The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Will NEVER Be The Same! The Harsh Truth... | Alex Gladstein

Episode Date: August 31, 2025

In this compelling episode, we explore how Bitcoin is transforming the landscape of human rights and freedom worldwide. Join us as Alex Gladstein delves into the power of Bitcoin as "freedom money," offering individuals a means to escape oppressive regimes and financial surveillance. Discover the stories of those who are leveraging Bitcoin to reclaim their autonomy and secure their financial future. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the intersection of technology, finance, and human rights.

Listen, as long as, like, I can, without permission, send some Bitcoin anywhere in the world, and no one can stop it, and no one can confiscate it from me. The dream is a lot. I think we skipped from this time of everybody was like, the government's going to ban Bitcoin. And now we skipped to, like, oh, my God, like the government's going to use Bitcoin. People abroad, they don't have access to U.S. bonds and stocks in, like, a diversified portfolio. Like, if they're lucky, they can get some gold made, probably not. And they're probably saving in shitty local currency, sheet metal or cattle. That's the savings technology, the average person in the world.

Just remember, stable coins are not freedom money. They can be rugged. They can go to zero. They can be frozen. They can be censored. And as Jeff Booth calls them, they're guaranteed lose your money coins. Like, they track inflation. The early cypherpunks would never, could never have dreamed that the present United States

and the Treasury Secretary would be saying Bitcoin is like the goal. I often say that there's Bitcoin and there's everything else. And there's a place for everything else as venture capital. tech investments, but that Bitcoin is the most important asset ever created. I make that statement, but there's people who are much, much better at really describing why than I am, and one of those is Alex Gladstein. Alex, in this incredible conversation, really breaks down why Bitcoin is freedom money, why it's fuck you tech and why people all over the world are adopting it to really escape

and save themselves from dictatorial regimes. You do not want to miss this incredible conversation about Bitcoin. all coins, stable coins in the world with Alex Gladstein. I caused quite a stir, I think, of late, and I've now had this conversation probably with five people who were in the comments on my tweet. This was the tweet that I had originally sent. Bitcoin is amazing, but it's obviously been co-opted to some agree by the very people that it was created as a hedge against many of the most ardent early whales

have seen their faith shaken and have been selling at these prices, right? And so I will say it was very unfortunate that I used the word co-opted because I should have said the narrative has been co-opted, not the code or the asset itself. And I actually went on after that to talk about how these were narratives that I was hearing from Bruce Fenton and Yago and early Bitcoiners on my shows. But you had an incredible response, which I actually retweeted just to give it. No technical aspect of Bitcoin has been co-opted. The network remains cypherpunk and the tools get more so by the day, despite or even, I would argue, because of mainstream adoption. Major challenges around education, mining, decentralization, privacy remained, but co-opted, no. Yeah. So here's the deal.

If you think about Bitcoin at the beginning with Satoshi and Hal when it didn't have a monetary value and you're trying to dream of it becoming something globally useful that's spread around the world that people are actually using and it's on a journey from zero to a million or 10 million or whatever you think it's going to do or back then even a zero journey from zero to a dollar right um with more price increase comes more adoption i mean they're intertwined right so of course you can't have a world where bitcoin is at 100 and whatever it is today 15 000 dollars a coin and where only based cypherpunks are using it that's impossible um and that's that's not going to happen. And what ends up happening along the way is that the small group of people

who were there at the beginning who had all these, for the most part, you know, maybe aligned values around maybe libertarianism or they wanted to stay out of their affairs or they wanted to see this global dream of a, you know, a fully anarchic, you know, sort of an anarchist internet society. They were together at the very beginning. And it's, I guess it's hard. for some of them to see that bitcoin's not only going to be for them forever and it's actually going to be for everybody including black rock and the u.s. government and all these other entities but at the end of the day this is the only way it can happen and i and i guess my you know when we were going back and forth on on x or whatever my point is that um some people are i think

reading it the wrong way not i know i know that you are trying to say that here is a narrative as opposed to like this is my opinion and it got this can true i just show this i just used the wrong sure no but like a lot no but tons of people use the word co-opted not you but like other people do and i think what they're missing and i've had this debate with um with epsilon theory with ben hunt about four years ago we debated this and he's like he's like wall street is taking over bitcoin and i'm like no no no bitcoin's taking over wall street so we're debating this and my point to him was like listen as long as like i can without permission send some Bitcoin anywhere in the world and no one can stop it and no one can confiscate it from

me the dream is a lot and you know what like at the end of the day my view has been that look man now we got BlackRock and the Trump family like basically promoting Bitcoin and they might be promoting it in a particular way like buy my derivative you know by my ETF or buy my shitcoin connected to Bitcoin or God knows what but Bitcoin is a brand it's a brand just like anything else, just like Nike or the U.S. dollar or anything. And the very fact that they're talking about Bitcoin is good for Bitcoin. So when Trump says, even though he's got his family shit coins and all this other stuff going on and stable coins and get into that, but when he says he wants America to be the global

