The Pomp Podcast - #994 Bruce Fenton On Running For Senator As A Bitcoiner

Episode Date: June 8, 2022

Bruce Fenton Is Running For United States Senator in the state of New Hampshire. In this conversation, we discuss Bruce's campaign, why we need more Bitcoiners in Congress, Bruce's reaction to Senator Lummis' Crypto Bill, why CBDCs are a threat to American citizens, and why Bitcoin represents free speech. ======================= Brave Wallet is the first secure crypto wallet built natively in a web3 crypto browser. No extension required. Store, manage, and grow your portfolio, get NFT & multi-chain support, and more.    Download the Brave privacy browser at brave.com/Pomp, and click the wallet icon to get started. ======================= The Pomp Podcast is powered by BetOnline.ag, the world's largest sports betting, casino, poker and horse racing website that accepts cryptocurrency for wagering.   BetOnline.ag gives you the ability to use Bitcoin and more than a dozen altcoins to make deposits and withdraw your winnings. There are no crypto transaction fees, and processing is instantaneous and secure.   Visit https://promotions.betonline.ag/pomp and use PROMO CODE: POMP100 to receive a 100% matching bonus on any crypto deposit.   BetOnline.ag is available in nearly every country around the world, making it the top global gaming destination for crypto users. =======================

what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off bruce fenton is a bitcoin og and a candidate for u.s senate in this conversation bruce and i talk about bitcoin talk about the macro environment we talk about freedom of speech independence in america and why he decided to actually go and run for senate i really enjoyed this conversation with bruce and i hope you guys enjoy it as well before we get in this episode though i first want to talk about our sponsors this episode is brought to you by ftx us ftx.us is the safe regulated way to buy and sell bitcoin and other digital assets you can trade crypto with up to 85 percent lower

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deposit with our exclusive podcast promo code pomp100 go check them out at betonline.ag anthony pompliano runs pomp investments all views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Bruce, how are you doing, buddy? Hey, Pomp. How's it going? Great to see you. I know. I'm very excited about this. Let me start with, how do you view Bitcoin in politics today?

We obviously are recording this on the day that Senator Lummis and Senator Gildebrand come together with bipartisan legislation and they want to pull Bitcoin and digital assets further into kind of regulatory clarity in the financial system. What's your read on the relationship between politics and this corner of finance and Bitcoin and crypto? Well, it's certainly getting more and more intertwined. I mean, I think that struck a lot of us who've been in the space a while. Down in Miami, for example, there was an event. Senator Lummis was there. I was there. Blake Master, several other candidates. I think there was probably over a dozen candidates for federal office that were there and a few other people who already hold office, a couple of Congress members and at least one senator, Senator Lummis. And then there's the mayors there, of course. So it's quite intertwined. I'm not sure that's a good thing. I think there's a lot of politicians who kind of jump into this because they see it as a fundraising opportunity or whatever. And, you know, overall, I'm against regulation, obviously. So I'm not a fan of politicians meddling in this business. But it is certainly an interesting phenomenon to see how they've, you know, kind of integrated into this space. How can people evaluate candidates in terms of who actually understands what they're talking about and who doesn't? And I won't put you on the spot.

I'll throw out a candidate that I had high hopes for and maybe has disappointed, which is the New York City mayor. So the mayor of one of the largest cities came out, said he was going to take paycheck in Bitcoin, was saying a lot of the right things. I think people were like, oh, OK, this is a big switch for New York City from where they were. gets in office and then almost immediately starts talking about, you know, proof of work is stupid and, you know, obviously gets a viewpoint that shows he doesn't really understand the value of the technology, doesn't understand how it works. So what's your suggestion to folks in terms of the framework they could use to analyze a political candidate or the ability for them to understand who actually understands this and has kind of the right thought process or not? Yeah, I think that

You need to analyze candidates based on what their fundamental principles are. And ideally, it's interesting. Ideally, they wouldn't need to know about it. Somebody the other day was talking about an entirely different industry and, you know, asking, you know, how much knowledge they should have. Really, politicians shouldn't need to know anything. Ideally, they should just mind our own business because the people in Washington, D.C. aren't going to know what Jesse Powell or Brian Armstrong or Sam are doing better than those people are doing. the people who are leading industries, you know, the people who are CEOs and business owners, small business owners, larger business owners, individual workers, they're the ones who should be making the decisions about their own industry. So ideally, you have politicians that, you know,

