The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin To Become Legal Tender? Bruce Fenton, Candidate for US Senate

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

There’s a gigantic shift occurring in how the world works. Border changes, power changes, government changes… nothing is off the table. Bruce Fenton believes there is nobody better to shape those changes and be part of building that new world than us Bitcoiners. And he’s running for Senate in order to help push that legislation forward. He joined us to discuss the Senate race, the evolution of Bitcoin, and the future of the world. JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER 📩 https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSOR ►► Vauld is a Smart Investing Crypto Platform which allows the user to invest without any stress! With Vauld, you can earn free passive income in crypto. Vauld lets you earn the highest interest rates in the crypto industry - 12.68% on stablecoins and 6.7% on BTC and ETH.. Sign up below and get a 40% kickback on trading fees, 5% commission on interest payouts and 5% commission on loan interest. Vauld’s ‘Buy the Dip’ function automatically purchases specific cryptocurrencies for you when the price dips below a pre-set level. It’s awesome! Sign up here: http://thewolfofallstreets.info/vauld EPISODE LINKS Bruce Fenton: https://twitter.com/brucefenton Production & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/ FOLLOW SCOTT MELKER • Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets • Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io • Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe • Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3FASB2c

I mean equities are a third of the world's wealth. If we make that work better, and then real estate's like another third, and real estate's basically equities too because they're all owned by corporations. All these big buildings, it's not owned by Fred and Alice, it's owned by corporations. So if we can make that work better, that's really exciting. That could create a kind of revolution like we haven't seen before, and hopefully a very peaceful one, where we sort of decrease state power and increase the power of the people.

So that would be the best case scenario, I think. This episode is sponsored by my good friends at Bullish. Stay tuned for more information on this amazing company later in the episode. The best way to effect change is to infiltrate the system and do it from the inside. Luckily, we have cypherpunk Bitcoin believers like Bruce Fenton who are running for public office, in this case, Senator of New Hampshire. I think we can all agree with his libertarian ideals and hope that we start to see politicians who understand the importance of Bitcoin and freedom in the future.

We talked about why he's running and what we can look forward to if he wins his race. Have you been doing a million of these or you keep me up pretty chill? A few, yeah. Today I have a few more, but I did a couple already and a couple more. So, and then I was MC on the first day.

I know. And then I went over to Jimmy's and I spoke at Jimmy's conference. Oh, nice. Which was fun. So cypherpunk turned politician, is that something we're going to start seeing? Oh boy, I don't know about politician, but... I'm sorry, if you win, you get the title.

I know, I realized that over the last few days that you really are a politician if you win, you know. Whether you like it or not. Yeah, yeah, you're part of that definition. So what's the motivation running for Senate? I think, I think it's really just where the country is right now, where the world is, you know, the country's in tough shape and I'm worried about how the world is unfolding. We have this sweeping tyranny going across the world, things that we wouldn't have thought possible just a couple years ago. It's a time of massive change, and I think that it's important to have people in office who understand human rights and the Constitution in the United States and the proper role of government.

So I felt like I had to, I felt like I'd regret it if I didn't at least try to be part of, you know, the kind of change I want to see in the world, you know. It's an optimistic view though, that you can go and actually affect change from the inside. I think a lot of people probably believe that you just go and get spit out by the machine. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's part of it.

And you don't have a ton of power. You know, in my case running for Senate, senators, there's nothing I, I would love to make like promises, like I'm gonna make Bitcoin legal tender and I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna decrease the SEC's power or whatever, but you can't do that.

You can't make any of those promises as a senator. All you can say is that you might put some bills forward and if they're bills like that, they wouldn't even go anywhere. And you can vote consistently. But I think we need that more than ever. If anything, that's something that I think is maybe even appealing to people

who are maybe more on the left or more moderate. When maybe they don't agree with my opinions, but they say, you know what, if he's in there, at least we know how he's gonna vote. At least holding back a little bit, one vote to kind of hold back the tyranny. I would consistently vote against any kind of government increase or regulatory increase or, you know, these huge spending and tax bills and these kind of things.

So, you know, one vote can make a difference sometimes. Certainly in the Senate. Yeah. And especially when you have, there's a number of people like this running. There's a lot of unconventional candidates. You know, you have Blake Masters and other people. You know, it's possible that you have a handful in there. And then there's a number of people like this running. There's a lot of unconventional candidates. You have Blake Masters and other people. It's possible that you have a handful in there, and then there's a few already.

You could see a dozen-person voting block, even this term. I mean, then it's a very significant thing, particularly the people like me who are more libertarian, where there's some issues I'm on the right, some issues I'm on the left. And I'm consistent with those principles way more than I would be loyal to one party or not. Right. I mean, is a two party system at all effective?