Bitcoin superpower, and when Scott Bessett, the Treasury Secretary is talking about how America is going to be like a Bitcoin power, like this is awesome. Like from that perspective. Like when I say awesome, I mean the actual word. It's awe in spite. It's like the early cypherpunks would never, could never have dreamed that the present the United States and the Treasury Secretary would be saying Bitcoin is like the goal. Like, so I think we skipped this time and I'll stop here, but like I think we skipped from

this time of everybody was like, the government's going to ban Bitcoin. And that's, that was the fud, right? I still have these dice from Nick Carter, the fud dice, right? I keep them in my desk, right? And, you know, the government banning Bitcoin. Bitcoin is on here. And like, that's no longer a thing. Like, that's not going to happen. Um, and now we skipped to like, oh my God, like the government's going to, the government's going to use Bitcoin. And, uh, like, people are now afraid of that. And, and I'm like, I just

think this is really amusing. And like, you have to just understand the journey of something like this from zero to hero is going to involve people that you don't like adopting it. Like this is money for the end of the day. Yeah, exactly. I was going to say Bitcoin is for enemies. It's a neutral currency. Yeah. Because even if you have poor incentives, your incentives are effectively aligned. It caused a huge sort of debate, though, which I'm glad. And there is the part that you alluded to before, which is obviously the factually, we know that there are some very early whales who have sold a whole lot of Bitcoin, right?

And I have no idea, no window into their mind, why they would do that. I don't fault them for doing that, right? If you got 150,000 Bitcoin and you unload 25,000 Bitcoin, I guess who can blame you? I think there's also the argument that maybe the Bitcoin had to come from those hands into a new floor to, you know, advance. But it is interesting to see a lot of people that once really spoke about Bitcoin to pass away as being, you know, anti-government or anti-institution, embracing every piece of news that sends the number up. So I can see there being some disillusionment if you were there from the beginning. Well, look, first of all, every seller has a buyer. And, yeah, these people who, you know, and we don't really, it's chain analysis is, is sort of like fake news.

It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's just guessing. Um, and you're using heuristics. It's that it's not an actual science. Um, these people could easily just be moving the Bitcoin around. Like, we don't really know what's happening. Now, if they go to a wall, it goes to galaxy and galaxy does a, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So. Right. So there's certain ones we know, but most of it is like we don't know. And you know what? A lot of these people were moving coins a while ago. And generally speaking, you can kind of see actually you can visualize the velocity of coins over time. People make cool, cool visualizations of this. Bitcoin's got this interesting Jekyllen Hyde thing where on the one hand it's quote unquote transparent because we can kind of see everything. But on the other hand, it's very private because we don't even know. Every time one of these whales moves money, some absurd. absurd amount of money, billions of dollars of Bitcoin. I think it's funny that on the one hand, yes, we can see that the coins moved. But on the other hand, no one knows who these freaking people are, like, their identities are protected. She's amazing. So we know that they have big brass balls when they just send $10,000 from a wallet that hasn't touched Bitcoin since it was on paper or an old MS. DOS. Well, it also just might be like, it might be like a small percentage of their holdings. And someone else is buying. And you know what? Like,

that's fine. I mean, I don't, it's amazing. They held this far. It's be honest like honestly to hold from so so one of the early pumps in 2011 was from a dollar to two dollars to thirty dollars back to two dollars so imagine living through that right and you're like oh my god i should have sold at 25 and then you know we went in the year 2013 we went from a hundred dollars to twelve hundred dollars okay and then we went all the way back down to two hundred dollars so imagine these early pumps were so violent and so intense people must have lost their minds right and then even the 2017 one you go from when i was really starting to get into it was uh late 2016 early 2017 Andreas had just been on rogan it was 600 bucks late 2016 and i

saw it get to a thousand and then it starts to go starts to run and i remember we did our first event on bitcoin human rights right as it broke 2 000 bucks and it was just like we it skies the limit and it goes to freaking $19,000 by the end of the year. Of course, it'll go all the way back down to like three-something in the bottom of the, both December of 2019, I believe, as well as, or 2018, as well as the pandemic like collapse. So, you know, again, that's another massive. And then now, you know, we'll see where we go from here. We went from 69 down to 15.

So every time you see these violent movements, people, buy people sell. I think that, you know, there's a whole lot to say about early people selling sometimes. I mean, they have to, unfortunately, we don't live in the Bitcoin standard yet and not everybody accepts Bitcoin for payment. So maybe they're trying to buy a company or a piece of real estate or, you know, maybe they're starting a business. And, and like the person who needs to be paid for something just doesn't accept Bitcoin yet. So it is what it is. So you're all over the world advocating for human rights. And. Yeah. Specifically for Bitcoin promoting human rights, what have you seen in the last year or two as we've

seen this sort of level of mainstream government institutional adoption? How is that actually driving adoption in the places where you're deeply paying attention and deeply involved? Has it had an effect at all? Yes. So the main thing is that end user experience using Bitcoin has gotten sold much easier over the last five, six, seven years. So when we started doing Bitcoin training for human rights activists, which is what we do, by the way. I know we kind of skipped over that. But yeah, hi, my name's Alex.

I work at the Human Rights Foundation. We help people who live under, good, good, yeah. We help people live under dictatorships around the world. 5.7 billion people live under an authoritarian regime. That's insane. And eight out of, we'll call it, let's say, nine out of 10 people on Earth. live under either an authoritarian regime or a collapsing fiat currency. So only one out of every 10 people on Earth,

only about 10, 11% of people in the world live under a liberal democratic system with reasonable property rights and free speech guarantees and a currency that's not going to go to zero tomorrow. Only about one out of every 10 people on Earth. Everybody else, money is a problem, a big problem in their lives. Like it either devalues severely against the dollar. Nigeria and Egypt are two of the biggest countries in the world. both of them issue a currency that has lost 75% of its value in the last few years.

