You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 70: Giacomo Zucco - Bitcoin, Institutional Adoption & Tether

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

My guest today is Giacomo Zucco, Director of Plan B Network and a well-known Bitcoin maximalist. He's also an advisor/investor for OCEAN, Relai, Ark Labs, Twentytwo, Geyser, Lightning Ventures, Breez and more. He spends his time supporting projects that he feels might be relevant for the future of Bitcoin, be it as an educator, consultant, entrepreneur, maximalist, or troll. In this episode, we dive deep into Bitcoin’s ideological and technological battles, from the early days of monetary activism to today’s regulatory and institutional challenges. Giacomo unpacks the role of stablecoins and specifically USDT, explaining why it has become both a “useful scam” and a financial bridge for millions. We also touch on CBDCs, the future of financial decentralization, transhumanism and why Bitcoiners should remain cautious as institutions get involved. Please note Giacomo’s views do not represent Tether’s official views in any way. ► If you got value, please like, comment, share, follow and support my work. Thank you!-- SPONSORS --►► Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it): https://affil.trezor.io/SHUn -- SPECIAL OFFERS –►► Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat: https://efenigson.gumroad.com/l/desmet_efrat ►► Enjoy the Little HODLer products, learn about sound money while having fun! use code EFRAT for 10% off on non-sale items: https://thelittlehodler.com/ ►► 10% off on all books & accessories at the “Bitcoin Infinity Store” - use code EFRAT.►► Join me in any of these upcoming events: https://www.efrat.blog/p/upcoming-events -- LINKS –Giacomo’s Twitter: https://x.com/giacomozucco Giacomo’s Nostr npub: npub1au23c73cpaq2whtazjf6cdrmvam6nkd4lg928nwmgl78374kn29sq9t53jPlan B Network Twitter: https://x.com/planb_network Plan B Website: https://planb.network/Mir’s Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMfe4C6auWo Efrat's Twitter: https://twitter.com/efenigsonEfrat's Telegram: https://t.me/efenigsonWatch/listen on all platforms: https://linktr.ee/yourethevoiceSupport Efrat's work: ⁠https://www.buymeacoffee.com/efenigson   ⁠Support Efrat with Bitcoin: https://geyser.fund/project/efenigson-- CHAPTERS –00:00 Coming Up…00:57 Introduction01:25 Giacomo’s Story and Background09:35 The Story Behind “Plan B Network”16:34 Tether - A Happy Accident or a Useful Scam? 26:51 Tether’s Audits & Conspiracy Theories of Pumping Bitcoin Price30:58 Tether’s Bet On Gold with XAUt32:26 Tether’s Tech & Investments Diversification32:58 Transhumanism & its Risks 37:04 The New Monetary Order: CBDCs,Stablecoins & Bitcoin43:22 The Evolution of Bitcoin's Ideological Landscape47:38 Giacomo’s Message of Hope

Usually ICOs, shitcoins in general, they use the blockchain hype to scam private investors, retail investors. So buy our token because of blockchain. That's a scam and it's a scam to investors. Digitalization is helping the centralization of fiat to print more, to distort more and to censor more. The problem is that people are just so in love with the brand of the dollars, not just, not Bitcoiners, But you know, people in Turkey that are suffering, people in Venezuela, they see the dollar, and that's stability for them. Even if it has lost 97% of the purchasing power

just in the last century, even if most of the supply has been printed in the last few years, even if it's super easy to censor, to manipulate. Mr. Giacomo Zucco. Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for being with me. Thank you for having me.

Thanks for taking the time. At last, we were talking for like a few months to make this happen. But things happen in the right time, right? Yeah, yeah. Lugano Forum for me is a little bit hectic. Lugano, San Salvador Forum is a little bit more relaxed. Good. So I'm glad I caught you.

So welcome to another episode of You Are The Voice. I have the pleasure of sitting here with Giacomo Zucco, and he's a director of Plan B Network, which if you haven't seen my previous episode with Mir, who is Giacomo's wife, I wrote myself, you're better half. Yeah, definitely better. He's your better half, right? Very little better. Probably more than half.

He's my better 90%. And people will be the judge whether her interview or your interview was better, but she raised up the bar. That's right. So go watch the episode with me. It was wonderful. But we're going to talk about some of the things related to Plan B Network today, but also on other things.

