The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Skyrockets, Gensler Quits: The Start Of The Crypto Revolution | Caitlin Long

Episode Date: November 24, 2024

Get ready for a jaw-dropping episode of The Wolf Of All Streets! While discussing the latest crypto news and industry shifts, Gary Gensler drops a bombshell announcement—he’s resigning as SEC Chair. We break down what this means for Bitcoin, banking, and the future of cryptocurrency. Don’t miss Caitlin Long sharing exclusive insights on federal reforms, stablecoin patents, and the fight for crypto-friendly banking! Caitlin Long: https://x.com/CaitlinLong_ ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEKDAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   ►► The Arch Public Unleash algorithmic trading. Discover how algorithms used by hedge-funds are now accessible to traders looking for unparalleled insights and opportunities!  👉https://thearchpublic.com/  ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. Use code '10OFF' for a 10% discount. 👉https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker  Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://x.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.com/ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #investments  Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 3:00 Live: Gensler Resignation 6:30 Operation Choke Point 2.0 9:00 Custodia Bank’s Fight 12:00 Big Banks’ Crypto Takeover 15:00 Regulatory Lawfare Unpacked 18:00 Stablecoin Legislation Updates 21:00 Chevron Deference Overturned 25:00 Federal Reserve and Banking Reforms 28:00 RFK Jr. on the Fed 31:00 Warren’s Anti-Crypto Agenda 34:00 Impact of New Administration 37:00 Banking Rules and Crypto Access 40:00 Strategic Bitcoin Reserve 43:00 Closing Remarks The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

The craziness of the whole thing that got us to where we are, Scott, and now, but we still know about Gensler. He hasn't announced his retirement. Barr actually said he wouldn't retire. Kaylin, there's no way this just happened. While we're recording on November 21st at 1.10 p.m., Gary Gensler has just tweeted, on January 20th, 2025, I'll be stepping down as SEC government chair, a thread, which I'm not going to read because I already read all the parts that I need to read. But this just happened while we are literally recording.

Gary Gensler is gone. Editors go back and take out whatever we said about Gary sticking around. We've long talked about Operation Chokepoint 2.0 and the fact that the banking system has been closed off or at all-out war with the crypto industry. On the front lines of that fight is Caitlin Young from Custodia Bank. And now that we have regime change, there should be a better chance that she finally gets her master account at the Fed and that we get to see Custodia Bank working. We talked about this, but so many things about the industry, the election. And we had an incredibly special moment in this podcast

seeing Gary Gensler tweet that he was resigning from the SEC live while we were just talking about Gary Gensler and the implications. This is one of the best podcast conversations I have ever had while Bitcoin pushes towards $100,000. I can't wait for you guys to listen to this entire conversation. Got the Bitcoin t-shirt on. I haven't looked at the price. Did we cross 100,000 yet? No, it got to 98,000 this morning. So obviously it's 30th of November 21st if they end up cutting

this in. But yeah, I mean, I consider, first of all, like in markets, 98,000 is 100. I'm sorry. Pretty darn close. It's around the year. Yeah, but the laser eye crowd. Come on, Our laser eyes. How many of us are going to have to take them off? Because if I know how much the whales who move price around want to troll us, I'm assuming we'll get to $99,999.99. And then I drop back to $75,000 before then coming up and breaking the engine. Well, that would be classic Bitcoin.

Bitcoin's doing what Bitcoin does. And I just want to go back and troll all the people. I was one of the early laser eyes people. And I want to go back and troll all the people who just poked fun that Bitcoin will never hit 100,000. And I never took those laser eyes off. I don't think you did either.

The question is, this is our starting question. And I've asked it on Twitter. Do people take the laser eyes off at $100,000? Because they may not remember. Laser eyes just became sort of this catch-all for anyone who was a big corner. But it was laser eyes to $100,000. That's what it was. Correct.

Correct. Yeah. You know what, Scott? I haven't decided yet. You know, a lot of people are like, laser eyes till fiat dies. It's really funny because I got, there was a tweet last night. And I engaged with it. And funny because um i i got there was there was a tweet last night it was and i engaged with it and i can't remember specifically who it was it was so well in the context of of jeffrey tucker who is the first person who orange pilled me way back

more than 10 years ago i think it was february 2013 he sent me an email um because i had i kept seeing bitcoin and started looking into it. And I was like, no, this is not going to work. But when I first took the really deep dive down the rabbit hole, it was because Jeffrey Tucker wrote a post about it to his liberty.me subscribers. And years later, he actually came back and asked me because I commented on it on Twitter that I still had it and he didn't have it because that email box was long gone by that point. And he asked me to send it to him. So he so he still has it. I might go back and post it. But that was it was February 2013. And I was engaging with him about something he's moved on

for Bitcoin. And he still he still loves it. But he's he's he's doing writing about other things. And he had a really interesting post comparing the Trump presidency to the Andrew Jackson presidency. And it was just really thoughtful because Jackson is controversial in historical circles, but he talks and he acknowledges those controversies. But he also talks about the parallels in sort of, you know, somebody coming in who had an axe to grind, who, you know, got targeted by the government and he wanted to kind of tear it down. And he tore down one of the first central banks of the United States in the process. And so it's such an interesting historical parallel. And the guy was engaging with me. The reason I brought it up is he's like, how can you trust a bank CEO who has laser eyes? And I started laughing. I'm like,

thank you for following. Exactly. Thank you for following. Exactly. Thank you for following me. You know, wouldn't it have been great? I would have loved to have had your company. It was somebody in the investment management business. Would have loved to have had your company, you know, 10 years ago at Morgan Stanley. It was really lonely being a Bitcoiner back then.

So it's just really funny, the whole laser eyes thing. You know, it's somebody who's new to it. And of course, every day there are new people coming in. And with Bitcoin crossing 100,000, we've seen this before. You know, I've been through a few cycles now. We will see new people coming in who don't know all of those things and don't understand them. And they'll make snide remarks like, how can you trust a bank CEO with LaserEyes? And pretty quickly, the community was nice to him.

And I welcomed him in and said, you know, hey, happy to help you learn. But we're going to have a lot of that. Yeah, I'm hoping that we're going to be a lot nicer to new entrants this time than perhaps we have been sometimes in the past. But you never know. Interestingly, you obviously brought up the similarities, I think, between the Trump presidency and Andrew Jackson. It's really interesting. You and I have spoken quite a few times, and specifically through election season. We sat with RFK together and interviewed him. And you actually were very careful about picking favorites.

You were very clear that you cared about doing what was right and not which politician did it. It wasn't about party. Okay, here we are. Right? And interestingly, RFK is in the cabinet. You and I had an interesting situation actually that day where RFK in the interview said that Trump was likely to be the next president. People caught it. They thought he was going to stop his campaign and they took it out. Remember they took it out of our interview interview, actually. So we were right there at this really pivotal moment in time when RFK decided effectively to throw his weight behind Trump, not publicly yet, but he alluded to it privately. Pretty close. And it was his son who I think jumped on it.

