TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #618: The Samourai Case Threatens Every Bitcoiner with Zack Shapiro

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

Marty sits down with Zack Shapiro to discuss the Samourai case. Zack Shapiro on Twitter: https://x.com/zackbshapiro P2P Rights: https://p2prights.org/ Bitcoin Policy Institute: https://www.btcpolicy.org/ 0:00 - Intro0:28 - Outlining the case12:26 - Biden/Warren admin17:24 - Fold & Coinkite19:00 - Next step and implications for precedent23:24 - Unchained23:53 - GENIUS act27:34 - History of Bank Secrecy Act33:19 - Nation states will need bitcoin39:21 - Bitcoin fixes the world45:52 - Killer use cases56:14 - OP_DEBATE1:04:54 - C2A

You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be probably should be yeah this has been uh it's been a long saga over a year since kian and bill were arrested i think so we're here with zach shapiro to talk about the samurai

wallet case been a lot of developments in the last week zach just mentioned there was a development this morning but i think for the context of anybody listening let's go back and just give a sort of timeline of everything up to this morning going back to last year to get everybody up to speed and then we'll jump into what's actually happening with the case how the sdny is posturing and potential precedents that could be set if this goes the wrong way for for samurai For sure. I'll be as brief here as possible because I've sort of laid the falling out in greater length online. But I think the relevant timeline really goes back to 2013, which was in the early days of Bitcoin. And people didn't really understand Bitcoin in the government at all yet. But it posed this sort of fundamental question of when you have peer-to-peer electronic transfers, which was available for the first time with Bitcoin and was not technologically possible before, how do the U.S. anti-money laundering laws, which presume that if you're going to do an electronic transfer of money, you're doing it with an intermediary, how do those apply to the Bitcoin ecosystem? So the Treasury Department, which deals with anti-money laundering, put out guidance in 2013 and then updated that guidance in 2019 to set out its view of how the Bank Secrecy Act applies to various business models, whether custodial or non-custodial.

And so most lawyers, including Samurai's lawyer, Rafael, who I'm going to be on a panel with at Vegas this year, looked at that guidance, which drew a line between custodial and non-custodial wallets, custodial exchanges and DEXs, multi-sig setups where you have sovereignty in your keys versus ones where a plurality of the keys are held by custodians. And every custodial business model, they said that is money transmission because the custodian accepts and then transmits value on your behalf. And all of the non-custodial models were not because they simply amount to software, right? The facilitation of you moving your own money. So this was the legal advice that the founders of Samurai Wallet got. This is the basis on which they were operating their business, which at the end of the day was a software business that helped people coordinate CoinJoin transactions. and, you know, how everything proceeded in terms of government actions until a year before the prosecution when the government brought a case against Tornado Cash, where, you know, they had

sort of non-custodial smart contract type setups that work differently than a CoinJoin. But that was the first sort of hint that the government was going on the wrong path here. And then in April of 2024, the government arrested the developers of Samurai Wallet, claiming that their CoinJoin software amounted to money transmission under the Bank Secrecy Act and federally, criminally charging the developers here, both with conspiracy to commit money laundering through offering the software and failing to register as a money transmission business with FinCEN when they offered the software the government says was money transmission. This is when sort of I and BPI really got involved here because the precedent that the Bank Secrecy Act can be applied to just software that allows you to move your own money on the Bitcoin blockchain is incredibly dangerous for developers, for node runners, for miners, like you name it, right?

Basically, everyone at the Bitcoin space is at risk here based on this theory that the government is using. And so we can go into sort of the details, but the immediate tension of this case was the government seemed to be, to all of us who are paying attention and have a legal background in Bitcoin, it seemed to be that the prosecution was ignoring the, at that point, five years of FinCEN guidance specifically around non-custodial wallets. And really, the guidance since 2013, going back over a decade, that the industry had relied on for what acceptance and transmission means. And last week, we learned explicitly ignoring after going to get advice about Samurai Wallet, specifically in August of 23. Yeah. So in the last month, there have been two really important developments, specifically in the Samurai Wallet case. Right. This has always been a bad prosecution for the reason we were just talking about. And, you know, one of the reasons that this prosecution was was so bad is because it was the federal prosecutors doing regulation, not just by enforcement, but regulation by criminal prosecution. They were expanding the scope of the Bank Secrecy Act, not having Congress pass a law to do that with Democratic input, not allowing regulators to give their interpretation.

They were doing it by throwing people in jail. And so the first important update in this case that's recent is that the Trump administration put out a memo at the beginning of April called the Blanche memo saying we're not going to do regulation through enforcement or prosecution by the DOJ anymore. Right. That was a Gensler Warren era phenomenon in the Biden administration. We're just not going to do that. And specifically, we're not going to do that with criminal prosecutions around noncustodial tech, including and they use the terms tumblers and mixers. So it seemed like this memo that the Department of Justice wrote was specifically about the Samurai Wall case and the Tornado Cash case. So the defense counsel in this case wrote a letter to the prosecutors and said, hey, we think you guys need to drop this case, right? It's no longer consistent with what the DOJ says you're allowed to do. And we need to pause while you decide whether you need to drop this case.

So that happened on April 10th. There was a pause in the case. the briefing stopped, and the prosecutor said they were going to think about whether they needed to drop this case under the Blanche memo. Around that same time, in a response to a request by the defense counsel, the prosecution gave what's called Brady material. So this is under the United States Constitution. If the government is prosecuting you, they know a piece of evidence that makes you look innocent. They constitutionally have to give that to your defense counsel. So that's what happened here. The prosecution admitted for the first time

that six months before this case was brought, they went to FinCEN, the party that you would have to get a license with if you're a money transmitter, and the part of the government that put out this guidance. And they said to FinCEN, here's what Samurai Wallet is. Here's how it works. Do you think that this is money transmission under the guidance? And FinCEN said no. And the government six months later brought the case anyway, and then neglected for the first full year of the case to tell the defense that this conversation happened. And this is incredibly consequential because the events here are charged with not registering with FinCEN. We now know if they'd gone to FinCEN and tried to register, FinCEN would have said, no, we don't think you're

a money transmitter. So they probably couldn't have gotten a money transmitter license anyway. And more importantly, in the United States, in order to charge someone with a crime, they need to have fair notice that the criminal statute applies to them. And if their lawyer told them that the criminal statute based on the best available evidence didn't apply to them and if the you know government agency that put out the guidance didn't think it applied to them in what world could you say they had fair notice that they were violating the law by not getting a money transmitter license with finson yeah it seems pretty cut and dry to me i mean that was the astonishing thing at the end of last week the finson the the information that the sdny went to