I mean, is that something you get in there and you try to form a third one once you're in? You're not going to win trying to pretend to be a third party candidate in a Senate race. Yeah. But is that a theoretical goal that you get in there and say, hey, it's cool to agree with stuff on both sides and disagree. Yeah, I think I would. I mean, I would stay as a Republican, but I would be very unconventional Republican, you know, very much a Ron Paul Republican. And in many cases, I would vote with with Democrats, probably depending. It really depends. There's not a lot of votes lately that I would have voted for them. But, you know, there's been times, for example, when Republicans have been very hawkish.

And if I would have been in, I would have voted against the wars, you know, and, and I'm, I'm against the wars now. You know, I would vote against the war consistently, regardless of what the party says. So I'm not somebody who's going to be kind of, you know, strong armed by, uh, you know, party officials. You know, I, I would anticipate probably only doing this once if I did do it. Yeah. Uh, it's, it's not something I'm not a career for.

You don't want to get 70 years. They bring you out of the cryo chamber to vote? It's not something that appeals to me much. The job is a brutal job. And I mean, it's a big sacrifice to considering it because there's a good chance I'll win. I mean, it's a very, very winnable race. And that's kind of a little scary because uh say boy now i got to go down there and do this job potentially which isn't i leave my beautiful farm and my kids and my family and it's a pretty brutal schedule you're down there like uh you know four days a week almost the whole year you know 180 days a year or so so uh and let's be frank you don't want to be down there yeah no i one of the things i did i did, I looked at the rules and I said, well, could you win and just not show up?

And unfortunately, no. They have the sergeant at arms of the Senate has the power to compel you to come back. And apparently, I guess, 100 years ago or so, there were some senators who just decided to go back to their farm and chill. And they went and got them. They make you go down. They'll physically drag you in there. I think they can't even arrest you. Make you sit in your chair. I guess that is a good thing if you're an elected public official to be forced to do your job.

Yeah, you could, you know, as nice as it would be to just play hooky the whole time, I mean you do have responsibility and there are votes that need to be done and you couldn't have a situation where you just can never get a quorum if everybody just stayed home. Because there are things that, even for me as a libertarian, there are some things that you do need to vote. And there's some things that there'll probably be things I'll be very glad to vote and things that I'll support, particularly if it's something that I put forward or something that's deregulatory. Like if somebody put forth a bill or if I put forth a bill that said, make Bitcoin legal tender or something, I'd want to go there. And then, you know, there is what it's originally designed for national security. I mean, there's significant issues and I'm afraid and worried that there's going to be significant issues

coming up in the next several years. Our world is in turmoil right now. Ukraine is not the end of the chapter. Or the beginning. Yeah, it's the beginning. And back in April 2020, I kind of predicted this. In a paper I wrote that this COVID reaction is going to cause second order, nth order effects. And we're seeing that now. Ukraine wouldn't be the same situation that it is right now if not for what happened over the last two years. There's a whole bunch of different political factors, geopolitical issues and things like that that contribute to it. So I think we're going to, unfortunately, probably have more turmoil like that. So, you know, even more important to kind

of, you know, do the right thing with these votes and what's going on in the government. So you're really early to Bitcoin, obviously. Did your politics lead you to Bitcoin or did Bitcoin lead you to your politics? I think my politics lead you to Bitcoin or did Bitcoin lead you to your politics? I think my politics led me to Bitcoin. I mentioned yesterday that being a Ron Paul fan, a libertarian, like a lot of people, I heard about it through that movement. I heard about it in New Hampshire at Porkfest. It was Eric Voorhees, Roger Ver and Charlie Shrum speaking at an event in, I think, 2012. And so that was the first time that was pretty much the first time I had heard about Bitcoin. And that's when I first started looking. I said, what is this, you know, weird libertarian geek money? And so.

So, yeah. And that made me predisposed to it because I was big on freedom and voluntarism and, you know, not a fan. You got it right it right away a lot of people don't right yeah I got it I got the political part of it it did take me a little while to get Bitcoin when I first bought it because I my background was as a trader and an investment person so when I first bought it I bought it as a trade like oh this is a trade I'll just and then it might make money yeah cool here's a cool thing i can make a 30 on and um and i didn't really care anything about it or know anything about i went and bought some exactly and then once it made some money i said oh well maybe i hold some more maybe i keep some

you know should have held it all but but my you know my first trade yeah of course you know my my first trade i i made some money and then I started looking at it more. And then as it kept going up, I became more serious. Started going to some, I remember the first Bitcoin conference I went to, I really agonized about, I'm like, this is a waste of, you know, $500 for a hotel and $500 for a ticket and a whole weekend.

I'm going to spend three days on this, like, but something in my gut, I'm like, there's, this might be like the internet. There might be something here. I'm going to want to go there and be, see what this is. And that, going to that conference, that totally changed my, I was like, wow. I could just feel the energy in the room.