That night, his son said he's going to go whichever way the winds blow. He wants a cabinet position. I remember. That's okay. I didn't know that part because you were engaging with him directly. You pulled me in to kind of, you know, have a two-on-one interview. And I, that's the second time I got to interview him. I interviewed him at ETH Denver in February as well. I am so impressed by him. Oh man. You don't have to agree with everything he says, but he is a true intellectual. I think you knew that I first met him in 97 when we were seatmates on a cross-country flight. And I just remember such an intellectual, somebody who's clearly well-read both breadth and depth and has just

thought things through. And that is why, back to your original question, I think Trump is surrounding himself with people like that. And Tulsi Gabbard, she came to Cheyenne a couple of weeks before the election, and I got to see her in a relatively small group. And she stood up on the stage and just spoke extemporaneously without questions, without being prompted for an hour and a half. And the depth that she has, the depth of understanding of foreign policy at the time, it had just come out that she was being targeted by the intelligence community on that Blue Skies program and being followed on airplanes. And she joked about the, you know, she had somebody following her on the flight out to Wyoming. And man, she just held steadfast. Same thing with RFK.

You and I talked, he had just at that point in Nashville gotten Secret Service protection. And I had been calling for Secret Service protection for him because I saw him down at the Texas Blockchain Conference, watched as his entourage came in.

He had to pay for all that privately. I thought that that was election interference, making a legitimate presidential candidate who was at the time polling more than 15 percent in the national polls, which is what the rules say. You have to get that. They get Secret Service protection. And he talked about the death threats that he'd gotten. I mean, just that just the craziness of the whole thing that got us to where we are, Scott. And now just, you know, with Doge and the whole mandate to change things. But our sector is being targeted. There's one last rampage, to use a phrase that one of the insiders in D.C. told me, that this crew of Warrenites at the federal banking agencies and the SEC is going on one last rampage against our space. And I'm seeing it. It's happening. Okay, well, perfect.

So there's so much there. Obviously, we're both happy that RFK ended up with a position. I think now we have clarity on what the next few years will likely look like. And I think through the lens of our industry, regardless of what other people think, it's a net positive. Right. Taking the politics out of it,

every person that's been thus appointed to a cabinet position is a pro-Bitcoiner. You have Health and Human Services, pro-Bitcoiner. Department of Government Efficiency, two pro-Bitcoiners, right? Everywhere that you look, it's Bitcoin. So I think that we can all agree that the environment moving forward looks very bright for us. But when I look at Custodia,

and what you've been through, you obviously have made the announcement recently that you're likely cutting back a bit more staff, which you also did in August, because you have to expend resources suing the Fed, basically. But it's sort of a situation where I think about, if I can just live 10 years longer, maybe they're going to find a way in science to make us live forever. So I don't want to be the guy who dies right before the magic pill comes out. I feel like Custodia is in this situation

where you know that the situation should be fine, but the fight is still here. Yeah. No, we're not. We are not dead. Not at all. I don't mean you're dead at all. Just saying you get to survive long enough, like to make sure that you get the clarity and that you get the win that you deserve and that you're looking for. Thank you. Yeah. That is why we, we have done the cost cutting that we did to extend our runway. You know, a lot of startups have gone through that. You're absolutely right. We have been targeted by the Fed. It came out since you and I last recorded a podcast that the Fed itself made sure that Custodia couldn't operate with a partner bank. The Fed itself

targeted our first partner bank and pressured our first partner bank to close our accounts. It has happened multiple times since then. I'm going to save details for the court case because the Fed's litigation position and the district court judge, we didn't get a trial in the district court, so we didn't get a chance to lay any of this out. But the district court judge said, well, hey, Custody is operating through a partner bank. And the Fed's litigation position was the Fed could operate through partner banks, but the Fed made sure we couldn't operate through partner banks because the Fed kept putting pressure on partner banks. So there's a doctrine in the law, fruit of the poisonous tree, unclean hands, right? So look, it's a fact. It came out publicly. I do not know who Veronica Irwin got confirmation that our first partner bank was pressured by the Fed to close our account.

We weren't even operating at that point, Scott. That's how innocent we were. They didn't even have transactions to look at in question or anything like that. They just closed our account under pressure from the Fed. And I had I had confirmed that in recent months independently. I'm quite sure it's not with the same person. But when I put out the call for people who had evidence of Operation Chokepoint and the Fed's activity specifically at the end of November 2022, so exactly two years ago, that's when Michael Barr went on a rampage against the crypto banks. It is now an accepted fact that the narrative about the Silvergate bank run was not correct. Silvergate survived the bank run and then the Fed suicided it. Effectively the same for Signature as well. I mean, literally

suicided on Sundays. I mean, these were just collateral damage that it was, well, not even collateral damage. I mean, they did it on purpose on a weekend when nobody was looking for no reason. Well, but Scott, there is more than that. I always wondered, and this is public information, you can go look at the documents in our lawsuit, that if you go look at the date of when Board of Governors staff were talking with the Kansas City Fed staff about Custodia's application, it was the Sunday after Thanksgiving. And I was like, why? Our application had been outstanding for more than two years at that point. Why are they working on the holiday weekend after Thanksgiving?

And I found out why. That was when they dropped the hammer on Silvergate the first time. And I now know from insiders who have come forward of at least five banks thature Act area tell me when an agency is doing a one-off thing, they can usually get away with it. of banks in this case with the same thing they and there's no rule that allows them to target those banks at the same time with the same thing then they are violating the administrative procedure act but they know that right of course but that's what i'm saying so how brazen is it what higher power did they believe they were working for that they didn't think they would get in trouble for something that obvious and that effectively illegal? Well, first of all, Elizabeth Warren and the Democrats controlled the Department of Justice. So any criminal referrals would just go straight into the trash can. So this is what's so significant about knowing all of those things now before even an investigation has begun. Both the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee have said

this debanking stuff was illegal. And I think and I know it's a lot broader than just the crypto industry, but we have plenty of evidence of coordination, you know, starting from the White House. But it was FDIC, Fed, SEC, OCC. They were all coordinating. And we knew it at the time too, Scott, because remember that Protego and Paxos also had applications at the OCC and the Fed. And they either withdrew voluntarily

or hit the wall in the case of Protego. They're not around anymore. So, I mean, and that was all coordinated. And I knew, we have it in writing from a bloomberg reporter that because they had gotten a tip from the white house who was trying to kill us all and using bloomberg to do it that uh that um and it's all this is all in our lawsuit documentation as well that uh that that they had gotten a tip that the Fed and the OCC were pressuring all the applicants that had anything related to crypto in their applications to withdraw.