don't really even need to know. They shouldn't need to know what's going on in Bitcoin. They should just say, it's none of our business. Let those Bitcoiners do their thing. Let the crypto people do their thing. Let the Ethereans and the XRPs, let everybody do their thing. You know, it's not government's place to interfere. So that's what I would look for. And that's what I would look for in a candidate. That's what I look for when I vote and when I support other candidates. I look for people who have a, you know, fundamental moral philosophy of peace and non-intervention and not having government in our business. So it's a fundamental belief. And that would have been obvious with Adams from New York. You know, it was very clear that he's a tyrant,

authoritarian statist, you know, so I didn't buy him for one second when he said he was a Bitcoiner. I think it's fundamentally ideologically opposed. And, you know, he was in favor of all kinds of movement passes and mask mandates and these kind of things. So it shouldn't surprise people at all because he doesn't have that fundamental moral foundation that you should have if you're running for office. When you start to think about regulation, you've mentioned a couple of times that politicians should stay out of it. I think the counter argument from a politician that wants to be very heavily involved is something like Terra or Luna, maybe some of the rug pulls in the DeFi world, etc. How do you balance what I would label as more of a libertarian view on

keep government out of this stuff, which I think is probably the dominant viewpoint of people in the Bitcoin community, with many of the, you know, kind of outlier catastrophes that have occurred in the larger crypto ecosystem? Like, how do you just balance those two things? Yeah, so the first thing is, you know, these tragedies are terrible, you know, people lose a lot of money. Sometimes they lose their life savings. In some cases, you know, people lose their lives over it. You know, it's, it's a very, very serious thing. But there's, there's two things to think about. One does, can the regulation stop these things? You know, can regulation prevent another Luna? I would say probably not because Bernie Madoff was the biggest fraud of

all time and he was head of the largest regulator. So there's people who are regulated, there's all kinds of frauds, Enron and other things. So there's a lot of overhead for these regulations and it's not really clear. It's not like we have a world where we choose either no regulations or we have regulations and everything is fine. Everything is not fine with regulations. We still have fraud, but we have this also huge, huge, huge burden on society and on businesses. So I would prefer to not have the regulations. Will there be drawbacks of that? Sure. But there's a lot of advantages. About half of the industry spends about half of its time dealing with compliance and lawyers. You talk to many CEOs just as I do all the time. And you know that a big

chunk of their time is focused with lawyers and compliance. And that's a shame. Now there's a drain on our economy. So people should be able to have a bit more freedom. There's some drawbacks to that. You'll have bad things happen, but you'll also have bad things happen if you have people like Madoff and other politicians and other people trying to run your lives. You'll also have bad things happen. So either way, you're going to have bad things happen. I prefer a market system where things like Luna can reset, you know, people would not, if you put a 2016 or 17 white paper and try to market it right now, it wouldn't work because the market has regulated itself. And although they've tried Luna 2, I don't think that'll work too much. And I know

that we won't see Luna 3 unless they really clean up their act and the market believes it, you know. So the market is a very, very efficient regulator in many ways. And that's the regulator that I prefer. Talk to me about central bank digital currencies, right? You're running for political office, it seems like central banks and politicians around the world get super excited, like, oh, that Bitcoin thing, that's really cool. Let's just take the same technology and create our own. How do you view central bank digital currencies? Is that something the US government should get involved in or should they stay out of it? They should stay out of it. Central bank digital currencies are, and I'm really glad you asked this because this is important. Central

bank digital currencies are a really, really serious problem. Everybody, not just crypto people, especially crypto people, we need to be sounding the alarm. We need to be telling our neighbors and our friends, say, hey, remember you didn't listen to us about Bitcoin many years ago or whatever? You got to listen to us now about CBDCs because they represent one of the greatest threats to freedom and human freedom and the future that we've ever seen. And it's very sneaky. It's not in the form of a tank. It's not somebody putting a gun in your face. But what it is, it represents the power of government and officials who have already shown their desire to censor people and their willingness to be authoritarian. It gives them the power to shut

off our money. And in a digital world, the kind of world that we're in now, that's a power that we cannot allow politicians to have. If we allow them to have that power, it's game over. We lose our freedom. We lose our country because we're simply one bad politician away. And there's people, whether you're right or left, whether your nightmare is Pelosi or Trump, whoever that politician is you dislike, picture somebody even worse than them. If they have the power of a CBDC where they can shut off your money, that means no protesting. It means I can't pay my internet. I can't be on your show. It means game over. They could completely and totally quell protest and quell speech and movement and activities and all kinds of other things. So we just can't gain that

power. It doesn't matter how good they are. It doesn't matter how much you like them. We can never, ever give them that power. We cannot give them that power because if they have it, it's too great of a power for politicians to have. So I'm really, really against CBDCs. I'd like to fight them. What do you think is the way to fight them? Is it just free market competition and Bitcoin becomes superior and adopted globally and then the CBDCs end up not being valuable? Do you think there's regulations that should be put forward that they can't actually go and create it? How do you put obstacles in the way of CBDCs or stop them? Yeah. Well, certainly, hopefully, Bitcoin is better money and that wins out eventually.

