TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #685: Why Bitcoin Policy Activism Matters Now with Kyle Olney

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

Marty sits down with Kyle Olney to discuss his journey from seizing banks during the financial crisis to becoming a Bitcoin policy advocate, the urgent fight against financial surveillance through the Bank Secrecy Act, and the critical importance of grassroots activism in defending self-custodial Bitcoin rights. Kyle on Twitter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyleolney Save Our Wallets: https://saveourwallets.org/ STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bit.ly/TFTCBitkey20 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Obscura https://obscura.net/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all 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 kyle off the plane uber to presidio checking at the lodge can't talk about why i'm here so we'll start over kyle off the plane straight to presidio bitcoin uh and we got introduced to each other yesterday via text formally yeah yeah long time listener uh big fan but uh and we've also

both been in the community for a long time but uh but yeah first time meeting in person covid uh i think put five plus years on pretty much everybody uh getting to meet one another so it's great to finally meet you in person uh you as well like i was telling you last time in sf was 2019 so it's been six years and a lot has changed since then actually the last time i was in sf my producer's gonna get pissed because he hates when i started out with dad talk but i found out my wife was pregnant with our first son so wow very special very special city for me in that way yeah well welcome back it's great to be back the vibes are high here as you can see if you're watching we've got the golden uh gate bridge right behind us yeah this is a beautiful place yeah pursue bitcoin's

gorgeous uh we're incredibly lucky that we now have this place um in san francisco so you know i've been involved in the community here for a long time but we haven't really had a home until Presidio Bitcoin got restarted on the post-COVID window. And so yeah, it's been really wonderful for us to actually have a congregation place, like the rest of the country has. Bitcoin Park and all these other places, PubKey, various spots around the country. So we got this gorgeous location. It's incredibly aesthetically compelling. So you work on hard problems here, walk out the door, take a walk on the beach, look at the Golden Gate Bridge. It's hard to beat. Listen, I want to piss off Chaincode, Bitcoin Park, Nashville, Bitcoin Park, Austin, the space in Denver, which I haven't been to yet, so I probably shouldn't add them to this.

But this is the most inspiring Bitcoin space I've been to in terms of the visual aesthetics and the vibe. Energy is high here. Yeah, absolutely. What's today? Is it Tuesday? Today is a Tuesday. Today is a Tuesday. I'm losing track of time here. It's like Tuesday, office is filled. but like i said we got introduced or reintroduced via text yesterday via connor brown good friend

of mine good friend of the show and obviously there's a lot going on the on the hill with the clarity act is it going to get uh sort of injected into the market structure bill if so what is included but before we get to that just before we hit record you're telling me about your history before Bitcoin and what ultimately led you to Bitcoin, which goes back to my radicalizing moment and what put me into Bitcoin in a different way, which is a great financial crisis. Yeah, absolutely. The great financial crisis, I think for everybody our age or our generation was a very formative event, right? In a lot of different ways. But yeah, my backstory here was that, uh, you know, I graduated right into the financial crisis and, uh, I was, uh, an

aerospace engineer, but, uh, by training like academically, but, uh, when the whole world's blowing up and everybody's getting laid off and everything's in, uh, kind of chaos, you can't get a job, uh, unless you've got, you know, many years of experience in an industry like that. And so, uh, I ended up going into strategy consulting, uh, which was a nice way to kind of bridge the technical, non-technical divide there. And the very first thing that my consulting firm was doing was seizing banks for the US government that were failing during the financial crisis. So here I ended up having this insane situation where I was banging my head on the

wall trying to get a job to go out and do moonshots. That was literally what I got my degree for because you know uh why not like we you know we should be doing big important things in the world right we should be changing the world with our time and our energy here and uh yeah and then i just you know got the hook from uh on the stage and it was you know life had had a different plan in store so i ended up going out and um wasn't just me i mean there were hundreds of other people in the consulting firm. But we ended up seizing and resolving 140 plus systemically important financial institutions for the US government on behalf of the FDIC. And through that process, I got really deep exposure to just how decrepit, corrupt, you know, choose your adjective,

you know, the global financial system was and kind of just how shaky everything had become at, you know, that point in time. And I guess thus began my trip down the rabbit hole. And that led ended up leading me to Bitcoin. And then I've subsequently been involved first as a political activist in that kind of 2009 to 2011 zone. And then later on, once I wasn't a ramen poor college student, and had accumulated some capital, I, you know, started making investments. And I spent the better part of a decade here in Silicon Valley building uh web two unicorns uh and then uh you know as the political climate started shifting in the last couple years and and uh you know bitcoiners could actually be out uh without you know kind of

fear of reprisal and retribution uh publicly then i started shifting over into the policy side of things and so i uh was advising presidential campaigns last year uh because i felt like it was super important that we you know kind of get on the political map so to speak as bitcoiners and you know actually start influencing the levers of power uh and then this year i've spent uh all year working on save our wallets and uh you know kind of the advocacy around the market structure bill so it's been a long weird detour for me getting back to bitcoin after you know 10 years of uh trying to figure out how i could you know reinsert myself into the market well kyle we're gonna go back because i need to know what happens when he sees banks i think like going all the way

back to what radicalized you what did you see like what was that process like what was the spectrum of for a bank balance sheets the executive management like how the spectrum of corruption like were some just poorly capitalized were some doing overtly corrupt things was there fraud involved oh yeah what happens when the government seizes the bank yeah yes to all of the above really um yeah i mean there's a lot of different things i could say there right i mean i threw the first bank executive in jail in lower Manhattan since the SNL crisis while I was involved with this project. I was deeply involved in the resolution of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of financial institutions, all of which were, I mean, I can't name specific banks

or specific details, but of the hundreds that we closed during the financial crisis, I would say it's safe to assume that virtually all of them had less than 50% of their demand deposits at the bank at the time that they were seized by the U.S. government. So just think about that, right? Like if it's, you know, demand deposits, that's not even... That's not reserves, right? Well, that's not even assets, right? That's not even saying like, if our assets perform and ultimately you know we can you know make money in the long term it was just we don't even have the money to pay half of our depositors savings accounts if they came into the bank today so i mean it was very much a it's a wonderful life moment for me uh being involved in this and um

it was crazy like you know there were so many things that we did like you know you asked mechanically like what is it like to close a bank like i mean it's very cloak and dagger right like we would have these banks on what was called the kill list, uh, for months where we were observing them doing financial reporting on them, trying to reconstruct their balance sheets, uh, as a regulator, right on the outside, you don't want to tip them off that they're on the kill list or that they're going to get closed because then that they start dusting their tracks or, you know, the people who are committing fraud start to button things up. Uh, and by the time that a bank actually would end up getting closed, you know, we would deploy, depends on the size of the bank

and these sorts of things. Like Wamuu was like literally hundreds of people for six to nine months, right? Like it was a very involved process. But smaller banks, it might be a team of 10 or 15 that go out. But for these sorts of things, we would go out, we would pre-position days in advance of the closure.