So at the time, I said, where's the due process in that? Each one of us were supposed to be individual applicants at different agencies, nonetheless, right? And obviously, they just didn't care about the due process. And I think the country reacted so viscerally to the overreach and abuse of government power across the board in the election. And that's why we saw the result that we saw. And our industry is just a microcosm of that. But I think it's actually more than just a microcosm. It's a microcosm of the actual activity in the US

government. But because we were so targeted and so viciously extrajudicially targeted with lawfare as an industry, and we had money to fight back, I do believe that our industry made a difference in the election. We absolutely did. Yep. Yeah. All you have to do is look at Coinbase lists of people that were backed by DareShake and such. I think it was 50 out of 54 were victorious that got significant money from crypto lobbies. And the other four were pretty long shots, you know, and most of those were actually long shots. So there's no question I think that it did. I will never forget. I reference it every time we talk. I reference it every time I talk to

anyone about the regulators. When you and I sat down in Miami in 2022, so it must have been April or May of 2022, everyone was talking about FTX and the SEC and all the problems. And you said it's misdirection. Look at the Fed, the OCC and the FDIC, the bank regulators. That's where the big problem was. Nobody was talking about Chokepoint 2.0. There wasn't the Operation Chokepoint 2.0. That term, I don't think, had even been coined. Nope. Right? And here you are with administrative change, right? In theory, everything should be changing now, but still in the fight of your life on behalf of your business and our industry. So we've unpacked the past.

What does this look like to you moving forward? Does the appointment at the, does who's leading the FDIC and the OCC, is that going to be what does it? Is it going to be the Department of Government Efficiency that goes through and wholesale hacks apart, you know, 80% of our bureaucracy? Does your case go away? A lot of people look at the SEC symbol cases and they say, well, everything gets Coinbase cracked and those are going to disappear. But yours is the other direction. You're suing the government, right? So you just get your master account because that's what's reasonable at this point. It's so funny how many people keep asking that question. And I mean, look, I have nothing to share. The Fed has dug its heels in,

and there have been some interesting things that have happened. Let's put it that way. Beyond just the fact that the Fed was telling the court in the district court case, oh, Custodia can just operate with partner banks, while the Fed was making sure we couldn't operate with partner banks. But it reminds me of SEC's come in and register, right? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, you just come in and register, but you can't come in and register. But look, we said yous come in and register, right? Yeah, you just come in and register, but you can't come in and register. But look, you said you can come in. Yeah, correct. Again, like, let's see what the judicial system does with all that. These are facts that are out

there that are now confirmed. And I don't know the extent to which that's going to have an impact, right? The oral argument in our case is January 21st. It's on. And by doing what Custodia did, let's put it this way. We extended our runway by a lot doing the cost cutting that we did. We can afford to wait this out. That's wonderful to hear. Exactly. That was brutal though. It was the Fed that did all that. Right. All these jobs in fintech and in the crypto industry that were lost because of this lawfare that was overreaching, where regulators just gave themselves power they didn't have across the U.S. government and it hurt a lot of people. And here's the other irony coming back to your original question. They helped the incumbent banks. One of our shareholders sent me a letter this morning, a note this morning saying, you know, what the regulators did was they really helped their friends. And they're out there saying, well, no, we don't like the big banks,

but look at what they actually do. They cleared the runway by getting the startups, by hamstringing the startups. And now here come all the big banks. And he said, look, they're all ready to go. They're all just waiting for the green light from Jay Powell. And they're going to get it. And those of us who were early and who tried to work with them and tried to go up the fairway, we talked about this before, this phrase, shoot the stallion to scatter the herd. They were actively trying to scare everybody away by lying about us and by publicly skewering us. And did that have an impact? Of course it did. So it's so heartbreaking because so many people's lives were disrupted by what the U.S. government did. And let's see if there's any justice in this. And we did this proactively. We're going on

offense. Going on offense in this case means being able to survive our way through all this and get to the other side. And let's see going forward how this works. I am very optimistic. Keep in mind, Custodia patented bank-issued stablecoins. We got the patent granted in July 2022. So I'm so glad you got it. Like I could just see by the look on your face. You understand the impact of this, okay?

Yeah. A little crypto bank in Wyoming has the patent that all the big banks are going to wish they had. But they were all too afraid to deal with this back when the, back because of, you know, Operation Chokepoint, we didn't know, you know, Nick Carter hadn't coined the phrase at that point.

So we didn't call it that, but they were all afraid of their regulators. The regulators were pressuring them, stay away, stay away, stay away. So Custodia, I've said at the time, I was surprised we got granted that patent because no other bank got there first. But-

I'm thinking about this all then in context of SAB 121, obviously, which was vetoed. And you and I spoke when that happened. And you said, I'm hearing there this all then in context of SAB 121, obviously, which was vetoed. And you and I spoke when that happened. And you said, I'm hearing there are going to be exceptions to this for the incumbents. Well, and then Bank of New York got an exception. And then all of a sudden, Bank of New York, Mellon doesn't have to play by the SAB 121 rules because they're the anointed one and everybody else still can't custody these assets. I'm sure State Street and Goldman are next on that list.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, at this point, by now, who knows? You said it was going to happen. Like, for anybody who thinks we're tinfoil hatting out here, she says it every single time and then it happens. But SAB 121, interestingly to you getting that patent, we had that moment where they were all afraid of the regulators. Then the ETFs got approved.

And then they were all pissed off because Coinbase got all the custody. And they're like, we're the regulators. Then the ETFs got approved and then they were all pissed off because Coinbase got all the custody and they're like, we're the favorites. We're the ones who are supposed to be getting the money on this. So they actually kind of hurt their own incumbents and then helped them in the end. It's just this weird- Yeah, but Scott, here's the thing. Maybe this plays out where Custodia is getting the last laugh because we've got that patent. Okay. And let me also throw something interesting at you. The Federal Reserve Banks are private entities. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

If they ever try to issue a central bank digital currency. You sue them for copyright infringement. So, okay. So your patent. Right. So to your point that Coinbase got the last laugh in the ETF custody business. I mean, literally Custodius sitting on an API based real-time payments platform and Bitcoin custody platform built with FinTech standards. Okay. Not bank standards, we actually shed a lot of our old bank stuff.

Here's one of the ironies. There's so much unwritten in the banking world that until you actually do it, you don't really know what the rules are. Banking has a million little rules, but it also has a million little unwritten rules too. Unless you actually try to deal directly with the Fed and start thinking about how are you going to integrate with the Fed and how are you going to plug in? Well, the Fed forces banks to use approved integrators. I've talked about this before. The approved integrators got fat and happy. They tend to force banks to sign up to multi-year contracts because they're sitting on a monopoly. And the Fed tells all their friends,

you have to use one of our friends to integrate with us. And so guess what those friends do? They sit back and they just rake in their monopoly profits and they don't innovate. And here comes this fintech industry that's just innovating around them and has just moved light years past all of them. They're called banking core contracts, banking core providers.

