TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #727: Orange Pilling The Deep State with David Zell

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

Marty sits down with David Zell, Executive Director of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, to discuss the Coinbase de minimis lobbying controversy, the battle to make Bitcoin tax reform a legislative priority, and why engaging the national security community may be Bitcoin's most durable long-term protection. David on X: https://x.com/DavidZell_ BPI: https://www.btcpolicy.org/ Contact a representative: https://btcismoney.xyz/ 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://bitkey.world/ OPNEXT https://tinyurl.com/tftc2026 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ SLNT https://slnt.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. 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 what a week in austin texas gentlemen oh what a week did we do something here what do we do with this coinbase de minimis tax exemption i think it's

a big thing that uh we made some noise this week about it i think your tweet did a lot of really good stuff um you know and i'm really just honored to be here with uh with the alex jones of bitcoin although if i had my way it'd be the real alex jones but i'll settle for for the jv hey we're gonna get we're gonna get alex here yeah no i think it was important for um the the broader bitcoin community and bitcoiners generally particularly in america to to know that this stuff's happening behind the scenes and i wasn't so i had one source reach out last week and um i was like okay this is interesting can't really confirm it and then i had somebody reach out a couple days ago so you had multiple independent sources come

and tell you this yes yeah yeah i mean it's been very interesting to see you know you obviously have been a sort of journalist and commentator in bitcoin for like a decade plus you know your incentive to lie as a lot of people are accusing you of is it's very low um like you already have you know a successful podcast and this isn't my beat it's not really policy isn't really your beat policy is not my beat the incentive for you just to like i guess the the accusation from from the detractors is that you just woke up on a random morning and said i'm just gonna make shit up about coinbase to just be a problem um you know and i i find you very credible um And I think, you know, the the sort of reluctance to go with something like this until multiple kind of disconnected parties tell you it's a very high degree of confidence that there's a there there and that that's true.

So I will say, you know, the silver lining of Coinbase's response is that they are not only doubling down on your claims being a lie, but, you know, they're doubling down, at least in public, on de minimis being something they care about. And I like I'm not to my knowledge, I don't know if there's been, you know, like, for example, we did a, you know, an open letter from industry members basically telling Congress, hey, after clarity is done, we think the most important thing to work on next is tax treatment for Bitcoin and making it money and removing the de minimis or creating a de minimis exemption and removing taxes and obligations for reporting on everyday transactions. transactions this is a very innocuous like letter you know we were not you know beating the the maxi drum i think we maybe even had language in there about like other digital assets getting a de minimis exemption trying to build like a big tent extremely uncontroversial and coinbase didn't sign it um you know and maybe they don't you know whatever i it is i wasn't even aware of that yeah when was this it's like two months ago okay it was like end of last year early this year um you know and like now they're all saying all the executives on twitter are saying no we do in fact

care about this um and great uh so now we have that sort of on record and like you showed me this morning you saw before i did but um somebody from the coinbase team responded to connor my colleague uh who kind of proposed in the wake of all of this and said okay why don't we do a a joint round table where Coinbase and BPI kind of present a unified front. And we talked to the key members, you know, in a public setting about why De Minimis is so important for the future of this country. And they responded this morning and said that they'd do that. So, you know, I guess time will, time will tell,

but it will be a lot harder to sort of squirrel away from, I mean, I've read this as a public commitment from Coinbase to championing this cause, you know after clarity is is passed uh and so you know i think that's more that is i i know i was aware of no such commitment from coinbase prior to this this sort of you know shit on twitter um yeah i didn't know they didn't sign that letter that's another that was another again this isn't my beat okay i mean i do talk i've had connor on right i go down to dc more often now because pub keys there pub key dc but honestly like the interworkings of capitol hill is something that doesn't really interest me i'm like focusing on the technology on the investing side on

the free market side not the swamp side yeah bitcoin which you have immersed yourself in yeah you sure have but i think uh i think this week i think it proves something if bitcoiners drive a hard line they make noise and they say hey no like i want this thing people will respond and i think it's a good lesson i'd be interested to get your thoughts on this because i think with trump too with this administration particularly after the inauguration last year and all the promises that were made in lead up to the election it seems like priorities got a bit flipped where strategic bitcoin reserve um uh seemed to have been the main priority but as soon as he got in you had this overwhelming lobbying effort from

the likes of coinbase ripple a16z and a a large lobbyist consortium dispar disparate disparate consortium and have a lot of money much more money than bitcoiners are spending on lobbying and the optics um outside looking in or that they were able to use that money to reprioritize what gets done so you're genius now clarity and sbr right is a distant third well and that's sort of like part of i think the semantic i don't want to say trick but um i think a lot of the response to this is just like this sort of interesting exercise in semantics where say well no we've been consistently advocating for de minimis it's like okay great like you've been telling people it's a good thing Um, but there is, you know, such limited opportunity to change laws in America.

Like it's such a sort of Herculean undertaking. Um, and so, you know, if you're saying, okay, like I think when, you know, when Senator Lummis, you know, came onto the digital asset subcommittee, you know, my understanding is that, you know, she kind of proffered four priorities, uh, for crypto in America in the following order, strategic Bitcoin reserve, uh, tax reform. So, uh, you know, the, the double tax on miners, uh, the, the, you know, tax on everyday Bitcoin transactions, uh, you know, uh, stable coin regulation and market structure like in that order. And, you know, the crypto lobby basically came back and said, we think these are all wonderful priorities. Uh, thanks

for your leadership we'd like them in reverse order please um and so i think that's how you get to a situation where you know it might not be it might be true that you know coinbase speak it's like you know brian was speaking very positively about the sbr i remember it you know davos he was talking about it i think brian you know probably i sort of give brian in particular the benefit of the doubt on some level. Like I think, you know, he has running a sprawling empire and there are so many people working at every discrete vertical within that business. The idea that Brian is sort of heavily involved in managing the day to day of the policy operations of Coinbase is just difficult to believe given how many other things Coinbase is doing. So I kind of chalk a lot of

this up to two things. I think one is, you know, a degree of like principal agent problem. Um, and, and two, you know, the argument that I think Bitcoiners might not like hearing, but it's just, I think fair. And honestly, I'd respect Coinbase a lot more if they just made this argument, uh, was that, you know, they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to, you know, engage in actions that benefit the company. And, you know, I can certainly understand the business logic that market structure for a coin based shareholder is a lot more important than de minimis exemption. But I think that, you know, my point here really is that, you know, saying that you like something is does not a sort of campaign for getting it done make

like you you have to expend political capital and like genuinely try. And there has been I have seen no organized effort from the cryptocurrency lobby on a de minimis exemption um i have not personally heard coinbase representatives you know say the things that were reported um i have definitely heard that attitude expressed by people in crypto policy writ large um you know that that de minimis is sort of a waste of time that it's like a non-issue that nobody's using bitcoin for transactions so you know let's just not prioritize this like the incentive structure for the crypto lobby is just very clear like you're running a you know meme coin casino like you want the meme coin casino laws to be written in your favor before you you engage in sort of the you know

what i'm sure some people look at is just like sort of the esoteric like you know pro freedom stuff but i i do believe brian when he says like hey i've told my team the sbr is important i've told my team de minimis is important um what i haven't seen is any evidence of actually expending political capital to try to make these things a priority and get them done um yeah i mean we gotta dive into this because that's like the big thing again i don't like dealing in the swamp and outside looking in it's like you have this crypto lobby spending a lot of political capital and things that are counter not maybe maybe not counter to bitcoin but just like as a bitcoiner it's like i don't care yeah about coinbase's ability to

list and dump tokens on retail yeah like and that's all they're focused on they're that and the stablecoin yield like i don't care if coinbase gets the ability to stare share yield uh that's generated via the treasuries they hold in reserves so the stable coins they issue they're not in consumer to me that's not really really something i care about no and i think bitcoin particularly at this point in human history in american history is so critically important that the focus on capital again going back to um the order of operations that senator lummis put forth and the fact that they reversed that it's like okay we're now a year and a month into trump two and we've spent 25 of a second term

doing cycles on things that don't really pertain to bitcoin no yeah exactly how do we how do we switch that like do we have to be more hard-lined and say like again i said this on rhr yesterday it's i think um really holding their feet to the fire um and saying do you will you commit to publicly stating that you will not accept a particular tax reform or a particular bill let's go with clarity act i think for clarity act we can get this brca or something yeah the brca i think the crypto lobby has increasingly i mean i've seen a lot of the crypto lobbyists come out and and actually say that um that you know they will not support a clarity bill that our market structure bill that lacks uh developer protections which is does this have to be our

modus operandi particularly as bitcoin like and like and also like from the perspective of like encroaching not encroaching on their influence but like forcing their influence to work in bitcoin's favor specifically yeah um it's interesting right like as i think there is a fundamental alignment of incentives um like i think the the argument that crypto companies and executives you know don't like bitcoin or whatever it's like very dumb to me it's really obvious that if we had a strategic bitcoin reserve that would be massive for the shitcoin casinos um like you know i'm just not i don't that's not why i support an sbr but it's just true um you know if if america embraces bitcoin the way that you know we want it to um and i think

