there's a sudden financial collapse. My dad was born in November 1929, literally I think two or three days after Black Monday of 1929. So he was a depression baby and grew up and remembers as a young boy on a farm in Iowa, you know, he, he, they had more food than than the people's in people who lived in the cities in Iowa because they could grow it themselves.

But he remembers the sugar rationing and he remembers some of the, actually one of the stories of my grandfather, who I never knew, he died before I was born. He didn't leverage his farm, but a lot of the people around him got caught up in the mania of the roaring 20s and borrowed against their farms to invest in stocks and then lost them when the Black Monday crash came in 1929. So I kind of grew up with that story and kind of had that, I guess, ensconced in me by my dad who lived it and very much understood as a young boy, you know, sugar rationing and the like. And my grandfather, one of the other vignettes, is that he used to scoff at people with their paper wealth. And boy in the end, you know, slow and steady won the race. He did not lose his farm. And his

family, thank God, you know, his, my dad, his son was able to go to college. And, you know, because of that, my generation in my family's doing well, right? We were all able to go to college as well if we wanted to. So my point is that it, these kinds of decisions have huge impacts on not just you, but, but your generations that come after you. And thank goodness my grandfather, because he didn't mortgage the farm, you know, he learned that important lesson. So hyper-bitcoinization, we don't want to live in a world like my dad remembers where there was a sudden collapse and people couldn't eat. Bitcoin well is the best place to be buying and selling Bitcoin in Canada and the U.S. And now with Bitcoin Well Infinite, it's also the best place to be making large buys at their OTC

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mark four and the queue. You have access to flexible conditions, the best rates, and institutional grade liquidity. If you're looking to make use of your capital, don't sell your Bitcoin, borrow against it. You can head over to debify.com to check them out or simply. scan the QR code on the screen. Yeah, yeah. It's funny how again and again history repeats itself, because as you're talking about the importance of your grandfather not leveraging the farm to effectively gamble, saving, I wonder how many people in and around this time will look

back at people leveraging Bitcoin to gamble on things when it could have been, you know, generational wealth, right? Yeah. Well, and one of the little memes that's been associated with me is a fool in their leverage Bitcoin are soon parted. And, you know, that came from warnings that I made prior to the collapses of FTX and, you know, the lending pools like Alex Mishinsky, Celsius, for example, BlockFi, right? Those companies ended up failing. And it seems like we just constantly, because of human nature, because of. greed. People are willing to gamble. They always think that they're going to be able to get out

before the collapse occurs. And some people do. And so that's why these trends keep repeating. It's because human nature never changes. But we have the ability to opt out of that individually. And so I would, I've always been very opposed to leveraging Bitcoin. And by that, I mean, borrowing more than a hundred cents on the dollar. So some people have more recently created structures where, oh, geez, people who have big unrealized capital gains, won't have to sell them for tax reasons, maybe waiting for Senator Lummis to get her bill through that would exempt Bitcoin or a certain amount of Bitcoin from capital gains taxes. And so if you sell your Bitcoin to live off it, you're paying capital gains taxes. And if you borrow against the appreciated value,

you may not have to. So it's a tax strategy. I'm not recommending it, but I'm just saying I'm acknowledging that some borrowing is fine. And this gets back to the Messassian distinction that debt falls into two different categories, circulation credit and commodity credit. Commodity credit is fine. If you are borrowing up to $1 per Bitcoin, dollar for dollar Bitcoin,

never going above 100% leverage, you're borrowing against your accumulated savings. That is commodity credit. If you're going above one-to-one leverage, the moment you go above one-to-one leverage, that's circulation credit. That is inflationary. And literally, it's not going to end well. So when I say a fool in their leverage Bitcoin are soon parted, that's what I mean.

It's going above one-to-one leverage. Yeah, fair enough. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit here. And I want to hear about some of the unfortunate things that you've had to deal with through your journey with Custodia Bank. And I guess my question to start here is, when did you first notice that something was seemingly wrong? and kind of explain what you were trying to do, what the steps you were taking with Custodia Bank and where you first started to notice this pushback or low-key pushback. When did you notice something was wrong?