Giacomo is also a Bitcoin maxi. And I started, I think, following you in the last one and a half years because I'm relatively new in this space, about three years. And the moment I discovered you, I'm like, thank God for people like that in Bitcoin. we need that truth tellers the people that have no fear to speak out and really are exposing bullshit in a very graceful way very funny way so graceful is not an objective i get but yeah yeah i i think it's great i think i find it very funny so can you tell us a bit about your background uh where you came from how you started and what got you to what you do today so i always

changed my interests a lot when I was a kid I wanted to be a singer then I wanted to be an inventor then I wanted to be an archaeologist by the time I started to do like ancient literature to do archaeology so classical studies in Italy humanities then I was so bored by humanities that I switched and university I did physics and I had a I basically had my dissertation in theoretical physics, Hamilton's quaternions. But by the time I was so bored about physics that I started to get interested in economics. And I got my first job as... Without doing a degree in it? No, just personal study. I think luckily, but otherwise I would not get Bitcoin. It's better to have zero education than a negative education, I guess. I started from

advantage point. Then I was hired by Accenture to do system design in payments. And so I was exposed to the infrastructure of traditional fiat payments. And I was active politically. I started an advocacy group against taxes, the Italian Tea Party. So I was going in television to advocate against taxes and governments, like libertarian leaning stuff. And in that period, I was active in two very different cultural groups. One was my friends translating the Mises.org articles in Italian. So that was Austrian economy, kind of conservative-leaning environment, mostly focused on economics, monetary economics especially.

And then I was inside a few groups that were more like left libertarian, some groups coming from the Pirate Party, Occupy Wall Street, with the people meeting under Assange embassy, I mean, the embassy where Assange was prisoner in London, people interested in Wikileaks. And this was a completely different kind of social framework. These people knew nothing about economics at all, monetary, economic, let that alone. And they were mostly like social progressives, totally different people. And in December 2012, I was part of the review of the translation of a Mises article about

Bitcoin from the point of view of digital gold, what will eventually become famous as the Saifedean territory. So Austrian economics, digital gold, store of value, this kind of narrative. And in the same week, people from the other contexts started to discuss Bitcoin because the Wikileaks adoption of Bitcoin and the interaction with the Silk Road case. And so something completely different from the first narrative. I was interested in both, but I felt myself as the only, as an only overlap. I mean, like nobody else was in both groups.

Usually they were incompatible in many other ways, but I was in both. And then in the January of 2013, I started to see a discussion between German colleagues in Accenture about Bitcoin as a technological improvement with no political overtone. It was mostly about the technology. And back then there was not yet the blockchain hype was like Bitcoin is interesting because it's like a user cryptography. So three parts of my life suddenly felt connected to three very disconnected parts of my life suddenly felt connected.

So a few months later, I was talking about Bitcoin, studying Bitcoin, thinking about Bitcoin all the time. So my beautiful wife, your previous guest, she told me, I mean, you should quit and just do Bitcoin because your political activism is pointless. You don't, you just waste money and time. Yeah, it was, it was like, it was a feel good hobby without any kind of impact on the world. And my career was boring, very boring, like nine to five or nine to 11 consultancy job in Accenture, very, very, I mean, very stressful, no satisfaction.

Yeah, it was about technology, but I started off that job as a very as a generalist and they wanted to specialize me in very particular, you know, I don't know, software for payroll in SAP, something I didn't want to do. And so you're protected at your work. You don't make a lot of money. You even if you do, you're sharing it with the state then. Yeah, yeah. Sharing with the state a lot, trying to minimize that, but not that much. Bitcoin, and your political activism is void, it's just a vanity activity. While you are interested in Bitcoin, Bitcoin could be a job, Bitcoin could be money, Bitcoin could be politics in both directions, Bitcoin could be technology where you have the skill

to understand and explain. So maybe just do Bitcoin." And I said, yes. And then next day, I told my boss, yeah, I'm quitting. And so I quit Accenture and then the idea was to create Bitcoin startups. I created way too many of them and a very high percentage failed immediately before starting. Back then I was a shit-coiner.

So I started to think that not just Bitcoin was possible. So at the beginning, I was like, Bitcoin is not possible in the first few months. Then I accepted Bitcoin, but at that point, my skepticism has been so, so hardly beaten by Bitcoin that I lost it completely and started to believe everything. So I went from believe nothing, no coin, to believe everything, shit coin. And it took a few months to get back to the center, basically, of actually reasonable skepticism. And so a few Bitcoin startups, I participated to the creation of Green Address, which then became Blockstream Green. The wallet Blockstream Green was a startup in 2013.

I participated to, well, a few things. Most of them bullshit, but some of them lasted in time. And then, together with Mir, we started to organize the biggest Italian Bitcoin meetup. The third iteration of the Scaling Bitcoin Conference, we brought it to Milan. Then we did the meeting to create the Lightning Interoperability Specification. And then stuff from there exploded. You never looked back? No, no, not at all. Best choice of our life.

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So we did something similar. During that time, me and Mir had created this stuff called BHB Network. So the idea was we had all these brilliant Bitcoin startups, but they don't make any money. We make money. I made money mostly by consulting banks and institutions, and I took all this money and I spent it to basically help my friend Bitcoin to survive. So we decided to turn that into a business model.