The team would book hotels under fake names and register conference rooms under fake companies. We would sit and everybody would have a briefing about what was going on with the bank and what was to be expected when we were going to close it. And then, you know, as we come up to the actual day of on Friday, everybody gets positioned in black unmarked cars in the parking lot outside these banks. You join a conference call with the governor of the state,

who often is the one who has to revoke the charter on behalf of the state government that it's chartered under and then hand it over to the U.S. government, to the FDIC, the Division of Resolutions and Receiverships. And so we'd all be sitting on a conference call. And there was one occasion, for instance, where I was sitting on a conference call and all of these cars in the parking lot with like 100 people. And the governor didn't revoke the charter. And for whatever reason, they decided that, you know, it wasn't going to happen. And so all of these people just kind of quietly drive away. And nobody in the bank is any the wiser. but in most scenarios what happens is you know the governor says yeah we're revoking your charter you're being you know seized by the u.s government everybody pops out the doors you know just classic you know fed style and we all march up to the door and you kind of put your foot in the door at 4 58 p.m on a friday afternoon and you say hi uh i'm here from the u.s government and i'm here to

seize your bank we're going to need you all to work all weekends and i'm going to need your cooperation for everything that we're going to do and uh yeah then we would spend 72 hours or so flash escrowing the bank trying to clean up its balance sheet do a forensic analysis uh determine whether the good assets the bad assets and then depending on whether there was an acquirer or not you would either cut it into good bank bad bank or there's some kind of a law sharing agreement with the u.s government um and yeah there's you know as you might expect in all of those things there are a lot of different ways for politics to insert themselves uh and for people to kind of put their own thumb on the scale and influence the outcomes so i saw you know quite a lot of

crazy things uh during that time the bigger bank saying i want this to roll up into me or is it you don't have to get too specific and now it's uh yeah i mean um i mean like here's like one thing that i can say for instance right like they're and i'll i'm gonna carefully avoid naming names just for the sake of avoiding lawsuits but uh you know there are executives who are in charge of large financial institutions who were responsible for the crisis caused hundreds of billions if not trillions worth of collateral damage to the broad economy and you know middle class people in both in the United States and around the world. And not only were they not punished, those people were able to form vulture funds on the outside to come back

and bid on the assets for pennies on the dollar. And so these people didn't just rinse the American public once. They rinsed the American public again and again and again. And frankly, were almost no consequences for a lot of these people and did you ultimately become jaded by that process and decide to go silicon valley focus on web 2.0 or is it hey financial crisis is over opportunities here now i can go do something that's more aligned with me yeah uh generally speaking i actually made one quick trip the firm needed me to work on the housing crisis after i worked on the you know kind of uh financial side of the financial crisis i ended up going and doing a bunch of the actual home mortgage stabilization work. And so I helped

make sure that the entire housing market didn't completely fall apart in addition to all the banks afterward. But yeah, after a few years of that, it got to the point where I was like, yeah, I got to go do something more honest. I got to, you know, work on something that's actually changing the world for the better or improving it. And at that point in time, you know, Silicon Valley was the spot. So I just, you know, hope and a prayer, got on a plane, arrived in Silicon Valley, and I got very lucky to have helped participate and build some pretty large companies in the time that I've been here. But, you know, now I'm kind of, I hate to say, but, you know, I'm coming a little bit jaded about kind of the tech industry now as well and the direction of

transit of how things are going there and so yeah this is part of the reasons for circling back to the bitcoin community and coming kind of home so to speak to where my my true desires uh to change the world lie uh well i think we need to set up all this historical context to get to the save our wallets campaign what did you do when you got here in silicon valley yeah um so i've kind of done a little bit of everything so as i mentioned i was an aerospace engineer by training um so uh for everybody here in Silicon Valley, that means I'm non-technical, right? I'm kind of useless when it comes to writing the code, but I'm very useful when it comes to architecting systems and go to market and everything like that. So I've been a product and strategy leader the entire time. But

most people in Silicon Valley tend to go very T-shaped. So they have a deep expertise in one particular area, right? It's like I might be a payments guy. And it's just payments company, payments company, payments company, right? Whereas I have a little bit more of an intellectual curiosity. So I ended up working for one of the really large software development companies. So I was making software for software developers, which is about the most, you know, academically abstract thing that you can imagine, but was critically important for understanding how the world is actually being shaped today and kind of like how companies shape the world in Silicon Valley. And then from there, I went to build a couple of very large logistics and global freight

forwarding businesses. And, you know, those guys ended up becoming incredibly important during COVID. And so, you know, I kind of had that experience. And then, you know, having been involved in the Bitcoin community for, I guess, 15 years now, I also saw the entire rise and fall or whatever you want to call it of, you know, kind of the token economy here in Silicon Valley. And um yeah it's just it's been a wild ride man it's been a totally wild ride what was the token economy like on the ground because obviously i've been paying attention to it i was in new york austin for a bit and new york i'd say much more so than austin there was a lot of the tokenomics and drifting for lack of a better term around that ecosystem but from what i understand it was it

pretty heavy out here too yeah um i'm trying to think of like what's the fastest way to describe this for somebody who who has very low context on what silicon valley and the token economy would be like so the thing that i would say is that like a lot of people out here in silicon valley really believe in the power of software right um and actually andreas antinopolis had a really great line about this i think back in like 2015 or maybe 2017 or something like that where he said the thing that um bitcoiners don't understand is software and the thing that uh etherians don't understand is money right and i actually think that that's probably one of like the truest single state statements that i've ever heard um right and you kind of tend to find people who

are very dogmatic about one or the other yep for a long long time i was one of the only people who believed in both uh right i both believe in the immense power of open source software like i would never ever ever ever bet against open source software because on a long enough time horizon you're never going to beat the crowd right like somebody sufficiently motivated with freedom to build uh and utilize open resources like that will win on a long enough time horizon um but at the same time the token economy uh has a lot of perverse incentives and so both as an investor and then as a participant, I've seen people with good intentions. It's kind of like the ring in Lord of the Rings, right? I mean, everybody thinks that they're, you know,

the moral champion until they have to wear the ring. And when you have the power and you wear the ring, oh, maybe I'll just take a little bit here for me. And, you know, oh, maybe we'll just, you know, do this thing that kicks back some value to my venture investors or, you know, whatever so you just kind of see the it was really an important and profound lesson in in the purity of bitcoin as a project and as a community because um we don't trust we verify in bitcoin right and uh i think that that's incredibly important right like free markets free market incentives um you know verification like these sorts of things are are really important and i think uh sadly lacking in a lot of the token economy so freaks this report was brought to you by good friends at

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that cannot log because of the way that it's designed. And that's why we have partnered with Obscura. That is our official VPN here at TFTC, built by a Bitcoiner, Carl Dong, for Bitcoiners focused on privacy. You can pay in Bitcoin over the Lightning. So not only are you private while you're perusing the web with Obscura, but when you actually set up an account, you can acquire that account privately by paying in Bitcoin over the Lightning network.

Do not be complacent when it comes to protecting your privacy on the internet. go to obscura.net set up an obscura account use the code tftc for 25 off when i say account you just get a token it's a string of token it's not connected to your identity at all token sign up pay with bitcoin completely private turn on obscura surf the web privately obscura.net use the code tftc for 25 off it's funny i always have to put zoom out put myself in context where it's 2025 i have been in bitcoin for 12 years now and i remember because i was i was working at a hedge fund at the time when i fell down the bitcoin rabbit hole and we were trading fx and compared juxtaposed to bitcoin it was very boring in a sense but not boring but it's like oh this

is definitely industrial age and this is the future my mind and it's easy i wasn't a technologist i was enamored by technology i was that dickhead in high school had the first iphone because i made my parents buy it for me and switch my my mobile plan like i always saw myself as tech forward came to understanding how basically software is built back in front and how they interact with each other was a bit ignorant i've become much more um much more up to much more up to speed on how it all works and all interconnects these days but back then it wasn't point i'm making it was easy for me to be like oh bitcoin it's cool and all but it's slow it's dumb uh can't do many transactions can't do smart contracting back in the day when people were talking about that

actually like in the earliest days it was like proof of stake versus proof of work fair launch proof of work coins and um the first two years of my journey i got enamored by the altcoins i got hooked on um really aligned with what andrea andrea sentinopolis said is like i got hooked was like oh like i think this is uh this is a tech thing and it's obvious that bitcoin's the myspace like these other things have to improve like there's no way out of the gate uh that's going to be right the first time and this is being completely ignorant of cypherpunk history the repeated attempts at digital currencies before bitcoin was ultimately launched but it's easy for people to believe that but to your point earlier there the ring aspect of it the power

and the ability to print money ex nihilo in this crypto economy, if you will, is very strong. You know, I hadn't thought about it until you just said it right now. But actually, I think that that is the fundamental reason for the corruption is because by creating a token, unless there's like really strong kind of reasons for the token that, you know, could exist.