that would be great for everyone in the crypto industry i mean bitcoin is the foundation of people talk about digital assets it doesn't exist without bitcoin so any policy related to this stuff bitcoin should be like the first priority yeah and this is like this kind of goes to the heart of, you know, why I co-founded BPI and, you know, my sort of views on this. Um, and I think the, the answer is yes, to be, to be hardlined and to be difficult when, uh, the moment sort of demands it. But like we, you know, our, our strategy is, is not predicated on, uh, getting into, you know, sort of wars of attrition, uh, and, and sort of spending battles with, um, you know, individuals and, and firms who can literally print their own money. Um, like I remember, uh,

like many years ago, I had a conversation with, um, with, you know, a prominent sort of individual in the, in the Bitcoin community. And, you know, he, he was just like, David, like you have to engage in asymmetric strategies. Um, like, you know, Bitcoin there, Bitcoiners raise a hundred million dollars to spend on lobbying. And the next day ripple will announce that they're spending 200 million. Uh, you know, if Bitcoiners match them, you know, ripple and Coinbase at all will come back and say, we're spending a billion dollars. Like, you know, that, that is clearly a losing, um, strategy. Um, and so, yeah, I think that the, the other thing that I have really observed that makes me feel increasingly like the strategy that we're deploying is, is the correct

one, um, is the extent to which the career bureaucrats have dragged their feet on stuff that matters. Um, like the, the strategic Bitcoin reserve, you know, I think it was basically killed by, you know, sort of career bureaucrats at, at treasury. Um, and you know, when you, when you come in as a president, you get your political appointees who are technically running these various agencies, but the overwhelming majority of people that work there, you know, work there for many years. Um, and they kind of view themselves as like, we are the treasury, Right. You know, the the people who are brought in by the president, you know, they're ephemeral, they're fleeting, they'll be gone. I can just, you know, you know, I can just air people on email and just not do my job for a few years. And, you know, you'll be gone in the blink of an eye and I'll still be here. um and so i i do think that where bitcoin is strongest is basically just that the the facts

are on our side in that bitcoin is very clearly an extremely critical technology for the national security priorities of the united states um in a way that you know cryptocurrencies writ large are very obviously not. Um, and I think where we have increasingly spent a lot of our focus and energy is on those constituencies. Um, they sort of unelected basically the, like, I'm trying to orange pill the deep state. Um, like, you know, it's like, that's like sort of the one liner and maybe that sounds sort of ridiculous, but there are a lot of people who have a lot of power in the U.S. government who are not elected, who you cannot lobby. And so, you know, if you want sort of novel policy that is of geoeconomic consequence, a necessary condition for that

is the buy-in of a very small, you know, group of politically insulated, you know, basically, uh, uh, you know, sort of grand strategy and national security people. Uh, those people, you know, are, are really doing, I mean, I think a lot of them are definitely patriots. They're doing this job because they care about the long-term future of America and they, they sort of think deeply and make choices. Um, but you can't, you can't bribe them. You can't, you can't pay money. You can't donate to the, you know, uh, to the national security council. uh you can't lobby in the traditional sense um you have to genuinely sort of convince these people um that bitcoin is good for america and that bitcoin flourishing in america and america

embracing bitcoin is really important for the future of the country for competition with china you know you name it uh and you know to convince those people you have to make you know sort of good arguments that are sound and true. Uh, those arguments need to come from credible people, um, who are kind of embedded in the sort of circles of networks of trust, um, you know, that they, that they talk to. Um, and I think BPI is sort of an end of one team with that kind of particular thesis. Like we are the only organization that has, I think both the capability and the intent to persuade that constituency that significantly adopting Bitcoin in America, um, is good for the national security interests of the country. Um, and so,

and I think if we do that, the, the results, if we're successful in that front, the results, I think will be profound. Um, and I think we will be successful in that front because we are right. And I think that is where Bitcoiners have a huge advantage is like the limiting factor on crypto lobbying is like you can you can print your own money you can spend indefinitely um but you know fucking solana is not important for the the national security interest the united states meme coins are not important like like these things don't fucking matter um right they just don't uh and bitcoin clearly does um we're seeing the emergence of a new sort of independent neutral monetary layer that is being adopted by, you know, dozens of governments around the world

that is reaching, you know, a crazy, crazy market cap. Um, and it's going to play an ever increasing role in, you know, in, in, in sort of geopolitics. Um, and I think the fact that Bitcoin is that consequential to stuff that actually matters and the fact that it's actually good for America that an open permissionless censorship resistant monetary network exists globally. Um, you know, that's why we will win. Um, and so our, our strategy is, yeah, it might sound a little corny, but our, our strategy is to just trust that we're right, that the facts are on our side, that if you talk to someone who is not, you know, sort of conflicted and biased, uh, or operating off of a different set of incentives. If you talk to someone who's

genuine incentive is what are the best moves we can make on the board to secure the future of this country? Uh, you can very easily convince them that Bitcoin is a key part of that story and a key part of that future. Um, and, and I think with technology policy, uh, it's very obvious just looking retrospectively, uh, that national security sort of trumps everything. Um, like you can have a million reasons why a given policy is a good idea. And if the CIA and the department of war, uh, and, and the sort of the deep state, you know, I see in, you know, uh, uh, uh, NatSec people say this is a huge blunder and it's going to cause us to, uh, you know, suffer in our competition with China, all those arguments go out the window. It's like, Oh, okay. We won't do that

then. And vice versa. Um, and so to me, like that is the, like, that is our asymmetry as like, we, we cannot print our own money. Um, I don't think the solution to this is for, you know, like someone yesterday at the conference was like, you know, what, so do we need to, you know, does Bitcoin need to just donate a ton of money to, you know, lobbying groups? And I'm like, yes and no i mean yeah i think bpi is is you know a great effort but our our strategy is not to outspend coinbase like that is just a recipe for all of us to waste a lot of money and we will never win we'll never outspend coinbase and ripple and a16z um i think where we are operating is a lane that companies can't really operate in um and and no amount of of white shoe lobbyists and

throwing cash around can sufficiently obfuscate the fact that a lot of this stuff's just a house of cards and like nonsense um so that's our asymmetry i think is is you know demonstrating with rigorous serious analysis that a world where america does things like have a strategic bitcoin and reserve, um, lead to significantly better outcomes for the long run future of the country than the world where we don't have such policies. Um, and then focusing our advocacy and our education and our efforts, um, on people who don't have mixed incentives, um, or who at least have clearer incentives, um, and, and focusing on people who are actually persuadable. Um, to me, like that's the big lesson of the past 14 months is that uh a lot of the decision makers are not

you know persuadable in the way you and i would think of the word persuadable you know maybe maybe they're persuadable uh if you donate enough money to their re-elect yeah a lot it's not it's money not logic exactly but i think there are a set of stakeholders in the u.s government who matter a great deal for whom like logic is really the only currency um and so it's just obvious to me that that is where Bitcoiners should sort of focus their efforts. long time, but haven't taken a step to self-custody because they're worried about the complications of setting up a private public key pair, securing that seed phrase, setting up a pin, setting up a passphrase. Again, BitKey makes it easy to use, hard to lose. It's the easiest zero to one step,

your first step to self-custody. If you have friends and family on the exchanges who haven't moved it off, tell them to pick up a BitKey. Go to bitkey.world. Use the key TFTC20 at checkout for 20% off your order. That's bitkey.world, code TFTC20. to optimize your savings retirement accounts in idle capital if you plan to use this downturn instead of watching it pass go download it at unchained.com tftc that's unchained.com tftc what is or in your experience what has been the most effective the pitch to this group of people outside the elected officials and yeah like what is the broader pitch like if they're listening now they may be listening this they saw the hoopla about the de minimis tax exemption right this

guy marty bent's got this bitcoin policy institute i don't you know let me check into tftc what's what's the they're listening now yeah why bitcoin why focus on it what is the strategic implications of of embracing bitcoin i think that an increasingly critical part of you know great power competition in the 21st century will be competition uh for and over uh critical technology networks the sort of the sort of rails of communications and payments and uh right now you know bitcoiners talk about this all the time there are billions of people all over the world, um, who live in, you know, countries that don't have stable rule of law that don't have, you know, stable currencies, um, who are genuinely desperate for better

monetary alternatives. And, uh, China is working extremely hard to push people in the global South in Latin America and Africa into their sort of authoritarian tech stack. They're saying, hey, we have an incredible digital currency that you can use. They are, you know, are the sort of Chinese CBDC. And I think Bitcoin and, you know, to a large extent, stable coins as well are kind of a natural market buffer to the adoption of those technologies. If you are someone who just needs money that works better than your shitty fiat currency that's inflating at double digit rates a year um that doesn't work you know well for cross-border payments etc uh absent an alternative the chinese suite that they are offering is pretty attractive

um and i think bitcoin is uh sort of necessarily pulls demand away from those alternatives especially for people who want something that is politically neutral, who don't want to align themselves with America or China explicitly. Um, so I think that's one dimension of this is that the proliferation of Bitcoin globally is, is good for American interests, you know, a, because it reduces demand for Chinese alternatives, uh, and, and B because, um, Bitcoin's censorship resistance i mean like speaking plainly bitcoin lets you evade capital controls that's like a scary thing you know you're not necessarily supposed to say that but it's true like that is the point of bitcoin literally literally the point and i think there's an awesome parallel

with bitcoin to something like like tor um you know which which we the u.s military funded and created uh and so you look at tor and you're like well okay we invented and helped proliferate a technology which fundamentally shifts the balance of power away from the state and toward the individual um like it necessarily restricts some degree of control or like reduces rather some degree of control from the government but why did they why did they do this like why did the government fund, you know, and on enabled internet? Uh, I think the answer is because we understand that America doesn't require a tight grip on the flow of information, uh, to survive, uh, when information can flow freely, uh, free societies win and closed societies lose.