So we rented a place in Milan. We invited for free all the best Bitcoiners from all over the world, free travel, accommodation, food, entertainment, and desk in a calculated way, like the people working on the same protocols on the same stuff. And the only thing that we asked them was to share, to basically share with us what they were doing, like show and tell periodically. And then we hired up to 13 people for a moment to, with the only mandate, help these guys whatever they need from software to legal to personal assistant, everything.

In exchange, you gather information, package information, then we sell information. We sold it to Intesa San Paolo Bank, Azimut Group, Poste Italiane, a lot of Italian companies. What kind of information? Investment radars, reports on what Bitcoin is and Bitcoin isn't. Back then they were interested in that kind of information? The brand we used to sell it was Blockchain Lab. So it was, of course, we entered the hype and they were asking blockchain and we were selling Bitcoin.

So we scammed them. But actually we provided the very good things like one of these clients, a very big Italian bank, had one of the first cold storage multisig implementation back in 2016 and a working lighting prototype created by us together with the lighting labs guys already in 2016 as well and they did nothing with that it's like you know at the end of the uh riders of the lost ark where i mean you recover the ark of covenants and you just get put in there like in a in a secret storage for many many it's the same thing they put this incredible stuff very very early on and put it in the in the basement before nobody to see big corporations do that a lot yeah that's why they

They have what's called innovation departments. We were working for them. Yeah, we were working for the innovation. They come up with all these ideas, and I think 80%, 90% of them are being shelved. So that was not Plan B Network. Then we had our first daughter, our first kid, the daughter. And so we decided to quit, to close down the airport. It was called BHB Network because we had the idea to expand it, the same model, in different parts of the world.

We had one deal in Montreal, Canada, one in South Africa, one in Hong Kong, to open some kind of twin laboratories to do the same model all around the world. But it was ambitious. It was a good idea. But we closed it down for personal reasons. So we focused on the daughter. And I started to do freelance. So I had a few investments in some Bitcoin companies, from Relai to Ocean. Back then, it was others.

But I did a small investment and some consultants, like a bank wants to ask about Bitcoin, I will go there, charge $2,000 and then just be home with the family. So we took it slow for a while. But then about one year and a half ago, two companies approached me. One was Tether. Tether created this Plan B initiative in Lugano, and they wanted to expand it as an educational effort. And the other one was Fulgur. Fulgur was the other half of the investment in the Lugano Plan B hub, which is now called POW.space. So it's a co-working, Bitcoin-themed co-working in Lugano. And they knew that we did something similar with this network of ideas.

So they tried to ask me to replicate the same thing. So the brand, I love the Plan B brand because the Plan B brand, I think, is very, it's very, the narrative that we use with Paolo Arduino stage, like if, in our talk as well, if the Plan A of the mainstream goes, don't stop it. I mean, just trust it. Go with that. But in case it breaks, we want to be ready with the Plan B. So I think it was a very good narrative. So we are not an alternative to university. Go to university.

But just in case the university system is broken, then we can probably help. And we don't want to just compete with the mainstream existence. We want to create an alternative with different logics. So Tether and Fulgur provide me with an offer of a budget in order to do education on one side, Bitcoin education, but in the future also other kinds of Plan B education from energy to communication. So Plan B for money and Plan B for other things. And on the other side, this idea of interconnected, co-working, co-living, incubator, accelerator kind of stuff. This is not an entirely new idea. Some people may remember the Bitcoin embassy network was an idea of 2014.

In Tel Aviv, there is still the embassy. Now there is that embassy is mostly independent. But back in 2013, there was an idea to connect them as an embassy network. So it's something similar. We are connecting the node in Lugano with one in Turin that we are building right now, with one in Tokyo that we're going to open in the spring, with one in Taiwan, which is very active. We are trying to federate with people in Madeira, the already existing hotspot in Madeira. So the idea is we will build together with Fulgur and Tether some new hubs. And we also integrate existing hubs like Madeira or maybe Pleblabs in Austin with our existing network.

So the education part of the Plan B Network idea, so the Plan B Network is an umbrella company which can do several things. One is education with what we will start to call the Plan B Academy, which is mostly what you can find now on our website. Courses, schools, we just hosted the developer school in San Salvador. We do the business school in Lugano and many other courses. then there will be events which is basically our connection with the forum uh in the forum we organized the game show the diploma the spanish stage in lugano we organized the italian stage we do the parties the rocamotos all this kind of stuff and so we're trying to basically integrate with with the event part and then there will be a little bit of investments because we are in touch

with full group for the plan b fund right now the plan b fund already invested in breeze was the first the first investment but the idea is to provide a lot of a lot of suggestions for investment and this should be all integrated under the plan minator so what is the plan minator well it's a mess it's a lot of things that we will try to make it work okay you touched on thank you of course but you touched on tether's uh involvement in plan b or one of their projects is plan b how do you view Tether for Bitcoin or as a driver for Bitcoin, as a sponsor of Bitcoin? I don't know how to call it, but I feel like the relationship between Tether and Bitcoin are so different than anything else. Yeah, it's very curious.