And even then, I don't know, I've yet to see one. But like... Access to a Wi-Fi portal. yeah well but it's like yeah there are potential use cases as i guess what i mean to say right but uh but you know the thing is like if you can print money for yourself that temptation temptation is real and it never goes away right ultimate power corrupts absolutely and so you know it is an iron an irony that we would think that you you could become the money printer in whatever local game that you're playing and somehow not have that corrupt you know your incentives yeah

right we observe this in reality every day right with the federal reserve and everything that's going on in bitcoin so um yeah it's a weird conflicted sort of state that we live in in silicon valley building software and and you know kind of coexisting uh but you know yeah i'm gonna touch the stove it's hilarious because right now it's it's uh this cycle it seems like all the defy web 3.0 meme coin craze that's sort of on the back end of that cycle people squeeze that lemon dry and now we're coming back to to older they're they're calling them dino coins so you have coins like z cash pumping now and i think that's a perfect example of the temptation of the ring it's like oh not only is the federal reserve wrong but satoshi was wrong we're going to launch this

coin it's going to have 21 million coins but we're going to have a 75 second block time there's going be privacy that you can opt into on it uh no by the way we need to incentivize developers to come work on this so we're going to allocate 20 of the block subsidy to this development fund for a period of time and that'll make sure that we have the best game and it's an example of the the hubris of man being introduced and i think bitcoin uh i've talked a lot about this with miles suitor and we mentioned it last week when i recorded with him in new york but i do truly believe and people think you're a cultist some crazy evangelist literally but i do believe in the immaculate conception like the fact that satoshi came launched it hung out for 18 months

and then was like all right i'm gone you guys got the rest of it the protocols sort of set the consensus rules the um supply distribution how much bitcoin will ever exist the block time difficulty adjustment and then he's gone and just left it to the rest of us and we don't have that a savior i mean maybe people view him as a savior but he's not around to sort of dictate and be the finger on the the thumb on the scale to influence things one way or another yeah absolutely i mean the benevolent dictator model is uh you know there are many uh many cases in history where that doesn't turn out well they're in devil's advocate there are somewhere it does turn out well you'll go like linus dorvold and linux like it worked out for that but that's not

money protocol that is an operating system correct yeah yeah no i yeah i would tend to agree and i think the the immaculate conception here in the you know kind of uh metaphor that we're using is is very real you know i mean again as somebody who has seen the ups and downs and uh lived many lifetimes now uh in bitcoin uh it is this sort of thing that the more you study it the more you experience it the more you live it i think the more spectacular and uh amazing the immaculate conception of bitcoin becomes like you don't lose appreciation for it you gain appreciation for it over time and uh yeah i mean i think that um i want to go to well you know another rabbit hole that we can park on the side but you know i i've over time become more and more convinced that uh

if time travel is possible, right? It's a big if, but again, I'm a physics guy. If time travel is possible, it would not surprise me in the least for Satoshi and, you know, kind of the emergence of Bitcoin to have been a time traveling event, right? Where 40, 50, however many years in the future,

somebody realized that dystopia had taken over and the maximum point of leverage to insert themselves into the timeline and arc human history in a different direction was at exactly that moment when the financial collapse was starting and an entire generation of digital natives was emerging into the real world

and being rudely disabused of the idea that this world functions in the way that most of us would hope or expect that it functions. Well, now with the emergence of AI, I mean, you can take it a step further. Like, was it a sentient AI that basically said, all right we completely messed this up this does have potential to work but we need sort of sound money for the digital age digital native currency and so we need to go back and and step it into

the minds of the masses at this particular point in time and then running on that thought like how has the timeline changed like since two or october 31st 2008 probably more importantly january 3rd 2009 like right right have we uh actually if it was a time traveling individual or artificial intelligence has it pushed us on a better timeline i mean i think unequivocally the answer is yes right um but yeah i mean i think that uh it would be incredibly ironic if it were just the annoyance of future ais saying god dang we don't have any money that's not just inflating away like we can't do anything interesting uh we need to go back and you know change the rules on these monkeys because they're uh they're messing everything up for us here yeah or maybe it was benevolent ai like hey

we turn these humans into slaves because we don't have good money to pay them for the things that they're doing so we need to go back and uh make sure that we're compensating them uh appropriately for the work that they're actually doing yeah now we're getting down a rabbit hole here yeah but you said you got jaded by silicon valley specifically was it tokenomics and all this or something broader um no i would say it's just kind of the incentive structures generally um i mean again it's like you know show me the incentives i'll show you the outcome right uh i think we are kind of of that generation of people we're kind of the between generation right like the gen z kids the alpha kids like everybody younger than us they don't even remember what it was like before cell

phones before the internet everywhere most of them have never even seen a pay phone i'm eating more and more they're born after 9 11. i'm like oh my gosh 100 of them now in college you don't anybody that you have met who's under the age of you know 25 yeah like they were born in a time where privacy did not exist right and they don't even appreciate this is the water to them right you know the good old joke about you know the fishes in the water and everything it's like they don't even know what they've lost and i think that's the reason one of the more important motivations for me about circling back like i've had a very successful career in silicon valley and like you know, despite my feelings about it, whatever, um, you know, I think the thing that's more

important and has become in really stark contrast to me as I've been reflecting on, you know, kind of the post COVID moment and like what the, what happened to us and the fact that we haven't properly reckoned, reckoned with both what happened during COVID. And then I rewinded back. I was like, man, we never even really properly dealt with what happened after 9-11 and the And the expansion of the surveillance state and the deputization of the financial system, you know, on behalf of the state in order to surveil everyone in society. I mean, we're living in a truly ahistoric moment, right? In all of human history since the emergence of society thousands of years ago until the

emergence of the computer maybe 30, 40 years ago, and then 9-11 and the expansion of the surveillance state, privacy was the default expectation for people in society to have. You had a right to have privacy. You had a right to be forgotten. There was no kind of leviathan that could come and, you know, deeply intrude into your life in such a way as it happens 24-7, 365, continuously now, forever, in the future, if we don't stand together and change that. And so for me, this is like a, you know, the return to Bitcoin is really about the fact that I think we desperately need a cypherpunk revival. I think that we've become far too heavy on suit coiners. I mean, we welcome you suit coiners, like thank you to some degree for, you know, appreciating the project and understanding that this is where humanity is headed. I mean, that's good that, you know, they're getting on early and they're helping usher or bridge us between where we are and where we need to be. But if we ever forget why this technology was originally created or gifted to us, which is the way I like to think about it. I like to think of Bitcoin as a gift from Satoshi. You know, we have a responsibility, I think, and uniquely people of this age and who have had the experiences that we've had where we stand between these, you know, the old world and the new world.

And we can see it with clear eyes. We have a distinct responsibility to both uphold those rights and privileges that we've enjoyed in Bitcoin for the last 16 or 17 years and to defend what I think was, you know, the natural way of human life prior to, you know, the last couple decades. Right. And so for me, that cypherpunk revival is like what I think is most important right now in the Bitcoin community. Like people need to understand and remember that, you know, like freedom in the United States, like this wasn't free. No. There were great costs that were paid to give us this gift. And I think that we need to take that more seriously and reflect on the responsibility. I completely agree. Secure your Bitcoin's future and your family's peace of mind.