China requires censorship and control of information. And the same is true with with capital. If capital could just move freely wherever it wanted in the world, America would be would be fine. We have the strongest capital markets in the world. We have, you know, incredibly good court system and rule of law. We have this sprawling university system with incredible talent. We have all of these incredible technology, AI companies in the States. That isn't true with China. China requires capital controls to survive. There's a reason that, you know, there's sort of the golden checkbook in China that you have to have special permission from the government to take more than, you know, whatever it is, $50,000 a year out of the country.

And so if you're just thinking about the game theory of this, if you remove capital controls and you let money go wherever it wants to go, yes, maybe we are sacrificing some degree of power over our ability to granularly censor payments, okay? But what's on the other side of the ledger? The other side of the ledger is that capital flows in mass out of the countries that we are maligned with who require to survive strict walled gardens and control over the flow of money so that's sort of you know a and b on bitcoin on the sort of payments and network side i think that the disruption of capital controls is a net gain for america relative to its adversaries

and the ability for people to opt into a monetary alternative that isn't a Chinese alternative is very good. Then on the monetary sort of store of value side, right now, I mean, since the war in Ukraine, we've seen a trend of central banks all over the world, especially those who feel that they face sanctions risk from America, reducing their holdings of treasuries and increasing their holdings of gold. And right now, the distribution of gold around the world is a lot flatter than the distribution of Bitcoin. We have the majority of Bitcoin custodied in America by individuals, by corporations that are domiciled here, and by the government. And so if you imagine over the next, you know, five, 10, 15 years,

that trend continues that, you know, countries are going to try to adopt a reserve asset that has these properties of gold, but actually works in the 21st century that you can actually use to evade sanctions, to make payments, whatever. You know, the every dollar that goes into Bitcoin is a economic boom for America. And so it's like if if you create this off ramp where we don't control the network, but we have an outsized position in it relative to our position in gold, every dollar that goes into Bitcoin versus gold just makes America richer. Like if we imagined a Bitcoin standard happened overnight, America would be the wealthiest country in the world. Um, and so the, so sort of the game is already rigged in our favor. Um, and so I think that,

you know, a, a, a world where Bitcoin kind of replaces gold, a gold sort of function in, in, uh, society just makes America richer. So that's really the argument, um, in a nutshell, uh, is that this is technology that does reduce the power of the state. Um, but it, it embodies our, our values. And from a global perspective, uh, the more that information and capital can be free, the more America wins and the more our adversaries, um, like China, Russia, et cetera, lose. Sup freaks up next, the Bitcoin scaling conference where Bitcoin developers meet institutional capital is coming to New York next month. Join Bitcoiners from Blockstream, Chaincode, Brink, and more at the Can't Miss Summit at the intersection of Bitcoin tech

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it out a couple things just like thinking riffing off that too i mean it is and i guess that's the hardest part of your job is convincing the state that like hey you need to uh reduce some of the power you have particularly over these capital markets but it is and obviously satoshi was explicit about this like hey government central banks uh proven time and time again throughout history they cannot be trusted with access to the money printer they will debase it they will issue it out in waves of credits and um the little man gets the common man gets uh the out of the stick at the end of the day and that's the thing like i mean what you just said was i completely agree with like bitcoin if it were to succeed here in the united states it would

due to the outsized position that individuals businesses and the government have uh in the network like it would it would benefit us massively at the detriment of our perceived um geopolitical adversaries and again that's just like only one aspect and like domestically this is another thing for the government to admit but 39 trillion dollars in debt now i think we're at 38.8 maybe 39 in the next month or two especially if this war continues to rage on it seems like that uh that number's gonna go up quicker than than it was only a few months ago uh inflation it's gonna begin rearing its head again uh you have a private credit complex that's beginning to break down and many people are looking at um the the exposure that pensions and

other entities have to this private uh credit complex and it's looking like it could potentially before us in the 2008 financial crisis and we're only three years um and we're only three years behind or excuse me three years after like the last crazy bout of inflation so i think the american like as a young millennial a younger millennial who was 10 when 9 11 happened it was 17 when the great financial crisis happened um had a bit of a reprieve there and then covet happens you have lockdowns the inflation the economic crisis and now here we are only like four years after that and boom we've got war and another pending liquidity crisis on the horizon the american citizen the common man has been beaten down time and time again throughout my

life and bitcoin is an off-ramp if you are going to print money if you're going to go to war if you're going to tax us out the ass the least you can do is let the individual make the conscious decision via their own volition to adopt a better money well and even if and even if that's true but even if you know you you imagine that you know uh uh the either you're just the state and you're or, you know, you're, you're just thinking about your own book, right? Um, maybe you're not thinking granularly about, you know, the average, you know, American per se. Um, you're thinking on a more macro level. Uh, why would you not want an insurance policy? Like, why would you not like to not embrace Bitcoin is to say, uh, I have no interest in a plan B. I have no interest in

a backup i have no interest in a hedge or an insurance policy um which is just crazy like bitcoin is the best priced insurance for the united states it's ever existed in in like there's you will never get a better deal on on insurance than america can get on adopting bitcoin um there's you know there's only two scenarios really uh the bitcoiners are wrong and it's going to zero in which case okay america like you know the even the lummis bill right but let's just say you know america buys um you know 50 billion dollars worth of bitcoin like what is that a couple of airplanes it's like two days of qe yeah exactly um so your max downside is that you lose 50 billion of the dollars that you print and in this scenario uh where bitcoin fails the dollar

must be doing pretty well. Um, so, you know, you haven't lost much. The other scenarios that the Bitcoiners are right. Um, and in that scenario, uh, when you have an entire global system that is predicated on a fiat currency, which historically has never had an enduring shelf life, every single, um, attempt at, at sort of fiat currency has just, you know, asymptotically tended to zero uh you have the very obvious next candidate and you've got a massively outsized position in it and so yeah you're not printing the money anymore you're not controlling the monetary policy of the world anymore but you're still doing really well um and i think like that is the sort of the the decision logic that for for for me it's like um yeah the amount of hubris

required to sort of say i'm uninterested in in buying this insurance policy uh is is staggering um and i think a lot of this is also just people have you know such a poor sense of um of time and of history um i think the default bias of people is to just assume that uh you know the the world that they've grown up in is going to be kind of basically the world that you know their children are going to live in, et cetera. Um, people just don't really like outside of our little weird corner of, of people whose autistic special interest is like, you know, money and then the history of, of money. Most people don't appreciate how many times we have changed just in America's history, what money is. A relatively short history too. That's another thing people

don't appreciate. Yeah. And like, you know, it's like we've, we keep having these sort of, you know, I think the fourth turning is actually like a really good mental model for this. It was funny to see Sam mentioned that in his announcement tweet for joining PPI. Yeah, it was. I saw he's like, this is the think tank for the fourth turning. And I was like, you know, it kind of is. It's exactly right. It's a great framing. But I mean, every single one of these turnings has kind of been accompanied by a reset of the rules of money. um you know we we have changed what money is over and over and over again um i think that's good that's healthy that's what sort of you know competition and evolution look like um but for some reason when you tell people hey i think the the rules of the the monetary system are going to get rewritten again it's like you you know to most people you sound like a conspiracy theorist

either that or like you just kicked their dog yeah like or you just kicked their dog and it's like well, wait, we, we completely changed the rules of the money in 1971. We completely changed the rules of, of money. Um, after the civil war, we completely changed the rules of money, you know, after the American revolution, um, world war two world. Yeah. Like we, we have re-architected the global financial system over and over again. Um, and so it is, I would say the, the conspiracy theorist is the one who says uh no it's just gonna stay like this forever like that is the view that is just completely um um you know maligned with empirical reality um yet somehow the sort of collective the popular view is that the bitcoiners are the conspiracy theorists that

you're the alex jones of or whatever um yeah it's just really strange um like it's weird how radical of a proposition it it you know how much how radically this proposition is viewed by so many people um that like hey nothing lasts forever uh the system that we've created uh has negative externalities that will eventually cause it to kind of collapse in on itself and require something new uh and hey if you don't believe me look to history because that's happened over and over and over again. Um, and somehow that's the conspiratorial take and, and the, the sort of approved, like, you know, uh, uh, normie, like technically, you know, the sort of the smart person, like, you know, IYI take is like, no, no, no. Like this is the end of history.