They claim to have APIs in a few cases, but they're not really APIs. They were lappable. And so we built a true API-based system to be able to service the crypto industry and fintechs, and we're a bank. But we shed a lot of that crap that we had to have because, you know, here's the irony in order to be able to apply to, to get fed membership, you have to have all that stuff in place. So you have to, you have to take the risk of having all those contracts, having all their vendors that they, that they approve to these multi-year contracts, and then they can turn you down for membership. I'm talking about membership here.

That was expensive. Right. It was very expensive. And when I talked to a bank guy recently, he's like, you got really screwed. And I'm like, yeah. You're like, yeah, thanks. Thank you for the confirmation. Yeah, exactly.

But it is not over yet. And again, like Coinbase got the last laugh. Custody's going to get the last laugh. Specifically in that situation. So you have so many balls in the air then, right? So obviously you have the suit, but then you have the master account in general to let you operate.

But then you also then have sort of anticipated stable coin legislation coming, which I think could greatly affect what stablecoins can or cannot operate in the United States, how they can or cannot be launched, who can or cannot launch them. Yeah. And you're sitting on a potential gold mine there if those things go your way, obviously. And I'm not afraid to litigate.

No, I think you've proven that. And I think that that was an inspiration to a lot of others that have chosen to litigate against other regulators in the United States. But so as I sort of alluded to before, you were trying to operate in arguably the most contentious environment possible. Yeah. Well, you're not talking about this in Miami. I was taking on what I think was the hardest thing for our industry, which is the connectivity back to the US dollar banking system. It's still not solved, still.

Right. And you had regulatory lawfare, as you said, where regulators effectively, we saw it over and over again against you, but specifically with the SEC, regulation by enforcement, passively naming tokens in an act, and all of a sudden they're unregistered securities, but you never prove it. Just all these crazy things that they did to stifle the industry. Well, now we have wholesale change and who's going to be leading these agencies. We know that they're going to be handicapped in what they can and cannot do, especially if their staff is cut 50%, but more importantly, because of Chevron. We had the Supreme Court come in

and basically say regulators cannot do this anymore, that it goes back to the courts. Either we need laws on the books that are very direct from Congress or the judges are going to decide. But you don't get to just say, because we've been doing this, it's law, right? But all of this should play heavily in the industry's favor, but in your favor. Well, let's see. I will point out a fact that the attorney in the Loper-Bright case that got the Chevron deference doctrine overturned submitted an amicus brief in our case. I remember.

On our side, we have three former solicitors general on our side in our case, including the one who will be doing oral argument on January 21st, the day after inauguration day. But specifically, Paul Clement is the attorney in Loper Bright. He submitted an amicus brief. I would highly encourage everybody who's interested in the Fed to read it because- It says the Fed is illegal, in case you guys were wondering. Okay. And what's so fascinating is you brought up Chevron, that his first action as an attorney after he got the Loper Bright win at the Supreme Court was to file that amicus brief in the Custodia case. So have at it. Go have fun reading. Yeah. And for those who don't understand it, this is something that Caitlin and I discussed at length in preparation for talking to RFK.

Because when we were sitting with RFK, we were kind of wondering what his big hitting announcement would be. And he stopped short of saying it directly. But effectively, it was end the Fed, bring the power of money printing back to the people as it was intended. Congress should be printing money, not the private banks that you alluded to. And that's what Clement is talking about here, correct? Yes, he points to the fact that the 12 regional private, regional Federal Reserve banks are owned and controlled by the banking industry. This has been something that critics of the Fed have been pointing out for years.

It's not actually a government agency. There's a government agency umbrella over the top, which is called the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. That is an agency. It is subject to the Freedom of Information Act and all federal agency laws like that, including the APA. But the Fed always likes to kind of play hide the ball, toss, you know, they'll say, hey, we're an agency in this case, we're not in another case. There is no question that the Federal Reserve Banks, because they're owned and controlled by the banking industry, are private entities. They are actually private corporations. They're not even.gov.

Yeah, they're shareholders. Correct. But it's also control, too. They share in the profits. They pay themselves interest. They vote to pay themselves interest because they sit on the FOMC. And the specific question is, can the president of a Federal Reserve Bank that cannot be fired by a presidentially nominated and Senate confirmed appointee officer of the U.S. government, can that person, the president of a private corporation, do official U.S. government business? And that's the question that is being addressed under what's called the appointments clause. There's a lot of case law under the appointments clause as to who is an officer of the United

States, who can make decisions. Some of that stuff, to be honest, might come up with some of these advisory positions like even Doge, right? That's true. Because they have said- Because they're not officially maybe a government agency. Government employees. It's exactly.

And they're privately controlled. I'm sure because Vivek Ramaswamy, who's all over all this, he's pointing out that basically you can just go through the Federal Register and probably 80 percent of the rules in the Federal Register can be reversed under those three Supreme Court cases that he that he points out of which one is is that is the overturning of Chevron deference. And all these rules can just literally be ripped up on on you know i don't know if it'll literally be day one but pretty pretty darn close they're going to go through just he's saying he's promising to bulldoze all those things so i'm assuming that he's dealing with all these

appointments clause questions right now but the fed is a giant appointments clause question and has been for decades. The academics who looked at the Fed have debated for decades whether it's constitutional for the private corporations' presidents to be voting themselves interest on the reserves that they hold at the Fed. And interest rates are set by the Fed. Not that the free market doesn't then decide what to do with them, as we've seen, as yields continue to rise, even though the Fed is cutting, they have limited control.

But private companies influencing what the interest rate will likely be and benefiting from that interest rate while also not being able to be fired by a government agency and also making the decision when and when not to rent our country's money. It's absolutely insane when you dive into it. And they arrogated themselves the power to keep competitors out. And that now gets to the question of who gets access to the Fed and the question that is open in our lawsuit.

And it's so interesting that we have three former solicitors general on that question of law because this is really a very big, important, it's a much bigger, much more important case than I think a lot of folks realize. I mentioned I was talking to somebody from the banking industry when I shared with him all the contracts that we had to sign just to be able to apply to become a Fed member bank. And then they rug pull us over this whole crypto thing. And he realized, he said, you got screwed. Well, this whole banking, very, very, very big question. It was answered by Congress in 1980. Then the law got reinterpreted by the Fed when a marijuana bank in Colorado applied. And anyway, here we are a few years later. And let's see.

Yeah. You say it goes back decades. It goes back centuries. If people start to really look at the Fed system. But I guess that's not something we can unpack here. But it's well, we'll find out. Yeah, we'll find out. We'll see. Maybe we'll see it. I haven't heard. I haven't heard the abolish the Fed rhetoric yet, actually, from anyone in the cabinet.