So you have to just think about that because those people, generally speaking, we're talking about 300, 400 million people in those countries, right? Just there alone. They don't have access to Amazon stock. Like, in America, the mainstream economists say, well, of course the dollar lost 99% of its value in the last century, but that's being silly. Nobody uses it for a store of value.

That's an incredibly privileged thing to say. Like people abroad, they don't have access to U.S. bonds and stocks and like a diverse support. Or our real estate. Right. Like if they're lucky, they can get some gold, maybe, but probably not. And they're probably saving in shitty local currency, sheet metal or cattle. That's the savings technology, the average person in the world. So to all of a sudden be able to access Bitcoin, which not only requires no ID, no paperwork,

it can't discriminate. It's a superpower. It doesn't know if you're a refugee or a billionaire or a woman or a. a man or a Muslim or a Christian or a Jew. It doesn't care. But also, it's kicked the living shit out of every other investment over the last 15 years, including all the alt coins. If you go just back from where, obviously where it came from, it went from zero to $115,000. Like Solana's gone from, yeah, a few cents to $200. Well, not even close, right? So we are, we are watching something that is the most fair possible currency investment combination emerge out of nothing from

zero and the whole time it's been available to anybody and it's been such a powerful tool and i know there's a debate right now between store value and median of exchange that's what's that's what's like today if you log on then you're like in this in this bubble this is the debate people are having and it's like well guess what it's both it's digital gold and it's digital cash and it has to be both if it loses one of the features the whole thing collapses you had all these cypherpunks in the 80s and the 90s trying to create private digital cash for the internet because they knew the surveillance state was coming you can go back and read all this stuff in wired magazine and all these sci-fi books in the 80s and 90s like people knew the electronification

of our world would lead to mass financial surveillance and control that's why david chom invented e-cash in the 1980s um but what they what they couldn't figure out was how to issue it how to do it right and chom failed with e-cash because he had to have a centralized mint So it just didn't work. And it's a vector for a single point of failure. Regulation, U.S. government. 9-11 happens. K.YC. AML everywhere.

It just became impossible. So the genius moment was Satoshi was able to, the real genius was the idea of like, okay, in order to have this peer-to-peer payment system that is described in the headline of the white paper, the only way to actually have that sustainably in a robust way is to have a decentralized issuance and to have. the decision to print money be taken away from humans. It's the only way to actually have it in a robust way. So my thesis is that you can't separate the medium of exchange cash aspect

from the store of value, $21 million, you know, hard money aspect. The way they're married together is what makes Bitcoin work. And that's why, you know, it doesn't matter what narratives you have. Like Saylor has his narrative. You know, he doesn't want, he doesn't really necessarily want people to spend Bitcoin as money, right? And then Dorsey has his narrative where he's like, no, no, no, it's got to be cash for the internet. That's what it has to be.

And what's cool is they're both right like in terms of Bitcoin works for both. Again, it's been an awesome SOV for people. It remains very easy to self-custody. I know people, you stress out about it, but like it's no more difficult than setting up an Instagram account or whatever in the end of the day.

Like things are getting easier. And the cash environment for it is fascinating. So I'll just give you some examples. examples that we've seen around the world in the last few years. What's really getting easier is paying people in Bitcoin. So for example, in many countries around the world, Kenya, Costa Rica, South Africa, Brazil, Ghana, what people have invented is a very clever bridge. So let's say you're in a taxi cab in Nairobi right now. The driver accepts something called M-Pesa, which is mobile money. It's what everybody uses in Kenya. The driver doesn't know what Bitcoin is.

That's fine. Kenyans have invented an app where you can live in Bitcoin. You can only have Bitcoin. It's all you have. Or you're a tourist. Let's say Scott, you and your family go to Kenya and you don't want to deal with the local currency of Forex. You just have Bitcoin and the wallet on your phone or whatever. Great. You can use this app called Tando. And what it does is you scan the drivers and pace a thing and you just pay in Bitcoin. It takes three seconds and it pays in Lightning. And he's paid. He doesn't know what Bitcoin is. He's paid an M-Pesa, he goes on his merry way. You've paid Lightning and the company does a swap and there's no K-Y-C or anything. This is also possible in Costa Rica with what's called Bitcoin

Jungle and in a bunch of other countries with other apps. Now, it's coming in America too with Square. So four million small businesses in the United States and larger businesses use these physical cash app, Square Cash terminals. You've seen them. They're like these little small things. There's other ones too, but like square off, you know, let's say block now runs one of the larger ones, larger networks. So it's starting to be rolled out in pilots, but by the end of the year, it seems, you can use like any wallet you want. You can write your own Bitcoin wallet and you can have some Bitcoin in it and you can pay your barber or your local bookstore or whatever in Bitcoin and the default will be that it auto converts and the merchant gets dollars, but that they can

turn on if they want to just take it in Bitcoin. And this is the frontier. Like when we have the famous meme, the most famous meme in Bitcoin history is the Matrix meme, where Neo asks Morpheus, you know, what are you telling me that I can trade my Bitcoin for millions someday? And Neo, Neo asks this to Morpheus. And Morpheus says, no, Neo. What I'm telling you is when you're ready, you won't have to. And the point of that is Bitcoin is hyper-Biquinization. The point is that eventually there won't be any dollars anymore. That's the idea. Eventually, you can just use your Bitcoin for everything.