finson asked vincent said no we don't believe that samurai walt is a money transmitter business money services business and i think the the vibe around the industry was like all right it's pretty cut and dry this should get thrown out in haste. And at the end of the week, ESDNY came out and wrote a letter back to the defense and no, we're not dropping the case. And so what was their reasoning? Yeah. So as the timeline on this, the disclosure from the government of this Brady information to the defense happened about a month ago. It became public for the first time last Monday when the defense filed this Brady letter with the judge saying that, hey, we got this information from the government. We think

you judge need to hold a hearing to make SDNY explain themselves. Why didn't they tell us about this earlier? And why are they bringing the case in the face of like this sort of ridiculous thing that they knew that FinCEN didn't think this was money transmission and they, you know, are putting people in jail for not getting a license with FinCEN anyway. On Wednesday, the judge said, okay, government, you have until Friday at noon to respond. At Friday at 11 something a.m., the government filed a response to the judge saying a few things. First, describing the conversation that they had had with FinCEN as an informal conversation with individual employees at FinCEN, not giving FinCEN's view, but giving their own sort of individual interpretation of

how they think the law applies. They also said that, you know, this isn't breeding material, right? This is not actually exculpatory or helpful for the defendants because the defendants are charged with two crimes. One is conspiracy to commit money laundering, where this evidence, the government says, is not relevant. The money laundering charge is about, did the defendants intentionally help criminals that they knew were criminals launder funds? And then the money transmission charge has two parts, one of which they basically admit this revelation is relevant to. But then the other, they say, okay, there are these two statutes. One is the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires you to get a license if you're a money transmitter. And there, FinCEN can speak

to that. But then the other is this law called Section 1960 that independently, outside of the Bank Secrecy Act, allows the government to prosecute you for not getting a license with FinCEN if either you needed to have that license or the government knew that you transmitted funds that you knew belonged to criminals. And so even this money transmission charge, even if it were the case that FinCEN viewed it as non-custodial and therefore not money transmission, you could still make out a case if they can show that the defendants transmitted money they knew belonged to criminals. Now, of course, the immediate problem with this logic, there are lots of problems, but the immediate problem with the logic is on that 1960 charge, the other money

transmitting charge, the government says that the defendants transmitted, the defendants transmitted. Keone and Bill transmitted money that they knew belonged to criminals. That's not how a CoinJoin works, right? The people who transmitted the money are the people that used Whirlpool and the people that used Ricochet. They signed their keys. They sent the Bitcoin from one address to another on the blockchain. And yes, they used the Whirlpool CoinJoin coordinating software to find others to do a collaborative transaction with. Yes, they might have used the Ricochet software to plan a certain number of hops for their transactions. But the people who wrote the samurai wallet code weren't transmitting anything. And the sort of interpretive

question about who is doing the transmission in this question is exactly the FinCEN guidance, right? Nevermind the logical question of who is the person transmitting money in a non-custodial question. The government shouldn't be, the prosecutor shouldn't be in the position of deciding what transmitting means here, especially if they're going to reach this entirely illogical conclusion and so first question is is so the sdny i'm not a legal expert i'm not going to pretend to have followed the interworkings of different sort of federal courts throughout the country but from what i can tell it seems like the sdny is the most important district and tries to throw around power. My question is, is this pushback in this particular case more of like

a meta fight that's ongoing right now with the current Department of Justice and federal districts around the country who don't like President Trump's and his administration sort of posturing towards judges and courts more broadly? It's increasingly looking that way to me. So, you know, full disclosure, I used to work in that particular court. After law school, I did clerkship in SDNY for a judge there. It's widely considered these are the best judges and these are the best prosecutors in the country. It's generally young lawyers, you know, from the best law schools with the best pedigree who do this early in their career to get courtroom experience. And, you know, in some ways they tend to be very smart and careful. However, there's a

nickname specifically for the prosecutor's office there. It's called the Sovereign District of New York because they have a very expansive view of their own jurisdiction and what type of cases they should bring and have under their mandate. Anyone who's seen the show Billions, this is a lot of what the show is about. And what I think this case is about is during the Biden administration, there was a real concern about money laundering using cryptocurrency. And certainly there is some money laundering that happens using cryptocurrency. The reason why the Tornado Cash case happened in the first place is because there was this crypto video game called Axie Infinity that North Korea was able to get inside of through a social engineering attack. And they did what at the

time was the largest heist in human history measured in the value of the assets at the time they were stolen, basically draining this bridge between Ethereum and a special purpose blockchain for the game. And the government was frustrated about this. They didn't see how they could adequately go after these tools. The government shut down the Tornado Cash website. It's a smart contract. It kept going. And so then they tried to overreach and use OFAC sanctions authority, and that didn't really work either. And so how do you stop this? And what they figured was, okay, there are these non-custodial transactions. There's not a financial intermediary that we can regulate under the Bank Secrecy Act. So who can we hold responsible? And the answer they reached

is software developers. That would, we know because of the Blanche memo, but we also know because of logic, that's not something that the current administration would do because the collateral damage of that decision is you basically ban the sovereign use of Bitcoin and crypto in the United States. When you say that software developers are criminally responsible for what people do with the code, it's a great way to not have any code written or deployed in the United States. And I think it is the Biden administration era combination of, you know, really heavy handed government authority and dislike for the Bitcoin and crypto industry that allows them to have negative consequences for developers and for users that allowed this case

to go forward, whether this case was intentionally meant to be a backdoor ban on Bitcoin or not, sort of like Elizabeth Warren had a bill called Damla, I'm sure you all have talked about on the show. There really was meant to be a backdoor ban on Bitcoin just by labeling everyone from node runners to non-custodial tools to miners as money transmitters in a way that Senator Warren knew that no one could comply with. I think this is maybe more unintentional, but even to just get to this unintentional, terrible precedent, you have to really not care and not like the industry. So now the dynamic is the Southern District of New York has decided they're going to double down and keep bringing this case that could potentially have really bad precedent,

notwithstanding the fact that there is this Blanche memo. The Deputy Attorney General of the United States said that it is going to be the Trump administration's policy not to bring cases like this. And the question is, where is the buck going to stop? Is the what's the main part of the Department of Justice called main justice with the attorney general, as opposed to the individual U.S. attorney's offices, which are like small law firms around the country, is main justice or is the White House going to step in and say, we're pretty clear about this policy statement that we're not going to do regulation by prosecution. You did that. It turns out also there was prosecutorial misconduct and you withheld

this incredibly important information about your discussion with FinCEN. And so it's time to shut the case down because you've not proven that you're going to do the right thing. And that is at the moment, you know, what I'm pushing for pretty hard. I think that's the right solution. But that's what that's what we're waiting for, because the prosecutors themselves are not going to decide to stop this case. Listen, I know you're tired of me talking about Fold, but I'm going to beat the drum. I'm going to beat the dead horse. If you're a Bitcoin or living in the United States and you're not using Fold, I'm just going to ask one question. What are you doing? You're leaving sats on the table. They've got gift cards. They've got their debit card. You can use your credit card. Just connect your credit card to the Fold app.

