TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #768: DAC8 Is A Kidnapping Factory with Francis Pouliot

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

Marty sits down with Francis Pouliot to discuss Bull Bitcoin's legal fight against DAC8 and MiCA in France, the dangers of FATF-driven surveillance regimes, and the Bitcoin privacy tools like PayJoin and Silent Payments that builders are deploying to resist global KYC overreach. Francis on X: https://x.com/francispouliot\_ Bull Bitcoin: https://www.bullbitcoin.com/ Stop DAC8: https://dac8.com/en/ Find the Home Mining Playbook here: https://www.tftc.io/home-mining-energy-playbook 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/yHGkvYxdqT Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bitkey.world/ Aven https://www.aven.com/bitcoin CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Francis, I'm ashamed to admit it, but it's been seven years since you've been on the show. Welcome back. It has been seven years. Wow. Yeah. The last time was in San Francisco, I believe, at the Bitcoin 2019 conference. The first ever Bitcoin conference. I found out I was

expecting my first child that day, right after we recorded. So I remember that day vividly. nice uh but we progress children have been born raised a little bit since then uh bitcoin has persisted and things are going on we got the bulls on parade in france we're going to start off with what you and your team at bull bitcoin have been doing in terms of trying to protect your users right to privacy particularly in france where they've implemented this DAC-8, D-A-C-8, which stems from MICA, I believe, which is very invasive to privacy. And obviously, France is a hotbed for $5 wrench attacks. You guys are on the ground there, obviously serving customers and are having to deal with

this up close and personal. So I think we should just start there. What's going on with DAC-8, MICA, MICA, however you pronounce it, and how oppressive are these governments get in terms of uh trying to collect user data yeah so decade is um a very interesting piece of legislation uh because very few people know about it and it is in my opinion the single biggest threat to both the cypherpunk principles of bitcoin and to the lives of our of our users So the backstory of Decade is that in 2021, kind of like at the peak of the COVID tyranny, the G20 countries had a meeting, probably, I don't know, in Davos or something, you know, one of those globalist hangouts. And they decided during that meeting that Bitcoin posed an existential threat to the ability of governments to finance themselves.

And when you look at kind of like the minutes and, you know, announcements of that meeting, they basically decided that tax evaders are going to bankrupt the state with Bitcoin and that they needed to do something about that. So the G20 mandated the OECD, another globalist organization, to come up with a solution to that problem. And that solution is something that they came up with, which is called CARF, the Crypto Asset Reporting Framework. And CARF is basically a program or methodology of collecting all of crypto users' transaction information and identity into a big database and allowing countries to share that database with each other. And in the EU, and as soon as the OECD came up with CARF, like 70 countries on Earth pledged to implement CARF. So this is a purely technocratic, globalist thing. But then the national governments need to implement this in their national legislation. And in Europe, they did that at the European Union level with something called DAC-8, Directive 8, or also called DAC-8.

So what DACA does is basically turn every single crypto company into a data collection, aggregation and transmission platform where every year you have to report all of your users kind of like financial transactions, like their volumes and their cost of acquisition and their identity, their home address, everything about them to your national government. But what's even worse than that is that DACAID allows EU countries to share that data with each other. So, for example, we can build Bitcoin, we're incorporated in France. So we share this data with the French tax authority. But then the French tax authority shares this data with the German tax authority, with the Dutch tax authority or whatever. So what it in effect creates is a big fucking list of crypto users and how much Bitcoin they're buying and how much Bitcoin they're selling every single year. And that is what I would say a very big rupture compared to the system of KYC that we've had before. And I'm going to go off on a little tangent here, but, you know, we've already had a globalist institution force national governments essentially to implement these kind of like KYC regimes.

And that is the FETF, the Financial Action Task Force. So the Financial Action Task Force was the, and I believe that is the IMF that is like the head of the FETF. Might be the BIS, I think. it's it's it's it's you know it's it's part of the club like the bis imf the ocd the g20 it's always coming from somewhere in you know in europe um and basically like so the fatf came up with this thing called the travel rule and they basically came up with these guidelines and what they essentially told every country in the world is like you have to implement kyc aml on crypto in your country otherwise you will be considered to be a bad actor and you're going

to get on what's called the AMF's gray list or black list. If you are on the FETF's black list or gray list, then things don't go really well for you. There's a lot of penalties for a country not to implement FETF rules. They're not obliged to, but they're flagged as a, let's say, non-cooperative state. So it's not the first time that this has happened. But the thing about KYC AML, the way that it's been going on like today, it's not as bad as people think. Okay, I'll give you an example um most people think that every time you buy bitcoin on an exchange it's like automatically reported to their government and that's not true um the point of kyc aml that we have now is basically um okay if there is something suspicious like if one of your clients looks like

he's financing terrorism because he's on a sanctions list or something or if uh it looks like he's you know laundering money you you report certain types of behavior that are like suspicious and um you you keep the data internally so that if there is a police investigation and they come to you with your with a warrant then you have the data on hand so and that's not something that happens a lot you know i mean like it's not it's not like a frequent thing like we don't get the fbi knocking on our door asking for data i'm something like i don't know bull bitcoin we get that like be once a year or something so so yeah kyc is is is bad but it's not like we're streaming the data to the government in real time um the vast majority like 99 of clients like their data

just never leaves bull bitcoin what dac a does is a complete shift because now the government requires us to send all of the data regardless of whether you're like a pleb or you're a whale with whether you're sketchy or not sketchy all of the data gets sent to the government and um that's a massive problem of course uh and it's a big shift it's it's a big change uh if you thought that kyc was bad before now it's it's way worse and there's multiple reasons why that would be a problem well first of all just philosophically speaking um you can have a problem with the government just creating a list of people and their assets just generally um because who knows what they're going to do with that information um so just philosophically

speaking that's just bad but where it becomes really bad is in places like france where we are based where the cyber security of the government is so awful that you have and i'm not kidding like something like a million user records that are leaked every single month every four or five weeks you have a top tier institution whether that's the tax authority or government agency or a big insurance firm um where all of the user records are leaked and not only are they leaked but in france specifically there has been convicted uh civil servants that were selling you crypto users information to criminal gangs so that these gangs could identify victims to kidnap, torture, and extort for crypto ransoms. So this is not a conspiracy theory. Those people

have been caught and convicted recently. So you have government bureaucrats which are collecting data on crypto users and selling that data to the mafia. And what is the result? The result is France, where again, we are based, bull bitcoin in Europe, is the crypto kidnapping capital of the world uh this year in 2026 we expect about 150 to 180 uh crypto users to be kidnapped um last year was like something like 80 or something like that if you look at just like the q q1 2026 kidnapping data it's something like once every two and a half days on average a crypto user gets kidnapped and uh i know personally i want to say maybe four or five people who had had either their daughter kidnapped there's there's a there's a famous person that i know whose daughter got

kidnapped their wife got kidnapped they got kidnapped um there's you know very famous story so essentially what we as an exchange have been forced to become is an agent of the eu's mass surveillance uh program and if this database this like mega global honeypot database of all crypto users in europe is leaked um it will be catastrophic to to the extent where i'm very confident that like someone is likely to die as a result someone is definitely going to get kidnapped as a result but people will will be murdered as a result um so running an exchange you have to do some kind of compromise um when you're a fiat regulated entity for multiple reasons um you know bull bitcoin does have kyc we're not a no kyc business

and the reason why we do this compromise is because for bitcoin to succeed in its mission to eliminate fiat currency, you need Bitcoin to be a highly saleable and highly liquid asset. You need Bitcoin to be used for commodities trading, by merchants, for payroll, for remittance. You need millions and millions of Bitcoin holders to use Bitcoin on a day-to-day basis.