You could actually have regulations to prevent them. The kind of things that I would sponsor or support if I'm elected would prevent... We cannot allow a money that has built-in ability for government to shut it down. We just can't. So that would be something that should be illegal in the United States. The United States government should not have the ability. They don't have the ability right now with the dollar. So this would be a new power that they would have. I would be absolutely completely adamantly against any bill that was trying to add that. And I'd probably even take the extra step of certainly being willing to vote for or even sponsor legislation that said you can't do it. So you have a you know, I have legislation that says, you know, government absolutely can never shut your money off and they can never track. It doesn't matter who you are or why or if you're a terrorist or whatever horrible thing they're going to come up with as an excuse of why cannot allow it. We just can't allow government to have that power. It's too much power for them to have.

And I don't trust them. And I think anybody who does trust them right now is crazy. So especially these days. When you look at the Russia Ukraine situation, obviously, there's been a lot of financial sanctions that have been levied. And one, what's your kind of read on that? But also two, is that a nail in the coffin for the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency once other nation states realize that the U.S. will use these powers to sanction them and cut them off from the financial system on a U.S. dollar basis? Yeah, money needs to be fungible. So, you know, being shut off, that's a problem.

That's another problem with CBDCs on a global level. So I don't know if it's the nail in the coffin. There's a lot of nails in a very big coffin that's been getting a lot of nails in it for a long time. There's been a lot of problems with the dollar, reckless spending, reckless printing of new money going back to 2008, you know, giving billions and trillions to bankers and cronies and foreign misadventures all over the world, wasting a trillion dollars, you know, droning and killing people, you know, very, very, very bad policies. So there's a lot of problems. And the world for a long time, you know, since our invasion of Iraq, we've been on a decline in some ways.

You know, a lot of the world is not happy about having the dollar be a reserve currency. And frankly, the dollar just isn't as good as it was. It's a crappy coin. You know, it's, you know, they're printing it from thin air. The supply is, you know, not properly controlled. So, yeah, that's a problem. And overall, with sanctions, I'm against sanctions in general. People should be able to make the trades that they want. It's not government's job to decide who can trade with who. If individual citizens don't want to deal with Ukraine or don't want to deal with Russia or they don't want to deal with Israel or Saudi Arabia or Taiwan or China, that should be up to the individual citizen. Yeah. When you start to think about Bitcoin, obviously Bitcoin is this decentralized digital money. I continue to say that Bitcoin is protected under free speech software. Software is free speech, EEF and many others. I think it's the Bernstein versus the Department of Justice is the kind of landmark case. Is that one? Is that your read that Bitcoin is free speech and protected?

Absolutely. I quoted that exact that exact case before Bitcoin is speech. Here's a neat thing. Four years ago, four years ago, the city of Plattsburgh, New York, said that they were going to ban Bitcoin mining. And I warned it. You can see my tweets on this. I warned. I said, well, what if I said right in the tweets? straight. I said, well, what if the town claims to do it? Next what? Then the state is going to claim the right to do it. I challenged it. I was with the Bitcoin Foundation at the time as a volunteer. I served as both executive director and board member. I think I was probably board member. And I wrote a letter to Plattsburgh. And I said, the law defined, they said, we're going to outlaw Bitcoin mining because they're in a town that had some issue with a power plant or whatever. And they had Bitcoin miners that came in there. We're taking advantage of that power. And they said, we're going to ban Bitcoin mining. And I looked at the law and it defined mining as three

or more computers. So I wrote him a letter. I said, well, if I come there with three raspberry pies, are you going to arrest me? I mean, what are you going to do? Am I in violation of your rule if I carry them in my suitcase? And maybe one of those has, maybe I put Shakespeare on the blockchain. Maybe I just like looking at a blockchain. That's my right. You don't need to do that because the court case, Bernstein already shows, code is speech. It's not the government's job to decide which speech is which. These ones and zeros in the Bitcoin code are every as valuable as Shakespeare. And to many Bitcoiners, they're just as valuable as any book there is. And that's our right. That's our right, just as much as it's our right to read the Quran