So I'm curious about your approach on how these two entities live together. It's very peculiar for at least two reasons. The first is that Tether is a very happy accident. And I will elaborate on that. And the second is that Tether is a very useful scam. And I will also elaborate on that. So Tether started off. So at the beginning, I was very close with Giancarlo Devasini and other people.

And they were mostly working on Bitfinex. Bitfinex was a great exchange, very useful for Bitcoin, very pro-Bitcoin. They were very helpful in the block size wars. The Bitfinex roles in the block size wars. and not be underestimated. They were the first one to adopt Lightning. So they fostered the technology adoption of Lightning. They sponsored my project, RGB,

that then branched off with the Tupperware asset that today was announced at the stage. So a lot of very good things, very good relationship with Bitfinex. Tether was supposed to just be a service, like an additional service for Bitfinex in the sense that in order to get on Bitfinex with a lot of problems with fiat bank accounts,

you separate the trading from the representation of fiat so people will send fiat not to bitfinex which would be difficult to buy bitcoin but to tether then you send the uh the representation of the fiat uh via omni protocol on bitcoin to bitfinex and you trade there and that's easy brilliant idea by giancarlo and the even more brilliant idea was not create a bridge and to help people just bring the flow in but also let other exchanges use the same so instead of creating something for us, since we use it for Bitfinex, come on and everybody can use it. Open for everybody. That created a situation in which many people entered, but not many people exited, which

was not really expected in principle. It could have been mostly symmetrical flow, but since more people are buying Bitcoin than selling Bitcoin on average, people were buying Tether to enter, but not really exit back. So basically, they created the debt, in a sense, of Tether started to grow so much that a bank could not just keep the Tether account in cash under the basement of the bank. They had to invest this stuff. And the obvious investment will be T-bills, because they have to track the dollar price. So there are not much alternatives.

What is liquid enough to keep a cash reserve of $4 billion, $40 billion? So they started to buy T-bills. I can assure you that the Tether people were not like super in love with the Federal Reserve and the American federal government debt. But there was no other option to track the dollar. And what happens is that, for pure coincidence, coincided with the rise of interest rates on the Treasury bonds in America. So they start to make a lot of money.

And now they finance it with a lot of money to invest in something that they care for, which was always Bitcoin and has always been Bitcoin. Paolo Arduino is a Bitcoin maximalist. And, well, Giancarlo is a very pragmatic man. But Bitfinex always had a very strong Bitcoin-centered mission. So now they always sponsored Bitcoin research and education. But now they find themselves in a condition to do it even more, not under the Bitfinex umbrella anymore, but under the Tether umbrella.

The second point that makes the relationship pretty weird is that, Of course, I don't represent Tether legally, so everything I say may be false and you have to ask Tether lawyers, but this is my personal opinion. I don't speak for them. Tether could run USDT, technically speaking, just like PayPal, with a central server. There is no strict reason for a blockchain. But if you do PayPal, the regulator will come to you and tell you, you cannot onboard a homeless guy from Somalia or an underage kid from Patagonia. You need KYC, AML, full rules. And Tether did something very, very smart.

They said, OK, the primary market where we sell the USDT and we redeem the USDT, that's fully regulated. KYC, AML, just like any other company. We cannot do otherwise. But then, since we put it on the blockchain for technical reasons, we cannot stop a secondary market that will happen. I mean, you come to me to buy ESDT, I have to fully KYC and AML you. But then you send it to a wallet, which works. But then it was Omni, then they started to use shitcoins.

But for a reason, and I will touch on that. And now you send it to a shitcoin wallet or a Bitcoin wallet, you cannot stop it. What you can do is, regulator, if you ask me, I can blacklist this series of addresses so I will not redeem, but I cannot control, I cannot do preemptive global ergo omnes control like they are required to do on fiat. So in my opinion, the technical reason, this is a personal opinion again, technical reasons to use the blockchain are basically zero. There may be something like interoperability with the exchanges, but they could use MySQL. But there is a strong regulatory arbitrage. in which they are not forced to control a blockchain.

Because it's not them, it's Tron, it's Polygon, it's Ethereum, all of them are centralized by the way. And Tether is also centralized, except for which, interestingly enough, they had to stop using. Why? Because the protocol on top of Bitcoin was at this point used only... They stopped back then. They stopped a few years ago.

Well, actually, a couple of years ago, they realized that Omni was only used by Tether. And that was a problem because in that case, the regulator could come to them and say, This is basically your infrastructure, so now you're liable, you're in control. They removed it and they kept using shitcoins. And now finally with the Taproot asset, which I am proud to say is basically a fork, a re-implementation of the RGB idea that Bitfinex and Fulgur sponsored for many years. And I was the guy starting the research. And that line of research will finally bring USDT back on Lightning and those on Bitcoin.