I guess Remeswami has kind of alluded to it at certain times. But you think that would be a hot button issue, actually, at this point? Well, no, J.D. Vance did. I don't know if you know that. He actually said, look, I don't I don't agree with with a lot of what Ron Paul had to say, but I've come around to his thinking on the Fed. And he said the Fed should be ended. He said that like maybe a month before the election. Yeah. So J.D. Vance, pretty darn close to Trump, has said that The others haven't quite gone that far. But, you know, coming back to RFK, you know, what was really fun is when I was interviewing him in February at East Denver,

I talked about all the times that he sued the federal government because he talked about how when you sue the federal government, you get a PhD in how to dismantle the agencies. And now he's going in as a cabinet secretary with his PhD on how to dismantle HHS to be the HHS secretary. And then he turned to me after he made that point about getting a PhD and how to dismantle the

agencies and said, but I haven't sued the Fed. And just the way that he said it, it was like, because he had just been talking, wink, wink, exactly. He'd been talking about his dad and his uncle. And, you know, I think the truth is finally going to come out about all that. And, and Trump has said that it will shock people. And I think, um, you know, let's, let's see what happens. RFK himself has been, has been saying, look, the U S government was involved in, in, in all this and let's, I'm waiting for the proof to come out. But when he says it, I perk up because he has obviously been, you know, he's lived it, right? And he lost his dad at a young age and watched all that. I think he's the oldest of that generation of Kennedys. And so anyway, so it's funny when he said, but I haven't sued the

Fed. So he said that and you and I happen to have had conversations with his team and him in advance of our actual interview when trying to distill it down to, you know, 45 minutes or whatever we had on stage. But he's well aware of how corrupt or how misaligned the incentives are of the Fed system. And he said, if I if I could say this without being taken out like the rest of my family, he said that. He said that he did said that. He did. Yeah, he said, I would say abolish the Fed, but I want to live till tomorrow. You know, like that was basically what he said.

And we were on stage. We were like, maybe we don't want to say that either. But I mean, it is that strong that multiple people said when we were floating the idea of him using that as a campaign promise that he wouldn't survive to the end of the election. And once again, this sounds like tinfoil hat, but these are the most powerful people in the world and they do not want you playing on their field. Well, that's clear. But you know, it's also really funny.

It's been really, really funny to watch what's going on in Wyoming, because one thing that I did not fully understand is that there was a bank in Wyoming who was stirring the pot and I kind of ignored it. Well, I didn't understand that the former CEO of the bank was on the Kansas City Fed board. And then the current CEO of the bank got a promotion to a national Fed board this year. And they've been stirring the pot in Wyoming. And I started looking deeper, like, why is this small bank? We're not a competitor of theirs. This is crazy.

What's in it for them? Why are they doing this? Well, they're clearly doing the feds bidding. But then I found a connection and I'm not going to talk about it here. Um, but, um, it'll come out at some point and everybody's going to go, are you kidding me? I'll leave it at that. Um, this is the kind of stuff that like when I can tell the full story, eventually I'll be able to tell the full story and figure out why this little bank in Wyoming as well. And there was a big brouhaha because talking about the bankers, right? Like stepping back, Elizabeth Warren and her crew, she controlled all the financial services appointees in the Biden administration. She officially is anti-bank. But look at what they actually did. Like we said earlier, they made sure that the big banks got, you know, all of the small competitors out of the way so that when they came coming into this industry, you know, they get to own the industry.

Well, wait a minute. I thought the official philosophy was we don't like big business. So how is it that they're doing nothing but helping big business here? And then you go look at, you know, Michael Barr, president of, before he went to the Fed, was president of the University of Michigan Public Policy School.

And look at their DEI policies. And then you look at what they said about me. They said, I have limited banking experience. Oh my God, I was a managing director, which is a partner equivalent for almost 15 years at two Fed-regulated banks. What's the issue? I'm a woman. And there are almost no women-owned banks in the country. So then you start putting puzzle pieces together about the hypocrisy of all this, espousing DEI while doing the most misogynistic thing, taking a woman and questioning her experience. Michael Barr would never have done that if I were a man.

Okay. So it is what it is. Like, come on. The hypocrisy of all of this is just insane. And I'm so glad it's all being called out. I mean, we got to talk about Elizabeth Warren in many ways. So obviously, she has long said she won't take donations from large banks, that she basically made her reputation on nobody got fired for the financial crisis. Nobody's in jail from the Great Recession.

But then you see her on the floor of the Senate questioning her buddy, Jamie Dimon from JP Morgan, about killing crypto in the United States. We've talked about this a bit. But, you know, he says, if I was the government, I would ban it. She's like, yeah, of course I would. Right. So it's right there, plain to see what the true intentions are. I think we all know she wants a central bank digital currency. But even- She said it multiple times.

So dismissing her past. Dismissing her past. So she won, right? John Deaton did exceptionally well. I think he- He did. Probably didn't have a chance to win, but he did exceptionally well. But she won.

She will be the ranking Democrat member still on the Senate. Most likely. Yeah, unless Chuck Schumer put somebody over her. Remember, the bankers are in New York and Chuck Schumer is New York senator and he's the minority leader. He has the power to put committee chairs in place. Do you think the bankers are going to be happy with Elizabeth Warren? Again, the funny thing is in certain ways, yes, the hypocrisy of what they've been doing, right? That they should be like, yeah, put her in. She's helping to kill our competitors in crypto so we can own the crypto

banking business. But then by the same token, they're yelling and screaming. So it's funny because Michael Barr's been caught up in all of this as well, that he tried to raise the capital requirements, which I actually agree with on the banks. The banks, you know, don't hold enough liquidity, right? The big banks hold about 12 cents in cash against all every dollar of demand deposits. The small banks, it's about eight cents in cash. It's not enough. This is why we have bank runs in this country. It's pretty obvious how you would stabilize the banking system. You'd make the banks hold more liquidity. Michael Barr tried to make the banks do that. The big banks came in and rolled him and it caved. And so it's kind of funny because they don't like him either. So who's really in control here? He's the one who got all these people appointed, including Gensler, including Marty Grunberg at the FTSC, including Barr. Which way are they going?

They're officially anti-Big Bank. And in some ways, they've done some things against the big banks. But look at these two things that I just talked about. Crypto, they're functionally handing it to the big banks. They let Bank of New York have the exception to SAB 121, as you said. And they slowed down and or killed other crypto-native companies like Custodia, like Protego, et cetera. And then number two, they and of course, Signature and Silvergate and SVB as well.

And of course, then number two, the big banks try to have their capital and liquidity requirements increased and they and they were able to roll that as well. So now let's come back to Elizabeth Warren's going to be probably the ranking Democrat unless Schumer has something else to say about it. But I will, I posit the question, is that so bad for the banks? They might yell and scream.

I think it's fine. Yeah. But it leads to the next natural question, which is what does she do without her friends? I mean, she's the anti-crypto army of one now, right? I mean, Brown is gone. He lost to Bernie Moreno. Yes. It's become politically unpalatable to be anti-crypto. It's very clear. Ruben Diego, even as a Democrat, is coming in as pro-crypto. Correct.