Yeah, it was in the spring of 2022 when both the governor of Wyoming and Senator Lomas had gotten phone calls from the Fed saying that they were going to be releasing these proposed guidelines for access to the payment system. We were actually in really, we were making all kinds of progress. And we subsequently did sue. We did get discovery. And the publicly disclosed discovery makes it clear we were very close to getting approved. And then FTX occurred.

In fact, actually, it all happened at about that same time. And there was a meeting in November, 23, at which we now know through leaks, thank goodness, Washington, D.C. is a sieve, that Michael Barr directed Fed staff to find something so he could deny custodia. It was all part of this all of government approach to try to kill the crypto industry. But the record shows that up until that point, we were making progress. The first time I knew that that sand was going to be thrown in our wheels, though, was in spring 2022 when, like I said, the governor and the senator got phone calls from the Fed saying they were going to change the rules on us.

So it's an interesting debate in federal agency circles, whether when someone applies and the rules are one thing and then the rules change on them during the application process, are those rules the ones that apply? But what I will say is that we played along. We played ball. And we kept going and said, all right. And in fact, actually, one of the back story, one of the back communications was we're going to get these rules in place. And then the Wyoming speedy banks like Custodia are going to be waived through.

A Fed governor told both governor of Wyoming and senator that we would be waived through. Well, it turns out there was a giant rugpole, of course, like I just talked about in November 2020. But think about that time of spring 2022 when we first knew we were going to be slowed down until November 2020. And we didn't hear, sorry, November 2020. So it was less than a year. It was spring to November 2020. But we got the official denial. It took them a couple of months once they had decided to deny us.

We got the official denial in January, 2023. What would you say was probably the most shocking thing? Was it the low-key, like, go and find something? Like, they were explicitly saying, like, just whatever it is, find anything you can to deny. is that effectively what was going on? Yeah, they got an 86-page denial order, and the longest ever Fed denial order in Fed history was three. Oh, my God.

I know. Yeah, so we were very clearly targeted, and we were lied about. And we, what was the most shocking thing? I mean, there's so many shocking things. So the whole find something, the whole, like, very clearly target, you know, 86 pages of throwing everything. And the funniest thing they threw at us was that I had, I didn't have banking experience.

I was a managing director at big Wall Street banks. Like, come on. But that just shows you the extent to which they were going to paper the file. And probably the most shocking, well, there's so many shocking things. But one of them was that the White House got involved. The coordination that happened between the White House and the Fed, again, this supposedly apolitical Fed, this is a big topic of du jour, right? because everybody's watching to try to see if Trump's going to fire Powell.

And a lot of people are like, no, we got to defend the independence of the Fed. The Fed is incredibly political. It always has been. That whole thing is a mirage of independence. But the White House and the Fed coordinated. But one of the other crazy things is they were trying to intimidate us into running away, they being the Fed, and the White House was involved at this point as well. And so we got a phone call from Bloomberg two days before the vote to vote our membership

application occurred. And Bloomberg told us that we were going to be voted down. How did Bloomberg know two days before the vote occurred what the vote was going to be? And first of all, and second of all, rather, that phone call happened during an FOMC blackout week when it is Fed policy that every single Fed employee is prohibitive. from talking to the press. So somebody at the Fed leaked to Bloomberg. We sent a letter to the Fed's general counsel, and within hours, Bloomberg had it. So now, I am aware that, very likely that both the Fed and the White House were leaking to Bloomberg. And the crazy thing is that weekend, after the denial