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these charges as a matter of law, they have to assume all of the allegations, the factual allegations the government is making are true. So the defense is going to argue, all right, notwithstanding anything the government says, let's assume that's all true, still as a matter of law, at least with regard to the money transmitting charge, you're not stating a relevant legal claim here because money transmission for X, Y, and Z statutory reason requires custody and control. And then the judge will decide yes or no on that. if that survives the judge's decision. And by the way, it's really it's hard to win these motions dismissed in a criminal case. It's it's very much hope they'd win this one. But it is

rare that these work. Then it goes to trial. And then after a trial, there could be an appeal. But if at the end of the day, the judge decides the wrong way on this, like the judge did in the tornado cash case, then it becomes federal law until the Congress changes the law that the Bank secrecy act doesn't require custody or control and then we're in a very dangerous place for developers and users yeah let's describe that landscape because not only developers users it's it's interesting considering the posturing that the trump administration has towards the bitcoin and broader crypto industry which is green light all systems go let's expand but this one case and the Tornado Cash case, for that matter, could have significant ramifications that could

completely derail any attempt to make sure that Bitcoin succeeds in the United States. Yeah, the best statement we have of this legal theory comes from a brief in the motion dismiss in the Tornado Cash case, where the government is trying to describe its theory of how the Bank Secrecy Act applies. Now, the Bank Secrecy Act says you're a money transmitter if you accept and then transmit funds on behalf of the public. And the question is, between accepting and then transmitting, do you have to have the funds? I would say just as a matter of the English language, yes.

But the government is saying that transmission doesn't require control, and it uses these two very telling analogies about cases where it thinks transmission doesn't require control. One is a USB cable. It says that a USB cable transmits data from one computer to another without controlling or custodying that data, and that a frying pan transmits heat without controlling or custodying that data. And therefore, as a logical matter, the word transmission does not imply custody or control.

Now, the problem with that is that there is no limiting principle. If by transmit, we just mean facilitate in some way, like the steel in the frying pan transmits heat, then the lumber company that chopped down the tree that was used to make the paper that was used to make the envelope that one criminal uses to hand cash to another criminal should have KYC the criminals, which is just a completely absurd conclusion. And, you know, think of all of the people in the Bitcoin ecosystem that arguably help others transmit money or facilitate transmission. If I'm using, you know, a ledger wallet with ledger live software, I'm holding my own keys. But, you know, someone else ledger live software is helping me transmit my signed transaction to the blockchain. Are they a money

transmitter? Do they need to KYC me every time I make a transaction? What about, you know, cold card made the hardware that allowed me to generate the entropy to generate my seed phrase? Is that facilitating my use of Bitcoin and facilitating my transfer of money? What about a Bitcoin miner or a pool that appends transactions to the blockchain, right? They take transactions and they add them and then those get confirmed and that's how money moves. Are they facilitating transmission? Do mining pools or miners themselves need to KYC every transaction they transmit? I mean, you know better than I, but that's going to be a pretty tall order for miners to be able to do at this point. And on and on and on, there basically isn't a business model that you can

think of or an actor in the whole world of Bitcoin that couldn't be captured by the type of theory the government is trying to apply to the Bank Secrecy Act in this case. dot com slash tftc it's insane because under the biden administration i mean it's become abundantly clear with operation chokepoint 2.0 and everything that's been brought to light with elizabeth warren how she was posturing behind the scenes and everything she pushed for during that administration that the industry has been signaled singled out but i think it's being exacerbated now with trump too in the sense that there's this again this meta fight going on about just trump his policies broadly and the the politis the politicization of the court system

uh to sort of push back against what he's trying to effectuate in terms of his policy goals and yeah i don't want to take us too far afield from the discussion about samurai wall which i think is incredibly important but there's another way this is playing out right now in washington dc around the Genius Act, which is a federal stablecoin bill. The main dynamic previously in this bill was sort of a fight between Tether and Circle about how we treat domestic versus foreign stablecoin issuers. But it looked like everyone had reached a compromise and that bill was to be voted on last Thursday and there was a glide path to it being passed and then Congress could move on to other stuff. What happened instead was nine Senate Democrats wrote a letter

who were previously going to vote for this bill, wrote a letter saying they wouldn't vote for it, and they specified two reasons. One is that the president's DeFi program, the World Liberty Financial, was doing a stablecoin, and so they were worried this bill would enrich him personally. But then secondly, the bill was not strong enough from a KYC AML perspective. Now, if you read the Genius Act, it is about as strict as you possibly could be from a KYC AML perspective, except for it doesn't treat secondary peer-to-peer transfers of stable coins as subject to the Bank Secrecy Act. The politics here for the Democrats that defected on this bill, I think some of it was, here's an opportunity, exactly like you were just saying, Marty, to whack the Trump administration

and say, you know, look at these corrupt people and sort of draw a fine point on that. But then the KYC AML point, I think, just directly comes from the Elizabeth Warren, just anti-Bitcoin wing of the Democratic Party, which is trying to put in a poison pill that the Republicans can't sign on to stablecoin legislation that attaches the Bank Secrecy Act to non-custodial transactions in the same way that her Damla Act would, in the same way that Tornado Cash and Samurai would. I don't think that Republicans are going to vote for that. But there's this really worrying dynamic right now where specifically crypto lobbyists and policy people are starting to say, well, look, the language is not great, but let's just move whatever we can forward. And the reason for

that is the bill that they really want to have passed is the market structure bill, which legalizes token launches and will bring a huge amount of money into the crypto space. And there is political recognition in D.C. right now, if the Genius Act, which was supposed to be the layup that everyone agrees on, stable coins are good for America, whatever, if that doesn't pass, the Republican leadership is not going to want to spend additional political capital on another crypto bill. And so this Genius Act passing is in the way of the crypto industry's cash cow. And so I'm quite worried about sort of like a dirty deal here where we get a version of the Genius Act through that basically blurs the line between stable coins and a CBDC and imports