Yeah, I think it would just take a lot of gall and stupidity to make your platform anti-crypto after what just happened in this election and sort of the mandate that the American people gave to anyone who championed the industry. So does she have power anymore, I guess, is the question, because she's not going to have her, you know, we all know that she had her plant in the White House. That's a fact. And we know that she gave us the greatest hits like Gary Gensler, you know, and so he's going to be gone. And Kroonberg and Barr. Yeah, exactly. So but they're all going to be gone. So I don't know about that. Does she have power? That's right. So good question.

My first response is she has very, very strong friends and strong relationships in the senior career staff at the agencies. I've been told by multiple people that I know the specific names I've given the names of the people that she controls in the career staff at the agency. So now the question is, what's Doge going to do with that? Is there going to be such thing as a career staffer in these agencies in six months? Well, you know, that's a good question. But knowing that these senior career staffers are 95 percent Democrats and they're going to, in some cases, just actively work to undermine the administration. What's Doge going to do about that? It's an open question. So I know specifically that one of the senior career staffers in the Fed supervision andulation Department talks to Warren and her staff every

day. Okay. So does she have power over that person? Probably still, because they're philosophically aligned. They want a central bank digital currency. They want to kill the private banks. That person really just doesn't believe that banking should be private at all. They want a central bank digital currency. So there's a huge faction of that crew, and they all follow Warren. And yes, she still has power over that crew. But interestingly, yesterday, Michael Barr testified in front of the House Financial Services Committee that he plans to stay at the Fed. His term, I forget when his term ends, but it's like when you're appointed to a Fed governor term, it's a 14 year term. And there's a lot of debate. This has been in the national financial news already. Can Trump fire Powell?

Well, it came out in The Washington Post about a month ago, the article that said, well, Trump's not thinking about firing Powell anymore. He's thinking about firing Barr, who's the number two guy at the Fed. Now, Barr's the guy behind Operation Chokepoint 2.0, and Barr's the guy behind the failed Basel endgame attempt to raise the capital requirement on banks. And he's also the guy who came out in the Silvergate thing. Remember that I talked about that Sunday after Thanksgiving? Okay, that was all Michael Barr. And there's a very, very strong factual case to be made that the bank run of Silicon Valley Bank in the spring of 2023 was instigated by the Fed. I don't think they intended to do it. I think they didn't think that taking down these small banks was going to start a bank run that hit more than a hundred banks, according to the New York

Fed's research, but it happened. happened. And now that we know that the bank run didn't take Silvergate down, it was the Fed that pressured them to voluntarily liquidate, go look at the facts. The next day is when the Silicon Valley bank run started. Forcing Silvergate to, quote unquote, voluntarily liquidate into jittery markets started a bank run. And that was all Michael Barr. Okay. So, but the question is, does he have the ability to stay on? There's a big academic debate over whether a president can fire these independent agency heads. If Marty Grunberg had wanted to dig in, there would have been a question whether Trump was going to be able to appoint a new FDIC chair. And there is still a question because Marty Grunberg said he's going to retire on January 19th. That guy should have been gone

a long time ago. Talk about hypocrisy. Warren is a big me too-er unless it's one of her people. Yeah, for those who don't remember, he got in a lot of trouble for the way he was treating female staffers. And of all people, the person who stood up for him and made sure he kept his job was a female. Right. Exactly. Like the hypocrisy of all this is stunning. But we don't know about Gensler. He hasn't announced his retirement. Barr actually said he wouldn't retire. So is that bringing up, you know, if you read The Washington Post from a month ago, you know, what's going to happen? Is there a conflict now? Go look at the Fed academics. They talk about how unclear this all is. And then the question is, if a president were to fire a Fed chair or vice chair for supervision,

then could they fire them from just those titles and then they stay and finish out their 14-year term as Fed governor? Yeah, right. A lot of people have pointed to the fact that he could end up not as the chairman, but could still be. Could still be. Exactly the same. At the Fed, the FDIC works a little bit differently. All these independent agencies work a little bit differently. But you see the fundamental problem.

And this is one of the things that Doge has been talking about, that Elon and Vivek have been talking about, these independent agencies have kind of gotten more powerful than the U.S. president, and they're not subject to the accountability of the U.S. voter. One of the things that I liked in the first announcement about the priorities that Trump came out with for Doge is to pull out the inspectors general at these agencies. Because I'll tell you, has somebody who filed an inspector general complaint with the Fed about what happened to Custodia and laid out all this crazy stuff that happened to us? Well, the inspector general at the Fed, who's, by the way, one of the highest paid people at the Fed, go look at the data, reports to the board of governors. But what happens when somebody files a complaint about the board of governors? What do you think happened?

Yeah, it's like the internal auditing guy at the hedge fund. They just want to get paid by their hedge fund. And I keep moving on. So they interpret the law. I have it here. Michael S. Barr's term as vice chair for supervision of the Fed is set to conclude on July 13th, 2026. So we still got another year and a half there. But then his term as a member of the Board of Governors extends until January 31st, 2032. There you go.

There you go. There you go. 2032. There you go. Right. So and he announced his intention to stay. Now, is that just classic DC? Nobody wants to be a lame duck.

So they're not going to announce that they retire, that they plan to retire or, but you know, if you, if there's a very interesting book to read is the power and influence of the federal reserve. I think it's what it's called by Peter Conte Brown. There's a Roger Lowenstein also has a really interesting book. These are two books that have been written in the last few years about the Fed. So they're very current. And he both of them talk about the fact that most Fed governors don't fill out their 14 year terms. It's it's been it's interesting because there are seven Fed governors, just like there are seven Supreme Court justices have lifetime appointments. The Fed governors have 14-year appointments, but most of them don't stay their full 14 years. So, functionally, well, I don't know, point taken, because this is the banking industry we're talking about, but functionally, the Fed has become, basically, a U.S. president has the ability to put more people on the Fed

board than they do on the Supreme Court, even though it's seven, seven appointees in each institution. But that's not the way Congress set it up. Congress set it up so that there would be more independence. So now it comes back to the question of, you know, the mandate of the voters. There were a lot of people who were really turned off by that, by how Powell went out and in his FOMC press conference two weeks ago, and he was asked, um, are you going, if, if, if Trump asked you to resign, are you going to, are you going to resign? No, exactly. And it was right. And then the follow-up was, do you think he has the ability to fire you? No, no. Um, right. And, and, and, and a lot of of people both on the left and right, like the New York Times was going after him for that. OK, so a lot of people on both the left and the right were

really taken aback by that. Just the notion that the Fed governor in in in in the way he carried himself, portrayed himself as not at all accountable and above the U.S. president. Exactly. And functionally, that might actually be true. OK, let's set that aside. But I ask the question just as rhetorically, because I have no insight other than I was I noticed yesterday that Barr said he's not leaving. Now, here's the impact of all of this. Some of your listeners, we probably lost them already talking about the inside baseball. But what does this mean for crypto? That's what one and a half times speed is for.