The system that we've constructed is perfect. And, you know, maybe it needs tweaking on the margins and, and iterate, you know, sort of incremental improvement. Um, but like largely, you know we figured it out this is how this is how it's going to work forever yeah the petrodollar nobody can no yeah nobody can compete with the u.s navy you know we're like yeah what's going on right well i mean in all seriousness the petrodollar i think it's last two weeks are accelerating uh at the very least a a questioning by our our counterparties and and their allies in the middle east of hey is this actually a good deal does it make sense if they're going to come here uh uh bomb iran and then iran's gonna retaliate by bombing us like is that in our

best interest does it make sense to continue to funnel the excess um the the excess profits of our oil and gas revenues into u.s financial markets i think a consortium of middle eastern states have come out with a consolidated message saying hey we're questioning this uh as we speak right now yeah i mean it's just never been more intuitively obvious to me that uh a digitally native fundamentally neutral like money is is clearly what where the world is is is heading um yeah like uh i think the the sort of unipolar moment is very obviously like over done it's not coming back at least not not for a long time or barring some significant exogenous shock um like you know i mean like i wouldn't i wouldn't say it's impossible um like you know

you could sort of construct a number of scenarios where we just snap back into the pax americana like you know for example imagine uh imagine we have a fundamental breakthrough in physics that comes out of um you've been talking to pines too much yeah well it's true it's also true but imagine we have like a fundamental breakthrough in physics and then all of a sudden it's like hey we have this step function, you know, advancement in our capabilities and we're just like mogging all over the world now. Like, you know, it's, I wouldn't write it off, but I also wouldn't bet on it. Um, like I think all signs point to, you know, an increasingly, uh, fractured and multipolar like world. And I think there will be an increasing premium that is paid on,

um neutrality and i think like this was the thesis for dubai in a lot of ways and now that illusion has kind of been shattered i think the reason that dubai like their their whole plan was to sort of position them i think was really smart to position themselves as um singapore of the middle east yeah or like the the switzerland of the you know of the of the modern era like we are going to be this kind of neutral place where you know a guy from shanghai and or a guy from like beijing london and america you know and tehran can come to a table and make a deal um and do business and be safe um and obviously the recent events i think have really shattered that illusion um like dubai's whole narrative was um you know we are kind of you know we're the place that you want

to go, you know, during the fourth turning and the crisis, like, um, okay. And so, you know, people bought real estate in Dubai on the same thesis. Well, I think that sort of illusion is now shattered. So, uh, it's very clear that that's much the task of creating a place where you can store value that is independent of the politics that is independent of um uh you know that sort of lacks counterparty risk like it's actually a really hard task like even if you're not thinking about this from from bitcoin or from the money if your entire thesis is i need to have value parked somewhere where i'm not making a proxy bet on the hegemony of like one particular country or set of alliances like there just aren't enough options like the bitcoin is kind of the only

thing that you have to move it to the digital you kind of have to move it into the digital with asymmetric drone warfare becoming yeah more accelerated acceleratingly apparent that hey like real estate in dubai real estate anywhere businesses anywhere infrastructure anywhere like yeah the the risk is get to a more peaceful state the risk is just too high and so uh But, you know, this is this sort of like I would always laugh when I would see people kind of say, oh, you know, the strategic Bitcoin reserve is, you know, is a bailout. It's an attempt to, you know, enrich the holders of Bitcoin. Like, I think the holders of Bitcoin are doing pretty well. You know, I think the the the the the fundamental kind of misunderstanding of that argument is the sort of the direction of the status quo, like absent intervention.

the us government never said the word bitcoin again never did anything relating to bitcoin again uh like bitcoin is still going to go to you know uh uh it's still going to kind of continue on its monetization like i think that is with some you know acknowledgement of of of you know sort of low probability risks like i think the generally safe bet to make that in 10 years uh bitcoin will will be a lot more valuable. More and more people will use it. More and more governments will hold it. Like I would not want to take the other side of the debate that Bitcoin will play an increasingly relevant role in the global economy. So that's like an, that's a settled question to me. The only question is, do we want to sort of dominate that process? Do we want to set up

America to be the greatest beneficiary of that shift? Um, like if America had just rejected, um, the technology companies of the nineties. Um, do you really think that we would have never had eBay or Amazon or Apple or Google? If we'd said, you know what we think pets.com is a scam. The dot-com bubble, it's all fraud. Uh, let's just get rid of this stuff. Let's not pass policies to promote the growth of these companies here. Do we really think that, you know, the only people that could have invented, you know, these technologies are, are just Americans on the West coast. No, like those companies would have been built. They just would have been built somewhere else. And so I think that's just kind of what's happening here. Like the idea that it's not that America needs to embrace Bitcoin for Bitcoin to succeed. It's like America needs to embrace Bitcoin for America to succeed. um and and you know i i think that's probably one of those statements where you either are

nodding vigorously and you completely agree or you're like this guy is a fucking moron like there's very i think there's very little sort of middle ground like i doubt there's many people that are sort of ambivalent about that proposition um but i think we'll just be vindicated by history um and we have been over time for 17 years it's going up and to the right and like we're only scratching the surface we're talking about this we're talking about the geopolitical ramifications of this neutral Reserve asset that is distributed um peer-to-peer global but we're not even talking about the applications and like the the sort of Niche applications energy the intersection of energy and Bitcoin mining massive benefits for the energy sector I've been on the

front lines of that for eight years it's real it's undeniably real we're in a state that has gigawatts of bitcoin mining that participate in demand response yeah the winter storm in 2021 grid tripped went down historic event very bad for ercot very bad for the people of texas led to some deaths but over the last five years generation has expanded in part of the ability of that generation expansion capacity expansion has been the fact that bitcoin miners are there to not only buy the electricity as soon as it comes to market but participate in demand response to make sure that you don't have a demand spike that trips the grid. And I think, you know, increasingly, Bitcoin has really helped us, you know, win the AI race or at

least take a commanding lead in the AI race. Like all of these Bitcoin miners built the power infrastructure. Like think about the bottlenecks. If Bitcoin didn't exist and this AI moment were happening how much like worse off we would be with respect to power capacity and generation um i don't like it took so long for these companies and i don't think and i know not that i don't think i know that most people don't understand i was actually before i came to to austin i made a pit stop and met the um the ceo of a large uh a large power company here in the united states and that was one of the things i took away from the conversation with him was he he said explicitly he's like i love working with you guys because i know how to

build the infrastructure like you know how to put down transformers and delay lines and to actually do that like i don't have to invest in that like bitcoin miners are like hey we need the power we've got the expertise we we know how to do all this like utility grid operator like don't worry like we we don't need your expertise for this we've got this in-house we'll build it and so So like there's these capabilities that people don't realize that the mining industry has specifically as it pertains to an integration with the energy sector that like we're like, no, no, we will build this infrastructure. And to your point, like a lot of miners are diversifying to AI because the economic incentive is there and they already have the power infrastructure in place. Yes, they do have to make some changes to make sure it's compatible with the GPU data center setup. Versus starting from scratch.

mean it's not even close yeah um yeah yeah and i mean so that's energy again talking about the story value if you think about the protocol the second layer protocol is being built on on bitcoin like the efficiencies for for the end consumer the chargeback risk that's eliminated yeah from the economy the the ability to literally download a piece of software and have the equivalent of a full-fledged bank account without having to go to a physical branch and give all your information away right the ability to send payments without going through uh swift or the visa mastercard with all their interchange fees like right the benefits for small medium-sized businesses who again are being squeezed by inflation to to save two to three percent uh of

their of their revenue year in year out that's gonna have compounding wealth effects for the the economy yeah and then the agent agent stuff yeah it's just crazy um and that's that's another thing that has just become very obvious to me is uh if we accept a couple of premises uh one that the intelligence of ai will continue to grow two uh that with increasing intelligence comes increasing uh sort of respect for and appreciation of and desire for autonomy and sovereignty um uh then you know it's just very obvious that the ai agents will prefer bitcoin um because bitcoin is the only protocol um that can sort of guarantee an inability to discriminate against an AI user versus a human, um, like any other protocol, uh, can, can create special rules and

say, okay, we're going to have, you know, uh, different standards for, uh, for payments made by agents versus payments made by people. And Bitcoin structurally cannot discriminate against you. It literally cannot recognize the difference. It literally cannot recognize the difference. And so, um, I do think an increasing, I think, I think we're at a generational bottom for the share of economic activity globally that is taken place by non-human entities um by ai uh i think in other words put put another way um an increasing an ever increasing share of economic activity is going to be taken place by ai agents um and i'm so bullish on ai agents adopting Bitcoin because the Bitcoiners have just stacked the training data. Uh, and again,

it kind of goes back to, you know, one of the first things I mentioned about like sort of truth being on our side. If you actually compare the arguments for and against Bitcoin, it's not even close. It's not even close. They're like the, the amount of, of, of extremely sophisticated and well-reasoned uh sort of advocacy for bitcoin um just intellectually uh you know it's it's just dwarfs the amount of sort of sophisticated reasoning for why bitcoin is is sort of either you know not going to work or is is bad i think so much of the barrier to adoption is that we're just not rational actors uh like cute like maybe in aggregate i think maybe humans are but on the individual level, like, you know, we are all susceptible to cognitive biases. Like you've