a lot of this dangerous Bank Secrecy Act stuff into non-custodial transactions just to make the political prospects of a market structure bill that will enrich VCs and token issuers more likely to happen. And this gets back to something I've been talking about on this show in Rabbit Hole Recap for years, which is the Bank Secrecy Act itself. I think 53, 54 years in now, the Bank Secrecy Act, I think it's time to review the Bank Secrecy Act, what its stated purpose was when it was originally signed into law, whether or not it has actually effectively accomplished the goals that it's set to accomplish, and

sort of acknowledge the elephant in the room that this one act that was pushed into law over 50 years ago now at this point is really constraining the american economy particularly from a financial perspective or at least a startup economy in the world of finance and fintech should we abolish the bank secrecy act it seems like a lot of these problems stem from this one bill which i would argue is completely ineffective at solving the problems that set out to solve and creating incredible barriers to entry for people trying to start any company that deals with money. I mean, just a brief history of this for your listeners.

The Bank Secrecy Act was originally passed in 1970, meant to fight organized crime. And organized crime was a much bigger problem in America in 1970 than it is now. And specifically because the mafia, et cetera, were using Swiss bank accounts to hide their money. And the U.S. bank accounts they were using to move money to Switzerland were not keeping records about those transactions. So the FBI would go to American banks. They'd say, hey, we want all of your records on the X and Y crime family. And the bank would say, sorry, we don't have that. And so originally, the Bank Secrecy Act was passed to force banks to keep records about their customers, right, KYC, and to have them file suspicious activity reports or

SARs, S-A-Rs, about people who were doing transactions with them. That might have made, I think you can you can definitely steal me on the case why in 1970 on a paper record system that might have made sense from a law enforcement perspective. The problem is that the Bank Secrecy Act has been modified a whole bunch of times, the two biggest ones being in 2001 with the Patriot Act after 9-11 and then again in 2020 to become a digital dragnet. We're no longer in 1970. We're now in the 2020s where money moves electronically. And what was originally a good faith effort to go after organized crime has now become this digital dragnet that really, you know, it feels like a proctology exam every time you want to move your money. And I think that doesn't

work for Americans. And it doesn't stop crime. Criminals are very creative. Criminals will always find means of getting around the rules and find ways of moving money that aren't captured by the Bank Secrecy Act. And then the biggest problem here is the invention of Bitcoin and the invention of blockchain, where now we have non-intermediated electronic transactions, which the Bank Secrecy Act actually isn't meant to capture, right? Which it didn't have in mind. And if you try and force the Bank Secrecy Act on that, which is what's happening in the Samurai Wallet case, what's happening is you have a law that applies to financial institutions like banks that sit between person A and person B when they move money, right? If you move money on Venmo,

you have correspondent banks that it feels like your transaction is immediate, but really it takes weeks to settle where your bank is talking to your friend's bank who you paid for dinner. And it is one thing we can argue about whether it's a good idea to regulate those banks. But if there's no bank there, and instead of the bank, you're going to find the guy who made the PayPal user interface and throw him in prison because you're unhappy about what people are using Venmo for. That's the situation we're in. And, you know, I absolutely think that there should be a conversation, data informed conversation about how useful the Bank Secrecy Act is and is the impingement on American privacy and sovereignty is all that pain we're enduring

there worth whatever benefit we're allegedly getting from it. But even if you think that the Bank Secrecy Act itself has value, it can't apply to non-custodial transactions. We need a new law that deals with the fact that whether or not the government likes it, Bitcoin now exists. And that needs to be reflected in the way we do illicit finance regulation. And one pitch I'd like to make is there is a law that does a pretty good job of that. It's called the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act. And the long-term fix to this issue we see in the samurai wallet prosecution. I would love for the case to end. I would love even more, I don't know, even more, but I would love for FinCEN to put out clearer guidance in 2025 that will prevent judges from

reaching the wrong conclusion. I would love for CoinCenter to win their litigation they have now against the DOJ to try and set better precedent here. But the best fix to this problem, the most durable fix that can't be undone if we get President Elizabeth Warren in the future is to have the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act passed into law by Congress to make clear where the Bank Secrecy Act at least does and does not apply. And what are the details of that act? It codifies into law that the Bank Secrecy Act does not apply to situations where there is not custody or control. So it would, at the level of Congress and the Senate, it would create a rule that if you're building non-custodial software, you are not subject to the Bank Secrecy Act.

And to the extent that anyone thinks the Bank Secrecy Act would apply there, it modifies the Bank Secrecy Act explicitly not to apply to non-custodial devs and tools. That would be great. And it's, I mean, been in these fights for well over a decade now in terms of Bitcoin interacting with the U.S. government specifically. and when you consider sort of the moment we find ourselves in as american citizens seems like we're at this inflection point we have tariff wars going on the treasury of the secretary the secretary of the treasury is talking about this great global economic reordering and i think the stakes are so high that's setting a bad precedent whether it be with the samurai case the genius act whatever it may be as it pertains to legislation around our industry over the next couple of years

could either set us up for incredible success and value creation in the United States or like lost decades of economic productivity. Yeah, I think there are two incredible sort of macro shifts happening right now where getting this right is incredibly important. One is geopolitics and economics. We are moving from a unipolar power world where it's Pax Americana to a multipolar power world, both in terms of just regular geopolitical influence and military and power around the world, but also in terms of money and the reserve currency. And we're hearing, I think, first time in the mainstream media about cracks in the idea

that U.S. government debt is going to be the world reserve asset forever. People are starting to lose confidence in that when Bitcoiners have been talking about this for years and years. So what's going to come next? Do you want it to be the Chinese CBDC? Probably not. That's probably not great from a privacy perspective or a U.S. power perspective or anything like that. So what are the tools you need? One, you need something to provide demand for dollars and for U.S. debt so that can remain a strong asset. And that's actually where I think that stablecoin legislation can be helpful, at least to create a bid for U.S. debt. And if those are going to be valuable, we need it to be not sort of a surveillance dragnet at the level of

peer-to-peer. The number one use case for stablecoins around the world is using dollar as a store of value in countries where people can't get access to U.S. bank accounts or holding physical currency is illegal and sometimes punishable by death. And so if you can hold tether on your phone, that's a better solution. But if we're forcing peer-to-peer KYC, that's going to undermine that use case. So that's not great for the dollar. But then if we needed a credibly neutral reserve asset, the two options on the table at this point are gold and Bitcoin. Our geopolitical adversaries have been stacking gold for a while and with a special intensity for the last three years since we froze Russia's treasury reserves after the invasion in Ukraine.