And in order for that to happen, you need brokers, you need trading order book platforms. You can't achieve like a global revolution on just a purely peer-to-peer exchange basis and meet someone in a parking lot with a bunch of cash. You need exchanges to achieve this level of liquidity and sellability and market penetration. So we've done compromises by implementing KYC,

but we believe that this new regime, the decade regime, is a line that we cannot cross. there's a certain there's a certain level at which we have to say no we have to uh make a stand and we have to refuse to see any more territory if we don't refuse this global database of big corners um then the message that we're sending to these globalists is is very clear uh is that they can do anything right like what's what's worse than collecting what's worse than put it been putting all the corners on a list and having all of their wealth like in a centralized database which is accessible by 27 bureaucracies across the european union i mean it's it's pretty

much as bad as it can get in terms of privacy um so we've decided to fight back the i mean not only is it incredibly invasive to privacy but by sharing it with 27 other agencies. I mean, you're just expanding the attack surface dramatically. And especially in the world that we're living in now with AI emerging and being able to attack critical systems rather trivially, it seems like we should be going in the opposite direction, try to collect the least amount of data as possible to protect end users and individuals and their lives and the lives of loved ones at the end of the day. And I think this has obviously been a massive topic on this podcast for the last nine years, which is the encroachment of KYC AML. And I'm very happy

that you and your team are drawing the line and saying, no, we're not ceding any more ground. Uh, what is, what does that look like? How, how big is this fight going to get? Do you think? I think this is going to be possibly one of the biggest, uh, tax law cases, uh, in europe so what we're doing is we are challenging the implementation of decade in france at the french government so we actually did this uh we started doing this in february where we we first did our legal challenge um we decided not to talk about it until um recently because we were in the process of applying for a meek license in europe and we didn't want to you know attract too much I guess

anger from the French state so as soon as we got our Mika license we started to talk about it so we're challenging the national implementation of DAC 8 in France under three principles one of them is proportionality so basically

the concept of creating this pan-European global database of crypto users is completely disproportional to the objective of the French government to evade tax evasions in other words they already have the tools in place to like do all their investigations they don't need like this new set of tool it's not necessary um there's also uh violations of the

eu charter of human rights i hope i'm not my lawyer might be a little pissed at me because i need to be careful about exactly what we're doing but uh we're kind of like breaching the eu constitution and there's a bunch of technical things also that the government did wrong So our objective is to repeal the implementation of DAC 8 in France, which would in effect allow, prevent or exempt bull Bitcoin from complying with this regulation. At the same time, we also have a, let's call it multi-angle legal strategy. So we have two more legal recourse that we're preparing that I can't really talk about. But one of them is about temporarily suspending compliance with this at the same time. And if we lose at the French court level, we're going to take this to the European Court

of Justice, which is kind of like the higher judicial authority in Europe. And there are precedents. And this is not like a frivolous lawsuit that we're doing for marketing. Like we have very good chances of winning this because there's like a lot of legal precedents around this. So if we lose, then we're going to take this to the European Court of Justice. And DAC-8 is a purely European thing, but I also want to remind the viewers that this is actually coming to the United States as well in 2029. I think 2028 or 2029, CARF is coming to the US. CARF is also coming to Canada this year.

And pretty much every kind of like major, you know, developed nation are going to have their own version of DAC-8. So we're starting with France as the first opening salvo of this battle, but soon after, we're probably going to be looking at challenging this constitutionally in Canada, and hopefully someone in the U.S. also does a constitutional challenge in the U.S. although as far as i know bull is the only company in the world it's it's the only legal challenge of carve um anywhere on earth as far as i'm aware of um so our goal is to i mean a legal precedent in europe doesn't create a legal precedent in the u.s or in canada but ideally uh we can motivate people in their own countries to pursue legal action because politically there's nothing to do like nobody gives a fuck right there's no there's no congressman or there's no parliamentarian that really and truly uh does anything about you know

even in the u.s you have like a pro a pro crypto government or something like that but even in the u.s like there hasn't been a challenge of this concept at all so ideally we we motivate people to use the justice system the courts as a method of defending crypto users because yeah sure we can we can use like all sorts of technology you know we can use pay join coin join silent payments you know liquid swaps all that kind of stuff like like we cypherpunks can build the tools um but it doesn't it doesn't stop every leakage like we need to also do this battle on the legal front as well yeah i completely agree and i mean timing is of the essence particularly for decade in france it looks like from my research they wanted you to start tracking beginning on january 1st of this

year and like the first mandatory report will be january 31st 2027 so we have about six seven months here before exchanges are expected to hand over this data yeah and even if we lose the constitution the constitutional the core challenge that we're doing now we we have a pretty good strategy of having a bunch of backup plans so our our goal is to using any and all legal means at disposal to repeal repealing is the number one goal delaying is the second goal and mitigating you know like the the plan c is basically negotiating um to have something that is less harmful but complete completely repealing is is our objective and i think we have pretty good chances yeah i mean i think we should dive into like the philosophy of this like deeper

Because, I mean, I think it's gotten to an insane point globally where exchanges, individuals have just been expected to just completely hand over the data. The government says, hey, new guideline. And the thing about FATF, too, it's like a supranational, unelected, bureaucratic institution that sits under the BIS or IMF. It doesn't matter who it really sits under, but they're technically not implementing laws. they get together the globalists get together they say hey here are the guidelines and like you said earlier if a country doesn't adopt the guidelines financial action task force comes in and says you're on the blacklist and there's just some weird leveraged incentives at play where you have this unelected supernational bureaucratic institution that nobody asked for that is

dictating basically what we can hold private in our lives in the digital age and it's completely insane. And I think France is a good example, but we have plenty of examples across the world of turning exchanges into data honeypots and now extending that further into government agencies, which are notoriously incompetent, turning them into even larger data honeypots and sharing that data amongst each other, which is even more frightening. and it just gets to the core of like what it means to be human like why why do we need to do all this and they opine that it's to protect protect you from uh terrorists and child abusers and things like that and they try to mark you as uh an insensitive uh rube if if you don't go along

with it because you're why why don't you want to do this you support terrorism you support the trafficking of children? It's like, no, of course not. But there's a better way to do these things, which is actual law enforcement. And I think the proof is in the pudding of 50 years of this KYC AML regime, which really stems from the Bank Secrecy Act here in the United States, that these data collection mandates are completely ineffective at stopping crime. And in fact, to your point earlier, actually put more people in harm's way. 100%. You said many great things

I'm going to touch on. The first thing that you mentioned is it's a little reminiscent of COVID, isn't it? So there's this COVID, there was this thing called the WHO, the World Health Organization, and they don't, they can't force countries to do anything.