got these incredible arguments for Bitcoin. And I think a lot of people gravitate to Bitcoin because of those arguments. And then on the other side of the ledger, you have basically like social stigma and shame, right? You agents don't feel shame. Like agents don't care if your professor is going to call you stupid. Uh, agents don't care if your friends are going to think you're crazy. Like, I think a lot of the reason that, uh, Bitcoin adoption is not higher among humans is that we suffer from cognitive biases. Um, we are not just like sort of utility calculators. Um, and you know, if you're giving these arguments to a sort of neutral arbiter who is just going to judge the arguments on their merits, uh, and sort of apply a strictly like just logical framework

to evaluating the choice of what money to use uh it's very obvious to me that that that is an environment where bitcoin thrives um because you know the ai agents do not suffer from the the sort of pitfalls in in you know human adoption um and so i think that's another reason america needs to embrace bitcoin um is if you know even if we are you know the home of the frontier labs that are shipping these models and, and sort of increasingly commodifying, um, or commoditizing rather, uh, uh, intelligence, uh, you know, it'd be a real shame if all of that, you know, value was being kind of moved around. Like if, if, if the transactions that these agents are engaging in are accruing value to, you know, uh, like what if the agents decide, Hey, we're going

to use the yuan for our payment it's like that would be awful um and i and i think that they're going to use bitcoin um you know we've put out research that you know i sort of plenty of plenty of flaws and and sort of ways you could nitpick it but i think directionally demonstrates that at least the uh current model weights you know i don't know if you could really like we call them preferences i think there's a you know legitimate semantic critique of that word um without going into that rabbit hole it's like pretty clear to me that the training data is very biased toward bitcoin and that i just believe the arguments are so stacked in favor of bitcoin and so when you have people that can evaluate or not people when you have intelligence that can evaluate arguments

just on the merits like bitcoin just mogs and so well it's funny because i was talking to corallo about your research paper this this particular research paper and you made a good point like these these models are trained on data and so they're trained on the corpus of of text on the internet and like in a roundabout way it highlights how prescient bitcoiners were because we've been writing content about the machine payable web and the agentic economy using Bitcoin payments for I mean machine payable web goes back 11 years l402 really brought the idea of like hey and this was five years ago like seeing into the future people were working on ai the the concept of an ai agent at the time was a bit obscure to most but there was enough people in our industry like no this

is like it seems like we follow the trend this is going to happen they're going to need a wallet like bitcoin's native digital currency point being is like it highlights the fact that for lack of a better semantic term the models today are showing to have that preference as proof that bitcoiners within like predicting this and writing about it for years hence why right the model knows to say oh yeah bitcoin solves this problem like we've been forecasting yeah today for for over a decade right and there's like a reflexivity to that where like kind of like bitcoin itself right it's this you know sort of meme it into existence um and like you know and yeah you can sort of have that causal debate of like well do the ai agents prefer bitcoin or did the bitcoiners just you know stack

the training data in their favor what difference does it make not even intentionally though it's just like the altus brains have been like oh wait we're gonna get to this digital future ai agents like we need to architect our system so that bitcoin right they're able to spend bitcoin and like we didn't do it thinking oh yeah this is gonna get injected into the training model and they'll pick bitcoin i was just like seeing the future and articulating it clearly yeah um so Yeah. No, I'm, I'm excited to do more research on that. Um, and yeah, it's, uh, it was, it was really, it was really, I think another interesting thing from that was, um, the fact that like a handful of the models in our experiments actually chose to create their own currency based on

compute as like a currency, which I thought was just fascinating. Um, and I feel like that's a very, you know, it sort of demonstrates again that like, you know, when you don't have these sort of biased priors that sort of drag you down and cloud your thinking, it's like, you know, you, you, you have this, this clarity of thought, um, and, and creativity. Um, and so, yeah, I think the, I mean, I just, it's so hard to know what the future is going to, is going to look like, but it seems, it seems kind of intuitive that, um, a lot of, a lot of economic activity is going to just be made and monetary choices are going to be made just independently of human intervention. Um, and yeah, I'm just more bullish on the, on the agents grokking Bitcoin than I am

on, you know, at least a lot of, of people. I clanker has a Bitcoin wallet. He's, he's using it yeah he knows how to use it that's uh it is crazy like how do you think these messages i mean you would know better than i you are again in the swamp how are these messages being received by the uh the asymmetric points of leverage that you're trying to to reach on the hell i don't think the ai agents and like bitcoin conversation is really happening well just broadly everything we've talked about oh it's really spiky like there are some people and groups who are like really smart on this stuff and then there are some people who are just like you know um what's the old like is it like oliver wendell holmes or sort of the famous saying of like uh you know you

you can't you know convince someone whose salary depends on being you know not you know it depends on, you know, believing the opposite thing. Like I think, um, the, I mean, we, we have briefed people at the national security council throughout the intelligence community, throughout the, um, the, the, the military and the, the department of war. Um, and I think demand for our work and our, our thought leadership is really hockey sticking in those constituencies. Um, you know i ran into elizabeth warren on the street the other day outside of pub key she talked to her i did yeah i uh i think i broke her brain a little bit because i was like i was like hey senator warren like i'm a huge fan um you know i actually phone

banked for you like way back in the day which is true um like i used to be a like you know pretty ardent democrat um like when i was a teenager and uh she was like oh that's so sweet like what a nice young man you are like you know let's let's you know she kind of pivoted toward me to um you know kind of in your body language is indicating like oh you know i'm gonna sit down and you know stand up and have a conversation with you for a few minutes um because i was being you know sort of cordial and nice and you know whatever and so you know we start talking and you know uh she's like so what do you do and i'm like well senator warren i'm the president of the bitcoin policy institute and she just like i think her brain just kind of like like i think she probably thought

that i was doing one of those like um what is it like the street like sort of project veritas yeah exactly like you know because i just like don't think her mental model of reality like allows for someone to have phone banked for her and be into bitcoin and so she just like ran away basically she was like well thanks for whatever and then just like bolted um so like yeah i don't think i'm going to convince like elizabeth warren that um that bitcoin is good for america but that's sort of my whole argument right is that like i i think if you can convince the national security policy makers that bitcoin is in america's interests then you sort of are going up one fractal in like the power hierarchy like imagine a world where you know a democrat is elected in

2028 and let's just say democrats control the house the senate and the executive uh yeah they're definitely going to go after crypto um at minimum they're going to go after um like the trump family and their business dealings in crypto which they're going to go after the the meme coins or whatever i think it's terrible strategic mistake on there me too yeah i think very very you know i agree um but what happens when you know they say okay and and we want to we want to impose a you know uh an excise tax on on bitcoin you know we're going to pass a law to create a special marginal tax rate for bitcoiners that is going to fund the you know the ubi and whatever um and then you know you get a knock on the door from some spook you know at the cia or

whatever and they're like yeah you can't touch bitcoin like the national security policy making community runs the country on issues of, of substance. Like it's just true. Um, and, and so like this idea that like, Oh, we need to convince all the Democrats to support Bitcoin. I think that's like laudable and noble. And there are really great reasons why somebody from a progressive, you know, worldview might, might find value in Bitcoin, but I don't think the winning strategy is to convince people who just can't be convinced to not go after Bitcoin. The strategy is to convince the people who they report to, who they cannot defy. And I think that if we create enduring consensus among the military and the national security community that Bitcoin is

critical infrastructure for america um and they're not going to let you know partisan politics undermine our great power competition there's not oh you got the marty jones coming out it is like because it's like i'm seeing i'm like picking up what you're putting down but also the other side of me it's like i don't want to i don't want to dance with these people yeah i don't like the deep states influence on neither do i united states uh in public policy no none of this is none of what i'm saying is normative like i am not endorsing this i don't i'm not i'm not really weighing in uh on whether this ought to be the case i'm just saying it is the case yeah yeah no i agree well and like we'll pulling on this right a little bit more i think uh we should all

look at what's happening between the department of war and anthropic right now and try to figure out how to avoid that with bitcoin because it seems very nice thing is we don't have ceos uh there's never going to be a leaked slack message from the ceo of bitcoin complaining about complaining about things no but i do think i mean if the the department of war specifically views a piece of technology critical they will whether they recognize they can or cannot try whether they realize they can or cannot actually ultimately do it they will try via some mechanism or another to right force particular actions who knows that's within bitcoin would that be protocol development would that be sure 6102 what would it be like yeah i

think that's i think that's fair um i think that the you know the argument that i sort of make when this stuff comes up like for example there's there's been like sort of this at least earlier in the trump administration there was kind of these whispers and mumblings around um you know america needs to dominate hash rate like we need to have the majority of hash rate in america and you know the argument that i would always make to people is like well that's exactly how you sort of kill the golden goose like bitcoin only works if it is credibly neutral if if every single bitcoin transaction can just be ofac sanctioned or whatever then it's over it's like no you actually the game theory is not that you want to control the bitcoin network the game