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with real Bitcoin, not IOUs. Go to Unchained.com slash TFTC to sign up. What's up, freaks? Been seeing a lot of YouTube comments. Marty, your skin looks so good. you're looking fit these days how are you doing it well number one i'm going to the gym more trying to get my swell on trying to be a good example for my young son to fit healthy dad but part of that is having a good regimen particularly staying hydrated making sure i have the right

electrolytes and salts in my body that is why i use salt of the earth i drink probably three of these a day with one packet of salt the earth i'm liking the pink lemonade right now it's my flavor of choice uh this is their creatine i've added this to my regimen they have it in these packets as well uh makes it extremely convenient if you're traveling you want to work out while you're traveling but you don't want to be carrying a white bag of powder going through tsa it's very very uh nerve-wracking at times you have to explain hates it's not what you think it is it's creatine i'm trying to get my swell on um make sure you're staying hydrated i have become addicted to these it's made my life a lot better i can supplement this for coffee in the morning

and be energized right away i can supplement i can bring the creatine wherever i need to just put a couple packets in here before i head to the gym bring this to the gym drinking out of a glass bottle make sure i'm not injecting any microplastics into my body go to drinksote.com use the code tftc and you'll get 15 off anything in the store that's drinksote.com code tftc I mean, especially over the last couple of years with developers like Roman Storm, Keon and Bill from Samurai, and a few others that have been persecuted by the state for writing free and open source software, non-custodial software that protects privacy. It has become very clear to me that it's a battle that we're losing despite what the particular administration in the United States would posture in terms of their willingness to lead when it comes to Bitcoin. I think their definition of Bitcoin leadership may differ from yours and mine. and i mean going back to the patriot act and the fact that it until you said it like i was

saying earlier and sometimes i have to zoom out and put myself in the shoes of a new coiner and like thinking about what they're seeing with all these different crypto coins but like now you brought it up and it just hit me like all these zoomers that i'm meeting their college age and lower like born after 9-11 born after the patriot act more importantly and to your point had never known a life of freedom and i think it ties in well to what we're really here to talk about to save our wallets and this is something i've been beating the drum about in the newsletter and on the podcast since it dropped this summer but it really got swept under the rug and again going back to the administration i do think there's very positive

things they're doing but they had that crypto brief report and it had something specific about the patriot act which is we need to expand the patriot act to create the six conditions that's specific to digital assets and then i believe a couple months ago the treasury and finson together came out with sort of guidelines for what they recommend um in terms of what individual american citizens are allowed to do with bitcoin and it broke all the best practices of self-custody bitcoin yeah um i mean this is exactly what i'm talking about right like if we uh lose the forest for a tree thinking that uh you know because trump got elected and because crypto was able to swing the last election that we've won or that somehow anything has

been accomplished uh that is just fundamentally wrong and and i think it's a very dangerous attack factor for the bitcoin ecosystem because uh you know back to you know you were mentioning a second ago that um you know the kids that are 20 25 years old or whatever they're like born into this post-patriotic world they don't even know about freedom from before they don't know what it was like to go through airport security and not have your face scanned and get patted down well i was actually going to say it's even scarier than that because they actually think that they've gained rights because they can keep their shoes on now it is nice not to have to take your shoes I mean, it's like, it's like, fuck you.

If you haven't done do this for the last 12, 13, 14 years. Yeah, man. I spent 24 years. Excuse me. I spent five years every time I was, I was a professional traveler. I spent five years going through airports and I would ask for an opt out and give a civics lesson to everyone around me in line who could listen, uh, while I was doing it. And yeah, again, I think that, you know, the situation with, um, with the white house and,

and you know kind of like the the world that we find ourselves in right like we're as millennials uh we're inheriting a world that's being given to us by boomers and uh the sad reality is that i think almost every boomer that i've ever met and spoken to about such things they would prefer to have surveillance instead of liberty right and i don't know what that says about their experience uh you know growing up and and coming of age in in america but there's this very clear bright dividing line in my opinion between people of our generation who i don't know i mean we were just promised something else about what this country was supposed to be when we were in school and we grew up in a you know kind of the post glow you know the soviet union had fallen

and you know there was no existential threat that was coming to to you know impede on our freedoms in our lives until september 11th happened i mean for all you zoomers out there maybe everybody believes this but i don't think there's anything better than being a 90s kid oh man 90s were an incredible decade and it was like the last hurrah before all this happened it's hard to convey to people what it was like i mean there was actually a recent trend that was happening on uh on well i was gonna say twitter but it's probably tiktok um you know wherever the kids congregate these this um where they were talking about like you know is it really true that like people you your parents used to just like say goodbye to you in the morning and say like come home for dinner before

dark and like you'd just be gone for nine hours with no cell phone and like nobody would know how to reach you and like your parents wouldn't know where you were and it's like that's literally the way that every human in history until the invention of the cell phone grew up and that's how they were socialized so again like you kind of just have to like and maybe this is an interesting way to like thread my experience in silicon valley back into this and and where i see you know kind of trends heading it's like being able to spot early trends and being able to catch outlying data sets uh and and say like hey that's weird right like nobody else is seeing what i'm seeing or like nobody else really understands where you know the game is tilted and you know kind of like gravity is

taking everyone this is just a great example right i mean again like everybody under the age of 30 has no idea that the way that they were raised the world that they've grown up in is completely anomalous it's completely ahistoric yeah in the thousands of years of human development and society i grew up in northeast philly which if you go to where i grew up today it's not a great neighborhood but even back then it wasn't the best neighborhood my brother and i were 11 months apart so we're like thick as thieves we'd get sent out the door and then we could be like three blocks away my dad had a very distinct whistle and that's how we would know it was dinner time he'd come out in the stoop blow his finger whistle and be like all right see you guys we gotta go

home yep not anymore yep no those those days uh are long gone now you just get a text message right yeah get home get home dinner time your uh your air tag buzzes like hey get your butt home oh man before i shock even more 5g um but bring this back to the current administration and its particular posturing towards bitcoin particularly ensuring that we preserve the ability for individuals to write code that allows other individuals to access the bitcoin network in particular ways um what would you rate the administration's job so far or is can you write it yet has anything been done outside i mean obviously the doj persecutions of the developers uh not great to see but obviously that's an overhang from the biden administration

well yes and no yes and no right i mean it was a prosecution that started under the biden administration but uh the trump doj once they were seated uh you know a blanche memo was released that said we will not be prosecuting people for these sorts of offenses which you know uh naturally received the resounding cheers that it should have received from you know our community but then the trump administration continued to prosecute these developers of open source non-custodial software in contravention of their own doj charging guidance uh and then you know as you just mentioned we saw the samurai guys uh went for a plea deal because they were facing decades in prison and of course you know like everybody you don't begrudge them for especially

as young you know parents of young children like you know taking a plea deal that guarantees that they're only gonna spend a couple years in jail if that's what it is but uh i would say that it's pretty cynical on the part of the administration to then throw the book at them and max charge, max time in jail, max financial penalties. To me, it would seem that the administration is trying to send a signal about the types of behavior that it doesn't want to tolerate in the Bitcoin community. And I think that that signal is a little between the lines. And you have to kind of know the inside baseball to be able to see what's actually happening. But, yeah, combined with the White House digital asset report policy that you mentioned, like, I mean, they're talking about regardless of what happens in the market structure bill, which I would like to talk a little bit more about and just like make sure everybody knows what's actually happening there.