But then you have all the bureaucrats of every country, which basically get a software update from the WHO. You know what I mean? They get like a mind download from the WHO and then they cook up some kind of call it emergency or public safety concern where the national elected governments don't actually make rules. Right. So in COVID, it was basically like I don't know who he was in in the US, but like the National Public Health Agencies and they start issuing these edicts and the technocracy, the bureaucrats and extending the state's power for something that nobody really voted for. Like nobody voted for COVID lockdowns for vaccine mandates. They were arguably, you know, popular in some places, but it's certainly not something that came from a representative government.

It came from the bureaucracy and the international bureaucracy coordinated itself around stuff like the WHO. And this is exactly what we see in the national legislature. You know, there's no protest on the street from people that want stricter KYC, AML regime that exchanges. you know that just it's not something on people's minds at all it's something that's kind of like it's a slow creep you know you know i mean it's it's like it slowly creeps in through the bureaucracy and um nobody really knows what's going on until until it's too late um carf and decade itself is presented as a purely technical thing um when you look at national debates there's no national debate at there's no like congressional debate about carf you you will not find a

congressional debate where you have like the democrats and republicans arguing back and forth about the merits of carf no no it's it's it's like it's like a technical change to you know the irs rules and it's like a technical change to the french in france it's just a technical amendment uh basically so it kind of like um sneaks under the radar and then that shit just keeps adding up it just keeps adding up over and over and over um and of course you have you know you had the public health stuff you have the crypto stuff of course at the same time we also have regulation of social media under the new public health scare which is hate speech um and all of that is is is coming in um at the same time and these institutions have a lot of leverage

against uh crypto businesses and businesses in general like because you know like if you're a media you need to have a broadcasting license or something like that if you're a crypto exchange you need to have a crypto license so basically they use the threat of removing your ability to operate in a certain country if you don't comply so it's kind of like again it's kind of like with the vaccine mandate it's not like oh well you don't have to get a covid vaccine uh but you can't go to the store uh for us it's basically like oh well you don't have to do that but you know you don't uh we don't have to give you a license either um so it's uh it's let's just let's just say i can i can see the pressure uh accelerating i can see i can see the

the soft tyranny because it's not it's not like tyranny in the same it's not tyranny in the sense of like um a marxist government lighting you up against the wall to shoot you and take your stuff it's a soft it's a bureaucratic tyranny uh the best way to conceive of this is actually with alexander de tocqueville um which is a french author but wrote about the american uh system of government and he has this uh this this this very nice passage uh this book called democracy in america where he specifically uh talks about this and he says um tyranny is not going to look like you think it's going to look like it's not going to be this this military government which is coming into your house and kicking down your door and and chaining you up

it's going to be a ever-growing set of small rules which turn you into basically a docile sheep um and then when you're in the exchange business like i am and you're very regulated i can i can see those as adding up so at some point at some point you just got to say no right at some point we just got to say no and you got to establish in your mind a line that you will not cross and um you know that specific one is the one that we just decided like no we're not crossing this one so freaks this work was brought to you by good friends at bitkey guys things happen things get lost you need to replace your phone life happens and bitkey has been designed with this in mind so if you're looking for the easiest way to secure your bitcoin off the exchange go get a bitkey

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like the coin bases and the stable coin issuers of the world and those who want to issue tokens real world asset tokens are cheerleading it but if you if you read if you read the bill it extends the the pay trade act and some of the words some of the wording is such that you could squint and see how they would try to say like okay open source wallet developers you need to have some k-y-c-a-m-l compliance like when somebody downloads your software you need to we need to know who's downloading a blue wallet or a bull wallet whatever it may be um and everybody's cheering it on and it's i think from the crypto industry outside of bitcoin it's mainly driven by greed the one to be able to go out and uh basically stand up their casinos without having to worry

about the government coming in and and um slamming the book at them for securities law but they're sneaking all these kyc aml provisions into the act and then on top of it expands the patriot act which i wholeheartedly believe should be repealed and it's a it's another example of what you just described the slow creep of of new rules and regulations where it's like hey i just want to be able to go about my life make money save it in the currency that i deem to be suitable for me and my family and that's all I want to do there's it's none of your business I should be able to say make money save it and secure it without the government being in my business and I'm very happy that you are standing up and beginning to beat the drum like no we need

to draw a line in the sand as an industry here because I think particularly from the American perspective um there's not enough people doing that and in fact they're they're cheerleading the the shackles to be to be approved by the government right now i'm not an expert in the clarity act but of course like every person i follow american politics because the canadian politics don't matter at all you know the only politics that really matter is uh is the u.s and maybe the EU, but I haven't seen anything coming from the U.S. that actually makes it easier or better or less restrictive for me or my users. Imagine that Bitcoin was to go to the United States, launch to the U.S.

I haven't seen anything in the Clarity Act that makes my life as a business easier or that makes my users safer. And I think Bitcoin has reached a certain place where you can't just ban Bitcoin, right? You can't just attack Bitcoin head on because there's just too much money involved. There's just too many important and influential people that have exposure to the Bitcoin price. Not that are self-custody and that are cypherpunks, but that have exposure to the Bitcoin price. So you can't just say something like, oh, the miners were going to shut you off or owning Bitcoin is illegal or anything like that. So you have to allow and facilitate institutional adoption of Bitcoin and stable coins with like stuff like the Genius Act and the Clarity Act.

But that doesn't mean that you have to make it easier to self-custody and make privacy like legal again. So what I'm concerned is that the pro-Bitcoin or pro-crypto political narrative is focused like more exclusively on stuff that you mentioned. you know like securities violations and um you know banks being able to do some accounting tricks with bitcoin that they couldn't do before or people being able to issue stable coins in the united states as long as they as long as they buy the treasury bonds with the fiat you know i i see the stable coin as being kind of like the new petrol dollar you know you can issue your stable coins as long as you're buying our treasury bonds with it you're fine you know um but if you issue stable coins outside of the u.s in a non-u.s bank and and you don't store in treasuries you're

fucked um kind of like you did with the petrodollar you know you guys can yeah you guys can uh dig for oil in your in your middle eastern country as long as you sell it for u.s dollars um so so it is definitely a concern uh and there's really never been kind of like a cypherpunk political party or political movement um so it has to it has to happen at the court level i i believe um you know even even if it it's it's easy to black bill uh for example even with covid like um a lot of constitutional courts um validated the vaccine mandates for example so and uh you say okay well the the supreme court will save us if it's really bad it's not always true um but it is it is a lever that that we have it's the only lever that we have basically uh

