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Welcome to the Free Thought Project Podcast.
A hub for free-thinking conversations about the promotion of liberty and the daunting task of government accountability.
Here are your hosts, Jason Basler and Matt Agarist.
Hello again Free Thinkers, welcome back to the Free Thought Project Podcast.
My name is Jason Basler and joining me is the Free Thought Project Editor-in-Chief, Matt Agarist.
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Okay, well today's conversation should definitely resonate with our crypto friends, the privacy nerds out there and anyone trying to piece together the bigger picture of the technocratic surveillance state.
Our guest today has spent a lot of time in the crypto sphere. He's a former editor and chief at Bitcoin Magazine and has come out the other side as an outspoken critic of stablecoins and centralized digital finance.
He's done quite a bit of work with Whitney Webb and writing for her investigative journalist platform Unlimited Hangout.
He's been interviewed by our friend and returning guest James Corbett on the Corbett Report and then on the TFTC podcast.
So our guest today is Mark Goodwin and we're excited to have him joining us.
So Mark, welcome to the Free Thought Project podcast, my friend.
Hey guys, thank you so much. I know I said it before we were on air but you guys are fantastic.
I've been doing it for a super long time and really thankful for all the work you've done and super excited to be here.
Well, thank you, sir. Appreciate those kind words.
And yeah, I've been really looking forward to this conversation as well.
And one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the show was to really get into the nitty gritty dissecting just how dangerous these stablecoins really are for the future of not only finances
but for the future of society.
Now, I've watched several of your interviews and I have no doubt you're a leading expert on this topic and have a unique ability to really break down all this information.
Matt and myself have been talking about the stablecoin threat for a while now and we realized there was a bait and switch going on with the Trump administration
and embracing these stablecoins over the CBD seas.
And we've tried our best to warn people about what these possibilities are and how it's basically just a rebranding and a repackaging of the current $38 trillion debt Ponzi scheme that we know as central banking.
So while you were on the Corbett Report, you described the stablecoins as just kicking the can down the road.
I thought that was a great analogy because we're basically just propping up the US dollar's illusion of stability while extending the central bank Ponzi scheme.
So do you mind maybe touching on that a bit and unpacking that?
I don't think most people really grasped how serious this is and it's not this modernizing money.
It's really just repackaging the same debt-backed scam until the wheels fall off, right?
Oh, a thousand hundred percent for sure.
Well, yeah, I think the kicking the debt can down the road analogy is pretty prudent because we've seen the US government do this multiple times.
This is certainly not a new concept of basically if we have debt problems, we need to find more users to be on our system and we need to find more buyers to buy our debt.
Those are kind of the two pillars of a debt-based system.
And we've done multiple iterations.
I say we obviously extremely liberally here as an American, but I certainly have nothing to do with it.
But we've done this a couple of times, right?
I mean, everyone kind of infamously knows about the gold window closing in 71, the Nixon shock, and that was where we took the dollar off.
The gold standard, because the issues with having a gold standard, so they say, is it limits your growth because you can only grow the money supply as much as the gold is coming out of the ground, right?
So that wasn't really working as we were starting to, people were losing trust in the gold peg pulling gold out.
And we had to figure out something else.
So we closed the gold window.
We were able to print money freely, which worked for a second there.
But of course, what did we see in the late 70s?
And in the mid-70s, we saw a highly inflationary environment because we were printing more money now that we were unbounded by gold.
So pretty much immediately after the Nixon shock happened, we saw a socio-political agreement, economic agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia and the oil producing nations in the Middle East
to basically establish the next iteration of the dollar.
So we saw the installation of the petrodollar system.
And all that did, obviously, here we are 50 years later dealing with the debt problem.
So obviously, the petrodollar didn't fix the debt problem.
We have more debt than ever.
But what did it do?
It gave us a buyer for these US treasuries that are really the instruments, the reserve assets that back dollars.