occurred, which was on a Friday during an FOMC blackout week, we had the first whistleblower come forward. We had multiple whistleblowers come forward, but I didn't know it at the time. It took me a couple of weeks to go through. He contacted me through LinkedIn, and he was very close to what happened. He knew exactly what happened, and he started naming names. And by the way, Nick Carter independently, when he put out his Operation Show 2.0, who's who, you know, wanted poster, if you will, with pictures of everybody. He independently got the same story. He was not talking to the same person. So, again, thank God, Washington, D.C. is a sieve. But we started getting names very fast. And it was crystal clear that some very unethical and immoral and probably

illegal things took place. Wow. So would you, with these experiences, would you say that this goes kind of even far, far beyond just custodious case? Like is there's like a major kind of broader, either constitutional or democratic concern here? Yes. Well, I mean, what you saw was, incredible abuse of agency power. And it was coordinated. It was coordinated by the White House. And this guy, Barat Ramamerti, the name, the person I just told you who contacted me, he was a Senate confirmed Biden appointee. And he was the first person who told me Barat and Ramah murky's name. And I'd never met this guy. I had no idea who he was. And by the way, a couple of days after the denial, remember the denial happened on a Friday? I think it was the following Tuesday.

Dick Durbin attacked Custodia by name on the Senate floor. I'd never met him. it was all just this giant coordinated, coordinated thing. And the guy who was pulling the strings was Barat Ramamurti. And two of the whistleblowers, more than two of the whistleblowers ended up filling in puzzle pieces about what happened. There was a power vacuum. I think we all now know Joe Biden wasn't really the president of the United States. And that there were, I mean, he was nominally there maybe for some things, but certain things he just, you know, wasn't involved. And this was one of them, that there was a power vacuum and into that power vacuum stepped this guy, Barat Ramamerti.

And, you know, he very clearly was directing the chorus. What I'm told is that he, Gary Gensler and the then head of the FDIC, Marty Groomberg, decided to lock arms and pursue an all of government approach pulling every lever they could to try to kill the crypto industry. And if you go look up who Barat Ramamerti is, he ran economic policy for Elizabeth Warren's 2020 presidential campaign. enough set. Yeah, that's putting it lately. Absolutely. Now, I'm, I'm, I'm, uh, want to touch a little bit on, on the choke point 2.0 stuff as well. Can you, for people that are watching this and maybe they're a little bit unfamiliar,

can you kind of outline what choke point 2.0 was and how, um, how that's changed with the election and change of administration, like what the state of it was then versus now? Well, it was an abuse of power, right? So kind of getting on this same theme where you had a guy in the White House locking arms with people at independent agencies, quote unquote, independent agencies, but pursuing an all-of-government approach. And you look at what happened in the crypto industry, the SEC was clearly a big part of it. But so was the Fed.

So was the FDIC. So was the OCC. was the CFTC, so was the Department of Energy, so is the EPA going after Bitcoin miners, right? So is the Department of Labor trying to keep Bitcoin out of 401K plans. It was an all-of-government approach, all coordinated from the White House. So candidly, what is this telling you? It's just telling you that this, that so much power has been concentrated in Washington, D.C., and it can be so abused, and there's no check-and-balance on the system. Now, the check-in-balance is the judicial system, There are some, you know, well, we're in active litigation. I'll stop there. It's been more than three years and we'll see where that ends up going. But there isn't a check and balance within the executive agency itself. So when you ask the more existential question, do we have three or four branches of government in the United States?

functionally by creating independent agencies, and this is a very hot topic in the legal, especially constitutional law field right now, does the president of the United States have the power to fire the people in charge of independent agencies? By what constitutional authority, is there a fourth branch of government called independent agencies? Congress created these things, but they may never have been constitutional in the first place. That's what's actually being challenged. And there are court cases, the Humphreys executive court case is the big one about whether the U.S. president has the ability, is he actually the chief executive officer of the executive branch of government or not? And with these independent agencies, are they constitutional in the

first place? I think we're going to get answers to these. There are several court cases running through right now. It's a hot topic as we're, as we're recording this. I see a TV in the background, the headline, Trump decided not to fire Powell, this whole question of, does a president have the ability to fire appointees at an independent agency, or are they really a fourth branch of government with no check and balance on them? Yeah, that's, yeah, it would take a lot to fully answer that question, I imagine. But nonetheless, I want to kind of dive into how things are progressing. When you're dealing, having with conversations with lawmakers or different agencies and things