So we don't have the problem to indirectly legitimize shitcoin tokens. But in a way, I said all this in order to intend that Tether people will never agree with this definition, rightfully so, but I would call Tether a scam to regulators. Usually ICOs, shitcoins in general, they use the blockchain hype to scam private investors, retail investors. So buy our token because of blockchain. That's a scam and it's a scam to investors. In the case of USDT, there is nobody that will be bamboozled by an investment.

Because you send me a USD, best case scenario, you get it back, but there's no investment to be made. It's just $1. If you're lucky, you get $1 back. So this kind of scam was not to attract people lured in with any prospect of getting rich. If you need to move dollars, you can use this tool. They never promoted keeping a store of value on ESDT. You can find a lot of public declaration by Paolo, don't store your value in ESDT, use

it to transact, which it does perfectly. But all the shitcoins, they may use the blockchain hype to confuse the regulators, but then they also end up confusing investors as an inevitable kind of after effect. While with the USDT, very luckily, that doesn't happen because you cannot invest in your USDT by definition. So it's part of the blockchain hype, but I'm happy that it exists because it's helping lot of people to do stuff that they could not do with PayPal, especially in the secondary market, and that they could do with Bitcoin when they get it and they can start to manage the volatility.

But some people are obviously not ready. So the community relationship with Tether is mixed, because on one side, Tether is helping the US dollar to be adopted around the world, which, of course, is helping the enemy. It's not what we want as Bitcoiners. Yeah, but it's helping the dollar to be used in a way which is mostly permissionless, not totally permissionless, because they still have some kind of central point of attacks. So in the secondary markets, people that were completely cut out of the digital dollar are actually included.

I'm with you. The benefit is clear, yes. Of course, it's a problem of mitigation. Whenever there is a mitigation, you may remember the Marxist argument that you should not help the poor, otherwise they will not do the revolution. So if you don't mitigate the problem, the problem will then explode and maybe bring to a better solution. So one could say, don't do this. So people will be forced out of fiat and then they will finally accept Bitcoin. But the reality is that most of the people are still scared by Bitcoin's volatility and the brand recognizement of the dollar.

I'm not saying that for Bitcoin. I'm saying that for like anti-dollar or like I'm just doing the devil's advocate here. No, no, it's a good argument. But the point is that it's not pragmatic. Anti-Fiat US dollar growth in the world. These people right now have a choice between normal fiat, where they are excluded, and Bitcoin, where they still don't get the volatility, they still don't get the brand recognition. And Tether is a mitigation, it's a bridge in between. And if it's made by a company which invests most of their revenues in Bitcoin research, in the Bitcoin ecosystem, as Tether is doing, without doubt, I think this is a...

I understand the discussion. I'm not saying that it's an obvious, but I fully believe in the intentions and the overall beneficial effect. Okay, great. I heard some, since I came late to the party, I heard that there's an issue with auditing the reserves of Tether,

saying it's buying all these treasury bills and no one ever verified that they have what they say they have. They had a few audits. The problem is that audits are not done by top four companies. It's not PwC auditing. So the point there would be to enter the elite room where you can actually... Right now, these kind of companies are not touching something which is controversial. They still don't know what is the relationship between Tether and the US government.

So they're very wary to accept. Tether proposed many times to be audited by a big company. So they have audits. You can check them online. But these audits are made by, I mean, second tier, not top tier. But you can check the audit. It's mostly there is a lot of gold in reserves. There is some Bitcoin, of course, not too much because they have to track the dollar, not the Bitcoin.

And there's mostly T-bills, which are fully verifiable. And there are some commercial paper of private company, but it's still something very liquid. And there were a lot of stress tests on Tether. There was a lot of like very, very fast conversion where you could see them selling under a lot of stress, selling very fast these assets, liquidating them and paying back. Again, personal opinion, not related to Tether. There may be even the possibility, technically speaking, that Tether is over collateralized because they cannot know how many tokens in the secondary market are not moving because somebody just decided to not move it or because somebody lost the keys. If they issued a USDT and somebody lost the keys, from the terminal service point of view, this collateral is now part of the company.

So they may be over-collateralized compared to the circulating supplies of USDT. Because of the means of use, because of how people use them. Yeah, yeah. There is the argument they can do fractional reserve, they can hide something. The conspiracy theory is they print Tether without the collateral, they print USDT to buy Bitcoin and pump the price. I think I find this very stupid because the point is that, yes, every exchange can do it, including Bitfinex. But if they want to do it, there are two ways to do it.