either we go fully unregulated um which is an option you know some crypto companies some bitcoin companies might say you know what fuck you i'm i'm i'm not complying and i'm going to go fully unregulated but then that is a noble move it definitely is a noble move but you have to you have to assess okay well if i do that what impact am i going to actually have if i'm basically on the run for example you know um you're you're not good to anyone if you're in jail and your service is shut down that's that's the thing and you're also not good to anyone if your service is so cypherpunk um you know like bisque for example like decentralized peer-to-peer uh marketplace i mean it's fucking sweet i mean it's fully unregulated it's fully decentralized

um but you you're not gonna achieve that there's like a critical mass of bitcoiners that we need and like we don't need mass adoption okay by the way like we don't need all the normies to get into bitcoin to have a socio-economic and socio-political change we do need like a certain critical mass of people i i like to think it's like three percent i i think three percent is is the number why three percent it's because of the meme with the american revolution where you only had like three percent of the population in the u.s that that were actively involved in the u.s you know uprising against the british i don't know if this is true or not it's just a meme but anyway i think you need like three percent of the population to become sovereign individuals and like fully opt

out like withdraw their consent from monetary debasement and withdraw their consent from from the fiat system but three percent of the population is still a fucking lot of people it's like my math is probably wrong but i think it's like 300 million people or something worldwide Yeah, it's like a quarter of a billion. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. So you do need a critical mass of people. And in order to reach that critical mass of people, you have to remain inside the overturned window, so to speak, at least something. And basically, I think the best that we can do as a regulated exchange is be within the Overton window where we can operate legally, but be so far at the extreme of the Overton window that we can slightly nudge it and push it with these kinds of things. There's all sorts of things that, you know, in Canada, we've been very highly successful at that, by the way. um, not necessarily publicize because we don't want to publicize every victory that we have against the States in terms of privacy, because also we don't want to, you know, rub it in their

face. But, uh, there's been multiple instances where the government was like, give me all of this data. And we're just like, no, what do you mean? This is the privacy. We have the privacy act in Canada. We have a very strong privacy. Like this is a privacy act. Like you're not allowed to ask me for this data. And then, uh, then they just kind of like back off. um so people would be surprised how efficient uh it can be just to just say no to a government and see what happens um it's kind of like again like you know you walk into a restaurant with you know the covid mandate you know what happens if you just say no no i'm not wearing a fucking mask i'm just gonna go sit down many times it just works you know people don't actually bother

you they just expect you to comply um so that's kind of like the philosophy that that we've tried to build and uh um you know it's a little bit it's a little bit of a business risk for us to do that but at the same time i mean everything we're doing is legal and lawful and it's legitimate and uh it's kind of like in the u.s you guys know you guys know about that like if you don't exercise your rights you lose them yeah i mean that's that's why americans are so i mean i'm not american i don't know but i mean i have a lot of american friends and a lot of americans that i know are so adamant about exercising the second amendment just like very very visibly like in public um because they know that if you don't exercise it it just goes away the same thing

with free speech if you don't exercise it then it just goes away and if you start to comply tiny bit at a time eventually um eventually your rights are gone yeah that's one of the uh I mean, flashbacks to an instance where I did this, I got, I got funneled into a DUI checkpoint in Missouri in 2012, 2013. And the cop was like, I'm going to need you to get out. We need to breathalyze you. It's a DUI checkpoint. I was like, no, you can't do that. And he was pissed that I knew my rights and said, no. And he made me do a field sobriety test past was not driving drunk, but it was that little like pushback, knowing your rights and to your point, I think in the industry we need more people to say no to the government not not only in our industry i

think just broadly speaking people need to develop the the intestinal fortitude to know when to say no to the government like you're trying to infringe on the rights of us as a company and our our clients and we're not going to stand for it and i think many people would be surprised at how effective that can be and again thank god you're doing this and i think it's important to highlight too i know it's been seven years since you've been on the show and for anybody um listening i i think it'd be worthwhile to talk about how you've designed your business like the whole stack and like i think you guys talking about like working around the edges and within the overton window as close to the edge as possible i think the way you've designed your

exchange how your users buy bitcoin they get sent to self-custody how they sell bitcoin the ability to do swaps with liquid and liquid tether uh i think from a design and architecture perspective the way you've built your business particularly the tech stack is aligned with cypherpunk principles as closely as possible while operating in the fiat system exactly and um i have uh we actually we actually kind of like try to conceptualize this inside the business with um a chart with literally a chart of speed and on the top axis is like speed and skill and mass adoption and the other axis is compromise so we try to do the least amount of compromise possible and see where we hit the ceiling right because because there's a point where if you don't do

do any compromise ever then you can't you can hit a ceiling so basically we have this like level again always like a line where we don't cross um example of that is for example with the ball wallet you know i wanted to build and this is completely unrelated to like an exchange but it's the same kind of philosophy where we wanted to build um the most cypherpunk wallets but at the same time be usable on a mobile phone um and uh you know the examples that i like to use is something like sparrow or wasabi which are in my opinion the gold standard of like full cypherpunk um software which is reproducible it's not always open source but it's reproducible and you can do utexo selection and you can do this and that and like you can connect your hardware wallets and

you're fully in control um and both of them are really usable software like wasabi is easy to use ish you know sparrow is easy to use like um a boomer can use sparrow uh it's it's not that hard so we wanted to build something that's like you know very very similar for mobile but the problem that we kind of like reached was when we tried to integrate lightning when we tried to integrate lightning and we initially tried to do something that's kind of like the phoenix wallet which is a purely um phoenix is also doing its own set of compromises so it's not um with lsp with just in time channels and the backup system and stuff like that um but when we try to implement uh liquid uh sorry lightning in the bull wallet we realized that um the absence of any kind of

compromise just really did actually we did we did hit a ceiling where we we couldn't create a usable product um that was satisfying my criteria which is that i can orange pill a taxi driver and he can leave i can tip him on my way out of the taxi within a few you know within a minute or two and then he can be on board to bitcoin so we compromise with liquid liquid was the first big kind of like compromise that i decided to make and it was very conscious and it was a very hard decision to do which is like i'm going to compromise on pure full self-sovereignty and use this other network, which is not as trustless as Lightning. But there are other compromises that we could have made

that I think would have been worse. And I don't want to get, this is not like a tech, I guess, episode. This is more like a political episode. But, you know, eCash, I thought was too much of a big compromise. Even Spark was too much of a big compromise. You know, there's other technologies like Arc, which have different trade-offs. but anyway so it's about setting up your ceiling of like no compromise and then once you once you

really hit that ceiling um once you really hit the limit then you can say okay we really cannot reach our goal without compromising here we've tried every single thing that we can and we cannot then you can kind of like raise the compromise limit a little bit and see okay if i compromise like a little bit what what um what returns do i get on this compromise like you have to think of return on compromise. That's the new business metric. Okay, fuck return on investment. It's return on compromise. For every unit of compromise that I make, how much units of success am I getting? And that's the way that you have to conceive your business. All right, freaks. You know me. You know I don't take sponsor money from products I wouldn't use myself. So listen up. The