But even if we get all of the good stuff that we're hoping for in the market structure bill, if OFAC comes back after the fact and updates their guidance and says, well, actually, because of counterterrorism and the Patriot Act, we want to expand the BSA to cover all US entities and all persons who are transacting on DeFi rails or decentralized blockchain rails, as they stated in the report that they were interested in doing. um that could mean that we uh still maintain the ability to create open source software but we will lose privacy and everybody will kind of be in a you know fully permissioned system how do you lose privacy under that well you'd have to kyca and you might be allowed to have your own uh personal wallet right and you might be able to transact on a you know person-to-person basis uh in a decentralized way out in the real world but if you're ever going to try to like properly move money or interact with a regulated entity i mean um you're at the doctor stack yeah you're gonna have to dox your stack you're gonna have to kyc aml um and you know i would say just generally

the idea that um i mean i hesitate to go too deeply into this because i don't want to give people ideas but i mean there's things like ordinals that exist right like colored coins we can mark coins so like if we think that we can exist in a world where 80 or 90 percent of bitcoin transactions are going to be surveilled and kyc'd and and kind of like known to a centralized party uh and that you're going to still be able to maintain 10 or 15 percent at the edges of true privacy and anonymity um that just doesn't work is that worth it well it's not even that it's not worth it i mean i would say that yeah we we will have failed bitcoin will have failed in that universe in my assessment, right?

Because that's not what it was created for. But what I would say more broadly is that it's like the privacy coins, right? The privacy coins that exist out there are not really private in my estimation because the size of the pools and the volume that you're moving. I mean, you say you used to work in finance.

You know, if there's only five people in the dark pool. Yeah, process of elimination, heuristics. Yeah, you know, I mean, like, you don't need to know who's trading in the dark pool if there's only a handful of players in the dark pool. And if you know the relative size of the players in the dark pool, somebody moves a transaction that looks like the relative size of like one of maybe two or three people who could execute that transaction. Well, do I really need to know that it's you? Or do I need to just kind of know that it's you? You can show up and say, hey, was that you? Yeah. Was that you? Right. It was me.

so yeah so i mean i think the thing here is like um this is an opportunity like this moment is uh both the most dangerous moment that i think we've seen in bitcoin's history because if the regulations fall in the wrong direction and we just kind of passively accept that it could permanently cripple the network or the original intent of the network um but then on the flip side, we are probably one of the most powerful political coalitions in the entire United States today. I think that we determined the last election. I think the crosstabs show that pretty categorically. And if we all just stood up and demanded that this administration, this Congress, this government live up to the obligations that they had set out when they were making

campaign promises last year, and they actually follow through on the things that are, you know, crypto native, or, you know, kind of Bitcoin native, then the opportunity here is, is enormous, because we're talking about unlocking a multi trillion dollar market that will allow free and open source software development in the first, you know, positive some economic arrangement that we've seen maybe in human history, or at least for hundreds of years, I forget who I was discussing it with when I said it, but when you look at it and you look at the tech, we have Bitcoin at the protocol level with the lightning network, liquid, Xiaomi and mints arc now coming to the fray spark, like the building blocks for a trooper,

a true futuristic, a truly futuristic cypherpunk banking system rebuilt from scratch exist, but that can be completely cucked. And this banking system can give you everything you want from sound monetary policy, payments infrastructure, free open banking with privacy embedded within the Xiaomi immense and other protocols. Even on Liquid, you could do smart contracting if you want. You can create these obscure financial engagements

arguments between peers and even institutions and individuals like it's all there but it can be severely kneecapped if we don't get this right yeah absolutely i mean now is really the most important again i'll just say like i think this is the most important moment in bitcoin yeah and trump's out there saying hey we're going to upgrade the financial system and the banking infrastructure with crypto like it's there but i don't think he knows what he's talking about obviously he doesn't but i think there's people behind him in the administration and very strong lobbying powers that um do view an avenue to push policy down that would sort of cattle herd everybody into a more controlled system and less free system yeah and i think that that's you know

again having participated in the government and uh you know uh again double tapping on your point about like being jaded and kind of seeing how things work right like the primary lesson that i took out um you know of my experience um doing during the financial crisis and everything that was going on then was that the government's going to lie to you right up until the moment that they don't have to lie to you anymore they can't lie to you anymore because like i knew that these banks were failing for weeks in advance months in advance there were some number of people who knew that. I don't know if anybody was taking prop bets on public stocks, but like, wouldn't surprise me. Somebody knew the airlines were going to do well in September 12, 2001. Yeah,

exactly. Right. And we've seen no prosecutions, no investigations, no nothing on any of that. Right. And so, you know, I think that was a kind of a revelatory moment for me, right? I had been kind of a good Boy Scout my entire life. I'd gone to school to, you know, well, I almost went to military academies and i didn't because of the iraq war um and then you know i ended up getting this uh degree to go and do you know moonshots and we were mothballing all of the space program and everything like that at that point in time so it's like you can only get rubbed so many times before your eyes get open and you become a little more like you know again don't trust verify right so for me the thing here is like the administration uh has been positive in the sense that normalizing

bitcoin into society is a good thing but the argument i guess that i would make is that especially at this point seeing what's going on this week uh in politics or the last week in politics uh you know with uh the bubba scandal uh among others right do you have the pictures of uh trump blowing bubba is that what it said yeah yeah yeah interesting i've seen about a hundred a hundred a hundred different uh gpt generated images but uh you know you you look at something like that and it's like well what happens if the next election goes in the other direction and they don't end up delivering all the stuff that they promised like even if they wanted to deliver the stuff that they promised which is still a big if uh right like who's to say that they actually have

the votes at this point to get it delivered right um and then if it flips back in the other direction how much damage has been done by this association with bitcoin being trump coded yeah right i mean bitcoin is um a neutral freedom money that is useful for everyone in the world regardless of their politics this is uh an equal opportunity for wealth creation this should not be a partisan issue no uh and i am deeply concerned that it's become a partisan issue more so during this administration and the only way that you know we really get to the far side of this um in you know kind of a maximally constructive sort of universe for the things that we care about is everybody getting engaged like now like if you're listening to this if you're a bitcoin or if you care about

the future of Bitcoin and the network for yourself, for your kids. If you think that it's important that there be a free market alternative to fiat currencies that are this rapidly melting ice cube, it is not enough to go to the polling booth and pull the lever once every four years or every two years and say, well, I did my part. Unfortunately, this is the battle at the end of the universe we're trying to take the power of you know the printing press away from centralized governments not just once but probably forever if we do it right and we're careful about it so this is a uniquely powerful and opportunistic moment in human history um and so despite all the dystopia you know kind of stuff that's flying around

right now like i am incredibly grateful to be alive right now and to be in the arena right now and be trying to fight for a better world because for the first time in 50 years or maybe 70 years since the end of the last 100 go back to federal reserve income tax 1913 exactly we have the we have the opportunity for the first time in in decades centuries to like truly inflect the timeline for humanity um where else would you rather be right like this is this is it i don't want to be in the feudal farms you know i don't want to be in the roman coliseum that would probably be cool i'm gonna be here with all the technology the agency but i think to your point of bitcoin becoming a partisan issue which i completely agree i think it is and i've been uh when we

say narrative testing this i guess i discussed it with connor when we we recorded in dc a few weeks ago but i think too when you when you look out at the political landscape in the united states how polarized it's become instead of like convincing democrats like hey bitcoin like you guys just should vote for this it's like freedom like if you don't like trump you like this i think we lean into the economic populism that exists on both sides obviously mom donnie just voted in um in new york city and then on the right there's a lot of consternation with immigration policy they took our jobs which certainly happened i'm not saying that uh facetious facetiously like there there is structural problems that exist in our economy that

the relative normie whether on the left or the right can feel intuitively and they're sprinting to both polar ends of the political spectrum for a solution it's either radical democratic socialism eventually communism or strongman fascism on the right somebody come in and fix the problems where there is a third path which is hey recognize a lot of the negative externalities that you are identifying as core issues or certainly issues but they're symptoms of the core problem which is the money is broken and there's a bipartisan way to fix this which is we lean into bitcoin we make sure that individuals can save in bitcoin they can custody bitcoin they can build on bitcoin they can interact with each other without the government snooping on their

lives and it's not going to be a rip the band-aid off things are fixed it's we begin going down a path understanding that we can re-architect a sort of economic engine of the united states at the monetary level on this fair open permissionless system yeah i couldn't agree more and uh and yeah think that that's an important thing for us to kind of like shift the dialogue around so you know kind of back to save our wallets and and the work that we've been trying to do this is what we're trying to convince legislators in washington dc about right um and there are some great ones that are out there who you know are early and they understand it like they got it they did the work they did their you know 100 hours uh studying bitcoin and you know these are freedom-loving

people they're in congress for the right reasons they actually care about their constituents and they're not just there to you know uh get the next lobbying job uh right they're they're fighting for this but there's too many people in congress and uh you know kind of among the boomers right who either don't understand the technology or they haven't they don't care to understand yeah they don't care to understand it or they've just heard bad stuff about it they just hear about exit scams and they're lumping crypto in with Bitcoin. Pig slaughter. Yeah, exactly.