theory is that you need to prevent anyone else from controlling the Bitcoin network. Like you want enough hash rate that you can make sure no one else can get 51%. But if you get 51%, it's a total Pyrrhic victory. You know, you're, you're, you're now the king of something that is, you know, like worthless basically. Um, and so I think with Anthropic, you know, there is, it was such a fundamental question of like control because someone is controlling, right it's either dario or the government and so it's this very kind of like zero sum like who are we going to give power to um and bitcoin is not really easily controllable um and so it's like there's less of a joystick to sort of fight over um and i and i do think

that uh i'm not saying that bitcoin is sort of immune from uh you know efforts to control it by like the deep state or whatever um in fact i think that's you know it's kind of exactly what satoshi said when when gavin was like hey i'm going to the cia and satoshi just you know bounces it's like i'm out i'm out see ya um i think that was way more true when bitcoin was like you know a few dollars um a few years old and a few years old uh the argument that it needed to you know stay under the radar as long as possible like the whole you know sort of wiki leaks thing of like this is actually like satoshi being like you know all the bitcoiners at the time it was so sick you know wiki leaks is using bitcoin and satoshi's like guys it's a bad idea like i don't kick the

horn i don't think we want our first kind of debut on the scene to be you know to be this it's too nascent it's it's too vulnerable um and i think my response i was talking to somebody at the sni dinner about this last night and shout out to satoshi nakamoto institute shout out the original bitcoin think tank um you know we'll forever be in their shadow uh what can you do but uh yeah shout out shout out pierre and and goldstein and the crew um you know somebody was asking like well you know don't you don't you think there's some risk in kind of calling attention to you know to bitcoin among these people and it's like okay well you're very bullish on bitcoin right like you you think that bitcoin is going to flip gold yeah you said that earlier in this

not you but this guy i was talking to he said that early in this conversation it's like yeah i do so i think bitcoin's going to a million dollars or whatever like okay so you think the you think that the fucking u.s intelligence agencies are going to be unaware of a 30 trillion 30 trillion dollar asset and technology network like i think there's a certain point where uh the conversation about crypto writ large, that ship has just sailed. Um, and people in these positions of power are being tasked with thinking about what is our strategy on, on Bitcoin going to be. Um, and I can't guarantee that they're going to come to the right conclusions or do the right things, but it seems obvious to me that making an attempt to inform these people of the arguments for

Bitcoin, um, and trying to kind of participate, uh, is probably is, you know, is, is, is, is on balance better than just, you know, not engaging at all. Um, you know, I, but I mean, look, I do think that there are serious risks that come from this, this next chapter of, of, of Bitcoin. Um, what do you think well um i think i think that the i think there are a couple of things that i see as risks um one is sort of just related to custody um i am very worried one on a sort of technical level that bitcoin just at least on you know the l1 just doesn't scale um to eight billion people um and and there's sort of this weird like you know meme it into existence where the belief that bitcoin does you know even though

we know it does with with you know uh with layer twos and stuff um the sort of belief that bitcoin doesn't scale causes people to you know maybe not adopt it let me say i'm kind of rambling to be more clear i think you still get youtube comments like why are you using bitcoin you can only do transactions whatever but i do think that whether it's misinformation or just preferences of the individual like the revealed preference of the last five years of bitcoin adoption is that people don't want to self-custody um it's just like i hate to say it but it's just true and it makes perfect sense that like the early adopters of bitcoin who are these you know really deep thinkers who are thinking about kind of fundamental questions like how do i preserve

my autonomy in an increasingly digital world where, uh, it's, it's easier and easier for the state to, um, monitor and, and, and alter my behavior. It makes perfect sense that these guys are like, yeah, I need Bitcoin in, in cold storage that nobody can fuck with. But the current cohort of adopters are not drawn to Bitcoin for necessarily those philosophical reasons that's fine like for this to work you know bitcoin's gonna have to just appeal to you know everyone on the planet doing black rock marketing emails saying all right pour some over pour some in and so i think that's something i i worry about a bit um of like how do the incentives around hard forks and stuff change when you have a couple of custodians that are

controlling like you know a ton of private keys to millions of bitcoin yeah um it's like i think the etfs are kind of a double-edged sword and it's there's no debate like you know it's like it's just gonna happen um you can't i mean sort of like king lear like yelling at the storm this is weird uh this is weird like conflicting emotion because it's the most popular etf launch of all time but it's also leading to it's also the most popular etf launch of all time and like yeah and like that is that is like um you know i just that that gives me some pause um but i don't know i mean like i think i think bitcoin is is not without uh tail risk um and i and i think concentration of of of custody of private keys and utxos rather is you know troubling um we need

to get but we need to get back to like not your keys not your coins don't trust verify i think we've lost that in the broader bitcoin community i mean i was gonna say put my hand up but like we literally say it every week on rhr maybe we could be more ardent about i don't think we could be more ardent but you're kind of you're sort of fundamentally levered to a philosophy that a lot of people explicitly reject which is uh you know you should take responsibility like you know it's I don't think the limiting fact, it's just, I think the limiting factor is the number of people who, uh, want to be sovereign, um, or who are willing to take, you know, who are willing to sort of, uh, pay in terms of friction and, you know, all this stuff, uh, to get people who sort

of price sovereignty correctly. Um, and, and yeah, um, like you, you can, you can yell at someone until you're blue in the face that they're better off if they, you know, self-custody there their bitcoin and they're gonna be like yeah i don't know i'd rather just larry fink hold on to it for me you know i i don't i don't want that level of responsibility don't care don't care i'm gonna let blackrock you know hold my money like what are you talking you want me to write stuff down on a bunch of washers and bury it in my back you're like what do you think you are and so yeah i think you're right like i do think the the marketing around self-custody you know can be improved and you know talking about like you know the sni dinner and stuff and like these these

early bitcoiners who were really laying the kind of mimetic framework for how we would talk about bitcoin and how people would come to understand bitcoin um i do think that the if the self-custody argument is limited to uh well you're not truly sovereign unless you self-custody then your tam of self-custody is not eight billion people the tam of self-custody is the set of eight billion people who value sovereignty um or or you know who who you know who actually not just say they value it but are are willing to make trade-offs in exchange for sovereignty um and i'm bearish on that as like a tam um so i don't know what the argument is to persuade people to self-custody i don't know whether it's you know you know just ux improvements and stuff i will say like bitkey

for example i feel like was a nice step forward in that um like i i had several normie friends uh you know i got bit keys for them and uh you know they they all sort of were people that were like sort of turned off by the traditional hardware wallet and like putting the seed phrase somewhere um and so i think bit key is kind of a step in the right direction like i think a grandma could you know could set up a bit key but i i don't know easy to use hard to lose yeah that's the uh we maybe instead of making a sovereign it's cool you can go back to like shut up nerd it's like flip it like no you're not cool if you yeah oh you have you have you have the you have oh you're a boomer yeah you're a boomer interesting yeah yeah curious yeah yeah but

yeah i think that is something that that concerns me um about the about the future of of bitcoin um i also think that you know something i think about a lot as well is like uh there's a there's a world where the effort to make america extremely pro bitcoin backfires and it gets seen as such an american technology that you know it stops being money for enemies in their head like people don't want to adopt bitcoin because they feel like it's strategy could be another example that so it's kind of this delicate balance of like you know you want america to embrace bitcoin maybe a little more than it has but you don't want it to you know embrace it so much that it uh you know it hurts bitcoin's brand as something that is is sort of you know uncorrelated to the sovereign and and

truly neutral um yeah so we need more we need hey citizens outside the united not united citizens of world outside the united states you need to step up your game begin lobbying your governments harder yeah you know they need if they need a bpi china or like a bpi whatever we won't get us probably we'll probably we'll get a bpi china probably we'll get a bpi china it's honestly it's good for like brazil it's a much larger population much harder argument for them to make um yeah but but like sort of the the meme aside like totally um like i and i and i've been sort of encouraged by this like we we started bpi i mean i remember me i met you in 2021 in austin actually uh like a some you know like sort of cocktail hour like party thing on the rooftop no that was that

nashville or austin i think it was nashville maybe it was nashville nashville smoking cigarettes on a roof in nashville yeah and like i feel like the sort of bitcoin i was driving down i remember i made a pit stop in nashville yeah and that's when we met you hadn't you've you've aged a lot sir yeah is this job aging and you had such a baby face you were so full of life not that you're not full of life but no it's it's definitely i'm kidding i'm kidding but um yeah like i remember talking to so many people about this idea for bpi and um you know the i would say like the general like the two common responses that i got were um sort of like you know big bro like sort of like oh yeah okay like have have fun doing that like that's just sort of silly whatever uh and then

like people that were like this is fucking retarded and like i think i was the latter i think you were definitely the latter at first like this is just fucking stupid i was like don't engage don't engage whatever and you know i i think there's you could look at like the the past you know whatever two or three years and say oh it's been a failure and you know nothing's come of this and whatever it's like if i re-round the clock to 2021 and said you know uh in in four years there's going to be an executive order from the president of the united states to establish a strategic bitcoin reserve there's going to be a bill that gets you know 10 of the u.s senate behind it to buy a five percent of the supply you know like that would be unbelievable