And there's a fascinating friction here because in richer countries, most Bitcoiners have a fiat job. They get paid in dollars, and they stack Bitcoin. And this is totally reasonable, understandable. And it's the smart thing to do, right? If you can do that. But eventually, what happens? And that's, I guess I would call that like where that's where we are. today for the most part around the world there are some places where people use bitcoin more as money

for different reasons um they don't have as good fiat as the dollar etc but generally speaking in the western world that's where we are what's going to happen eventually though is that your the merchant's not going to want your fiat that's going to happen eventually five years 10 years 20 years i don't know when but eventually the person selling you the house or the car i think it's going to start with more expensive items luxury items we've a ton they're not going to want dollars they're going to want bitcoin and then you have to spend your bitcoin and that's that's hyper bitcoinization so we're we're not there yet but that's going to happen eventually that's my thesis and as far as what's how it happens to stable coins and all coins and all that they're always going to be around i think that's my thought

i just think over time the market gets smarter and they become but first of all coins become more like penny stocks like sure if you if you can game it out maybe you can make yeah but like maybe you can make a quick buck but even today it's like eif and solano will like outperform bitcoin for like large periods of time and then they'll crash and then but you know we're still early right like eventually these things will be penny stocks stable coins are like i mean they're really interesting right because they're kind of like uh they were not invented to be a tool of u.s economic policy they were invented so people can have liquidity when they were trading bitcoin in their early days and hedging their speculation and they were invented to be so exchanges could do business with each other and had

nothing to do with like u.s. economic power or the national debt problem but over the last the years some very smart people in the government now they've now they're in power with the trump administration figured out that stable coins could kind of be like the euro dollar market and they could simultaneously a increased dollar network effect and hegemony around around the world. So even in these like bricks countries like Russia, uh, where they're like trying to fight the dollar. The people want tether, you know, so it's like, it's fascinating. So A, it's increasing dollar network effect around the world and B, the issuers of the stable coins have become a top five net buyers of treasuries. So last year, 2024 issuers, after JPM

Morgan and China, they were the third largest net buyer of treasuries in the world. This year, it'll probably be top two maybe in top one so this thing is going in a way where they can meaningfully impact interest rates and that the government sees this and that's why you have scott besent on television telling people that stable coins are super important that's why they pass the genius act so i think these things will continue for a while and they'll gut and and crush other small nation state currencies i'm a believer in that dollar milkshake theory like i really we're seeing it happen. I think, you know, before the dollar dies and collapses, like, you're going to see it eat all the other fiats. That's kind of my theory here. And then eventually it fades to

Bitcoin, but that's going to take a really long time. So for now, like, it's still the dollar world, right? So much unpack. Yeah, well, I mean, the main thing is that, like, the way we win, when I say we is like all the Bitcoiners who believe in this, you know, the neomorphious world where we can just use Bitcoin as money. And it's a meaningful. improvement to the world in many ways. The only way we win, you know, is to Dorsey's point, if it can be used as cash, if it can be used by money, people can be paid in Bitcoin, I think. So we're, we're not there yet. And the stable coins are an interesting challenge because governments are going to try to use those to sort of fight off and fend off the Bitcoin

payment thing. Yeah, they would rather have to be. They defend the fiat currency that Bitcoin was created as a hedge against. Well, imagine if you could look, think about the visa merchant network around the world so you have hundreds of millions of small businesses that use these credit cards around the world right so imagine if you can have your like metamask wallet or whatever wherever you're keeping your stables right and then you can just be in like the philippines or whatever and you can just you can pay a local merchant and it settles into visa that's what they have their eyes right so stable points could be press travelers check and fly somewhere and use the check to the merchant right well use an account locally

I mean, stable coins really make life a lot easier for a lot of people. The big conundrum will be KYC versus reach, right? Because if there's no KYC and you can just use stables like cash, then in theory, they can take over the world. But then they have this conundrum of they can't have micro, they can't see because stable coins are permissionless for now at least. So we'll see that unfold. I mean, I'm about to go out to Southeast Asia,

visit a few countries, check out what's going on there. In Thailand, check this out. So the government has this new program where when you visit at the airport, you can convert your Bitcoin or your stable coins or your cryptocurrency. You can convert it into the Thai essentially like central bank digital currency, some sort of digital credit. And it's something that all the merchants accept, like through their phone or their payment reader. So what they're doing, though, if you think about this carefully over time, is they're like harvesting hard money Bitcoin from tourists. and they're giving you this thing that can print that you can spend in the country.

And that's really clever. It's what the Cuban government does. Like, Cubans are paid in this, like, terrible peso currency that nobody accepts, even businesses inside Cuba. The only way to get the good stuff is to get your family abroad to send you hard-born currency.

And then they give you MLC, just like a gift card thing, and then you can buy stuff. So what they're doing is they're harvesting the good currency and printing the shitty stuff that's hyperinflating. So you're going to see a lot of countries do this. And the way out is,

is pay me in bitcoin like if the local merchant in thailand or cuba all of a sudden accepts bitcoin you can go around this whole uh kind of basically stealing operation like this is government stealing from people so that's why pay me in bitcoin and bitcoin is money is so important and it's not necessarily a technological thing like yes it's true there's a lot more to be done with bitcoin at the app level and at the network level to get it to where it can really do this for everybody. I agree. But at the end of the day, there's so much more we can do today about education and just sort of, in just sort of just understanding way before we catch up to the technological limits. Like people say Bitcoin has a scaling problem. Yeah, it's called education.