nowadays and politicians, how do you perceive the understanding of Bitcoin and the entire industry coming from them versus just a few years ago. Has it shifted? Oh, it's definitely gotten better. You know, every time somebody big from TradFi decided to come in, you know, Larry Fink, for example, at Black Rock, it caused it to be okay for those who used to be critics. And remember, President Trump used to be a critic. In fact, one of the most frequently liked tweets that I've ever was when I politely countered Trump during his first term where he said, you know, Bitcoin's for scammers, basically. And I said, Mr. President, let me explain.

And so I, you know, tried to speak truth to power. And ultimately, everybody who did help Trump along ended up flipping him. And, you know, I think a lot of us in the Bitcoin space, we have a knee-jerk reaction in the beginning. No, this can't possibly be true. then you start going down the rabbit hole. And I don't really know anybody who's gone deeply down the rabbit hole, whoever came back out. And all of us start skeptical.

So I think everyone who is skeptical is an opportunity because ultimately is just taking them longer. They haven't had that moment yet where they wake up and realize money is not what the government says it is. It's what human beings use. It's a good that human beings use as a medium of exchange. all this other stuff about money and where it comes from is stuff that is essentially being disproven right in front of our very eyes. How much of your troubles would you attribute to a bit of a good old boys club and giving the incumbents time to prepare and get their ducks in a row

before any newcomers can get their foot in the door? Oh, a lot. A lot. There are, I've alluded to this in a couple of other recent podcasts. I'm sitting on some pretty big things that I've never talked about before. And when those eventually do come out, as I believe they will, it'll be, everybody's going to look and say, just the magnitude of corruption that custodia ended up uncovering by just refusing to go away,

refusing to be intimidated by these thugs who tried to kill us. I mean, we were debanked five times. And that was not accidental. They were, I mean, remember, we have a lawsuit, right? If there's something called standing in a court of law, if we had failed as a business, we would have lost that standing to keep the lawsuit going, right? So start to put the pieces together. Maybe where we debanked an unusually large number of times because there might have been

a strategy to try to make that lawsuit go away by killing us. I'll leave that as a rhetorical question. Looking for a simple and secure way to manage your Bitcoin on mobile, Aqua Wallet has you covered. It's user-friendly and puts some. you in full control of your Bitcoin with secure cell custody. Aqua also supports lightning and liquid network, making fast, cheap Bitcoin payments and asset transfers easier than ever. Plus, it even supports stable coins giving you ultimate flexibility. Build on open source code,

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No private info needed. Take control of your Bitcoin today. Click the link in the show notes or scan the QR code on the screen to check out the Honeybadger plan. Now, you, just earlier on the conversation, you were talking about an early convoy between you and Safedin and how kind of maybe a transition. to a Bitcoin world would look. And so how do you view Bitcoin as it is right now being kind of injected into our traditional financial system? You know, a lot of Bitcoiners refer to Bitcoin as a Trojan horse.

Yes. Do you think that that's kind of truly what it becomes? Do you think it's just people will gradually gravitate towards something that they view as better, or is there a period of easy coexistence? How do you see this playing out over time as Bitcoin's tendrils kind of reach through all of society? Yeah, it is kind of playing out the way Safedane and I, I think, in 2018 or 2019 on that podcast said that it's people walking with their feet, voting with their feet over to something

better. You know, the inflation that we're all experiencing, I know that, you know, the official CPI data is saying, it's not very high. And the standard and once under the aisle is, oh, there is no inflation. And then I just looked at what the medical and dental cost inflation is for my own company. And, you know, you see sticker shock. There's obviously inflation.