or read the Bible or read Shakespeare. And we can write and read that code. And that's our right as Americans. That's a human right. And for somebody to say that people with fancy titles in a fancy office have the right to say that you can't run the code or read the code that you want to run on your computer is absurd. So absolutely, it's a free speech issue. And it's something that we've got to protect. And I hope that this New York decision gets overturned by the courts. And it should. Talk to me about Bitcoin mining. You mentioned New York trying to put a moratorium maybe as their latest effort. And that moratorium is on new miners who are not 100 percent renewable is basically what they're trying to target. The Fifth Amendment

gives right the people the right to private property. Do you think that Bitcoin is protected under the Fifth Amendment and mining is basically the ability for someone to secure and protect that private property? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that so your property is also your miners, the computers, and you have a right in America to own a computer and you can run whatever software you want on it. You can type whatever words you want. And there was a person named Satoshi many years ago who typed some words, some words and some numbers. And I like that person. And I'm going to run that person's software and you're not going to stop me. You know, that's it. So is the thought process that these types of efforts at the state level eventually get struck

down as unconstitutional? Like play this out for me in terms of how it plays out. It certainly should. It's a very, very solid case for speech because what is a Bitcoin mine? You're running the software. And you can do that right on, I mean, I think you could do it on your phone if you're a little bit clever. You can certainly do it on a Raspberry Pi. You're not going to get many Bitcoin doing it that way. You're not going to get any. But you can run that software. And software is words and numbers. And the Bernstein decision says that it's speech, because clearly it is. Words and numbers are speech. And in America, we have a right to print speech and running speech, running a compiler or hitting execute or running an executable file. That

That's a form of speech. Absolutely. And that's all it is. Now, this particular speech running this program throws off these weird do hickey widget things called Bitcoin. Okay. I mean, that's a thing that's within the code. That's not something that because of that, it gives anybody any authority to say what speech you can have or what kind of code you can run on your computer. So the whole thing is just absurd. And this is kind of a bigger issue with the overall creep that we see. We see with the SEC, with ESG initiatives, other initiatives where you have government trying to get more and more into the lives of people and businesses saying, well, you should run this software and this is okay. And it's not a waste to watch porn or Netflix or

the Kardashians, but it is a waste to run this ledger verification thing that you want to run or whatever. And these kinds of things just don't have a place in a free society. Talk to me about ESG. You mentioned ESG and there's a debate. Some people think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread and we should all change our lives because of the feel-good ESG story. There's other people who think it's absolute bullshit and a complete scam. Where are you on that spectrum and how do you see Bitcoin interacting or related to ESG initiatives? Yeah, I'm concerned about it because it's a way for government and other authorities. I mean, the people who say they like ESG, that's great. People should be able to do and like whatever they want. Any business should be able to have whatever kind of screens or, you know, business style that they want. And people should be able to buy and invest in that business or deal with that business. But what we're seeing with ESG is kind of a very heavy-handed, top-down, and in many cases, government-driven initiative. And you have government initiatives. The SEC has also had diversity initiatives. Now they want to know who is on your board and these kinds of things. And many of these things are well-meaning, but they interfere with governance and the way that things should work in the world. We shouldn't have government authorities who are able to come in and make these kind of decisions and tell people how to run their business. That's just not a workable system. might sound good. It might even have well-intentioned goals like diversity is in many cases a well-intentioned goal. It's not the play of government to do that because then you

end up with power brokers and tyrants in charge and you end up with kind of different sets of rules for different people and all kinds of other problems that you see in failed economies and authoritarian states. So I'm very, very concerned. And it is all encompassing, environment, social and governance, you can put pretty much any aspect of a company into one of those boxes and claim controls. And they do have that now with official public company filings and these kind of things. There's quite a bit of control that doesn't have to do with necessarily what the people running the business want to do. And that's wrong. A business just should be run by the people that run them. And those decisions should ultimately be made by the shareholders.

What is the Bitcoin critics greatest argument? Like if you were the critic and you had to argue them better than they argue themselves, like what do you think has a validity to it? That's a great one. Best critic. I would say, I mean, for Bitcoin specifically, I've always, and this is, I've gotten a lot of flack from this. I deleted a tweet one time because I got so much flack.

It wasn't because I got the flack, but because I think it was really misunderstood. But what I said was something about, you know, self-custody. I've been in Bitcoin a long, long time, but I came from traditional finance where we never did custody. When I was a little, little kid, my mom's brokerage office was robbed by an armed robbery. And that was probably one of the last times a brokerage office was robbed. I don't think you've seen brokerage firms robbed since the 60s or 70s. Nobody robs Merrill Lynch or Robin Hood because there's no actual money there. It's all electronic.