Like, we could easily have another. Yeah, I think that's what I was thinking at with the last question was like, how much has Trump talking about Bitcoin all the time in Bessent and BlackRock and literally everybody in the world and financial markets becoming a promoter, how much has that helped your job as an educator? Because at the end of the day, yes, you're at the Human Rights Foundation and you're looking to help people, but you can't help anyone until you educate and convince them on it.

And these are pretty hard topics to educate a lot of people on. Well, look, if you take my premise that we could easily have another 100 million occasional on-chain users with really no impact on the Bitcoin network, It's really good. I mean, look, now, admittedly, a lot of the newcomers are coming into Bitcoin derivatives, meaning they're buying ETFs or what happened. Like a strategy. Rapper, yeah.

But generally speaking, like, their validation of Bitcoin, the fact that BlackRock's out there, they have suits and hundreds of sales agents, sell side people, like selling a Bitcoin product. And you've got the U.S. government. saying it wants to be the Bitcoin superpower of the world. And you have a lot of these like Biden era anti-Bitcoin regulators out the door. It's and again, there's we still challenges the privacy thing is a huge issue. But still, the fact that Bitcoin is like here to stay, just Bitcoin reserve, all that stuff.

Like it makes it so much safer and like people are less worried about it today than a few years ago. And it makes our job a lot easier. Absolutely. If Bitcoin is no longer seen as like black market money by the average person. then it makes it way easier for us to do what we do so this is general validation and adoption and normalization of bitcoin as a first yeah as as an investment and i think that's fine that's where we are that's step one is like general realization by the public that bitcoin is not a Ponzi scheme it's not a pyramid scheme it's not criminal money it's an investment and you know what it's done really well and

and i think money managers have figured that out and have started to talk to their clients about it i I mean, I'll tell you, as you know, that we're still early on that, but that's stage one. And then we'll see what the further stages are. But, like, I think generally speaking, my thesis has been I'm not, like, government adopt, like, adoption by, like, governments and mega corporations, instead of being a betrayal of the ethos, I think it's, it's like a Trojan horse. It's made our jobs a lot easier because there's only one Bitcoin. Like, I get it that you can, you can say, buy my whatever ETF. et cetera um but for now like ostensibly whenever they whenever blackrock has more demand to sell more that they have to buy more spot in the market like there is at some point someone's

buying the yeah someone's buying the person who's buying the etf is not custodying their own bitcoin but let's be honest the person who's buying the ETF is probably buying it as an investment because they think the number will go up and not as the hard money in the future and by the way that's totally fine. Yeah. Yeah, I guess my argument is like people are unwittingly participating in a big revolution. And it's going to take decades and they don't realize it. Even the Black Crock people don't, I don't think, quite realize it. Now, they have changed their tone. If you listen to what Larry Fing sounds like the last three years. It's wild. Well, five years ago, he was like, no fucking way. And now he's like, he's like, he's like, he's not saying it's going to replace the dollar,

but he's basically saying, hey, he said it could. Right. I mean, they said it could. He literally said, you know, if the Treasury continues on this path or if the debt, you know, train continues to run out of control, something like Bitcoin could be the global reserve currency. The dollar could be replaced by something like Bitcoin, something to that effect. And I love it. And like, I think the main thing that I, well, here's the thing. So I'm working on a book on this idea. But what I want to advance is this idea for America, for Americans of if you're a patriot, you believe in American values.

you have to deeply question our money system. It's not like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would have been happy with what we have now, a $37 trillion debt empire that's reliant on Forever Wars and financial surveillance. No, they would have been like, I'm out. That is not what I'm building. There's a reluctance to have a central bank at the beginning of our country. They didn't want that. They didn't want any centralization.

They wanted privacy. They had values, right, that are embodied in our Bill of Rights. The current financial system is the opposite of that. We have this petroddollar system. We have to have this crazy pact with these, like, crazy dictators in the Middle East to prop this thing up. We gut out our own middle and lower classes as part of the Triff and Dylana, where we export these dollars around the world. And the dollar becomes really strong. And it becomes very hard for us to be competitive manufacturers of stuff.

And all these things have happened that are, I think, contrary to what the founders would have wanted. So I think it's time for us to make, like, a hard stand and say, that like if you're pro-American and you're a patriot you should be anti-dollar i think dollar's been bad for america it's certainly been bad for a lot of the world and i think the middle ground is saying okay let's actually analyze this what's been good about the because a lot of a lot of like the dollar's been good like the market naturally wants a global neutral shared currency that makes things easier right there's certain attributes about the dollar that are good it's like great we can take the bitcoin takes some of those one neutral currency for the world one standard it does all

a lot of the things the dollar can do without a lot of the costs and it can do something new and better for America. So my main thesis and argument is that I think America will be super dynamic and powerful in a Bitcoin world. And it's so bad for dictators. It's so bad for dictators. If you believe in America as an idea of a people, a free people that have a government that is accountable to the people and a government that works for the people, we should not

be afraid of money that the public controls. That should not be a fear. However, if you're the Chinese government, the Russian government, the Saudi government, you are petrified of money that you can't control. And ultimately, it's going to bring your empire down. So I think this is awesome for America. I think it's really bad for dictators. I think it'll help reform America away from some of its worst parts that I'm ashamed of as an American when it comes to too much spending on forever wars and conflicts, too much surveillance inside our system. a lot of like

opakness in terms of like essentially financing projects that the public is not interested in. A lot of that collapses under a Bitcoin standard. So my main sort of I guess radical provocative thesis would be I think Bitcoin, I think America will be

way better with Bitcoin as a global currency than the dollar. That's I guess the main one. It's interesting because before this administration there was this tremendous fear of a central bank digital currency and it seemed like actually that was the direction that the government was likely to push in. Probably not going to happen in the United States.