So if we sort of go whole hog on monetizing gold, we're going to make our geopolitical enemies a lot richer. And as all your listeners will know, gold is also just not a great asset in the 21st century. It has a lot of flaws in terms of how expensive it is to assay it and how expensive it is to move it. And it's not divisible as much as we want. And you end up with paper gold or we could do Bitcoin, which is overwhelmingly held in the United States. I think River has or will soon release really good data on how much of the Bitcoin network is held in America, but it's way higher than gold. So by monetizing Bitcoin, we can enrich American individuals. We can enrich American companies at the expense of demonetizing our geopolitical adversaries that have been stacking gold.

And so that's good for America. It's especially good for America if we have funded our SBR with Bitcoin between now and then. And Bitcoin is something that really embodies American values. It is fair. The Bitcoin network treats everyone the same, whether you hold $1 worth of Bitcoin or you're Michael Saylor. And it makes it really hard for authoritarian countries to shut out the free market. right the classic examples are women in afghanistan who can't have bank accounts but are able to earn bitcoin over the internet people who protect themselves from bail-ins where the government steals your money in cyprus by holding bitcoin this would just be a real coup if we move in that direction with bitcoin and if we ban the actual use of bitcoin through elizabeth warren's damla bill through a very bad version of the stablecoin bill or through you know unfortunate case law in

samurai wallet or tornado cash that undermines all of these geopolitical benefits of bitcoin and then meanwhile uh ai is is seemingly still going exponential we're going to face a world where more and more of our commerce our decision making etc is mediated by incredibly powerful artificial intelligence both public facing you know open source or closed source llms like individuals are used to using and then other scary software from from companies like palantir and the question is like what is it check on that system how do you know that you know the person you're talking to is a person and not a bot uh how do you sort of hold wealth in a way that doesn't end up being this dynamic system where top-down company or government-run systems can

manipulate the money can confiscate things from you can censor you having a power-backed bitcoin blockchain is incredibly useful there as a decentralized, as a real world, real energy grounded system that's different from the sort of Gossamer AI world and getting rid of actual usage of the Bitcoin network. And again, ghettoizing Bitcoin to just an asset held by BlackRock that maybe you can get some price exposure to, but you can't use, that would be a real strategic error in that domain as well. It feels like the next two years are going to dictate and we're biased i'm biased i'll put my hand up i won't speak for you from one of the one the largest bitcoin investment platform 1031 this media company is dedicated to

educating people about bitcoin this is all because you look at what bitcoin represents and the opportunity it provides not only individuals but companies states cities nation states and it does feel like i mean lawrence lapard has popularized this is for all the marbles like if you foot gun yourself because you fall prey to the whims of a geriatric elizabeth warren and their nanny state tendencies you're going to set the u.s back decades i think i am i'm actually optimistic i wanted to have you on just to really beat the drum around this and make sure that it's really clear to anybody paying attention that this samurai case the tornado cash case these stable coin bills are extremely important and things that people need

to make noise around because it could dictate the long-term potential success of you as an individual in this country as an aggregate of individuals and it seemed like we were out of the woods um with trump coming in but there are still battles that need to be won before we're clearly out of the woods yeah i mean unfortunately on this particular issue we're not out of the woods at all yet and and the macro reason for that is that there is a conflict of interest sometimes between number go up and freedom go up. And I think that is short-sighted on the number go up people. I think the reason for number go up at the end of the day, the reason why Bitcoin is valuable and is going to be worth many multiples of what it is now in the future

is because it is censorship resistant and scarce. And I think both of those things depend on actual decentralization and actual use of bitcoin not just as a speculative instrument but as a money um but i agree with like this is for all the marbles and now's the the time frame and there are two sort of battlefields right now uh on which this needs to be thought i'm i'm involved in bitcoin at all you know now it's pretty much full time because i think it's good for the world I think this is a solution to a lot of our problems. It's a solution to creeping authoritarianism. It's a solution to broken money that has left the millennial generation, by and large, unable to buy homes, corrupt markets where money has an outsource voice in politics. Bitcoin really just is a good solution to those problems. But Bitcoin succeeding is going to require sort of two things at this point, or at least

succeeding on the relevant time horizon. One is the political battle. And I'm focused a lot on that with my work through BPI and the Peer-to-Peer Rights Fund. Each branch of government has a role to play. The Samurai Wallet case is an example of us fighting this in the courts and the judiciary, but also the executive branch. We want to make sure that the agencies and the White House understand Bitcoin and they see it as a priority. That actually seems to be going pretty well so far.

And then Congress on Capitol Hill, you know, we want them to pass the Bitcoin Act. We want them to pass the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act. But, you know, laws can both accelerate moving in the right direction. And we've seen some evidence of that so far. But if it goes the wrong way, like it is currently going in these cases, right? but currently we're going in the wrong direction. Or if the stablecoin bill goes in the wrong direction on peer-to-peer transfers, that could set us back in a really devastating way. But at the end of the day, often when I talk about this, I mention that the government work

that I do, I see as a rearguard action. Bitcoin is ultimately going to be a challenge to some areas of state power. Obviously, in terms of monetary policy, if we move towards a Bitcoin standard, the Federal Reserve is going to be less important in deciding the price of money. I view that as a good thing. Certainly, some people in government are not going to see that as a good thing, and that's going to be a fight. Also, the censorship-resistant piece of Bitcoin, which I think is incredibly important and good for the world and allows Bitcoin to be useful for human rights advocates and people in authoritarian countries, that does take away some government power to. And so the government is not going to go away without a fight. And at the end

of the day, they're not going to ultimately roll over on this stuff. So these court cases that were fighting the action on Capitol Hill, the lobbying, the education of policymakers, that is buying time for the other piece of this that's really important. You mentioned 1031, but people need to build ultimately the non-custodial whenever possible and unstoppable whenever possible tools that make Bitcoin the freedom money that it has the potential to be. And so my day job, I run a law practice. I try and help people form Bitcoin companies, raise money from funds like yours, and think about what are the tools you're going to need to be able to use Bitcoin as money instead of just in your brokerage account held by a custodian. And there are amazing

strides being made, but not enough. We really need better financial services. We need better custody solutions, insurance, payments, smart leverage that's not just gambling on piles of Bitcoin. There are all sorts of things that Bitcoiners need to be able to actually lean on this new, amazing technological breakthrough in what money means. And the developers and the entrepreneurs have an incredibly important role in parallel to the government and policy folks and lawyers. And Bitcoin as a cypherpunk first revolution, it's that side of the ledger that's going to win this for us at the end of the day. It's going to build, it's people who build the tools that gain adoption and the government can't stop in the way that at this