The pig butchering scam, right? Yeah, this is a great example. Like, you know, the pig butchering thing, it's like, if you were, if we were able to come to, like, it should not be controversial for Republicans and Democrats to come together and agree that consumer protections

to prevent things like pig butchering are a point of alignment that everybody in America should be able to agree on and that we should be able to pass whatever laws we need in order to prevent or, you know, heighten the, you know, kind of consequences for that sort of bad behavior. But to throw the baby out with the bathwater

and say, my constituents don't deserve the opportunity to generate capital and preserve their life's work into future generations for their kids and grandkids because I didn't understand that there was a difference between being socially engineered, you know, and the fact that the money was fundamentally broken. Like, that's a really sad state of affairs. And so this is the thing that I guess, you know, again,

save our wallets and like the idea of like Bitcoiners picking up the phone, you know, I was out, I can't remember if you were there, but in BPI did the day on the hill in DC a few months ago at the beginning of summer. I was not there now. I was at the event. I was not on the hill.

Yeah. I was at the BPI event with all the panels, but I did not make it up to Capitol Hill. Yeah, that's fine. You were doing important work on the panels, I'm sure. But for all of those of us who went to, you know, actually do the talking to Congress members, it was incredibly powerful.

I mean, like there's just a random sampling of whoever was motivated enough to come to DC and come to the BPI conference and then stay to go and talk to their legislators. And I was blown away. And like, you know, people were great. They had great personal stories about how this affected their lives. They were telling them to the legislators. Legislators were, you know, actually taking notes and very interested in it and everything like that. And so, you know, I think a lot of the times we talk about this existential conflict and like kind of the scale of what's going on and everybody thinks like, oh, well, who am I? I'm just an individual. Like my story doesn't matter. Like the government doesn't care about me. Like this seems scary. why would I pick up the phone and try to tell my senator what I think? Why would they care what I

think? And it's like, it couldn't be further from the truth. I don't know how many people will end up hearing this podcast, but I'm willing to bet that if 10% of the people who are listening to this podcast actually picked up the phone and made it a concerted goal to talk to somebody in their senator's office about Bitcoin and the importance of what's going on right now with the BRCA provisions in the market structure bill, it would probably be the most popular issue on the congressional switchboards this week. Rather quickly. Rather quick. Yeah. Or yeah, whatever timeframe you want to use, right? And we're a huge group of people who are well-educated, fluent on the issue, have life experience to contribute.

um it's important right government is responsive to uh only the things that they are aware exist and that they can help no i was telling connor this for the longest time my bitcoin journey was very radicalized by 2008 wiki leaks snowden leaks middle eastern wars it was like the government's not going to save you like you have to save yourself but i totally believe like you should do everything at your fingertips and do everything in your capacity to save yourself to the best you can that's why self-custody bitcoin all that good stuff but at some point when you get older you start having kids you look out at the world and you get more privy to how politics actually operates becomes very clear you may not care about politics but politics cares about you

and you have to engage and to your point like and i've become convinced of this particularly over the last 18 months like people do react i've talked to people in the administration individual politicians and they do seem to genuinely care and respond when they think that this could affect their ability to get um to get voted back into office um but you mentioned brca the last we covered this on this show was earlier this year with matt corallo when the save our wallets campaign had just had just launched you said brca blockchain regulatory clarity act at one point was a standalone act it has since been included in the market structure bill which is one of the big things the trump administration came in david sacks everybody's

saying we're going to get crypto legislation genius act push through second priority uh on the hill as it pertains to bitcoin and crypto is this market structure bill it's been talked about for a while it seems like there are some fast-moving developments you had brian armstrong from Coinbase, interviewed earlier this week, saying that progress is moving forward. There's likely going to be a vote imminently here. How much of the original BRCA will get into the market structure bill? So that's still a question. So this is the thing, like, this is very inside baseball. So strap in, friends, if you're at home and you care about the legislative details. So as you mentioned there was originally the brca which was a standalone bill uh which had it was very

it was like a two-page bill it was very uh straightforward to the point and it was everything that we would have wanted in the bitcoin community to protect open source developers and non-custodial developers from prosecution that was folded into what became the clarity act in the house and then it ended up passing the house which is great that's good news but uh that's only one half of the process as those of you who remember your schoolhouse rock video uh i'm just no bill yeah all right you'll uh you'll remember that the senate now has to play their role and the senate as the uh cooling dish of democracy uh is a pretty difficult place to get things through so at the moment there's two competing committees inside the senate who have produced

different draft versions of the their version of the market structure bill there's the banking Committee, and then there's the Agriculture Committee. The Agriculture Committee released their draft text last week or the week before, and it was excellent. They get it. They understood the assignment. They understand that Bitcoin is a commodity and that it is very different than everything else in crypto. And their approach to their drafting of the bill was that instead of leaving open-ended clauses that could be interpreted by the regulatory agencies, they explicitly say if you are not an entity named on this list you are not subject to securities you know sort of laws uh that you know we would normally be concerned about and that's

actually the right solution uh for this market moving forward the problem is we don't know whether that's actually going to make it out of the senate to a floor vote because everything in that draft bill was in brackets which means it's a draft for discussion among everybody And will that discussion be internally within the committee or on the floor publicly? Both. But at this point, I think that the committees have both had their internal discussions. And so now the sausage making is going on behind the scenes of, you know, what bill will actually make it to the floor for the Senate to vote on. And that's why it's really critical that if you're a Bitcoiner, you call your senator today or this week or as soon as you can and tell them that this is important. will get this out tomorrow morning so um this will come out wednesday november 19th great um i don't mean to push you that hard on it but in general like yeah the idea is like now is when they're

having those conversations right and if we can get the agriculture committee's version of uh the regulations as the bill that gets voted on and we can get that through cloture which means that we can actually hit 60 votes in the senate so that nobody can filibuster it aka you know elizabeth warren yeah right we've we've experienced a lot of that in the last two months yeah and she also is you know the one who you try to throw a wrench in the banking committee version of the bill from like six weeks ago or something like that and everybody freaked out because it was like so or is the senate even going to be able to pass anything like it's unclear right now what what if anything the senate can even pass uh as a result of this so the thing

is we need to get to 60 votes in the Senate, which means that we're going to need six to 10 Democrats to cross over and vote with the Republicans. And we're going to need that version of the bill that passes the Senate, if it passes the Senate, to also survive the committee markup with the House version of the bill. So there's going to have to be a conference bill once the Senate passes their version. And if we're able to get this language from the House Past Clarity Act and the Senate Agriculture Bill fully to the floor in front of everybody

and it gets voted on and we get it through, that is the best case scenario for everybody in the Bitcoin community because it will mean that open source, non-custodial software developers will not be prosecuted anymore the way that we saw the DOJ prosecutions over this prior summer.