Sorry, I lost my train. What do you think is the best critique of Bitcoin? Oh, right. So the critique is about the custody. Coming from the investment world, I'm just not comfortable with it. I've never been comfortable with it. I'm probably much more technically advanced than sort of your average person. Maybe your average person in Bitcoin, but certainly I'm not like a developer or something.

I'm pretty techie compared to whatever most average folks. But I've never been comfortable with the level of risk with, you know, self-custody, the fact that you can lose your money, that it can be, you know, there's different ways people can get it and there's risks. And a lot of people who've been around a long time have seen different things happen. So, you know, that is a concern. And I'm really optimistic about companies like Casa and others who, you know, there's a whole bunch of smart companies who've been working on solving this problem. But I don't think we're quite there yet. We're not to the point where me as an investment advisor. Remember, I manage my own money, but also other people's money where I could be totally comfortable, totally comfortable with the custody thing.

I do lose a lot of sleep about it. I worry about it and it stresses me to no end. So I'd say that's a valid concern. Yeah, it's one of those that I think is so well accepted in the Bitcoin community, self-custody, that having you ask that and kind of question it is interesting. When you think about where Bitcoin is today, I think that you got into Bitcoin in like 2011, 2012. What's the thing that has surprised you the most over the last decade? That's a good one. It's funny, you know, a lot of, it was more like 2012, 2012, 13. By 13, I was full time. And a lot of us talked about kind of it becoming global money.

They'd say, you know, maybe it'll hit $3,000 or $5,000 or $10,000. but it's been very interesting to to actually see it happen and uh i pictured it would be very very big i got in real early you know like i said i jumped in full time it was it was a nothing industry that back then but i thought it was going to be a big industry but now it's quite a different thing you know you you go to giant events that i go to and it's just something yeah this the scope and scale i think has just been amazing to see firsthand you know to see the number of companies and also the money. Some of these companies are just so huge. It's really interesting to see coming from a startup environment, which is what the entire space was.

I mean, it was really an experiment in those early days. There was a lot of people who weren't even doing it for business. They were just doing it because they thought it was cool. And then there were a few people thinking like, oh, maybe I'll make some money on this. I'll make some... And it's kind of sad. You look at the businesses, they're like, oh, I'll make t-shirts or I'll make pins or I'll make an exchange. Different decisions that people could have made in those early days. Some of the startups you could have invested in. It's really been fun. It's been a great journey to watch this unfold. Talk to me, my last question for you is around the Senate race. What are the odds you win? What are the other candidates? What's kind of the

breakdown of your specific race? Yeah, so I've got great chances because the incumbent is very weak. Her name's Maggie Hassan. She's a Democrat. She's only served one term. She only won by a thousand votes last time. And there was another candidate in that race who got 17,000 votes and he endorsed me the first day that I announced. So, you know, definitely the votes are there. You know, she's very unpopular. A lot of Democrats are, you know, unfortunately for them are very unpopular right now because, you know, of the view that their policies have failed and that Joe Biden has failed. And I think her policies have certainly failed. this is a sort of purple state. It's gone back and forth. It's more red, I think, than blue.

So that's another reason it could shift. And then for the primary, so I've got to win the primary and the general. But what I can bring to it that no other candidate can is I think I have the broadest appeal. There's actually some Democrats that support me because I'm anti-war and against the drug war. I'm pro-gay marriage. I'm very socially liberal on many things as a libertarian. and then I can bring in certainly the list. I should get all of them. Uh, and, uh, and I should get a lot of independence and I, and I would get all the Republicans as well, even those that are a little, you know, cautious about some of my stances. So I think I have the broadest appeal. And I think that, um, this is what America needs right now.

Uh, where can we send people to find you on the internet? So, uh, Bruce Fenton.com is my website and, uh, you know, that's my Twitter handle and my main, um, you know, social media, Bruce Fenton, you know, I've got videos on YouTube on most of the things out there. There we go. So at Bruce Fenton on Twitter, brucefenton.com beautiful website right there. Cypherpunk capitalist about the connection. All right, Bruce, I appreciate you coming on forever and always. All right. Well, thank you very much. Bitcoin OG running for Senate in New Hampshire. Best of luck, my friend. And we will talk soon. Thank you very much. You have a good one. All right, later. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope

you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to palmscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to palmscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.