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community. Bitcoiners, you found sovereign money, now find sovereign health and sovereign health care. I mean, talking about the tech stack, I know you said it's not tech episode, it's more political, but I think they intertwine, particularly now with all this legislation that's coming across the world to really cattle herd Bitcoiners into this digital panopticon. I've been saying this a lot in the last year it is incredibly frustrating because if allowed to i think builders like yourself and others out there could re-architect the global monetary and banking system with a new tech stack that is much more efficient in way uh is far superior to the incumbent financial system and monetary system that exists there like we have the potential to

build true sci-fi cypherpunk monetary and banking rails and we're just being confined to this compromise matrix that you described because of the insane regulations and the the the thirst for control by by the governments and the supranational unelected bureaucrats of the world yeah and there's there's so many technologies that um you know people think that bitcoin is like old tech and it's not good for privacy and you know you should use zcash instead you've got the like the suits that are pushing for for zcash and then you've got like the jason bourne style uh you know hardcore cypherpunks pushing for monero and then you've got the retards pushing for ethereum and so on you know um but there's a lot of technologies in bitcoin you know you know

if i was to design it from scratch like i don't think that privacy would be that much of an issue um and for whatever reason people are afraid to use bitcoin privacy technologies in their stack because somehow they think the government is going to be upset at them there's there are cases in europe where a bunch of exchanges uh decided to drop the lightning network and who knows why for in truth but i suspect that it was because um they believe that lightning was not necessarily compatible with like the travel rule or kyc aml laws which i think is complete bullshit like when we got our mika license like we still kept lightning and we still kept liquid um we still kept you know pay join and all those kinds of technologies and then i'm sure the government

you know they ask questions about like what is this pay join thing and we're like don't look at that it's it's just uh it's you know it's not it's it's not a legal transaction batching it's it's it's collaborative transaction batching and it helps you save on fees. And, uh, there's like a side effect that it, you know, improves privacy. Same thing with lightning and same thing with liquid. Um, and, uh, all you have to do is say like, no, you have to, you have to like defend those technologies as being like purely valid. And, um, you have to also defend the user against that.

That's kind of like the argument that we're using in France. It's like, let's reframe this as, um, from bad people trying to finance terrorism to people trying not to get kidnapped and that's a very successful reframing and you know to your point like um if kyc was not mandated legally i would still probably do some we would still probably do some voluntarily um a good example of that is in costa rica uh in costa rica there is no kyc rules because bitcoin is entirely unregulated in costa rica there's there's there's no legislation at all forcing us to do any type of kyc um but we do enhance due diligence and we do kyc some people in costa rica because

i don't want to have um you know i'm not a fan of islamic terrorism killing my people in europe I don't want to deal with as a business I do not want to deal with Islamic terrorists I do not want to deal with uh there there there is child trafficking that is a thing and some of them might use bitcoin I don't think they they do use bitcoin in reality but some probably do there's probably some instances of that where bitcoin is used I don't want to deal with that I don't want to deal with cartels that smuggle fentanyl and decimate my civilization and I also certainly do not want to deal with scammers that steal money from old people with a bunch of crypto scams um so so there is a point where even as a business that's not mandated to do kyc um i would

still probably do some of it especially for fraud and especially to protect elderly people from getting scammed um but uh but that's that's a purely voluntary business decision um you know Another thing where the industry has been super cucked, very cucked, is chain analysis. Chain analysis, at the same time, is a big threat to privacy, but at the same time as well, is a fucking scam. It's a pure LARP. The amount of false positive that you get on chain analysis is surreal. We get a bunch of requests from a bunch of law enforcements and a bunch of governments and a bunch of people all the time at BoldBitcoin that are like, hey, our chain analysis has identified that this transaction belongs to

you. And we look and it's like, no, it's not us. So chain analysis just completely sucks. And I don't think provides, and it's not legally mandated. Chain analysis was never legally mandated in any country that I'm aware of. What you have to do as an exchange is to make sure that sanctioned entities are not using your company. But what you can do is, and that's what we do.

For example, we don't use a third party chain analysis service. we download the list of addresses and we check internally to see if one of those sanctioned entities is dealing with us. You don't have to send all of your data to third-party chain analysis companies. And I guarantee you that all the exchanges are doing that. Every single Bitcoin address that's ever been used on, let's say almost all of the exchanges, except the select few that are kind of like Bull. Bull is not the only one, but there's like, I don't know, maybe two or three or four worldwide that I know that have like the same approach. So you don't have to use chain analysis to be compliant but then the industry kind of like had this desire to be over compliant

and to show the banks that we're doing as much as we want so we created not we they created this kind of like meme around chain analysis that in order to be a good crypto citizen you have to have this hundred thousand dollar a year subscription to the chain analysis software company and you have to send every single address that you have and that's a big problem that's also one of the reasons why all of the exchanges they don't support um they force address reuse they're forcing address reuse because it makes their chain analysis easier and what that does is that not only that fucks with everybody's privacy but it also exposes these addresses to quantum risks because if we if you reuse an address you've revealed the public key when you

spend it um that exposes a new level of quantum risk so so this kind of like it's it's it's not only that people are not fighting back the industry is not fighting back but the industry is proactively cucking itself in order to try to dispel the myth of the the shadiness you know it's like they have like an an inferiority complex like no you know we're not sketchy like we're just like you guys we're just like wall street we're just like banks we want to play by the rules so we're going to invent these industry-wide rules and the thing about like chain analysis it's an interesting rule um again that was that was fully created by exchanges not by governments the the the requirement to use chain analysis and now like eight years later

if you're an exchange that doesn't you know and if you're applying for a partnership with a bank they're going to be like which chain of losses provider do you use and if you say no then they're immediately going to flag you as sketchy because we've created this expectation of of compliance which was not required at all and then uh and then eventually this this this custom so this is like an industry custom customs tend to become law so so you know currently chain analysis by third parties like even with mika which is really hardcore european regulation um they do not actually legally mandate chain analysis, but if you don't have

a chain analysis subscription, you have to go above and beyond to demonstrate that you're still doing that. So, yeah, the industry has been cucking itself pretty badly. And of course, it creates a moat, right? And like Bull,

if I was to start Bull Bitcoin today, there's zero chance that I would be able to succeed. Zero chance. Because the moat of compliance is so big. Mika, I don't know how much it costs us, but i don't know there's all sorts of costs but probably close to a million dollars uh just to get the mika license and it took like two years and at some point we had like six people working like full-time on this for for many many months um the cost of compliance is huge and um

the level of you know yeah it's it's it's it's really huge and then when when i've launched bull bitcoin i launched bull bitcoin like like a classic american startup like in my garage basically with no funding just like hustling you know with one person and then two and then three and then that's kind of like how we were able to i believe be so successful is because of the lack of funding uh we had to be very very very careful about a um not spending too much money and b treating the customers correctly because if if you're massively funded you don't really need customers uh to like you you just need to raise the next round uh whereas if you're self-funded like if the customers don't like your product then you're fucked because they're your number