One is create a Bitfinex account, create the fake dollars within the Bitfinex account, buy Bitcoin from there. Nobody will know because it's an internal database account or do it with USDT, which is basically represented in public chains that anybody can verify and everybody can try to run the number. So it would be the most stupid way. So if they wanted to do fractional reserve, they would and should do it with Bitfinex dollar account like Kraken could do, Coinbase could do. But it's more hidden rather than doing it out of the open. Doing it in an auditable public chain is just stupid. So I think that, I mean, I would rather believe Bitfinex dollar accounts are not fully collateralized

over Tether is not. Because that is super easy to double check, and there are audits, I've read some, but then I find it very boring, so I'm not an authority in asset auditing because I find it boring. But nobody that I know that I've checked remain with many doubts about the fact that, of course, it's liquid, it's there, it's still a counterparty risk. The US government could just decide that the TBS owned by Tether are now not ready anymore. And then the collateral evaporates.

So that's something that Tether people know and say. And ready for, it sounds like. Ready for. Mentally, it sounds like. Mentally and even financially, they may have some plan B. So, of course, the main point is do not hold USDT. It's a transactional stuff. If you want to store value, Bitcoin, if you want to transact and your counterpart is not

ready for Bitcoin pricing, Bitcoin volatility, Bitcoin brand recognition, you have this dollar option. Tether is also pushing for Tether Gold, XAUT. Tether Gold is actually fully collateralized, reviewable at any time, peg to the dollar, so they issue XAUT and they buy gold, physical gold that you can even visit if you have enough of them in a Swiss vault under a mountain, which is beautiful to see. And actually, TETO is pushing XLT, but for some reason, the brand, it would be way safer because there is a clear way for the US government to make that gold disappear unless they invade

Switzerland, which everything can happen, but it's a little bit remote. So they are pushing for XLT. I think it's a very good product. The problem is that people are just so in love with the brand of the dollars, not just, not Bitcoiners, but, you know, people in Turkey that are suffering, people in Venezuela, they see the dollar and that's stability for them. Even if it has lost 97% of the purchasing power just in the last century or something, even if most of the supply has been printed in the last few years,

even if it's super easy to censor, to manipulate, they are in love with the dollar. So Tether would love to push gold more. I know that for a fact, speaking with the leaders, but the market is so much in love with the dollars. But now Tether is not just USDT. Tether branched off and used all this money coming from the TBL interest to buy like Old Punch and sponsor like Rumble and Synonym. So they are basically diversifying. There is Tether Power, which is doing central mining and power plants all around the world. There is Tether Data with Old Punch and the North Stream for the AI GPU training.

And they are doing Tether Evo with Biotech. They have the BlackRock Neuralink technology. They are competing with Elon Musk Neuralink. Oh, my God. They acquired a competitor to that with the same mindset that all this technology is good if you do that local and sovereign. So the take on that is... I'm a big, big anti to those technologies.

Yeah, but you should discuss... I mean, if you grab Paolo, you should discuss about that. Because his theory is instead of refusing this technology, we should build an alternative where this technology is not centralized. So the difference is Neuralink, you basically connect with the central server of Elon Musk and you just hope that everything goes fine, like driving a Tesla. Like what they're trying to do with this BlackRock,

it's not BlackRock, it's just a coincident name. You try to do something local with no cloud access, which cannot be connected from the outside, which is only local. Or the same with so-called AI. The idea is that instead of just chatting with CharGPT and leaving them, leaving Sam Altman all your data, you train stuff locally, keeping the data locally.

So the full mission is, if you read the business plan of the staff, the full mission is be a plan B to these technologies. Instead of the centralized version, which is controlled, instead of just saying we don't use it, we create an alternative, which is as much as possible local and sovereign. I understand the approach and I will definitely look into it. And if I manage to talk to Paolo, I will. What I'm against is the underlying ethos of it. of having the need to actually track our brain function. I think that we are getting closer and closer to the transhumanistic agenda

where we are becoming intertwined with robots and with the singularity approach. And I think that that is a very dangerous slippery slope that we shouldn't be taking. So it's more in the ideological part that I am against this, not the implementation, whether it's central or decentralized. I think the ideological point would be,

I mean, I led this to a conversation between you and Paolo, but I think that you will agree on the fundamental ideological position, but we'll disagree on the strategy. He thinks you cannot just hide from this. You cannot really stop it. So the only thing that you can do

is to create an alternative to fight it. So he would say, if robots will try to control us, the only way to fight robots would be to have our own sovereign ships. So he doesn't think it's possible to stop transhumanism. So he wants to make transhumanism decentralized. So that's where I disagree.

Sure. People told me that I won't be able to resist mRNA. So far, I'm doing pretty well. I know. I take another side. Humanity has to also be very vigilant about how much do we accept technology in our lives. And, you know, here I am sitting with you in a technological conference. It's not like I'm against technology.

I've been 25 years in tech. Exactly. I've been 25 years in tech. I love technology. Translating our debate. But where is the border? But where is the line that I draw between... For your physical body, for example.

Your physical body to the IoT or the... Not sure it's a very resistant border. But I agree to disagree. For Bitcoin, one of the options could be when you see central banking and fiat, one of the options would be... And some people, some libertarians took that option. No.