point, they really can't stop the Bitcoin network directly. That is the sort of final getting it into the end zone uh while you know we you sort of buy time from a legal and political standpoint yeah i mean last week was a hilarious and poetic juxtaposition where you had the bitcoin plus plus conference going on here in austin at the same time that the strategy corporate balance sheet bitcoin for corporations conference was going on and it's you had all the attention with the op return stuff there was a considerable amount of attention on bitcoin plus plus but i think from an external observer like just like the lay person who is curious about bitcoin all the focus was on strategy and love what michael saylor's done in terms of raising the awareness

for bitcoin and highlighting it as an asset worth holding if you're a corporation but i do think it was a bit poetic in the sense that all the attentions on this thing number go up bitcoin on the balance sheet which i think is good but we have these these fights that need to be won and the attention of the cypherpunks actually building out the protocol and the layers above it was marginal compared to that and at this particular point in time with the with how high the stakes are i do think it's important that people really recognize that this is a monetary revolution at the end of the day but is enabled by tech and as you mentioned will only be enabled if that tech is sufficiently distributed and decentralized yeah well and the good news is like we now do

have some time. Notwithstanding the very real and very scary potential precedent posed by the Samurai Wallet case, the government through the Blanche Memo has made clear they're not going to bring more of these prosecutions right now. And there's a very different environment with the entrepreneurs I work with. The conversations I had last year, especially last spring when this case was announced, I can't tell you how many founders I talked to who were considering leaving the country, considering shutting down. The chilling effect was incredibly real. And now we're seeing a lot of the opposite. I'm sure you're seeing more Bitcoin companies get funded. There's more money in the space. There's more people who have really interesting

ideas and builders who have more confidence that they can build non-custodial solutions to move the ball forward. And so that's great to see. Although, you know, I think we always need more um we need people who have good ideas of what to build on bitcoin yes it's a hard business model it's hard to make money around an open source protocol and it's really hard you know from your lp's perspective to compete with the expected returns just on holding bitcoin but it's both possible and it's necessary uh to to get us to where we need to be at the end of the day and it's happening too i'm sure you've been following about like the e-cash development the ecash different custody trade-off model but comes with increased privacy cheaper fees

quicker instant settlement than the protocol level like seeing what the open source developers are doing with the cashew protocol specifically how rapidly that's developing and how the ux is improving there you can squint and see the cypherpunk banking stack of the future being built out and but i think but that's an area and full disclosure you know i can't get into all the details here because I either legally represent or advise most of the relevant e-cash players at this point. But we need to figure out a solution for e-cash in specifically, like, for example, with the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act. Even if we agree legally that there is this line between custodial and non-custodial tools with the Bank Secrecy Act,

and the line is, do you have custody or control over user funds? Conceptually, there are some difficult lines. So let's say custody and control gets enshrined in law. What about the liquid network? Is the liquid network custody and control user funds? Does any kind of federated e-cash mint or federated institution or side chain or roll up or whatever you can imagine that has sort of multiple custodians, each individual participant in that, right, who's a guardian or a federation member or whatever, they don't have independent control or custody. But at what point do you point to the collective and say this collective has custody or control and then like from a legal structuring question there's this really difficult okay do you wrap this all

in a company and the risk there is that the government points at the company and says okay this company now has control or if you don't wrap it in a company the legal default is that a judge would treat it as what's called a general partnership which is a type of business arrangement where everyone is personally liable for what the general partnership does and so even with these individual tools be they e-cash mints or arcs or you know lightning routing nodes or whatever there are very difficult regulatory and legal questions to to you know work out and good luck getting judges to understand this um yeah well like i was saying you can squint and see it being built out in front of us. Like how do we ensure that we're actually able to leverage

those tools? Because as an individual, as a business owner, as somebody that invests in businesses, like those are tools that create efficiencies, they increase individual freedom and privacy, and they are an upgrade to the incumbent system, which is running on 1970s tech. A hundred percent agree. But I think this is just a great example of where we both need to move the ball forward from a technical perspective and really particularly from a UI perspective for some of these tools, but then also a legal perspective. And some of that will involve litigation. Some of that will involve lobbying, right? I would love to see an amendment to the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act that specifically talks about e-cash, for example,

because I think e-cash is a really important part of the custody solution of the future. I'm totally with you there. And seeing the way e-cash is now used in the global south is just, you know, incredibly inspiring and I think is a really important part of what's happening in Bitcoin. I was in London recently for an event that HRF put on and I got to hear all of these people that are using Fediments to hold their life savings and farmers and it's incredible. But it is a hard thing to shoehorn into the legacy legal system. And there are not a lot of lawyers that understand this, let alone policymakers. And so just the first step here of just education is difficult and really important. That and to your point about UI, it's like make

the UI so good that the tech gets so widely adopted that it's harder to put the genie back in the bottle. Yeah. And there are other areas, right? So definitely this privacy focused stuff, super important community custody. But then at the other end of like the economic spectrum, And again, full disclosure here, I'm both their lawyer and investor, but like, you know, when I look at what AnchorWatch is doing on the custody side, how do you make something that for a high net worth individual is going to be a compelling alternative to just holding Bitcoin ETF shares? You have rich people that are persuaded that Bitcoin is a good store of value. They're used to a brokerage account. They like that, you know, BlackRock and ultimately Coinbase can be held responsible for the difficult parts of custody. And it's one thing to sort of explain, well, actually, really, we want people to be able to and then to actually self-custody Bitcoin because that's important for the decentralization of the network.

And that's important for, you know, its store value properties that will ultimately make it valuable. It's nice for them to hear that, but it creates a tragedy, a common situation. And so the solution here is not like wagging your finger at rich people and telling them they need to, you know, custody in the like old school Amish way. You actually need to offer them a product that is better than what BlackRock is offering. And so I think, you know, zooming out, I don't really know, to be honest, what to make of all these quote unquote Bitcoin treasury companies. It's not something I've been particularly involved with. I don't really understand the investment case for them. But people clearly this cycle, one of the narratives that is emerging most strongly is that the killer use case for Bitcoin right now is people borrowing against it.