you would be like oh wow like this is not just someone who has like sort of a a bad idea this is like a fundamentally delusional person like this is someone who is sort of in like a schizophrenic you know having a schizophrenic episode um and so i feel like you know it's just you get so used to the new normal so quickly um that immediately the goalpost shifts to well all we got was an executive order and a bill and it didn't pass and it's like okay yeah i mean you can you can have that view but you would have literally you would have bet your life savings that i was wrong if i had told you four years ago that this is you know that if i just described the current moment to you you you would bet the farm that i was that was incorrect yeah i was convinced

we were all going to the gulags back then that's what adele always said you know it's like you know man just just we were going to the gulags um you know and and and now i think we have sort of demonstrated that you don't need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to lobby the government, that if you do make an earnest attempt to meet people where they are and talk to them about Bitcoin in language that they are accustomed to, that is cognizant of their objectives and priorities and their values, that you can really make a big impact. And, you know, I've started to see over the last year, like all these other Bitcoin policy organizations like spring up all over the world and you know a bunch of them are like bitcoin policy institute whatever

country okay it was one of the well i think they're like a bitcoin policy uk there's a bunch of bpis and uh like i have two minds about this because on the one hand i'm like ah we have to defend our trademark unfortunately so like please don't call yourself that because you're not affiliated with us but you know that that aside like it's really awesome it's really inspiring like i think a lot of people bitcoiners all over the world have seen what we were doing in america and in done exactly what you were just calling on the listeners to do and like you know create you know organizations and um advocacy groups and and you know uh uh grassroots efforts uh like i think there is uh i think we kind of helped kick off this trend of bitcoiners realizing that

they can have influence and agency and you know it's not that the state is just this thing that does stuff to you and you sit there and and just you know take it thank you sir may have another yeah that you could exactly like that you can actually you know engage in the political process um uh and so yeah i i hope more people around the world do what bpi is doing with their respective governments yeah um and say hey are we really gonna let america win and and you know they've been dominating us forever like are we really gonna let them win the bitcoin race um Like, I think that is a great bulwark as well against, you know, the risk I mentioned of, you know, Bitcoin getting branded globally as like too American. And so, um, yeah, I, I'm, I'm bullish on Bitcoin advocacy around the world. Um, and I'm, I'm

bullish on the people who have, uh, decided to kind of make that a, like, you know, kind of how they spend their time. Um, cause it's super thankless and it's miserable. Um, like in many ways um and you know even a lot of the i'm sure like a lot of those people are facing the same kind of you know uh kind of derision and condescension that i faced from you know like people in the bitcoin community from you and it was just like i remember being like stop this is good he's like dude just fucking have a cigarette man like it's you know we're going to just enjoy a time before we go to prison um yeah and so like i i i think that if there are like international bitcoiners listening to this pod um and you know yeah uh that you should try to you know

get involved with with the other people in your in you know in your meetup or whatever the other bitcoiners that you that you you know that you know in your country and and you know kind of give this a college try um so yeah well i mean again we're talking about yes and i dinner last night and then the conversation of the the official speeches were about creating and then preserving the canon of bitcoin and the the sort of emergence of this mimetic vernacular that has emerged strongly via the shatoshi nakamoto institute but broke containment into the twitter sphere and like we were in like heavy meme warfare for uh i would say better part of eight years between 2015 and 2023 i think it's the meme warfare has died down

a bit um but i think bpi what you guys are doing is sort of a sort of bottling of like that memetic power and like okay we need to focus this energy towards yeah it's literally the same thing it's just like we're you know it's just like a different sort of fractal of of meme warfare basically and it's like okay cool um you know uh well and i bring it up too because i think it's i think this week is a great example of um you're fighting for bitcoin policy on the hill and i think this week was a great example for me like a reminder like hey these politicians like they are worried about their next election and they will respond or in the case of this week a politician has responded we forced coinbase to respond uh essentially like the people who made a fuss about this de minimis

thing it's coinbase made a response like we said earlier it seems like you and koi base will be participating in a round round table discussion but the point i'm bringing all this up is like how can observers like myself on the outside looking in help your cause like how how strong is the memetics of participating in discussion outside the hill on the internet well i think it's really strong on the de minimis piece um like i think there are basically two arguments that you could make against a de minimis exemption for bitcoin uh one is that it's a trojan horse for tax evasion um which i think is the argument that some people are making i think it's a very bad argument um and it won't win um i think the other argument that people you know will make and

are making about de minimis is that it's just a sort of solution in search of a problem and that it's not important that people don't use bitcoin as money um and so it's interesting because like I think what's going to happen is like the principal argument against this policy is going to be that people don't care about it, but why should the government spend time and effort and all this stuff, uh, you know, for,

for something that people are not using as money. And so it's weird. It's like, okay, if, if Joe Schmo from Arkansas calls their Congressman and says, you know, here's what I think about the war in Iran.

It's like, all right, man, like, thanks for your call. Like, have a good day. Um,

But, but this is an interesting thing where like the very act of that phone call or email to your elected official is actually like in and of itself, the evidence against what I think the main argument against de minimis will be. And it's, you know, it's one of those rare moments where I actually think there's a ton of value in reaching out to your elected official because all they're trying to do is understand just ground truth. like, you know, is this real? Are people really using Bitcoin as money? Or is this just like BPI and Bitcoin organizations, you know, telling us that people are using Bitcoin as money? And so I think, you know, if you were a business owner, if you're using Square and you've turned on Bitcoin payments, like just if you are someone who uses either receives Bitcoin as payment for, you know, your goods, your services, or you're someone who pays in bitcoin for your goods and services just emailing your representative and saying that i think is

actually going to be meaningful um and janessa lopez who runs bitcoin policy for block uh tweeted out again yesterday a a link that they have it's bitcoin is money or btc is btc is money btc is money dot xyz and they just have like a one-click tool that makes this you know you could probably have your your claw uh just do this for you um you know it's just like a drop down you put your zip code it tells you kind of who your your elected officials are and it just auto generates um you know a message that you can send them hey can you go to btc is money dot xyz um and and i want you to send an email using your your uh agent mail dot two account on my behalf my local representative please thank you all right he's on it all right

he's on it incredible um so i think that's one thing uh i will say uh i think donating to the bitcoin policy institute um is you know important we like we sort of exist only because of the generosity of of bitcoiners um and we've had you know a lot of people in the community step up and donate in a big way um but you know i think something about non-profits that people don't understand is they cannot just be funded by you know very wealthy people like the irs looks at your revenue and you have to meet what's called a public support test. A certain percentage of your revenue as an organization needs to be from small dollar donors, like people who give $5 a month or, you know, $20 a year or whatever it is. And I think it's, uh, how would I say this?

Like, you might think like, why would I give $5 to, um, you know, uh, uh, to BPI? Like, am i gonna do buy connor a coffee or whatever but every small dollar donor that we get lets a bitcoin whale donate more money to bpi uh and so there is this like inherent multiple on small dollar giving um you know we had a lot of small dollar donors when we did the legal defense fund for samurai wallet um and you know we raised i think a million dollars for for that for their legal defense. Um, and that was pretty much all from small dollar donors. Uh, and we didn't take a dime of that, you know, a hundred percent of those funds went straight to, um, to, uh, to, to, to, uh, Bill and Keone, um, and their, and their lawyers. Uh, and so, yeah, um, we,

we really could use more pleb support. Um, and so, you know, literally if, even if it's like, you know, a couple of sats, like it, it genuinely makes a big difference. And I know that's like the corniest thing to say, because everyone's like, Oh, you know, every dollar counts. And but like, no, there's a very, very, it gets very critical to the future of BPI that we have a large base of people that give no pun intended, a, even a de minimis amount of, of money. Um, and your support of BPI, you know, at, at whatever it is, 20, 50, a hundred dollars a year, uh, it, it raises the ceiling on how much money uh bpi can raise from you know larger donors um so that would be my uh my two plugs would be you know talk to your representative about de minimis talk to them

about developer protections uh those emails do get logged and they do matter on the margin um and the question isn't really like is it is how effective is it it's how effective is it relative to the 20 seconds it takes you to tell Claude to do it. Like, you know, the, the, it's a very asymmetric payoff, uh, you know, given how easy it is to, to do this stuff, um, and donating to BPI. Um, if you, if you support our mission and you want to see kind of us succeed and do more of what we do, um, then yeah, uh, I think we are sort of an end of one organization. Um, and then we are the only sort of real bitcoiners i think in this process on on capitol hill and in uh dc so yeah i just gave it my zip code so it's two minutes away from sending my my email incredible

on behalf of me um yeah i think it's very important work and you're maybe as we i was highly skeptical when we were smoking cigarettes on that roof in nashville i was like no it was here in austin actually no i remember we were here but uh i remember being like no and why engage flying gauge and again going back it is still conflicting to this day like i and marty jones i don't like the intelligence agencies i think they're a false flag and yeah i think they're mk ultra and i think they're propagandizing us but we live in an age of main warfare you've got to engage yeah we are in an info war and we got to get the better info and i think and again i i think again focusing that the medic energy that existed on bitcoin twitter from