I, the intelligence level of the people was off the charts. And then I, then I really started getting it. And, and that, you know, that was a big change in the charts. And then I really started getting it. And that was a big change in the trajectory. Have you ever been trading crypto and during bouts of high volatility had your exchange go completely offline or seen the order books go thin and have absolutely no liquidity for your trade? I know that you have. It's happened to every single crypto trader, but it's not an issue anymore thanks to Bullish. Bullish is a powerful new exchange for digital assets that offers deep liquidity, automated market making, and industry-leading

security. Combining the innovations of DeFi with the regulated environment of traditional finance, Bullish empowers users to trade with confidence across variable market conditions while secure in a regulated environment that's backed by multi-billion dollar liquidity contributions from the Bull bullish treasury. Follow at Bullish on Twitter or visit bullish.com slash Melker to learn more. I always love to talk to people who are much earlier than myself. I came in in 2016 as a trader, same as you. I want to make money. And then it was kind of funny. You say you got the belief in it as it started to go up. i really started to believe in it when it went down because i had to justify my uh yeah my position right so that i think that's how

i got orange peeled a little sort of later more during the winter and and not as much as a trader but you obviously saw the political potential for it the the freedom aspect is there anything about the way it's evolved that has surprised you or even disappointed you? Yeah, it's, I guess, you know, we all sort of talked about it being a big thing and being global money, but to be like here at this event, when you really see the magnitude of what it's become, I think a lot of us talked about this and sort of,

I guess you could say many people predicted this, but to actually see it as a different kind of thing, you know, you couldn't have predicted it to this detail, you know, say, oh, it's big, you know, and people would throw out numbers. I remember, you know, people used to say, oh, someday Bitcoin's going to be a 3000, you know, and that seemed like such a huge number. And, you know, when the first businesses started accepting it, you know, all these milestones were a big deal. But to see this, this scale that what we have now, and we can only predict what's going to happen in the future,

but I think it has been surprising, just the scope and scale of this, when you have governments and also the speed. I mean, it's been quite fast. It's just 10 years and we now have it totally mainstream at a government level. Yeah, we're now at Coinchella, I guess Coinapalooza, whatever you call it. That's what this really feels like.

Yeah, it is. There's going to be a legitimate music festival actually outside. So I guess it's a fair analogy. But does institutional and government involvement in the asset worry you? You know, government, I'm not a huge don't, I'm not a huge fan of government involvement. I'm not against it. I say anybody can buy it, you know, more buyers, more hodlers, the better. And it's a good decision from those governments. And it's ultimately, hopefully good for those citizens. But I'm so skeptical of governments. I'd kind of, I'd rather just,

you know, I don't view the biggest victory of saying, oh, a government's taking it. I view it as the people in a country. So if I were to give advice to a country, I wouldn't necessarily say, you should buy it for your balance sheet. Ideally, governments wouldn't even have a balance sheet. It would be all the people. And so if a government can encourage their people to do it, or better yet, just break down any barriers that there are, regulatory or otherwise, I think that's an even bigger victory. But, hey, I'm all for it if governments buy it. I am cautious of this sort of slippery slope where first it's Bitcoin, then it's crypto, then it's CBDCs, then it's CBDCs that control where your money goes and have tracking and all this other stuff. And it's kind of nothing like Bitcoin. You know, you've got to be cautious of sort of, you know, making other things,

lumping other things like CBDCs in with Bitcoin, which is night and day difference. CBDCs is fiat and all kinds of controls likely. And I think, you know, bad effects of the surveillance state and that kind of thing. Totally different than Bitcoin. So, you know, that's something to be cautious.

What's that? I hate the term cryptocurrency. It's like the most damaging possible language we could use for it because 99% of them have nothing to do with currency. Right. It does lump them into that bucket. It shouldn't be, and it doesn't have to be.

Yeah, I like digital asset better because some of them aren't currencies or they're not very good currencies. And, you know, I've done a little bit of work trying to get people to think about what these different things are you it's easy to lump them all together in this thing like you say cryptocurrencies which can include you know anything literally thousands of things you've never heard of yeah you want to you want to say is it actually a currency because if it is a currency then it's competing against bitcoin so that's the bar you should measure it against or if it's not a currency is it a security if it is is it a good security with good terms like uh

you know publicly traded companies uh some are good some are bad but at least they have good terms you know that you own equity in a real thing and uh and then some are just kind of neither some of them are gift certificates to a store nobody wants to shop at uh you know some of them are collectibles. So you want to figure out as an investor and as an investment advisor, I say to people, figure out what you're buying first, and then you can measure it,

whether you're measuring it against Bitcoin or measuring against IBM and Tesla or whatever, put it in the right bucket and figure out what you're buying and what you're getting for what you, you know, what this token or digital asset that you're buying is. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. So assuming you win, you've said you would be willing