And I'm seeing that in the form of treasury companies. I'm seeing that in the form of like, you know, some of my high net worth clients that are working on like private agreements to borrow against their Bitcoin and, you know, Bitcoin custody solutions, all this stuff. And just the financial services sector for Bitcoin is underdeveloped. And there's a real great opportunity now to build – a lot of people talk about, okay, what is microstrategy X number of years in the future? And you hear the word Bitcoin bank thrown around. I think we got to do a lot of first principles thinking of what is it you'd want with a Bitcoin bank? What does a Bitcoin bank mean? What are the services you would offer to someone?

And some very large percentage – again, deferring to the sort of public stats put out by River here – like 16 million coins are held by individuals. Um, still it's Bitcoiners who are holding the supply and down the road, uh, when, you know, maybe you don't want to hold it all in sort of a roll your own wallet situation, whether that's a single sig or multi-sig setup, and you want a upgraded custody solution. Uh, there's the technical question of like, do we need covenants is manuscript, but then there's on top of that, what are the services you need? And that's where I think like entrepreneurs have an opportunity to step up and provide a compelling sort of long term minded solution that will be both beneficial to themselves and beneficial to holders and beneficial to the Bitcoin network as a whole. But just like

with the privacy solution where we need the UI to be good enough that people opt into privacy as a default, I think that's really important. There is a analogous question for sort of high end Bitcoin as an asset custody where we need these ultimately sovereign solutions to be so compelling that people are choosing them because they're compelling and then we benefit from the externalities of people choosing that rather than leading with the externalities and trying to lecture people into what we think is the right answer i completely agree i completely agree i think uh the shameless op return stuff is uh top of mind for people the last two weeks particularly because I do think the covenant discussion was gaining traction and is very important to have

and consider because it would enable much more robust fail-proof setups to enable that self sovereign sort of stack that you're describing. Yeah. I mean, I think that's important and you know, I don't, I don't, I'm not technical, so I don't really know the merits of the operative discussion other than it seems like unfortunately there's like a there's the meme now is it's the podcasters versus the the developers and i'm trying to stay out of it me too um and so again i'm not i don't know one side or the other but uh the question is uh if we have this level of dysfunction over a policy decision yeah i mean what does that mean when there are really scary things on the horizon. And one of the fun things recently, Matt Pines

has stepped up full time at BPI as our executive director. He has an interesting background in helping facilitate war games and tabletop discussions. And so we've been talking a lot about in the Bitcoin world, what are these sort of big picture questions we'd want to look at and figure out how the relevant actors would deal with crises. And when we think about those things, three off the top of my head would be an AGI takeoff, would be some sort of quantum computing moving faster than we anticipated. And then a third would be some geopolitical event involving Bitcoin, whether that's terrorist financing or one of our geopolitical rivals announces a huge Bitcoin stack and an attempt to move on to a Bitcoin standard on non-American friendly

terms, how is it everyone's going to react to that? And in each of those situations, it's easy to imagine specifically core devs having an incredibly important role, right? Whether we need to migrate to a different address type or a soft fork or a hard fork in quantum, whether there's incredible legal and violent pressure to fork non-US actors off the network or combat whatever Russia or China or some terrorist organization is doing with Bitcoin in the geopolitical example, or you're literally battling against the AIs in the third example. And the question is, when the stakes are much higher than they are now, and we're under a huge time pressure. And we're not just generally playing for all the marbles, but like, it's now

or never, are we going to be able to come together and implement what we need to do? And what does consensus look like in that world? And, you know, when I was thinking about Bitcoin as an investment, so I first sort of came up against the Bitcoin and crypto space in, you know, around 2016, I was working at a large law firm. And mostly, I was interested in the legal questions around crypto involving the dark web and then the ICO boom and stuff like that. And I came away from that falling for the Wall Street line of it's blockchain, not Bitcoin at the time. And I unfortunately didn't really understand Bitcoin as an asset. And then when I came back to it around 2020, one of the real things that was my aha moment about Bitcoin and why I realized that

that's what's actually going on here was the aftermath of the block size wars. And when you do sort of a side-by-side screen here of the block size wars where you had all of the important interests, whether the exchanges, the miners, the VCs, et cetera, on the side of bigger blocks. And then the Bitcoin community was able to get their will over all of these moneyed interests with the user-activated soft fork. And then you looked split screen at what's happening with Ethereum with the DAO hack, and then a small group of people ordering a chain rollback to get victims their money back, it's like, oh, this is actually what digital gold looks like, right? This is much more a commodity than it is a startup. And, you know, that I think is a really

incredible, important part of Bitcoin's lore and what sets it apart. It is at the end of the day, what underpins the credible scarcity of 21 million is that like, yeah, good luck, good luck changing that, right? You know, Greenpeace and Ripple, you can throw as much money as you want into pressure campaigns, like nobody's going to listen to you. Um, but, uh, we need to sort of maintain a balance between the sort of decentralization and community run effort of an open source project like Bitcoin on the one hand, but then the ability to reach consensus when we need it. And, uh, most of the reason I'm paying attention to the opera turn stuff, I don't know about the merits of one versus the other, but I think it is an important, you know, way to take

temperature of what it looks like to to reach bitcoin consensus in 2025 and and so far those at least to me the dynamics don't look awesome no they do not they certainly do not hopefully this is i think the silver lining of the opera term discussion hopefully it highlights that there is some sort of dysfunction in terms of the organization of this distributed open source software project at a time when things aren't as pressing as they may be in the future when one of those three or any number of higher stakes scenarios materialize and we can learn from this lesson during relative peace times to basically say all right this is not this is not efficient this is not working to a certain extent we got to figure it out get to the table

and have the discussions, the hard discussions to figure out how we may or may not do something in the future. But yeah, it's never boring. That's for sure. It's never boring times. And one of the things that I've found most interesting recently is I was posting on Twitter about this yesterday. I've been fascinated by the shift in the Overton window on Bitcoin. Yeah, I had sort of the like very classic fiat yuppie both upbringing and early career right i went to sort of like the fancy east coast schools and i had a sort of traditional uh big law firm government early career and my social circles outside of bitcoin couldn't have been any farther from bitcoin they are the people that have benefited from the legacy system there are

people who've never had reason to think of bitcoin and and therefore you know there's like the classic crisis article about the up elite in Bitcoin. That was absolutely my experience until about a year ago. I think the launch of the Bitcoin ETFs and then even more at the end of last year, Bitcoin hitting 100,000. I'm starting to see, you know, career risk around Bitcoin going away. When I talk to, you know, Bitcoin with my normie friends, they don't think I'm crazy anymore. Actually, about half of them are starting to buy a little bit and they understand the difference between Bitcoin and crypto. That's not lost on people. Some of that is the spectacular incompetence of the crypto sector and how much money has been wasted building