No, it was probably not going to happen even if it was being pushed for in the United States. But now it seems like if you're tilting the scales of justice, we would have more of a chance of Bitcoin becoming the currency that a central bank digital currency based on the dollar, which leads to the question of whether if stable coins as currently in existence begin to proliferate, we get private stable coins, and maybe some of these stable coin issuers like Circle who have actually floated now, or will be creating their own blockchain, do those become de facto central bank digital currencies if they're on centralized blockchains that are controlled by the entities that are issuing them? Well, part of its semantics, like definitionally

speaking, no, they, a central bank general currency by definition is issued by the. Yeah, literally has come for the central bank. However, they could kind of be like a stealth one. where they're issued by these private entities, but really the government control. Yeah, if the government has a transparency into what's happening on that chain, and that chain can roll things back. I guess there's a couple things. There's interest, and then there's K.YC. So at the end of the day, if stablepoint issuers are not able to provide interest.

So currently they can't. The whole part of the genius thing was sort of trying to like sort of calm down or a suge in some way the traditional banks because they don't want to lose their lunch over stable coins because who's going to want a like a crappy savings account if you can have stable points in a state exactly bank account or in a bank account and you can't be used paying five percent interest hourly exactly right so so so there's something going on there with a friction and like there's already loopholes like I think the PayPal stable coin you can get interest on I don't know if there's some loopholes that are going to have

happen. That's one fight that the banks are going to fight the issuers on. We'll see. Now, at the end of the day, the banks just might issue their own stable coins. We'll see. The other one would be the K. YC thing. This is, I think, the most interesting one. So again, going back to what I was saying before about the stable coin is a tool of U.S. economic power. There's a dilemma, right? We can have a much more powerful global stable coin regime as long as there's no KYC. But I don't know if they're going to like that. So if they start imposing KYC, shotgun KYC, whatever flavor of KYC you want. on the majors on the major stable coins i mean you're going to you're going to have a collapse in both velocity of money because you're all going to all of a sudden going to have hundreds of millions of people in the global south that currently is them today unable to use them they couldn't k yc if they tried so it's yeah and and while i i understand that the major clients and like depositors at tether are are mainly like you know banks and large institutions There's only like 10, 15 people who work with Tether, right? Probably similar with a circle.

But the thing is they're reliant on demand from places like Nigeria of like on Tether volume. So they're like individual small transactions of Tether are connected to the larger volumes. And the whole thing, of course, is also tracks the price of Bitcoin. Like it moves up and down along with Bitcoin demand. But like at the end of the day, I think they become way less effective and profitable. if they require KYC. They're also going to become, by the way, way less profitable when we inevitably have rate cuts.

Well, when interest rates go down. Well, that'll be an interesting thing because, you know, with bonds, it's like it's an interesting conundrum. Like, they'll be less profitable short term. But the asset itself will grow more valuable. I mean, it's just sort of an interesting thing. But isn't circle stock effectively just interest rate exposure? I mean, it's a bond.

Yeah. So what I'm excited about. things, but I mean, if we go back to 1% interest rates, I think I read it, like circles income decreases like 70, 80% a year or something. It's a big, big difference. I guess what I'm saying is like, you know, we're on our mission. We're doing Bitcoin education around the world. We're bringing people into Bitcoin. We want people to be paid in Bitcoin. Pay me in Bitcoin should be the thing. I mean, that's the key to a prosperous future is pay me in Bitcoin, not just save it, not just get exposure to the price through my retirement account. It's pay me in Bitcoin. This is

it like podcasters graphic designers architects small business owners like they want to be paid at bitcoin i mean you can at least be paid in like if you're thinking about this and listening to this i'm not i'm not saying your entire salary should be in bitcoin i mean how about like tips or how about like a couple projects you're doing or maybe you can talk to your employer and get 10% like but but if you don't if you don't if we don't create that demand you know this is this is a harder fight so the one thing I'm looking at is that and how do we increase the global Bitcoin economy where people are paid and they buy and sell things in Bitcoin. And then the second thing is watching this fight unfold and just kind of being in the back like, you know, observing where the existing legacy

banking system is going to fight the stable coin issuers. And they're going to fight over interest and they're going to fight over KYC and we're going to see how it comes out. It's going to be really fascinating to watch. And it's in plain sight now. I mean, Citadel completely freaked out a few weeks ago about the Genius Act and obviously we know exactly how it would affect their business, but now the bank lobbies have very transparently been trying to, to your point, slow or closed loopholes that they viewed in the Genius Act that could eventually be used to have interest. The minute there's interest on stable coins for retail banks have almost zero purpose. Well, again, like I'm already saying, there's already some kind of loophole where PayPal's offering