to propose Bitcoin as legal tender in the United States, I assume with very low expectations of success. Yeah, yeah, I think there's probably a lot of procedural things that you do that are kind of like, you know, that would probably be more of a media event than anything else. Right, it's a PR move. You might get a few other people that would support it. From what I understand, it's pretty hard to get bills forward and stuff. But hey, the world's

changing very rapidly. I say to a lot of people, the playbook that a lot of people are operating on is from the 2019 and earlier world. And that world's gone. It's totally gone. So we don't know what the future is going to happen. So anything is possible. It's not out of the realm of possibility. A lot of people think like, oh, yeah, maybe it'll take 20 years. I don't think so. You look around at what's happening here. You look at what's happening in the world right now. Things could change very, very, very radically. I wouldn't put anything off the table. I think it's totally possible we could have legal tender Bitcoin in two years. It's possible. I think it's totally possible we could have legal tender Bitcoin in two years. It's possible.

I think making 20-year predictions on almost anything at this point in history is impossible. Yeah. Because that's like a lack of exponential thinking. It's just not understanding how fast everything moves and much faster now than 20 years ago. Exactly. And where we are on a global timeline, you know, the timeline, there's a great book called The Fourth Turning. And there's this kind of concept of an, I call it epoch shift, even bigger than a fourth turning, where sort of every hundred years or sometimes every 400 years,

there's these shifts in how everything works. Borders change, money changes, governments change, power structure change. And we're definitely in one of those. We're at least in a fourth turning right now. If you read the book or look through history, I mean, there's no question that the world is shifting and changing. And historically, nobody alive has seen this happen before. Nobody alive has been through one of these.

And when this has happened, the world is unrecognizable. I mean, imagine being in, you know, growing up in 1905, when my grandfather was born. And then in his lifetime, he had a horse and buggy would deliver food to his house. And there was soldiers in World War I who had never seen any kind of mechanized vehicle. And then they found themselves on the fields of France with tanks and planes and things like that. I mean, the whole world changed completely radically just in an instant. And that can happen again and it will happen again.

And it's not unusual, it's actually the norm in human history going back hundreds and hundreds of years. We have these big shifts. So I think we're in one right now. I think anybody looking at the world would agree. And I think Bitcoin is a big piece of that. So who knows what the world is going to look like, but we can build it. We can be part of building it.

Who better to build it than us Bitcoiners? We can be part of building this new world and deciding what it's going to look like. Best case scenario then, what does it look like in 10 or 20 years from the perspective of Bitcoin being a part of that? I think if we have the separation of money and state the same way we have the separation of church and state. Which we kind of don't, but okay. Yeah, right. In name only, but yeah. Well, I mean, at least the way that,

when you used to have the government and the church were one and the same, and now it's separated, you're still going to probably have some kind of government money. But if we had that kind of separation, and also more decentralization, it's a buzzword that everybody uses a lot. But decentralization works in certain things.

And it's worked really well in Bitcoin. It works really well in certain other aspects of our ecosystem. And I think it can just in this process of running for office and that kind of thing, I see so many ways in our world where the kind of best practices from Bitcoin and our industry could be applied to the old legacy world that's being reinvented as we speak right now. And I'm big on securities. That's my background. So if you could have securities more decentralized, you don't necessarily need exchanges. There's so many more ways for people to trade and have value.

Every business we see out here should have shares that people could have tokens of. We have the technology now. Tokenize, you know, just tokenize everything. And you could, you could say, I want to buy that particular building, or I want to invest a hundred dollars in my favorite restaurant. That, that could be an exciting revolution for the world. If we make the money work better and we make things like equities work better. I mean, equities are a third of the world's wealth. If we make that work better, and then real estate's like another third, and real estate's basically equities too

because they're all owned by corporations. All these big buildings, it's not owned by Fred and Alice, it's owned by corporations. So if we can make that work better, that's really exciting. That could create a kind of revolution like we haven't seen before, and hopefully a very peaceful one where we sort of decrease state power

and increase the power of the people. So that would be the best case scenario, I think. So where can people follow you and support your campaign? Thank you. It's brucefenton.com. It's my website. I'm all over social media, same handle, Bruce Fenton. And especially if you know people in New Hampshire, share, you know, getting the word out. I'm who I am, and I'm very frank and open about my views. So it's really just a matter of saying, you know, who are the people who agree with what I say? And if they do, then they can support me, especially if they're in New Hampshire, they can vote. Well, the good news is that we're in a world now

where they can very easily find you. Awesome. Because we have the technology that exists to actually get that message out. Thank you so much for sitting down. Thank you very much. Awesome, thanks. Thank you so much for listening to this episode.

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