vaporware. But I don't want to paint just a negative picture. I think there are ways in which we are just so unbelievably winning beyond our wildest dreams. I got involved in the Bitcoin community originally through Clubhouse and made a lot of friends there. And one of my friends American HODL said to me a couple of years ago now, we'll know that we've won and that we have a Bitcoin president when someone pardons Russ Albrecht. And at the time, I just thought that first of all, I was like, that's such a crazy goal to set here. Because when people talk about the Silk Road, they talk about murder for hire and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the fact that not only was that right, but we were like two years away from a president that owns Bitcoin

and supports Bitcoin and did an executive order for Bitcoin Reserve and freed Ross Ulbricht and, you know, went to the Bitcoin bar in New York and used the Lightning Network to buy a burger. And in some ways, we are in such an incredible timeline that I could never have predicted. Like, it's nuts. It really is. It really is. And hopefully, to bring this back to the beginning of the conversation um whether it's the main justice stepping in or the pressure from the trump admin getting so large that the sdny is forced to walk away from this case against samurai hopefully that is the next big step and so with that like what should anybody listening number one be paying attention to or number two be doing to make sure that a bad precedent isn't set

Yeah, absolutely. And so, look, this is absolutely what I'm trying to do right now is get this issue in front of the relevant decision makers, because I think at the end of the day, you know, in the clearest example of this, the Blanche memo, this prosecution runs absolutely counter to what the current administration says they want for Bitcoin and want for crypto in the United States. So, you know, just a list of asks for people. One, understand and pay attention to this issue and understand the stakes. I know that like there's a little bit of legal minutiae here about what it means to be a money transmitter. But the sort of headline thing about that is there is a legal question about when someone is using a non-custodial tool, who is transmitting the Bitcoin? And the obviously correct answer from a logical perspective, from a legal perspective, from a policy perspective is it is the person who has the private keys that is moving the Bitcoin and transmitting the Bitcoin. There's no one else who could do it. And right now, federal prosecutors are trying to basically force a overnight law change so that we're going to pretend that the person that wrote the code that someone uses to move their Bitcoin is the one moving the Bitcoin. And in the cases where the developer is not KYC-ing, the user throwing the developer in jail. So that's what's happening.

And just logically, if that becomes the law of the land and in the United States, federal judges can make law through their decisions, then basically no actor in the Bitcoin economy is safe. And the government's theory is that if you facilitate movement of money, your money transmitter, that would reach node runners, wallet developers, miners, you know, lightning routing nodes, you know, arcs, e-cash mints, you name it, whatever tool stack you use, the people who built that are at risk. And if you're running your own node, you know, you could be at risk. And so this is hugely important from a precedential perspective. OK, so what can you do about it? Right now, it's looking like the legal solution is an uphill battle. The prosecutors have basically announced they're not going to do the right thing. The judge in this case is in his late 70s.

He's not been particularly kind to the defense in the Samurai Wallet case. And so we're definitely going to litigate this as hard as possible. I'm personally going to do an amicus brief, but the much more likely solution to this problem is political. So from first principles, what's the political solution? The prosecutors in this case are federal prosecutors. They work at a U.S. Attorney's office. Their boss is Maine Justice and the Attorney General of the United States, Pam Bondi, and then her deputy, Todd Blanche, who wrote this Blanche memo. And then the Maine Justice's boss is the president, who is the first pro-Bitcoin president. So we need the White House and or main justice to understand that this is an important issue at BPI. We're very focused on this and working all of the channels available to us. There are other great organizations like Coin Center. They're doing this, too. But politicians are at the end of the day, very responsive to political pressure. So I would recommend talking to your elected representatives, especially, I mean, really regardless of their party. If your elected representatives are Republicans, I would point out what's going on here, why this hurts you as your constituent, why this will stop Bitcoin businesses from employing people in the United States and saying, hey, you should talk to the White House.

you should talk to DOJ, maybe write a letter. That would be great. Write a letter to the Deputy Attorney General saying, you wrote this memo, federal prosecutors are ignoring it. They're doing Biden era style regulation by prosecution and this needs to stop. And if you have a Democrat representing you, just one anecdote, I mentioned before Elizabeth Warren's Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act or DAMLA bill that is a backdoor ban on Bitcoin. I grew up in Maryland. My senator was a co-sponsor of that bill. I called their office. I got a meeting with some of their staffers. I explained my concerns in brief and they said, don't worry, we intend this to be a light touch piece of legislation and we'll make the fixes we need. They had just had no idea.

They had no idea that this was a Bitcoin ban and this couldn't be any farther from light touch. So if you're represented by a Democrat, even just explaining to them what's going on here, what this case is about, just so people can be on the lookout, that would make a huge difference. And then finally, if you have the means to do so, either donating to the Peer-to-Peer Rights Fund, which is a nonprofit litigation fund that I set up specifically, both to deal with the samurai case in particular, and in general, to fight in the courts to make sure that we don't get judges making bad case law on this question. And you can choose when you donate either of those two, right? You can either support the fund generally, or you can support this case in

particular. That's still very much relevant. There's still a lot of fight ahead in this case and other cases. So that's greatly appreciated. And then the policy version of this is just donating to the Bitcoin Policy Institute, BPI. And BPI's mission is to educate lawmakers, policymakers about what Bitcoin is, how it works, and then what we view a good Bitcoin policy as. We're coming out soon with what we're calling our policy manifesto. It's a 21-page document that sets out what we view as good policy for the network, meaning Bitcoin, the asset, mining and energy, and then technology and innovation.

And I think that'll be a useful document for people understanding what PPI's work is. And then if you can make it to our summit on June 25th in DC, that's going to be pretty incredible. We're going to have lots of people, both from the industry and government, and really try and hammer this message home. You're doing great work, Zach. You, everybody at BPI, thank you for, number one, staying on top of the samurai case, stepping in, making sure that they have the right legal infrastructure to fight, but number two, staying on top of it and publicly speaking about it.

over the last year during which etfs launched bitcoin treasuries became very popular many people are focused on number go up which again not a problem but i think like you said earlier zach number go up is contingent on protocol being sufficiently distributed and developers being able to write code and users being able to use that code to send bitcoin and receive bitcoin in a peer-to-peer fashion could agree more and and thanks for for having me i mean the first step in all of this is just making sure people hear some of this stuff and understand and i really appreciate you uh lending your platform uh to this issue hopefully it's the first of of many times we have conversations hopefully not always like this but yeah if need be looking forward to

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