if you look it up like so so we'll see i mean at the end of the day there's a lot to unpack there with like how much is a stable could really different than like an existing you know line of credit like there's interesting stuff there to unpack like at the retail merchant level is the actual transaction of money going from one party to another is that going to be done with like a stable coin moving around or are we talking credit still there's a lot to unpack in that whole area of like retail adoption of stable quids and it might it might just fail like we don't know like like governments have tried to impose CBDCs in places like Nigeria and China no one's interested for for some of the obvious reasons like they don't want negative interest rates

they don't want zero interest rate they don't want to be like they don't want limits on like calorie intake or like buying cigarettes or whatever this is actually you know the case in places like China they want they want to have more freedom with their money which is, of course, the long-term Bitcoin thesis. But, like, I think the stable-coin proliferation thing is going to be, is going to have a lot of challenges. Like, there are some reasons why some individuals would want stable coins, but the average American, if it's not going to offer interest,

and if it's going to have all this K-Y-C stuff anyway, what's the fucking point? So it's going to be interesting to see how they evolve over the coming years. But, you know, at the end of the day, just remember, stable coins are not freedom money. They might have, they absolutely have humanitarian value. Of course they do because people in Egypt and Lebanon and Turkey don't have the relative to be afforded to the dollar.

Maybe the path ends at Bitcoin, but having a digital dollar versus, you're in a currency that cuts in half their value in a month. And if you want dollars, you have to go walk into like a mafia den and get, you know, beaten up and losing three times the money anyways, you know. Yeah. So like, let's like, let's like, be. realistic like stable coins today offer a lot of human attorney value for a lot of people but they're not free to money you can't actually self-custody them in a way that's unconfiscatable they can be

rugged they can go to zero they can be frozen they can be censored and as jeff booth calls them they're guaranteed lose your money coins like they track inflation like they're literally going down so so there's a lot of issues with them they're definitely useful for a lot of people around the world that's why you know one of the reasons you see such a huge volume increase um so we'll see how it goes, but ultimately that they're orthogonal to the Bitcoin revolution, that they're not connected in a meaningful way. Like at the end of the day, they don't solve the things that Bitcoin solves. Like Bitcoin is fuck you money. It's neutral money. It gives people free speech and property rights, and it's not tied to the central banking system, and it's scarce. So the value

of these things over time, it's rocky, but overtime goes up. So they have NGU and they have FU built in and stable coins don't have either. So at the end of the day, it's funny, they're not really competing. They don't share the same kind of DNA. You and I have another Twitter conversation. People think they're competing. You know what I mean?

You and I had a not so different Twitter conversation about this. I tweeted something to the fact of Bitcoin basically has already won the race and Bitcoin maxis don't need to be so concerned about all coins. Oh, I see. Yeah. Because I was like, you know, Bitcoin's hard money and all coins are VC investments and whatever. so different asset classes. That was my view.

And I think you said something to the effect of shit coins or trash coins. I think you said at the time were the biggest threat to Bitcoin adoption because so many people have been scammed around the world. And I actually responded, what about stable coins? They're the ones that have actually taken the peer-to-peer cash shine off of Bitcoin for now. It really is very interesting because I think in certain places people don't conflate Bitcoin with these other things. Yeah.

But in certain places, it really maybe is a choice, like which one. One do I? Well, I agree that like some people, if stablecoin didn't exist, yes, I guess those people would be using Bitcoin, fine. But what I really meant by that is like the people who got scammed and lost money and now they're not going to touch any digital assets at all, right? Because so that's an education thing again, right? Because like if you got scanned in the real world, you still would go, you put your

money in a bank because you had to. Right. So I guess what I'm talking about is like in the developing world, you have a lot of presence from companies like finance, shilling all kinds of. crazy shit coins like ones you've never even heard of before and people are getting sucked world coin the whole thing where they were giving out the world coin tokens like when you traded your retinal scan for them so there's a there's a lot of that going on in the developing world and that that that gives people at least a bad taste in people's mouth is my point and it makes it really

hard to to show people the value of bitcoin so yeah i do think in many ways that this vast sea of all coins is a huge hurdle to bitcoin education Now, then again, that was always going to be that way. So it's just, it's part of the story. It's part of the journey. Like, you have to touch the stone in order to learn that it's bad. On the flip side of that, and I don't disagree, but on the flip side of that,

I wonder how many people have backdoored into Bitcoin because they found crypto in an entirely different way. I mean, last cycle, you look factually. Like, the most people who signed up for some sort of crypto account that maybe ended up on Bitcoin, like wanted NFTs or coach, right? I'm not saying they're good for Bitcoin. adoption. I'm just saying there has to be some population that backed into it. I think that this was, this was a more of a thing in that 17, 18 cycle where like a lot of

people, including me, like didn't have, we were just like, oh, there's all these coins. Cool. Like that. And then and then you learn about it. I don't think it's the same with like the 21 cycle. I think there's like people who are like, no, I'm just like into Solana. I think there's people who don't know Bitcoin basically exists. I don't even know what Bitcoin is. Yes. Yeah. Like there's a great, this is a long time ago, but there's a great. Andreas Lentonopoulos thing where he's like talking about how he went to Singapore. He's talking to this guy who works on blockchain for Bank of America. And Andres is like, oh, I do like Bitcoin education.