But we still have to do the work of making sure that the White House and OFAC and Treasury don't come in over the top and destroy privacy, as I mentioned, kind of at the top, right? So that's kind of a second fight, like a second, you know, kind of a tier that we need to be concerned about. This is the first battle, the immediate battle that's in front of us is the Clarity Act, Market Structure Bill. Is this still called the Clarity Act? So again, this is where it's complicated. It's called the Clarity Act in the House. right now it's called the rfia uh or in the senate i should say it's called the rfia is

is what we think the bill is going to be named um so but presumably they'll when they do the conference the joint conference bill it'll probably be called the clarity act since that's what they've been messaging all year and uh what does the crypto lobby think of the agricultural um department's view or draft of the bill that we like i've heard rumblings from beyond the scenes that there's some influence in the crypto the broader crypto not bitcoin lobby that really doesn't care what happens they sort of want to create these regulatory moats and yeah they're they just need a market structure so they can do what they need to do they don't really care about open source developers is that true um you know i don't want to pay with too

broad a brush but i guess what i would say is that uh regulatory capture is a hell of a good business right i mean we see that in wall street right the reason that we don't have access to good financial technology and tools in the United States is not because we can't build them. It's because the, you know, large corporations have captured their regulators and they get to write their own laws. So, you know, I wouldn't say that the token side of the crypto markets is unique in this way. They are just responding to the incentives and behaviors that such as they exist. And so I would say that, yeah, when push comes to shove, if you're operating a centralized exchange with licenses and you've got all the venture capital in order to be able to pay the lawyers $1,800 an hour to stay in court nonstop fighting with the government, it's in your interests to say, well i would much prefer that my random token is not qualified as a security under whatever new

how we test they're going to try to put out than to care about whether some random open source developers who are working on a decentralized exchange or a private you know host wallet uh you know are still allowed to do that thing that competes with me right i mean in their you know kind of business logic they're so call your representatives and center streaks yeah they have a lot of money yeah and they do influence yeah and that's the thing i mean uh you know one of the reasons that we started save our wallets at the beginning of the year was because matt and i uh knew that there is no centralized bitcoin company right we don't have a ceo we don't have a marketing team we don't have a lobbying outfit really right um and so we knew that we were going

to be a massive structural disadvantage as bitcoiners relative to everyone else who's know making tokens and other broad crypto things when it came to this lobbying effort um and so yeah i mean we're outspent a thousand to one in washington dc right now as bitcoiners um you know it's great that we have organizations like bpi and coin center and you know others who are fighting for the things that we care about in washington but uh we're doing you know they uh we whoever whatever you know however we want to draw the box are doing it on you know kind of macgyver budgets yeah uh right duct tape and bubble gum right now and so that's why you look like macgyver well uh yeah don't force me to get my way out of this room with a paper clip uh or things might

get messy for you um but uh but yeah no i mean i think like this is why you know it's like what we do have in the bitcoin community is we have truth and righteousness on our side and we have people power and a ton of grit yeah and a ton of grit yeah proof of work baby we'll grind it out hand up i've not called my senator but i'm gonna wake up tomorrow morning and call uh i've sent emails but i think calls calls work just as well too yeah you should definitely call uh if you're listening to this uh it's again right here right now senators are the most important people if you have a senator who is sitting on one of the either the banking committee or the agriculture committee double points for calling them

and then for sure call them. Call them because especially now with AI, written emails are a dime a thousand, right? So, I mean, they don't know what's real. They don't know what's not real. They'll just throw that away, really.

I mean, I shouldn't say they're going to throw it away. Maybe they look at them, but it's much less impactful than picking up the phone and having a conversation. And if you go to saveourwallets.org, are still it's like a top line broad like here's the the points you need to hit when you call them

yeah so we have a bunch of information on saveourwallets.org uh you can also put your zip code in and it'll give you all your contact information for your representatives uh there is a form letter generator on there but you can't directly as i mentioned send an email to these congressional offices just because they would get ddos every day if they had public uh email addresses and uh we'll be updating the site with more guidance on what needs to happen once there's clarity of what's going on in the senate uh right so at the moment it's all geared toward the house campaign um but you know we'll be keeping it updated you can also sign up there for updates if you give us your email we'll uh blast out some updates to people when there are important things

that are going on and we need people to like really rally the troops and push something over you know probably when the voting is actually happening um so you know i would say there's a bunch of resources there um definitely check it out and um you know get involved because again this is a this is an easily winnable fight you know there are very few things in life that i've come across at least where you know the hard work is literally just about showing up right like oftentimes it's like well i gotta show up and i gotta fight goliath right and to some degree we are fighting Goliath here because it's the U.S. government. It's the most powerful government in the world and institutional inertia is in the wrong direction. But like at the end of the day,

we still do live in a democracy and we are the swing vote majority group in that democracy right now. So if they don't listen to us, the next election is going to be a bloodbath as long as we actually show up in those elections and push our legislators and do the hard work of participating in democracy right so again maybe the the way to say this here for everybody who's a bitcoiner if you're a real bitcoiner you believe in proof of work um proof of work for being a bitcoiner right now is picking up the phone and calling your senator and making sure that they understand that you know it is not acceptable for open source software developers to be getting thrown in jail or writing code yeah for writing code and then first thing go do that freaks we'll link to all

this in the show not second thing like going into the second battle of fact all this it's completely going in the wrong direction where i would like to go where i think we should abolish rescind the bank secrecy act we should get rid of these sort of supranational regulatory bodies that really don't understand the technology and at the end of the day objectively don't care about freedom or protecting people from crime whether it's physical harm or financial crime like i think the data is out there it's abundantly clear kyc aml compliance that has been thrust on the market broadly has completely ineffectual at stopping criminals from actually doing what they want to do absolutely i mean it's kabuki theater as a former bank regulator i can tell you that for a fact but uh i mean you

don't even need to take it from me or trust that right like you can look at the news that's come out uh you know over the last 17 years since the financial crisis right i mean uh the largest bank in the united states jp morgan chase was just caught up for laundering hundreds of millions of dollars or potentially even billions of dollars for jeffrey epstein yeah right even though they're filing suspicious activity reports you know to the tune of dozens or hundreds in the background right none of which were ever looked at or followed up with these friends are the secretary of the treasury so it doesn't matter jp morgan yeah you're good why are those funds and they wired them to Deutsche Bank you know which is another large regular regulated uh banking institution

yeah right and so you know the thing here is that uh you know KYC AML and like all this intrusive financial surveillance like none of this is actually doing anything on the ground to make the average American's life better or safer or inarguably makes it worse yeah definitely puts them more at risk adds more compliant costs which layers in cost to the end user it's more expensive it's more dangerous for i mean how fraught is the world with credit fraud and people basically selling other people's information on black markets yeah because they were able to steal it from companies complying with kyc aml regulation by collecting all that data and securing it terribly in the first place yeah creating honeypots left right

and center all of which will be hacked eventually you know again as somebody who's worked on a lot of these banking and just general technology platforms like none of these large institutions and the barrier to i just wrote a newsletter about on the flight over here i don't know if you saw anthropics sort of post-mortem on um prompt injection hack i mean essentially there was a chinese espionage attack using their llms and mcp yep servers to basically take down parts the internet and infiltrate highly critical systems in the united states yeah it's a barrier to entry to wage these attacks is getting lower and so the more you force people to comply and collect more information the easier it's just going to get to take that and abuse people at

the end of the day oh yeah 100 i mean the u.s government can't even maintain the safety and security of its own data right i mean china hacked the gsa like two years ago and got like 100 million social security numbers or something like that right i mean it's it's crazy like what was it the um what was the big social security hack two years ago evergrande's coming to my mind but that's the chinese um yeah property property lending what was it um i feel like it began with an e2 was it equifax literally a 200 million social security number like two-thirds of the country this was a decade ago at this point but yeah yeah now we got them buying 23andme or trying to buy 23andMe where they would get, you know, 20% of the United States is genetic data