one source of funding um but like with all the regulation that you have to if i was to start today it would not be possible of course like the reason why we can afford uh to spend a fucking million dollars on this license is because through the because we were early essentially because we did that 10 years ago but if i was to start today uh i wouldn't be able to do that so these companies have obviously a massive interest in creating this moat uh to give you an example like in europe there was about 4 000 something crypto companies in europe and about 260 got a license i make a license in europe so it's like about 90 of all crypto companies just got kicked out of europe and um a week ago right and it went live july 1st yeah a week ago even binance didn't make it

if binance can't make it well you know also binance is you know it's binance but um even binance didn't make it and pretty much all the crypto companies we made it like at the last minute uh and it was a close call uh you know strike got it the deadline was like june july first we got it on june 2nd 22nd strike got it on like july 28th or something like three days before the deadline was over and if you didn't get it before the deadline you were essentially fucked um and uh yeah so there's tons of little brokers and that's how bull bitcoin started in europe actually was this broker uh this bitcoin only cypherpunk brokerage from france called leonard and uh they've been operating since like 2018 and they were like a you know your local kind

of like your local bitcoin broker and they came to me and they're like dude there's zero chance that there's zero chance that we're ever going to be able to get mika so you know either we we sell you the business or we're just going to close shop um so i acquired this brokerage um in order to get grandfather and a long regulatory story but i acquired this brokerage uh and i can tell you i've had many many people reach out to bull bitcoin to be like we're closing shop in europe we can't afford to comply um do you want to buy us out and of course like i can't i don't want to um so it's kind of like all all the small good guys are getting closed down and only the big guys very few of the small good guys are able to um to remain in operation so it sucks it sucks because

Of course, all the Coinbases and Binances and Kraken and all these guys have nothing against them, but they obviously have a vested interest in the regulation because they have the bandwidth and they have the funding and they have the weight, the political capital to remain in operation. so they want these moats whether they subconsciously want to expel their competition or not is another thing but you know deep down I'm sure they Coinbase likes regulation you know Binance likes regulation except when they

get kicked out of Europe but they usually like regulation yeah they probably don't mind their competition getting taken behind the woodshed I don't think they share the same yeah I don't think they share the same free market ideas as we do

But they're liberating finance and money on the internet. That's what Coinbase is doing. They're bringing freedom money to everybody. They're democratizing finance. That's what I heard, yeah. Yeah. With USDC and prediction markets and gambling. Democratizing gambling is more like it, but...

Yeah, it's disgusting. From the point of chain surveillance, too. I know we talked about it, you mentioned it a while ago, but I wanted to bring it up. Roman Sterlingov's in jail, and it's like, there's been plenty of people pointed out to Chain Analysis, their analysis of what they deemed to be him buying that domain was completely wrong, and still, he's in jail. The defense said, hey, can we audit Chain Analysis, their systems, to make sure that they actually did this right?

And they said, no, it's a black box, you don't get access to it, it's proprietary. That is one of the biggest travesties. It is very dangerous, and I can confirm and guarantee that chain analysis reports are being used to get warrants and also to convict people, and they are false positives. So this is like the equivalent of using 1970s fingerprint technology to convict somebody of a crime based on probability heuristics, which are completely bogus. I have some personal stories that I will share eventually. uh i don't want this to be the the scenario but i have uh i can guarantee you that false positives are very bad people are getting arrested uh with false positive chain analysis and it's right it's frightening because judges will take a chain analysis report at face value and consider it to be as damning as dna fingerprint on the gun like the video camera like like

Chain analysis will come up with this report, say, OK, Roman Chernoff is the guy that was operating the Bitcoin fog because of this PDF that I have, which proves that it's him. The judge will will see that and be like, that is the same thing. It has the same weight as a fingerprint on the gun. And there's like video camera with like 93 percent facial recognition and the DNA was on the victim. uh they really believe that this evidence is is like flawless whereas i can guarantee you that it's fucking retarded because it's it's so retarded and even there's a brilliant report by peter todd where um i don't know how this wasn't like major news but peter todd in his report on chain analysis and wasabi uh points out that he was at a dinner with one of the founders of chain analysis or like a bp of chain analysis or something he was drunk right and his loose lips

he was drunk and he was bragging that their shit is fucking phony as hell it's complete larp um it's just it's a warrant factory you want you want a warrant on anybody in on earth just go to chain analysis and you know they'll find a way to link his bitcoin to some crime and then they meet you at the airport and they fucking cuff you and then uh uh you know and then you have to hire your own counter chain analysis and then and then it becomes a battle of experts uh yeah it's it's frightening that's part of the reason why i'm so interested in technologies like payjoin for example because one of the foundational heuristics of chain analysis is the common input ownership heuristic.

There's a lot of false assumptions that chain analysis makes. Some of it is about identifying change and some of it is about fingerprinting and stuff like that. But the worst one I think is the assumption, chain analysis makes the assumption that every input in a transaction

belongs to the same person. And from this heuristic, they build their analysis. So part of the reason why I'm so involved in building and promoting pay join is that on a on a massive scale if enough people use pay join um and and what pay join does is it it breaks this heuristic like in a pay join transaction the uh the inputs don't belong to the same person some of them some of them belong to the recipient and some of them belong to the sender um so if a sizable percentage of transactions on the network or pay join then at a legal level we can actually legally challenge chain analysis as evidence

and there's there's a legal principle in in u.s uh case law uh which i think that would be probably the next legal battle that i want to do is to is to challenge the legality of chain analysis to be like hey it is based on faulty evidence like like and if that's the case then not only can it not be used for a warrant but people that were convicted they should be retried because the evidence was not was not good kind of like you know i think this is a common thing where you know 30 years later now that the dna evidence is better we realize that the previous dna evidence was like was not was not good um so that's probably the next and again that's that's we need to be using the courts for advantage like cypherpunks write code but cypherpunks also use the legal system

i we don't really we don't really have a choice i i really do believe that i've had many discussions with cypherpunks and uh they they also tell me like yes this is this is a key cypherpunk principle is to is to you know i you know hal finney and like adam back well you know with the arms exports kind of thing that they did like like we need we need to we need there we go that's what happens always in the background hell yeah yeah so cypherpunks used the law to their advantage and uh they also fight legal battles and i i also want to make a distinction between political battles and legal battles i think political battles are are not fully obsolete they're mostly obsolete but thank god we still have some kind of legal system

where the courts are presumably at least making a half-assed attempt to protect the rights of the individuals and we should leverage that to the maximum completely agree what um what's the current state of pay joint adoption obviously you guys have uh implemented it and what you're doing at bull bitcoin um i think there's a couple others maybe but are you talking to any because i think if you get exchanges like bull bitcoin we need a few others to do it and that's a good a good jumping off point to get towards that critical mass that you described earlier so when we integrated page line it was kind of like the reckless uh thing to do it was very early alpha level technology and uh there was a few other companies that did it at the same time as

there's cake uh cake wallet a shitcoin wallet but we love them anyway um and sparrow and blue but all of us were kind of like on incompatible versions of page line uh because either the technology was shifting so much that there was like breaking change or we were using different pay join protocols. Like blue was using summarize pay join protocol and Sparrow was using, I think also summarize pay join protocol. Whereas we were using BIP 77, anyway, technical stuff. But the pay join project, which is supported by you know, private companies,