Every time I, you know, I just actually treated myself to McDonald's for the first time in a little while. And I'm just sticker shock. You know, it's all, it's just in places that you, you know, you have a context. And then prices have gone up so fast. fast in the last few years that if you haven't engaged with those prices, you just get these sticker shocks. And they just keep happening. It's not just eggs, you know, and eggs obviously, you know, have come down. And the rate of inflation overall, I think, has come down. But there are certainly huge pockets of it. And if, you know, if you have a context from what prices should have been

three or four years ago versus what they are now, that's when you really get the sticker shock, because that's when most of the inflation was, was in the COVID and post-COVID era. But in any event, it's a, it's, it's, I think people will vote with their feet because they understand that Bitcoin is finite. It has value and it's a store of value. You see it in gold. The gold price is up at $3,300.

You see it in silver at $36-ish. I mean, these things have all had big runs. And what is that telling you? And by the way, a good friend of mine from Wall Street, put it really well when he said, you know, once that big beautiful bill went through and they couldn't even codify the doge cuts, and that was cutting out a lot of waste, obvious waste and abuse and fraud, and Congress wouldn't even codify that. Okay, Trump was trying to bend the curve of the deficit in this country, and he failed. And so what does that tell you? You know,

Money printer go burr forever. And those of us, I'm probably a little bit older than the average Bitcoiner. I know I'm a little bit older than the average Bitcoiner with a five handle. The average Bitcoiner probably has a three handle, if you will, age-wise. And, you know, my generation, Gen X isn't counting on Social Security. I can't imagine what the millennials and the zoomers are thinking about all the money that gets taken out of your paycheck, every paycheck to pay into Social Security. You're never going to see it. You're never going to see a return on that money. And if my generation isn't expecting to see a return on our social security, then at some point there's going to be a revolt. Right. So there's a reckoning coming. And so

just people are voting with their feet. And yes, Bitcoin doesn't need to be a ubiquitous payment system right now. I think it's headed there, but it doesn't need to be that right now in order to to succeed. Yeah, yeah. How much, so there's a saying that a lot of people go by, you don't change Bitcoin, Bitcoin changes you. Do you think the theme is true of the government? No, I think the incentives are all wrong in the government.

I am very grateful that Trump and Scott Besson, Howard Letnik, those guys are, they're late comers to Bitcoin, no doubt. They're more about Bitcoin as an asset class than a payment system and freedom money, no doubt. Although Scott Bestin definitely leans more towards that philosophical approach to Bitcoin. Trump and Lutnik are not there yet, but maybe they'll get there. I don't know. Besant is, of course, an intellectual and a true expert in financial history.

So I think he's got a really good philosophical base for understanding. understanding this. And so he's welcoming it. But, you know, I look at it also and say, like, the stablecoin bill, this isn't about Bitcoin. The stable coin bill is about bringing in new universes of buyers for U.S. treasuries because the U.S. deficit is out of control. And, you know, Tether figured out how to bring unbanked people in all over the world into U.S. Tills. So they created a vehicle for that. And the U.S. benefits from that. So that's why Scott Besson is going down that path.

But he is letting Bitcoin coexist. And, you know, ultimately, Bitcoin and the dollar are going to come into a clash. But that's not going to happen, I think, quite yet. I think we've got another wave before, you know, of new dollar buyers that are coming in through these technologies that were enabled by Bitcoin in the first place. So right now there's a symbiosis between the dollar and Bitcoin. That will not always be true. How many of the, assuming that we get a favorable regulatory framework for, you know, all of this encouragement for U.S. backed stable coins to come to fruition, we get these buyers of