Technology is corrupting money. It's true. like digital censorship, surveillance, printing money out of a database, let's remain with gold. Analog, completely analog. Completely analog. So let's remain with gold. That's a consistent position.

I understand the approach. But it's a losing one. I agree. On that I agree. On the monetary side, I agree. He's extending, Paolo's extending. I think health and body is a little bit different than money. I know, I know.

It's a completely interesting... But now you get the idea. They are trying to extend the Bitcoin approach into these other fields that right now are dominated by big tech kind of control situation. It could be a losing bet. That is definitely very interesting. Yeah, yeah.

Okay, I want to ask you, in my keynote just today, I spoke about the new monetary order that is shaping up in the world that is consistent of many different types of instruments because we are still in the stage of shaping it up, then you're seeing the eruption of all these different types of instruments

like the tokenization, like the stable coins obviously have to be very regulated, like the ETFs, like the CBDCs, retail, wholesale. There are all these different types of experiments with digital money for the traditional finance when they're trying to now bridge over to the digital sphere with finance, which haven't happened in many, many years. I mean, we know it's digital today, but not in the way that they want it to be and not in the way that they want to take it. Plus, you and I were also on a panel

a couple of months ago. We talked about CBDCs, right? So my question is, how do you envision this new monetary order that is shaping up? Do you feel like, because since we did the panel, and just monitoring what's happening,

I think my opinion is changing the wholesale CBDC. Yes, they will probably try to implement the interoperability between countries and central banks with some kind of a digital platform, this unified ledger that they're trying to reinvent the wheel of what Bitcoin already has, while at the same time, you're seeing countries or nation states becoming more and more friendly towards Bitcoin as long as it's identified, permissioned, KYC, AML, and also regulated stablecoins, whether it's by the nation states or the corporations and the commercial banks.

You want to issue your own token. You want to have something that is under regulation. And we see in so many countries laws and regulations that are now coming into play to allow stable coins to exist in a very controlled way. So how do you see this shaping up? We're really, I feel like we're in, let's say if this is a 10-year process or a 15-year process,

I feel like we're in the first two, three years now. So we're probably going to see a lot of changes still. But I know you're a visionary and you always think about these things. Yeah, I think it's a very complex kind of situation because there are different tendencies that are orthogonal to each other. They interact in non-trivial ways. For example, one point is pre-banking. So fiat was a process of centralization.

Before, any commercial bank could issue their notes and then they redeemed the notes with some collateral. And in the US, at the beginning of the 20th century, any bank could just issue a note and redeem it. Then some of those banks had some kind of bank run. And so that was used as an excuse to centralize everything in state banks. And then the federal banks said, wait a minute, you cannot do that in state banks. Let's just do this federal bank.

And the state bank cannot do anything anymore. So it's a centralization of monopoly on a bank note issuing function. So there was a centralization. Then there was an international centralization, Bretton Woods. So guys, only the Fed will give the collateral. Everybody else will just give dollars, so credit from the Feds. And then we will do the exchange centrally. So there was a centralization movement.

In a way, what's happening right now with technology is that decentralized entities are getting more powerful, because with digital technology, they can track more, they can censor more, they can print more. What I always say is that printing money with paper is already cheap and doable. But at least you take some time. When you watch the Casa del Papel, these guys at least have to stay three days in the bank in order to print. If you do that with digital, they enter, they do click, and they exit because it's already done. The big red button.

Yeah, exactly. You don't even need paper. So digitalization is helping the centralization of Fiat to print more, to distort more, and to censor more. But at the same time, it may help, it's not really happening so much, but it may help a little bit, re-decentralizing, not at the individual level, but at least at the corporation commercial bank level. If commercial banks can take something out of the central bank, it could also be seen as a partial return to free banking.

But I think that this is a delusional path, because even if it's happening to some degree, it's very easy for the government to stop that and to re-decentralize everything, in In a way, Tether itself is free banking, is a company issuing dollar credits, bypassing the central banking entirely. And to some inferior degree, USDC is the same. But of course, USDC is fully controlled by the US government. And Tether will not be able to always operate the secondary market outside of the US government. Eventually, it will end.

And they know it. And they are preparing the contingency plans. So I see that as a potential. Let me put it this way. If there was no Bitcoin, my hope would be e-gold kind of entities, commercial banks trying to rebuild the free banking system against the government with some kind of legal arbitrage, trying to stay in the mud of ambiguity, legal ambiguity, different jurisdictions competing. If there was no Bitcoin, that would be my best hope, my best wish for having more freedom

instability in the payment and banking and financial sector. Since we have Bitcoin, I'm glad to, I mean, I'm not disturbed by the fact that it is delusional, because I think that this will fail and Bitcoin will go on. And in the meantime, this debate about CBDC can just take some focus out of Bitcoin. So the regulator will be busy trying to create the perfect CBDC, and they will be busy trying to prevent private companies from doing the same. And in this, you know, the meme, you know, the meme, the two girls are fighting and then the guy with the bong is watching. So the guy with the bong is Bitcoin.