but also a lot of nonprofits has reached a level where we have what's called pay join version one uh where the protocol is stable um so bull has it and we're but we're like on version 0.23 or something anyway long story short bull bull is upgrading to the latest version everybody's doing that cake is also upgrade to the latest version so cake and bull are going to be compatible and uh in terms of exchanges i think that so technically bull uh this is kind of like breaking news uh but pay join was only in the wallet it was not in the exchange uh so we've just managed to put it in the exchange it is currently in the exchange now it hasn't been announced and it's it's kind of like hidden from the general public it's like an

experimental experimental feature but bull is now um the exchange now has pay join allowing people to buy and sell bitcoin with pay join um and i believe that a bunch of a bunch of others maybe two or three that i know of that are either exchanges or swap providers um are swap providers would be would be massive like companies like bolts like you know if they were to integrate page on that would be massive um so it's unfortunately the adoption is low adoption of page on is low um but think about it like this like if the bull wallet and the bull exchange talk to each other and both have page on and transactions are page on by default like every single transaction between a bull wallet user in the exchange is going to be page

on by default so just that is going to create tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of page transactions if you had bolts to that everybody that does a swap with bolts from the bull wallet that's going to be another pay join and if you had cake to that anybody that sends and it's it's going to be growing and then of course there's there's sparrow and then there's wasabi as well um so it's low right now but i think uh it's just because the technology was early pay join is really complicated uh it's it's not it's not that simple and of course the other big one is silent payments uh i'm insanely bullish on silent payments uh you know when sparrow introduced it people were like oh well it doesn't really do much uh it doesn't solve chain analysis yeah

it solves the address reuse problem and address reuse is the number one cause of bitcoin privacy issues because so many people reuse addresses that it's kind of like the chain analysis companies can cluster a bunch of entities because if if a lot of people are really bad at their privacy like you who are good at your privacy you stand out essentially um so other people reusing addresses is bad for them but it's also bad for us um and uh part of the reason why people reuse addresses is because we like to have a reusable payment code you don't want to have to like let's say like for your mining pool rewards like you don't want to be every time you get a payout you don't want to be putting a new address or something. Or if you're like DCA-ing or something, you don't

want to have to put a new address. There's tons of reasons. If you have a donation, the Pirate Bay on their website has a static Bitcoin. Everybody that's using a donation address puts a static donation address. So silent payment really solves that. And that's something that we've been working on. There was a pull request that was just opened today. Finally, after one year of R&D, we actually literally opened the silent payments pull request in the bull wallet um this morning and we're also bringing it to the exchange as well so that again like the user of the bull wallet would only give one address to bull forever uh it's going to be a silent payment address and we will just generate new addresses on the fly um so there are tools and there are

technologies you know there's liquid there's you know e-cash which i'm not it's a bigger rabbit hole to talk about but liquid swaps lightning pay join silent payments there's there's other experimental technologies. There's another one that I'm looking at now called OctoJoin by this guy called Floppy. Very interesting transactional tool. And people are building awesome software. That's also one of the really nice effects of vibe coding and the AI software revolution is that it reduces the

asymmetry of power between the state and the individual because the state has enormous power for surveillance and uh and we as individuals we don't have like 7 000 engineers and a data center to protect ourselves like the nsa has you know but now that we have vibe coding we can build self-defense tools um very cheaply so one of the best examples that i know is this uh these guys they have something called am i am i exposed closed and it's an open source chain analysis that you can run yourself and you can see what the chain analysis companies know about you by replicating so and of course like if you look at the software repository it's not slop like it's it's pretty cool but you can tell like this is

vibe coded stuff you know what i mean like the the the capital required to build this kind of software like five years ago this would have been like a five million dollar you know bc race to build this kind of software i need you know you need a runway for like three four years with like you know seven eight engineers and like you know a product manager and that kind of stuff now you can just build these tools yourself um so so yeah i'm pretty excited like um even the stuff that we've been doing with uh the wallet like of course as a wallet developer you can't vibe code a wallet that's that's that's asking for trouble but you can do a lot of testing and like you can save a lot of time so like the pace the pace of progress that we have as cypherpunks and again like you

can't do slop with cryptography it's very dangerous but it is 100 true that we are accelerating way faster than the state than the bureaucrats right um so i'm very bullish on that because uh it's kind of like uh you know drone tech or um you know 3d printing or you know look at 3d printing now like it's fucking insane what you can do with 3d printing uh look at so you know right now i think we're still at the liberator level of uh ai you know like the first 3d printed gun but in two years i mean sovereign individuals are going to be able to do a lot of damage so to speak like you know metaphorical damage um anyway i'm kind of rambling but i'm not i'm not bearish uh i'm not bearish on the state of the cypherpunk uh movement even though i am very concerned uh

for sure because i'm probably more i'm i'm probably less concerned than a lot of people but i'm probably more accurately concerned than a lot of people because i being inside the industry as a regulated entity i can see the tag vectors um i'm not as concerned because i also know that there's methods of resistance that are being employed um so i am worried but i'm also bullish i'm also bullish on the cypherpunk principles of bitcoin um a lot of people are are blackmailed about like sailor and blackrock and whatever um bitcoin has been co-opted and whatnot like the cypherpunk dream is dead and blah blah blah and and that's just because the ratio of uh noise to signal is like higher right the ratio of noise to signal is higher because the absolute amount of

like garbage slop in Bitcoin, like NGU, Bitcoin treasury company, um, you know, wall street financialization of Bitcoin is increasing more than the cypherpunk base. So the, the, the institutional narrative and like the, uh, anti cypherpunk narrative of Bitcoin is increasing faster than the cypherpunk, but who cares? Like what matters is the absolute amount of cypherpunks working on bitcoin i don't care about the ratio of cypherpunk to non-cypherpunk in bitcoin i don't care about that i care about the absolute number of cypherpunks in bitcoin and uh being in this space and of course there are like signal chat groups and you know telegram groups where i talk with a lot of privacy devs and we meet in person at conferences and uh we

work on technology collectively and i've never been so stoked by the way like all the wallet developers are i mean i wouldn't say we're all friends but a lot of us are friends like i talk with the cake guys i talked with the sparrow guy about silent payments i talk with breeze i talk with these guys like we talk all the time i talk with aqua um and we're most of us are on the same page when it comes to privacy tech i love to hear that and that's um i'm happy you said that because i agree there's a lot of black pilling out there but similar to you i mean i don't have as much uh inside knowledge in terms of uh the attack i think i understand them pretty well but you see it day in and day out and obviously you're talking to these wallet developers i talk to a lot of the

privacy tech people too but just again to reiterate the vibe coding unlock is real yeah and when it comes to black billing yes the noise is way louder and yes you may not agree with what michael saylor is doing you may think it's going to end in cataclysm it doesn't matter if you can run a node if you can create a private public key pair if you can use tools like pay joy and silent payments and use bitcoin the way in which you want to which i hope is uh in a sovereign and private fashion it's never been easier and it's only going to get it has never been this easy and people who said that bitcoin was better 10 years ago shut the fuck up you have no idea what you're talking about no idea whatsoever um running a node like dude like have my right here well you