U.S. treasuries, you know, they're basically able to be making a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, pretty good buck on, you know, just storing those dollars in the form of treasuries for other people. And then they get a return on that. How many of these new issuers do you think down the line will take a note out of Tether's book and begin taking those profits and creating a Bitcoin treasury for themselves? That's a good question. I think a lot. These Bitcoin treasury companies. Some of them are going to learn from that old adage of fooling their leverage Bitcoin are soon parted. Others are being much more careful about it. And it's just like any sort of trend in finance. Some succeed and others do not. So I think it matters, the details of how they

accumulate the Bitcoin matter. But are they issuing stable coins to issue Bitcoin to collect Bitcoin and then pay out those Bitcoin profits? I don't know. Some will and others won't. The stable coin issuers are now going to be after the Genius Act becomes law, they're going to be pretty locked down, though. They're going to be, they can't take the proceeds and invest in Bitcoin. They can do what Tether's doing right now, which is take the proceeds, invest that in Tee bills, and then take the retained earnings of the company and invest in Bitcoin. That's what Tether's doing. Although, actually, I think I may need to amend that. I think some of the reserves backing Tethers right now are invested in Bitcoin.

coin, but it's not that large. At one point, the allegation was that they didn't have the money, and then it was, oh, they, they, it's not safe money. Now it's almost entirely T-bills, but not, not exclusively. One more thing on the, on the stable coin thing. How much risk do you attribute to the idea of some of the stable coin stuff being used to issue a a quasi, we'll call it just in practice like a CBDC style. I don't want to necessarily use the term panopticon, but maybe how much worry do you have

in and around that kind of stuff? I do have a lot of worry because I watched how the Fed in particular pulled the strings of power to close and try to destroy and to block access. to the banking system to its perceived political enemies, whether real or perceived. And that was an abuse of power. And it was not just at the Fed. It was also at the FDIC and the OCC. And so those levers of power unfortunately still exist. Some of them have been reduced. But not only the levers of power, as Senator Lumas points out, the people who used them and abused them in many cases are still there. So I do worry about that. You cannot give that much power.

to an agency that has no oversight and that that creates, tries to create situations where not even the court system has oversight. I mean, it literally has tried in certain circumstances to set itself up as above the law. So I worry about that. Yes, is that power, it's absolute power and absolute power will absolutely be abused. Yeah, 100%. I want to shift gears one more time. I've got a few kind of like lightning round questions. I'm just going to talk your way from random fun things.

Now, I know you're obviously a big proponent of Bitcoin self-custody, and I've seen you talk about that a lot. What are some really cool things, tools, wallets, whatever is top of mind. Are there any things that you've played around with or that you've really enjoyed or had fun trying out or that you just think are great tools for people to test. All of it, especially if you've been in this space for a long time. You've watched the evolution. I remember when the first ledger came out.

And I remember it was actually Trace Mayer who was with me at a Miami Bitcoin conference in 2016. And I didn't know what a ledger was. And we were stopping at the booth together. And he said, oh, you want one of those. So, you know, it's fun to kind of watch that, you know, how much things have evolved since then, how much those exact companies have evolved their tools since then. But what I would say is the best education you can give yourself is just going out and trying some of these things on your own. Yeah, I would absolutely echo that. Funny, when I started doing the channel, because I do a weekly tutorial on some.

tool, whatever, and that was nine years ago, the most frequent question I would get asked at the beginning is you're doing a weekly Bitcoin tutorial. Aren't you going to run out of stuff to do? Nope. And no, my list of tutorials that I want to cover, it far extends any possible thing I could hope to cover. It's growing faster than weeks in the year, right? Well, I mean, it's amazing because even before then, the whole concept of a seed recovery phrase, until that was created. People complain about how hard it is to do self-custody now.

Imagine what it was like in the beginning before you even had that. And then you had these devices where you could have the wallet on your device. Imagine what it was. I mean, I remember the Winklewey talking about sharding on pieces of paper, their seed recovery phrase and flying to different places where they had the pieces of paper. That's how it was done in the beginning. but we're talking about, you know, more than a decade ago, well over a decade ago now. But that's how it was done.

And the tools and the user experience that people are able to have, if you're just coming in now, are so much better. Even though you might complain about how hard it is, it's still so much better than what it was, you know, for the old timers who were facing it before any of those tools existed. Yeah, it's easy to look at it right now and say, oh, it's too difficult. But again, when you put it in context, you can see the trajectory. Oh, yeah. Big improvements.