There you go. There you go. What does this mean for crypto? A lot of the interagency guidance on crypto banking came from the FDIC, OCC, and Fed. If Michael Barr isn't leaving, then how easy is it going to be to undo that interagency guidance? Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Right. Yeah. It's really, I mean, you know, it seems like we've unwound almost everything, but it's not going to be as easy as I think people assume it's going to be that just because we have a new president and new people at the head,

there's so much bureaucracy and red tape and so many things that people probably don't want public that they're incentivized to hide that none of this is going to be as easy as we think. Yeah. Well, and it's going to be interesting because you're right to say, let's look forward, right? The fact that both House Financial Services and Senate Banking have said they're going to operate or they're going to investigate Operation Showpoint 2.0, that's looking backwards. It's an interesting question. I don't 100 100 know if that's true because they might be so engaged with what we're talking about in terms of reform there is there are fed reform bills out there and more coming and what exactly is trump going to do with this we don't know nobody knows and and so they might be so bogged down. And I think the

Senate especially is going to be so bogged down with appointments next year with the new administration coming in because all those jobs have to turn over and the ones that he has appointment authority over and the Trump tax cuts expire next year. So they have to put a new tax bill in place. So think about what that's going to do to the Senate. It's going to occupy an enormous amount of Senate time just to do those two things. So where's the crypto industry and all that? Where's the stablecoin bill? I hear a different thing every day about whether there's an opportunity for the stablecoin bill to pass in the lame duck session. There are a lot of crypto people who just don't want Schumer to have his hands on it because they think they can better deal if we're willing to wait another six or nine

months. But here's the other interesting dynamic. What if the Fed says, well, we'll let the big banks issue stable coins in order to get a jump on the crypto industry in the interim? Good question, right? There are so many permutations of what can happen here. Exactly. And the jockeying between TradFi and the crypto startups, it is unfortunately going to be influenced by the sequencing of what happens in all of this. And I've long heard that, you know,

as impressive as the crypto lobby has been and was impactful in this election, that it's also very disjointed and cannibalistic and will be moving forward because there's misaligned interests, even from the individual companies or entities that are lobbying for different things. I think we saw the first iteration of that when SBF was the anointed one to go craft crypto policy in Washington, right? And that was a policy that nobody in crypto would have liked it if it had been seen except for FTX. So there is also some risk that now that our money is really in play, you have to make sure that the money is actually pointing us in a better direction and not towards more FTX. the hypocrisy and the double standards. If the regulators had been serious about consumer protection and preventing fraud, they would have rolled out the red carpets for the companies that went into the SEC and said, how can we register? And for companies like Custodia and Protego and Paxos who were getting bank charters from our various chartering agencies and were trying to comply with the Fed rules to get access to the Fed payment rails. But instead, what did they do? We were the ones who got targeted.

They weren't serious. We just got it. Kaylin, there's no way this just happened. While we're recording on November 21st at 1.10 p.m., Gary Gensler has just tweeted, on January 20th, 2025, I'll be stepping down as SEC government chair, a thread, which I'm not going to read because I already read all the parts that I need to read. But this just happened while we are literally recording. Gary Gensler is gone. Editors go back and take out whatever we said about Gary sticking around. He's gone. He tweeted it himself. That's amazing. We can hashtag fire Gary Gensler. So we got that one. But this was actually so interesting because this leads to my next and hashtag fire Gary Gensler. Are you real-time tweeting?

I don't have my- So we got that one. But this was actually so interesting because this leads to my next question. We talked about what power Elizabeth Warren might have going forward in the new administration. We unpacked that. What shots can they take before January

if they're being vindictive? You just tweeted about Elon Musk, right? This 259 page rule. The Biden who just enacted this to stop X from becoming a payments juggernaut. Wow. A whole new 259 page rule aimed at X yet more lawfare against you. I mean, this is the guy who's literally coming in to work for the government and they're taking their last shots at him on the way out the door. So they're not afraid to still use this lame duck two months to be vindictive or try to actually have major impact. Well, and I tweeted right after the election, Custody had been debanked yet again. I'll save all the facts for for the judicial process.

But we've been debanked multiple times. The impact of that is loss of mission critical tech integrations. And it's just a massive cost. So it wasn't just the litigation cost. It was also just the massive cost of trying to operate with partner banks. And so you saw our announcement in reaction to that. And I was told by one of our tentacles that they were on quote, one last rampage. So get ready, because I think there will be more impact than just on custodians. What do you think? Like, I mean, I know we can't predict necessarily, but is that more because the thing is, like

SEC enforcement actions at this point are likely to just be dropped in two months. So it's not like they can get one in the next two months. So where can they actually, you know, make a permanent difference and not just be annoying kind of? Well, they're going to do everything they can. OK, so the bank regulators we know operate behind closed doors. And I think that, by the way, is going to get reformed because the bank operators have hidden behind the doctrine of confidential supervisory information to do things that are extra judicial and outside of the regulatory scope. And they threaten the banks if there's disclosure. How Nick Carter got

all the information that he got to be able to report is incredible because he clearly got people who were breaking confidential supervisory information. Same thing with Veronica Irwin hats off to you guys, both of you, for your reporting on this. It was real reporting and they got people to talk clearly. But I know in one case, you know, there were lawyers involved making sure they could even print what they learned from people because they didn't want to get sued as journalists. So I mean, this is big deal stuff. So yes, Scott, there is going to be more of that. OK, don't be shocked if you're in the crypto industry and you suddenly get a notice from your bank or from your crypto company that, you know, the routing number of your account has if your wiring has changed. Right. Or, you know, are your accounts going to get closed? There's going to be a lot of that. I think they're going to try to slip in rules just like they did today. Somebody pointed out to me, it's 60 days from the election today. And the Congressional Review Act, Congress can go within 60 days

and overturn rules. So basically, anything from here forward in theory could be overturned by Congress. I think you're going to actively see the Congressional, a lot of the rules get overturned by Congressional Review Act. But then it comes back to essentially what Vivek and Elon have been saying, that they're going to use these three Supreme Court cases to go through. And there are going to be probably opinions of the Justice Department that these rules do not comply with the law. And they're just going to start tearing them up. I think there's a staggering number of pages in the Federal Register. Elon tweeted out, you know, just every year, the Federal Register, the number of

pages added is just insane. Nobody really actually knows how many pages there are in the Federal Register, which is where all the rules get published when they're finalized. And there's been so many extrajudicial things that have happened, and they'll just go through and start tearing them up. Specifically in the banking industry, the other thing that needs to happen, somebody needs to rewrite what's called the FFIEC exam manual. I've done a lot of thinking about all this because again, like being inside the banking world, there's a lot of stuff that happens outside of the Administrative Procedure Act. And, you know, you just, some of the stuff you don't learn unless you actually do it. So I know where some of the proverbial bodies are buried. And, you know, like I've always said, you've you and I've talked about this before,