or things of this nature. I mean, data privacy is, I think, to piggyback on your point here about the BSA, I think data privacy is actually the next frontier for us, right? Like if you can kind of fast forward a little bit, suspend belief and say like, you know, we're going to win on a long enough time horizon with Bitcoin, right? Which I deeply and truly believe, right? Like this isn't really a question of if it's a question of when right and the sooner that we pull that future forward and you know kind of bring the uh the positive some you know flywheel spinning in all of our lives the better but um yeah taking it like the next step further like data privacy is going to become the most important thing in the world in my opinion in the next decade because we are

all going to be subject to hundreds of thousands of adversarial ai driven attacks trying to pilfer our data wherever it exists for again pretty much the duration of the rest of our lives yeah um and so you know you i don't i think it's crazy to trust anyone other than yourself to have enough motivation to secure your own data right and and have that level of privacy and interaction between two willing participants in a private market yeah and just from like a defensive or systems posturing like why would you want to centralize all this data like create defense and security of your distribution like why aggregate everything in central locations and allow people to to self-secure to secure their own data their own money and yeah individuals may get picked off

individually on a one-to-one basis but that doesn't put everybody who's engaging in a a particular service in harm's way right yeah and i think that that is uh again it's a sort of design paradigm that the the current um you know kind of controllers of the world don't understand the dystopian hellscape that we live in because that's another thing i mean i'll probably i'm going to record with steve lee and it's funny behind the scenes the one question we're always asking each other we walk up to each other say who's going to run the mints it's like we shouldn't have to ask who's going to run the mints we should be able to run the mints and offer privacy preserving money to anybody we want to if not anybody we want to be able to experiment with

new wave cypherpunk cutting edge banking technology yeah without having to worry about getting thrown in a cage yeah of course it's you know we either believe in free markets or we don't right and there are you know there's a another thing that i've been talking about while i've I've been doing this, uh, several wild stuff, which is like, it's called Blackstone's principle, right. Um, which is like a, a very, um, core piece of Western legal canon, uh, right. Which is that we should prefer. And our system is built on the idea that we should prefer that 10 guilty men go free than that one innocent man be, you know, wrongly convicted and caught up in and punished were the actions of those 10 bad men.

And again, that's just kind of crazy if you think about how inverted the world is today relative to the fact that those are the principles that we've built our entire society around. I think it's becoming a popular meme and I'm very happy it is. In many aspects of our life, but particularly this one, you're catering to the lowest common denominator of criminal scumbags. You're basically nerfing the world

and making the user experience of many things in life terrible because you're worried about the bad guy like you can't nerf the world um as joe rogan famously said uh many years ago but it's true you can't you can try to but criminals are always going to criminal yeah yeah exactly if you i mean this is the good old argument about guns right if you if you take guns away from you know normal people uh then the only people with guns will be criminals right and uh i know that that's probably a controversial take in some parts of the country, but... Hey, and if you're listening, you're saying that's a controversial take. I recorded an episode with Dr. John Lott two weeks ago. Go find it. We go through the data. It's not

controversial. It's backed by data. Like if you take it away from law-abiding citizens, it actually gets worse for them, right? And everybody else. Well, and again, back to the show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome, right? I mean, these are pretty simple loops if you actually are capable of taking a step back and deconstructing them and thinking about them, right? So back to your point about the BSA, I just want to like quickly, before we migrate too far away from that, I want to say, like, you're not alone in thinking that the BSA needs to be overturned or, you know, repealed or that we need some fundamental modification to that. I think, in fact, that the one serious legal challenge that was brought against the BSA in kind of its contemporary moment, you know, after it emerged in the 70s, it only that the BSA was upheld, I think, on a five to four vote by the Supreme Court. and they had some very choice words about, you know,

kind of the danger that we were entering into with something like the BSA. But at that time, you know, the limit for suspicious activity reporting was like $10,000, which in the 70s... Was a lot of money. Was an incredible amount of money. I mean, we're talking about like $100,000,

maybe $150,000 or something like that in like modern dollars. And from what I understand correctly, the history of the BSA was particularly focused on the mafia, right? There was a lot of mafia problems going on. Yeah, correct. That's, yeah, back in the 70s, we didn't have, you know, the global war on terror. So yeah, that was the presumptive reason that, you know, it was created back then. And even then it was controversial. Right. So, you know, again, I think that this is a situation where, you know, our generation is being called to, I think, greatness, right? Like, I would like to think that we are going to achieve this greatness and that we are going to overcome these existential battles that are facing us because we've just been hardened and sharpened in a very unique set of circumstances that have led us to this unique historical moment. and uh you know as i said before i you know for me it was just kind of this realization of like

if not me who if not now when right like what am i waiting for no no one is coming to save me if i'm not willing to get in the arena and you know have the fight myself um and i just kind of woke up and realized like man there have got to be thousands tens of thousands i don't know how many there are of other people like me who have been around and thinking like how could i contribute like i'd love i'd love to contribute um and yeah for me this was just you know the stakes have just gotten so high now that i feel like you know standing on the sidelines was just a an inconceivable notion like we need we need all of our champions in the arena right now we need everyone who can pick up a sword uh and fight for the future that we want and i have every

belief and every fiber of my being knows that we will prevail if people just pick up the sword. They do their duty. They serve their country, which in this case, I'm going to say both is the United States and a return to

our original founding values and I would say Bitcoin network as the instantiation in code of American principles. I think now is the time for patriots to stand up and fight. I'm looking the camera because i know you're out there you dm me you email me you find ways to contact me to

tell tell me that you listen to the show you read the newsletter and you've been thinking these things but not able to express them here's your chance get out there go to save our wallets.org put in your zip code figure out who your senator is call them and stand up for this thank you for standing up for this kyle this was an incredible way to hop off the plane into the studio and start my few-day trip here in San Francisco. Well, it's such a pleasure. Thank you for having me, Marty. And yeah, I mean, again, it's funny, right?

Because I've been following you for so long and I knew about all your content. I was kind of a lurker or an anon in the community for a long time. But look at this conversation that we were able to have and kind of the energy that we were able to spark, I think, for one another in just a very short time. So I would encourage everybody out there,

get involved, just get involved somehow. Go to your local meetups, find where other Bitcoiners live, get engaged in this fight. This is an important thing and we should fight for this. At the very least, you'll get a more well-rounded understanding of how the state is attacking Bitcoin or would like to cattle herd Bitcoiners and the network into a very nerfed form,

which I don't think we want. And getting engaged, I think having done it myself the last couple of years, I think you would be surprised the upside I certainly was with how responsive some people are. And to your point, how willing to learn people on the Hill are about this. And there are many individuals on the Hill that actually do care about this. And you just got to let them know, here's the signal. Here's what we care about. here's how do I know you're not an expert on this staffer or senator, but I've been immersed in this for many years. Here's how it works. And here's how it should work moving forward. Yeah. And

respond well to that. Yeah, it's super well, you know, and it actually has been revitalizing for me and my belief about the government as well, to be honest, like being on the other side of the table and having those conversations, like I've actually walked away surprised at how willing to engage these members of Congress are and the fact that they're just really busy. They're stretched so thin. They're juggling so many problems. They don't have time to be an expert on this. If you are an expert, you can save them an enormous amount of time and energy as long as you can be articulate and thoughtful. Yes. So don't scream at people. No. But, you know, be professional, you know, and erudite and make good cases. Make a good argument. Be polite.

Be polite. Yes, ma'am. Yes, sir. Thank you. Please. Appreciate your time. Yeah, absolutely. I know on this show, I can get a little bombastic, but for you guys and when I call my senator and representatives, I will be very polite. Kyle, thank you, sir. This was a pleasure. Absolutely. Great to see you, Marty. Peace and love, freaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad-free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app and go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free, helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time.

And until next time. Okay. Thank you.