know i don't want to dox my location so i'm not going to turn my camera but i have my start nine right here next to my starlink um just like connect connecting a self-custodial wallet to your own electrum using silent payments and pay join on your phone doing swaps like like it's nothing like you can do that like with a few clicks like people have absolutely no idea how bad it was like 10 years ago and you know everybody everybody that says that that bitcoin is uh that it's not advancing or it's not progressing or that the cypherpunk dream is dead is selling you something they could be they could be just uneducated but i think most of them know but they're selling you something else and they're selling you either a shit coin or um a financial

product basically cash z cash bitcoin's debt getting the z cash of course and like for example you know self-custody so there's there's like you know two major components to making bitcoin better it's privacy and self-custody right and of course you can't have privacy without self-custody by definition um so you need to work like that's why we work so much on self-custody i see it as foundation of everything else like every property that makes bitcoin valuable as money so the things that are on the on the sales pitch you know when you sell bitcoin censorship resists it it's this it's that you can't change the rules um it's uh immutable it's uh trustless it's uh private all of these features of bitcoin that are on michael cero's pitch deck um stem from the fact that you

can self-custody it if you can't self-custody it then all those features kind of like disappear and the second one the second layer is is privacy and like there are problems with self-custody but there's a lot of entrepreneurs uh you know back in the day you know there's a certain type of individual which is again today liberated with ai because they can do stuff now that they couldn't before but when you see a problem i see a business and i see i see a marketing campaign i see a new feature and i see a new market that's that's what i see when i see a problem and i'm not the only one like there's tons of people that are like call it cypherpunk entrepreneurs um So of course, self-custody is a massive problem.

We've built tools, for example, like the main thing that I think that I'm the most proud of in the last couple of years is our backup protocol called Recoverable. I mean, it's not fancy. It's not like really well-known out there, but it's a very clever way to create a encrypted backup that is safe for the cloud

using a key server protocol anyway so so it's this tool in the bull wallet where you can do a backup in like 30 seconds and it's very secure it's very very secure it's not as secure as like 12 12 seed in in a plate but it um it makes self-custody like extremely extremely simple um kind of like the stuff that we did with uh you know one of the things that aqua and bull came up with this at the same time by the way none of us were first uh it's actually a i think i was first but aqua also thinks they were first i agree to disagree um but aqua and bull came up with the same idea at the same time um which was i think a consequence of the first spam attack in 2023 where we realized that you know a mobile wallet where you manage channels on your phone um kind

of like phoenix does not work if the network fees are 150 satoshis per byte it just doesn't work because you need to open too many channels and it locks up too much liquidity anyway um so that idea of like having what's called a graduated wallet so bull and aqua were the first two graduated wallets and that's like where you have like a liquid or e-cash or fediment or i don't know like spark or something and it's using swaps to communicate with a lightning network so i'm really proud of those tools and then of course there's multiple other things that we need to work on like inheritance inheritance is the next big step uh to solving self-custody but again like these are problems that are being worked on so if someone is selling you because the people

who are selling you away from cypherpunk bitcoin they're selling you it's not private so use zcash and you can't self-custody your coins it's not safe for you to do that you're not ready to do that so buy my stonk right um so i want to make sure that these people run out of arguments and also the the argument like well you can't spend your bitcoin anywhere we've solved that too that was like one of the first things that i tried to solve when i was starting out as an entrepreneur in 2013 where can you spend your bitcoin well that's why we started bills which then became bull bitcoin that's already been solved with companies like bit refill like bitcoin jungle all these things like you can spend your bitcoin like this is not an this is

not a serious argument you know with of course with square united states like you can't have a serious debate with someone who's like well you can't spend your bitcoin shut the fuck up man there's like look at this map like i can i can buy bitcoin i could we can we can walk down the street in any american city right now and i will probably find within a few minutes a shop that accepts bitcoin because of the work of the cypherpunks like you know i wouldn't say that square is necessarily cypherpunk but you know close enough like they're they're they're pretty good in terms of of uh of doing things the right way within their you know they have a different box because they're you know publicly traded company and it's a massive you know global empire

now um but they've done it pretty well so anyway just a lot of words to say that i'm very bullish that's it i am as well um as it pertains to dac 8 the legal battles and and honestly all the cypherpunk tech that we've been talking about for the last portion of this conversation what um what calls to action do you have for anybody out there how can we help on the legal front how what um well by the time this episode is uh released uh we have a website called dac8.com I did buy the domain just to rub it in their face. So DAC8.com is a website which basically shows all the arguments for repealing DAC8 and explains our legal strategy. So I would say go on DAC8.com and educate yourself about what that is.

I don't really have that much of a call to action because when we decided to fight this legally, um we decided not to do an industry group and not to do a crowdfund and not to do like a big thing just because of the overhead of doing those things we're just like fuck it we're gonna pay the lawyers ourselves and we're gonna do it ourselves so we don't have a donation page and we don't really have any real way for people to help us um we have one partner in this lawsuit which is another crypto exchange in france the only other crypto company that i talked to that was willing or had the balls to do it. Um, so there's no donation page. There's no signup. There's no newsletter. Unfortunately,

I wish I had a better CTA. I would just say, just use the wallet, just use the bull wallet. That makes me happy. And, you know, leave it, leave a nice review on, on the play store. Like that's, that's the, that's the best thing you can do for me is to leave a nice review on the play store or on the website, because I read all of them and it just makes it, it, it, it boosts the morale of the bull team. Uh, it really really does like we actually do read all the reviews so just do that download the wallet and leave us a review and you can say that you've contributed to our mission that way

we'll link to that in the show notes so you can download and use it highly recommend it francis there's not many of you out there there's only one of you out there there's only one of you out there and i'm very glad that you exist because i think what you're doing what you have done for over a decade now at this point has been extremely impactful for bitcoin and very important for the ability of individuals to use Bitcoin in a sovereign fashion. And particularly in this era of Bitcoin, a lot of what you do is overshadowed by the orange ties and the suits. And I think it's important to remind people that the cypherpunk dream of Bitcoin is nowhere near dead. In fact, it's more alive than ever because of people like you.

So I just honestly, earnestly thank you for all the work and the commitment that you put into this. Well, I appreciate that you appreciate. And it's a nice place to be in because even though it's really hard to do what we do, the community which exists, there is such a thing as a Bitcoin community. People who say that the Bitcoin community is not real are stupid. The community is very supportive of what we do. And we really appreciate that. We appreciate that people appreciate. and that's what we feed on um so it's uh it's a great space it's a great space to be building it

it's it's hard but there's nothing else on earth that i would rather do so thanks to the viewers everybody that comments on twitter and everybody that sends says good things about us on online um we we really highly appreciate that and makes it all worth it thanks guys all right peace and love freaks okay all right thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show.

And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad-free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. you can go to fountain.fm to find that five dollars a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps the show gives you incredible value so please consider subscribing via fountain as well thank you for your time and until next time