And then you have private companies and commercial banks fighting governments to do the CBDC. I mean, let them fight. Yeah. Okay, good. um bitcoiners won't comply in 2013 was your uh or your title of yesterday's uh keynote and then verse of 2024 where it's fuck government no sorry okay that was the title and then we said 2013 it was fuck government wikileaks peer-to-peer cash and then 2024 it's like etfs please simping for Trump allowing self-custody please allow me to hold my Bitcoin in self-custody

what happened can you give us a yeah well of course we we were complaining about that but we're not surprised about that I think it's a what happened to Bitcoin it's growing and when you grow you you you have to compromise on purity a little bit because I think so let me put this away in this life was pessimistic was it was a joke against this kind of evolution but my real stance is optimistic. The absolute number of people with sound Austrian economics ideas and

understandings and strong ideological cypherpunk ideas and crypto anarchists and anarcho-capitalist ideas I think is growing in absolute number. Way more thanks to Bitcoin. Many people entered in Bitcoin for investment reasons, technology reasons and then they discover

some of them discover a consistent framework of ethical ideas and practical strategies to implement those ideas. So I think I'm very optimistic about the growth of the initial non-compliant spirit. The problem is that the absolute growth, the absolute numbers are growing, but the adoption is growing more, the hype is growing more, the mainstream hype is growing more. So we have a growth of the now I have more anarcho-capitalist committed non-compliant

rebel friends that I had back in 2013. But over the number of people interested in Bitcoin, that percentage is shrinking in a relative way. So I think that's to be expected. Natural. It's natural. It's growing. And if you, I mean, a true rocker will tell you that when rock and roll went mainstream,

of course, now it's all commercial shit. The true rockers are still there, but it's inevitable. You cannot have adoption and purity at the same time. It's important that we have, it's important that the core, the nucleus, the best companies, the best developers, the decision makers, the project builders, those guys are stay focused in the core values. And then the, I mean, the parasitary adoption, all this kind of adoption on the fringe. Yeah, you know, these guys that will use the thing without participating, they can be ideologically

compromised as long as they don't get to decide, they don't get to corrupt the core. So I still feel that the slide was in order to create some reaction, but I'm fairly optimistic about the fact that even if we have more and more, there may be, so I discussed a lot about Trump, there may be some more disorientment because there is always the political hope that you can reform the government from inside. So now Trump will fix everything. I understand that's also natural because it seems like an easy way to win, an easy win. Yeah, but I never buy into this.

Me neither. And the good thing is that if I'm right, there's not much time to wait for me to be shown right. So, I mean, we will see it very soon. And best case scenario, in four years, we are back to start. And if I'm wrong, well, okay, I will admit I was wrong and Trump was the messiah and saved everybody. But I think he's a very funny guy, but not a savior. And so I'm not really worried about this. I think that as long as we have strong ideological commitment in the core of the ecosystem,

the fringe can become a little bit, I mean, retarded and still fine. And degenerate and Bitcoin will be OK and we will be OK. Yeah, yeah. Of course, that doesn't mean that we stop shouting and we stop insulting. that's a role everybody's playing their role my role is to try to make them feel bad I know that I cannot stop them

but we play our roles amazing, Giacomo, last words message of hope, what you want to give people so that they stay optimistic for what's to come because it's definitely not going to be boring in the next 12 months 24 months

we can promise that, we are not going to be bored if you buy Bitcoin if you curate your opsec and privacy so learn private technological privacy learn to keep your conversation information private maybe learn how to use a gun learn how to move in the world get a second residency be able to travel get your vaccine passport ready uh there i mean there are ways uh get get all you need and to resist and uh and get the popcorns and just and just be relaxed work on yourself to be relaxed enough to sit there with the popcorn and just watch popcorn cool storage

gun and and you're set to go i love it i love it thank you so much for your spirit and your you bring such lightheartedness to this combaggery and this you know fucked up world that we live in today so i really appreciate appreciate your spirit and um where should people follow you Well, now, finally, I have a unifying project, Plan B.network. Of course, you can follow me on Twitter, X, Giacomo Zucco. But most things I will do will be in the context of the Plan B.network. Okay. Are you in Noster as well?

We are. I still didn't learn how to spell out the public keys in interviews. But on Noster, you can find Giacomo Zucco and Plan B.network. You get a nice fancy email address. Yeah, I think we have one, but I'm not sure. But anyway, we'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, thank you. We have my own, there is me, there is Mir, and there is also Plambinetto.

Okay, wonderful. Great. Thank you so much. This was wonderful. My pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for being with us. Please take a minute to give this episode a like, a comment, and subscribe or follow.

and please share it with your friends so they can also get value and choose to take some positive action in their lives. Till next time.