You know, so many more options and they're all becoming easier. And multi-sig to take away the single point of failure issue and, you know, the wrench attacks. It used to be Matt Levine used to joke about how crypto exchanges existed to be hacked. You just don't hear about hacks all the time anymore like you did more than 10 years ago. something happened. What happened? The security model got a lot better. The hardware and the software related to it got a lot better. That's what happened. Markets worked and the solutions came about thanks to market forces. This is a selfish question for me, but have you ever tried a cold card cue? And if not, can I come play and teach you how to use one? I have not.

Okay, well, we'll have a sit-down lesson sometime. They're pretty... Whenever we're in the same place, Yeah, I'm always, I'm always interested in trying new things. Obviously, I don't spend that much time, you know, on like you do, right? It's part of your business to stay up on those things. There are people that I rely on who will test things and I'll read about their test results. And so, you know, that's where I spend my time. Awesome. Well, a couple last lightning questions for you.

And so I wanted to ask if you were to give a piece of advice to maybe somebody who's a little bit younger, they're, you know, earlier in their career, building a family, and just kind of getting their feet underneath them. What piece of advice would you give that person as it pertains to really anything? You can go Bitcoin-centric or you can go just broad advice. But what piece of advice would you give to that type of person? Just network. That's how I got to know people in this industry. I gave this piece of advice yesterday to a friend of mine from my hometown and his son is interested in this technology and he asked about an internship and what advice I would give. And I said, you know, this is an open source decentralized community. Just go to meetups and start networking. Start meeting people, start learning. And you'll find people who will help educate you. This is an industry where people do actually spend a lot of time. time helping others learn and then pay it forward once you learn yourself so that, you know, you don't, that the knowledge continues to propagate. This is a decentralized community.

We have no official leader. So it means everybody's got to play their part in helping to help others to get to know each other. And if there's been some breakthrough insecurity or some new thing, or even frankly, a threat that has. come out to start talking to your friends about it, making sure they all know, so that they can benefit from it as well. Awesome. Awesome. What would you say is either one of the best books or pieces of content or really anything

that somebody can consume that would be best directed towards somebody that's maybe skeptical of Bitcoin? What's a good orange pill and resource? Yeah. Safedine's Bitcoin Standard and Lynn Alden's Broken Money, both really terrific books for giving the historical and philosophical context. And it's the first half of Safeedin's book for that. The second half gets into some of the mechanics of Bitcoin. But Lynn's book really goes into the financial history.

And she comes at it, Safedine's a trained economist. She's a trained engineer. So they speak about things in different terms. She's speaking in terms of system design. And I think, you know, unless you're a lawyer or finance person or engineer or economists like Safedin, the way Lynn talks about things is different. It's like the way Sailor started talking about it in the very beginning. It's different because they're bringing a different lens to it.

And you learn a lot if you don't have an engineer's background, just the way I think they learned a lot from Safedin if they didn't have an economics background. Okay. What does the average person's interaction with Bitcoin look like in two to three decades from now? Are they interacting with layers of Bitcoin? Are they mostly going through Bitcoin banks? What do you anticipate happening in the coming decades? Well, in two to three decades, like I said, the average age of a Bitcoin is probably got a three handle. two to three decades, those are going to have five or six handles, right? So the people who grew up with understanding that tokens in a online game or loot boxes had value and could be sold. So the concept that our parents and grandparents of a Gen Xer would never have been able to understand,

that's one of the big problems with the octogenarians in, you know, in control in D.C. They don't understand that an online token can have value. They just fundamentally can't get there. But those generations that grew up with that, to them the concept of self-custody is going to be second nature. The tools for it are going to be second nature. Will we always have service providers called banks? Yep, absolutely. Even how many predicted that because there will be service providers around it. But that doesn't mean that you have to store the fruits of your labor in a leveraged counterparty that might fail, which is what we're forced to do today in the traditional banking system. And same thing with the securities industry. The banks are more obviously