The guy's like, what's that? And I think that that's obviously, it's a great story. I wouldn't say that all these, the Salana community, these people like, obviously they know what Bitcoin is, but they've never used it for sure. Like, it's shocking to me whenever I get the type of people who would ever become. Like, I don't know Salana specifically, but like if you came to trade meme coins, like, Like, you're inherent and not a Bitcoiner. Right, but so say, but there are people who will say that those would have been

Bitcoiners, if not for Trump token. And I'm like, no, those people just like wanted a digital lottery ticket. There's D-GEMs. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no. But that's fair. But like, I guess my point is that's fair.

That's fair. But a lot of them, you know, they make up all this nonsense about lightning and they try to flood Bitcoin. And it's totally inaccurate. Like it's like they have some sort of need inside themselves to criticize Bitcoin. for some reason and there's different reasons for that and and you you realize over time that like they haven't used any of these products like like lightning is very good today like it was totally shitty five years ago but like it's kind of a lot better like you can if you if you use while if

you download wallet of Satoshi now the new beta it's super slick now it's it's interesting like it uses spark so that they're you don't have to deal with lighting channels anymore like like if you download it right now scott i can just send you a dollar and it goes right to to you and it works like this was it it's so awesome wallace atoshi it's now it's it's the it's in test flight uh so the new beta so like yeah go to the twitter account of wallace at toci and download it on your thing and then after the show message me and i'll send you a dollar you'll see how amazing it is now in your mind though you have to understand it's not actually on chain bitcoin or lightning it's spark which is a side chain developed by light spark here's the cool part

though uh i know spark has unilateral exit yeah it's killing it has unilateral exit so you can't really get rugged and it speaks lightning so for example once you've got that dollar for me you can pay and you can go to steak and shake and buy french fries with it and it works immediately like and stake and shake gets actual bitcoin so it's this is what you're seeing is this growth of these kind of side chains and other l2s in bitcoin that are that speak lightning so what i think david said to me in may i interviewed him at bitcoin conference and he was like I tried to build on lightning for like three years, and it just didn't work. So here we are, Spark.

Yeah. Well, I think, I think to, you know, look, you have to be Bayesian, right? You have to change your mind when things change on the ground, right? So I think, to be fair, yes, the 2017 dream of lightning that I believed in where it was going to be the thing we did micro payments on the internet with and paid for coffee with. You can, I mean, you can kind of still do it today. But I think to me, at least it's pretty obvious that that's not in 20 years what's going to happen. my view on lightning currently is that it's like the central nervous system of the Bitcoin economy. And you're going to have custodians, e-cash mints, L2s, payment pools. And you're

going to have all these different ways to use Bitcoin. And it's all going to settle over lightning. That's, that's, in my view, how it's going to work. And there will still be hobbyists who run their own lightning node. But that's, in the future, that'll be like a hand radio operator. It'll be like a club of people who do it for sport. The average person will not run their own lightning node. But you know what? There'll be enough of them to keep the network healthy. And everybody else will use something like e-cash or Spark or something like that. And look, man, we're going to be living in the Bitcoin world. I think it's beautiful. So I think that's what people are sleeping on in the other crypto communities.

They are not looking at what's happening, which is this kind of scaling of Bitcoin in this new unique way. But we don't even need it like a fork to get there. I think we will eventually get some kind of fork. It'll be interesting. That'll make it more powerful. But we don't even need that right now to have arc spark e-cash um and just the improvement of lightning so it's been fun and you know noster is this other thing i love which i agree it's small small community it's only whatever somewhere between 50 and 100 000 active users at the moment but you know what it's so cool to have a social media platform where i control my stuff i cannot get censored nobody controls what i say I can do whatever I want and I can zap people and nobody can stop me.

And I think it's just inevitable that Nostra grows because all of these other platforms are controlled by somebody else and they're not natively Bitcoin compatible, whether it be Farcester or X or YouTube or whatever. They're all controlled and they're proprietary. And Nostr is the only one that's fully open to the world. So it's got its own problems. It's like 2011 Bitcoin in terms of development and how hard it is to use and stuff like that is getting better, but I'm excited about that as well. So I think a lot of the broader

crypto world is missing out on some of the cool stuff happening in Bitcoin, and they should come check it out. That's a we somehow ran right up against time already, but I mean, final thoughts on what you guys are doing and how people can contribute or help or even just obviously further Bitcoin education. Sure. Well, look, Bitcoin was, the first use case of Bitcoin was Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. That was the first real use case, right? It was like, okay, the bank accounts were all shut down and this worked. That continues to be, I would argue, to you listeners, that that is the use case for Bitcoin still today. It's money that the government can't stop. And people haven't discovered other use cases for it. Wonderful. But at the end of the day, that's what it is.

That's what it does. And that's why we use it at the Human Rights Foundation, because it's money dictators can't stop. And if you're interested in learning more about that, you can join us at our live events. We do something in Scandinavia every spring with a lot of Bitcoin content called the Oslo Freedom Forum. That's a lot of fun. You can look that up. We have a fund where we give away that a million dollars in Bitcoin every quarter to open source Bitcoin projects called the Bitcoin Development Fund. You can look that up. And then we have a weekly newsletter that goes into financial repression and also how people are fighting back with open source tech called the Financial Freedom Report. So you can look that up as well. So stay tuned. You know, meet us. Come hang out.

out our newsletter. And if you're interested, apply for a grant. So I think that's kind of where we'll leave it. Thanks so much for having me on, Scott. Yeah, man. Thank you so much for taking the time. I'm glad we had to hash us out. And I don't know how many years it's been, like I said, but let's do it again soon. Yeah, make it happen. Thank you.