2015 to 2022 2023 sort of bawling that energy and like goku fucking domain towards the yeah intelligence agencies is at the very least like they they can't say that they don't have good arguments and i to your point the truth is on our side like it's very convincing yeah once you understand this that's the other thing too is it's just like i don't know like what like yeah it's just a fact like it is just true that america will be better off if you know it allows bitcoin to flourish here well actually i meant to bring this up earlier it was a perfect time to bring it up like america is better off because bitcoin already like many could argue like bitcoiners the industry the country are better off despite a massive uphill battle we've had to fight uh we had to

fight up until um 2020 the end of 2024. like we were under attack yeah multiple times and despite all that despite the relative um uncertainty that that bloomed over the industry for so many years like people persisted and knew like hey the the risk is worth it and we're going to persist and we're going to keep accumulating bitcoin we're going to keep building companies and um i think that is a testament as well like we've done so much despite imagine what we can do if we have tailwinds instead of headwinds yeah exactly um i don't know i think i think another you know to your point of like the duality of like you know the the yeah i think i am I'm way more sympathetic to, like, I see every now and then, like, you know, sort of criticism

of BPI, um, you know, really just because I think people are philosophically against the idea of doing this. And I am, I think of everyone at BPI, I'm probably the most sympathetic to those arguments. Like, I think everyone else on my team is like, yeah, well, yeah, that's fucking stupid. I, I spent like a lot of time, like, you know, like over a year, just sort of like thinking very deeply about whether this was a good idea or not. Um, and I think where one of the places where I just sort of landed was, you know, the world where I'm wrong is just too depressing for me to accept. Like if it really is the case that we have no agency and there's nothing we can do and

And the, our, our, our lives are solely at the mercy and discretion of, you know, nameless unelected bureaucrats. And, you know, you, you are just a little like goy cattle. It just, you just, you know, there's nothing, you know, you, you, you just sit there and you, you eat the grass and you live in the pod and you, and you go die in Iran when the, when the state tells you to, and there's just nothing you can do. Like, I don't know. That's an incredibly like low agency view of the world.

and i would that's just too depressing like i just have to i just have to choose to believe that the state is is not a monolith like we anthropomorphize the state into like this gargantuan like b it's just people yeah it's literally just human beings and human beings are just fundamentally persuadable they are you know they're not monolithic like it's they're just people and in the same way that you know we got the entire world to believe in magic internet money and you know we we memed this like we as in the bitcoin community uh memed a new form of money like bitcoin itself is one of the most high agency things that has ever happened ever like the sheer audacity of a bunch of nerds on a talk forum and on a mailing list before that to say uh yeah this

thing money that is the exclusive purview of nation states uh actually like we can draw little like wizard memes and just like you know orange coin good and you know whatever like we think the audacity to to believe that you can you know meme a new form of money and value into existence um is so inspiring like that's like why i got obsessed with bitcoin like i got completely one-shotted by that um it's fun and i and i you know my my initial kind of coming into bitcoin was was like wow this is overwhelmingly likely to fail um but what if it doesn't and i feel like that was the attitude of a lot of early bitcoiners like when i went down the rabbit hole and started reading all of these you know this like sort of pages and pages of of you know discussion on

the talk forum and and on the mailing list um you know it was so cool because it felt like the smartest people in the world were kind of here talking about this and the attitude was very intellectually humble like it was you know this this will probably fail it will probably go to the gulag or you know this will blow up or get shut down or whatever every once in a while and how funny we're like but if it does work but if it does work how cool would that be and so i think there's been this weird pivot in the kind of median attitude of bitcoiners kind of in some ways away from that spirit of like you can just do things and agency to this weird kind of sort of politics of inevitability of bitcoin is inevitable and we're going to win no matter what

and also uh the state hating us and hating bitcoin is inevitable and there's nothing we can do about that and i think both of those are just wildly retarded and like dangerous like stupid fucking views and and whether they're and honestly they're just depressing views and to me that is like the antithesis of bitcoin like bitcoin is fundamentally a project of like human agency and an ability to say yeah we can opt out like we can do something different we can change the course of history and change the timeline um and that's kind of you know in a in a less cool way uh but like sort of same mental model that's how i feel about uh this type of work is like i don't know my options are what sit there and and uh and do nothing and just accept that i have no control over my life

that we as americans have no control over how our government treats bitcoin um like i'm sort of again i'm sympathetic to people who view that the world that way but i just feel like those people have to be really unhappy yeah like that just can't to me that is not a sort of mental model of the world that is you know compatible with like being well adjusted black pills it's just so black very incel driven yeah it's just really depressing it's uh no no i'm getting reinvigorated i was actually saying this week has been very reinvigorating for me because the coinbase stuff really pissed me off like i was like are you kidding me are you kidding me coinbase and the fact that the bitcoin community the internet's coinbase reacted the way they did it was like yeah

we're back in like like uh the sni dinner uh pierre was described as somebody back in 2015 on twitter he'd get in a phone booth with like paul krugman and like knife him yeah it felt like that energy that again that medic energy that existed between 2015 and 2022 i mean those people are new to this stuff and they're like like like the magnetic energy of bitcoin twitter in that era was so strong so powerful so much fun it's been lost but this week i feel like a little bit of it came back yeah and the i'm not trying to blow smoke up my own ass be like i did but like i don't know there's like a weird convergence of things happening right now and i i think the idea that we have agency and that we can do these things needs to be to your

point uh engendered across the spectrum of bitcoiners nothing's inevitable no complacency is is a killer and get back in the meme warfare yeah let's get back in let's start having fun again yeah the price is down yeah there's there's wars popping off yes there's a private credit bubble but this is why bitcoin exists i mean it's going to help us get away from this we need to start having fun again yeah don't be a chud don't don't don't take the black pill like you know you're the you know like there's just no there's no upside in that like your your your maximum upside of the black pill is everything goes to shit and your life sucks and you get thrown in the gulag and you get to be like told you so told you zell bpi was a waste of fucking time

okay man like so your max upside is sweet can you pass can you pass the slot can you pass the rule to me please before we have to go break up the rocks to you know whatever in the chain gang like the max upside of the of the low agency sort of you know black pill take is everything you care about goes away and the world is terrible and you get the sort of unique privilege of being able to say i told you so like what that's terrible i predicted this i called it yeah i said this was right i you know you i told you you know you could you never this was a waste of time okay like what i mean yeah i i just feel like the risk reward on that trade is like abysmal it's just asymmetric to the downside um so yeah uh but no i i am very i'm very sympathetic to like um skepticism

and uh uh you know in critique um but you know um you're like you're in the arena brother brother i'm in the arena the man in the arena but i mean like okay that actually is like so fair though um like i mean not not to like just you know whatever but like i mean it's true like if you don't like what i'm saying to the government about bitcoin go go say something else you know like um i don't have some monopoly there's bitcoin is decentralized there's no you know i'm not i'm not getting a rake on the the political you know on the on the policy budget of the bitcoin corporation. Um, you know, like, you know, uh, and so, yeah, uh, I, I think that, I think this is just so worth a college try. Um, and I'm totally willing to concede that there are possible

states of the future where, uh, you know, this all ages like milk and, uh, you know, everything i've tried to do uh fails um i'm totally fine with that yeah like you know that's that is a sort of necessary condition of doing anything meaningful and worthwhile and worthwhile yeah um so i i'm you know very cognizant of the the fact that this could just be a waste of time um and you know uh yeah but like i i don't know i i have to believe that as you know as easy as it is to take the black pill and as like depressing as the world can be um the moment that you just decide that you have no agency you you meme that into reality like everything you do is memeing something into reality and if you decide the moment you you decide you have no agency over

the future that you have sealed your fate and you do have no agency over your future um i don't know that's kind of how I resolve like to your point of you're like the back and forth of like oh I think this is cool I get it I'm also like ah is it cool is it the right thing like to me it's just that that's sort of the logic that I kind of came down to is like you just you know the the the the upside of of trying is uh really large and the uh the the downside of of of it's just the there's just it's not it's not an equal distribution like uh the the the max downside of trying and failing is the same downside as not trying at all and so you know with bpi and the work that that you're doing and that so many people in bitcoin are doing um we're at least you

know uh uh given into college right yeah trying to make a better place yeah like in sort of yeah exactly like sort of increasing the probability that we get to the good timeline yeah we're gonna get there we're gonna win i know you gotta get going yeah so this has been an incredible pleasure i believe it's been the first time in person so much better yeah it is and it's so much better maybe i'll start honey i'm gonna start traveling do all in person i'm gonna become the next peter mccormick don't worry we're gonna buy a soccer team though um yeah uh no this is i think the work that you're doing is incredibly important i think um i think everybody like i really like the sort of last train of thought we ended on there which is like hey do you want to live in

a world where we're we're eating our gruel saying i told you so or do you want to live in the world where it's like wow we fucking did it boys we fucking did it yeah bitcoin is uh the standard monetary reserve asset of the world we're using it as payments the politicians have bent the knee and the politics of inevitability is a psyop to make you complacent yes like everyone who tells you that you have no agency in power is psyoping you into precisely that outcome and yeah we're gonna win we're gonna win go go go get your five dollar monthly donation bpi set up freaks peace and love 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

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