levered because they fail more frequently, but broker dealers are, it's the same structure. We don't own the securities in our brokerage account. We own IOUs to somebody who has the legal title to those securities. All that's going to get, all those layers of intermediaries are going to get broken down where we're going to actually have self-custody to our money and to our securities. And it's just going to be second nature to everybody. And it's already starting to happen. I'll give credit to Justin Slaughter of Paradigm, who had a really great tweet read a few weeks ago now about a survey that Paradigm did. And it turns out in that youngest age category, I think they cut the age category of 18 to 24, that already,

a larger number of people in that age category have got a crypto account before they got a bank account. The reverse was true for everybody of the older generations. So if you're above 24, you got a bank account before you got a crypto account. But as those generations grow up, they won't maybe ever set foot in a bank. Yeah. Well, I mean, my daughter is seven going on eight, and she's had a Bitcoin wallet for two years now.

Her own, too. And she goes and we have like a local circular economy thing. We put on markets a couple times a year. And she knows how to go and go to the merchants and like pay with her Bitcoin and everything. So yeah, like these kids are going to grow up. And it's just going to be why I was able to get a Bitcoin wallet, you know, years and years before I was allowed to have a bank account. Yeah. Yeah.

It's going to be so different. All right. Caitlin, last question for you. And I always ask this up my guess. but I'm going to spring it on you really quick here. Of all the things happening in and around Bitcoin right now, what makes you the most bullish? Bitcoin Treasury companies.

Yeah, expand. How come? Because they're speculative attacks on the U.S. dollar. Like I said, the two are going to coexist for a while, but that's the difference. is as long as they don't borrow in Bitcoin, if they borrow in Bitcoin, then they're just the latest incarnations

of the same old fractional reserve problem that ultimately took down BlockFi and Celsius and FTX. There was more fraud in FTX, but they were running fractional as well. So, you know, as long as what they're doing is borrowing in the dollar, and you're starting to see a Bitcoin yield curve come out. And it was really Michael Saylor

who discussed, discovered that he could create a Bitcoin yield curve. And I think that's really significant. There's an entire Bitcoin capital market that is developing and that as somebody who came from traditional capital markets and wanted this to happen for years, it's finally happening. And it's funny, it's not happening the way I was thinking it was going to happen, which is Wall Street firms getting involved. Like I said this about Sam Bankman Freed as well, I was afraid. Way back in 2018, 2019 when backed, which is a sister company to the New York Stock Exchange, got into Bitcoin custody, I was saying this is where the problems are going to start to come because

Wall Street cannot help itself but get leveraged, but rehypothecate, but get themselves blown up. It's just who they are. And what's funny is it didn't actually turn out that way the regulators restrained Wall Street so much. But the people from Wall Street, so Sam Beckman-Fried had come from Jane Street. He created his own version of that and blew himself up. So the Wall Street firms didn't blow up, but the people who I was afraid would do it did end up blowing themselves up.

And it's going to keep happening, I'm afraid. So just be careful. Not all Bitcoin Treasury strategies are created equal, but there is something to this. There's some real advances in corporate finance happening as we speak and a Bitcoin capital market with a Bitcoin yield curve and Bitcoin forward curve are finally being created. And I think they're being done in the right way, generally speaking. Just be careful. I'm not endorsing this across the board as a strategy.

You've got to read the fine print and understand who's a true Bitcoin. Who's a true Bitcoiner and who's not? Yeah. Yeah. If anything, the people that choose to F around do find out. And Bitcoin makes the finding out very expedient. And it's just vicious sometimes and it's beautiful. Yeah, it's great to see.

Caitlin, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Really enjoy the conversation. And I hope to see in first get some events in the coming year. Yeah, likewise, and let's do this again sometime. Hey, you. Yes, you watching the Bitcoin price movements and the latest exciting news. It's awesome to stay informed, but the real power of Bitcoin comes from taking control.

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