I've been willing to help anybody learn Bitcoin. I'm willing to help with these reforms. And, and, you know, not putting my hand up per se, but definitely willing to help, because I know it's going to be tricky to handle some of these reforms. The banking system is not stable. Like we said, when the big banks hold 12 cents of liquidity and the little banks hold eight cents of liquidity against their demand deposits, pretty easy to see how if there's a panic, bank runs happen. And it's pretty easy also to fix that stuff. But the banking regulators have been a lot more interested in things like climate change and those kinds of policies. OK, and so somebody's got to go in and unwind all that stuff and get at the stuff that really matters and do it in such a way. Tom Luongo and I just did a

podcast last week where he said he's an in the Fed guy and he's he's saying, look, you got to I'm not an in the Fed now guy. You've got to be super careful how you do all this. That could be really ugly. A hundred percent. And to be clear, Trump has never said that. Wind down the Fed might be our better catchphrase. It's going to take time to stabilize all this and get to that point. And so, by the way, last point to answer your question,

I'm really, really interested in who ends up in the Treasury Secretary role, because that's going to be the most pivotal role. Is that a business as usual person? Trump needs the Treasury market to stay functioning and calm. But he's also got to do some reforms, because the voters mandate is get rid of too big to fail. Get rid of weaponization of government against people who have been debanked. That was absolutely part of the mandate. There was all over the news when Melania released her book, it disclosed that the Trump family had been debanked. Okay. Um, and,

and religious conservatives have been screaming about this. Sam Brownback, the former Senator from Kansas has been talking about this, um, as well in recent, recent months, the form or the current CFO of Florida, Jimmy Petronas, announced that he wants to start the Florida Sunshine Bank because too many Floridians were being debanked for

political reasons. He also wants to put Bitcoin on the balance sheet for those who are- Yay. Yeah. Everybody who's on this same thread, we're all on the same problems. How do you solve them? A lot harder to do in practice. And those solutions have to be done very carefully. And the banking industry will just bury whoever's a reformer who tries to come in and reform. They'll just bury them with all these million literal rules. Somebody who actually understands that, that's who you need to be able to reform all that stuff. So I'm watching it all very closely. There's so much. But listen, it's all

in the right direction. You talk about who will be the next Treasury Secretary, and I don't have to go back too long to think about people saying Gary Gensler might be the next Secretary of the Treasury. So I mean, if we're going to count our blessings, at least we know that it won't be going in that direction. Lutnick's at Commerce, so he'll be doing tariffs and trade if we're going to count our blessings, at least we know that it won't be going in that direction. Lutnik's at Commerce, so he'll be doing tariffs and trade. Treasury is going to be interesting. And there are some real challenges here for the next administration. I don't think it's going to be as easy as people think, but it's still, for our industry, I think a win to celebrate.

Prices have obviously reacted positively in all markets. I mean, as we started, you know, we're pushing towards 100,000 here on Bitcoin. It just feels like everything is aligning. I just got to be hopeful that it will remain that way. I was just looking to see if Bitcoin crossed 100,000 while we were recording this. I don't think not yet. 98,100. I got the Bitcoin t-shirt on. Last time I recorded with you, I had my irresponsibly long t-shirt on. Well, I recorded with you, I had my irresponsibly long t-shirt on. Well, I hope you're still because you benefited massively from being irresponsibly long because Bitcoin was probably like $50,000 back then. Yeah. Well, it's funny. I don't even know the price at which I started to buy my first Bitcoin because I actually traded around it a little bit. I've probably disclosed that I used it. I used it to buy Christmas presents

on overstock.com in 2014. And a lot of people are like, oh my God, those are the most expensive Christmas presents ever when you think about it in today's terms. Like the Bitcoin pizza, every day on Bitcoin pizza day, everybody talks about what those pizza were worth.

I don't think of it that way because if the early users hadn't been there to bootstrap the network by using Bitcoin, we wouldn't be where we are today. And I'm so grateful to have been able to get in early. And I was one of the few that I remember a Wall Street Journal article that said something like only 800 some taxpayers disclosed Bitcoin on their tax returns. I was one of that. Like, I've always just been really careful about it.

And so I only we got in 2016 and when I got in 2017, when things went crazy, I remember the narrative was this market's amazing. You can do whatever you want. You don't, they don't even ask you to report on your taxes. If you're trading between things, you're just making money and it doesn't matter. And maybe you'll pay. I mean, no, we were wrong about all that. Yeah. Yeah. So, well, right. No, of course. Yeah. Everybody, definitely. I would not encourage people not to pay taxes. I did, even when it wasn't clear whether we had to. Me too. To be clear, I did. I'm just telling you what people said. Exactly. Right. You know, just, I'm a rule follower and so here we are, but thanks. There's been some reminiscing as we get close to 100,000. I saw Bruce Fenton and Wayne Vaughn, some early, early Bitcoiners, people I saw at Porkfest in like 2013, right?

I saw those conversations. Talking about it. You know, it's really fun. Back when we could buy a bacon wheel. Bruce's tweet was great. Yeah, Bruce's tweet was great. Like, you know, we were just a bunch of nerds sleeping on couches trying to make this happen. And here we are, Larry Fink out on the roadshow and the president talking about a strategic Bitcoin reserve. I know I got to let you go. Next time we'll talk about the strategic Bitcoin reserve.

Maybe, hopefully we'll be talking about is a past tense thing that's already happened. Maybe it'll be done by then, we'll see. But another thing coming out of the great state of Wyoming. Yes, indeed. That came from Senator Lemus. Indeed. Yeah, she's been a huge proponent. Well, Caitlin, we're going to all be cheering for you. I'm hoping that this at least,

you know, increases dramatically your chances of getting the account that you've deserved this entire time and hopefully with a more friendly and reasonable Fed than you would have had if you had been approved before. Well, we'll see. You know, of course, the big dynamic is the big banks, of course, are all now ready. And we lost, when I say we, I'm talking about not just Custodia, but Wyoming, all the Wyoming speedy banks, all the crypto companies, we lost four years to the big incumbents in all this. Congratulations, Elizabeth Warren. You made the big banks bigger. Ah, what a, couldn't think of a better way to end.

And I could not honestly think of a better person to share the Gary Gensler resignation news live with than you. So I'm glad that we got to do that. I can't wait for this to come out on Sunday. Everybody, please follow Caitlin. Of course, she'll be tagged underneath. And is there anything we can do to help you at this point? Just spread the word. Watch our lawsuit, oral argument on January 21st, the day after Inauguration Day.

I think a lot of people are going to be logging on to that Zoom. And just dig in. Read the Paul Clement amicus brief. Just literally spread the word about it because there are big things happening in this space. And we'll see legislatively some changes. We'll see rules that have been blocking us torn up. We'll see new enabling rules get into place. And it's a new day. It really is. And I couldn't be more excited for the future of the United States and for the future of the U.S.'s role in an industry that just kept going without the United States. Just shows how much the United States just doesn't have the power that it once did.

But we're going to come roaring back, folks. Well, as they say, first they dismiss you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you. And then you win. I wasn't sure that's where we'd yet, but here we are. Thank you so much, Caitlin. It's been a pleasure. Always great to see you. Really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.