So by having this agreement, we were able to print money and say, hey, before you buy oil, you got to buy dollars first.
That was the agreement.
So anybody that wanted to industrialize and get oil had to buy dollars before they could get access to oil in the global south and in the Eurozone
or the soon to be Eurozone and in Asia.
So we increased our user base and found a buyer for our debt.
And then of course, the Saudis and crew are getting a bunch of dollars in.
They do a thing called petrodollar recycling.
They take the funds that they're making, the dollars they're making and reinvest it back in the United States.
So that worked for a while.
I mean, that did pretty good.
We didn't really have any extreme issues.
There was a couple of pops here or there, of course, in the 80s and around 9-11.
But really into the great financial crisis in 2008 was where we saw another global catastrophe to be made.
But we had to figure out a new system of buyers for our treasuries as we did massive monetary expansion to bail out all these financial institutions
and let the, of course, the homeowners get stuck with the bill and the taxpayers stuck with the bill.
So in this post-08 crisis, 0708-09, the great financial crisis, interestingly enough,
randomly some guy under a pseudonym pops out, drops the Bitcoin white paper.
And in these last 15 years or so, we've seen a couple of things happen.
We've seen the monetization of Bitcoin, but also we've seen this rapid expansion of these tokenized debt instruments that we call stablecoins.
And stablecoins are basically doing the same thing that the petrodollar system was doing in which we're finding a net buyer of our treasuries,
these stablecoin issuers, these private issuers, and we're finding more users, more dollar users.
By allowing anyone to access the dollar with a smartphone, we've increased the monetary velocity exponentially and the user base exponentially.
And I'm sure we'll get into a lot more than nitty-gritty here, but basically now we've made the dollar available to 8 billion people
versus the 350 million or so in the US.
And of course, a lot of nations are dollarized, but it still was a smaller chunk.
Let's say a billion people, still a lot, biggest monetary system in the world.
Now we're seeing dollar access to 7x of the amount of people.
So stablecoins are just sort of a stop gap as this debt is going and going exponentially, really out of control.
We've added like a trillion dollars it feels like in the last week.
We were at 37 like a second ago and now here we are at 38.
So it's really just the next iteration of the US dollar system trying to solve those two problems of who's going to buy our debt
and then who's going to use the dollar instruments on top to keep the monetary velocity up so that the Ponzi keeps on kicking.
So that was a little bit of a rant, but I hope that kind of sums it up.
It's complicated and there's a lot going on.
So sometimes these questions are a little hard to answer in a short, succinct way, but I hope that worked.
No, that was a perfect answer exactly what I was hoping that you would bestow upon our audience.
Yeah, and I think it really hits all the points.
Excellent breakdown of course.
And you know, it is interesting how fast the debt is accumulating.
I guess that should be expected at this point.
I think it was this past the 38 trillion that was just hit was a fast accumulation of $1 trillion outside the pandemic that we've seen so far.
And yeah, you made some great points there as far as, you know, who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
Where did this white paper come from?
I definitely want to touch on that at some point during this conversation and get your take on that.
But yeah, the whole kicking the can down the road thing, you know, I think that we had a pretty successful strategy as far as really trying to get people to wake up to the CBDC threat.
And I think that may be why so many people rejected it, especially during the COVID years, right?
And of course, they had to repackage, they had to rebrand it.
They have to keep their Ponzi scheme going.
And it's truly amazing that Ponzi scheme of central banking really did spread throughout the world.
I think I just read something that, you know, the world has some accumulative global debt of $102 trillion.
That just blows my mind.
And of course, it kind of makes me scratch my head to like who, you know, to the banking class, like definitely something to think about.
But I guess a good follow up question would be to maybe examine the partisan support for the stablecoin stuff.
Because, you know, as I mentioned, MAGA was dead set against the digital IDs and CBDCs during COVID viewing them as like a globalist control tool.
But what do you think is going to happen now that Trump is embracing stablecoins?
Like, is MAGA just going to pivot? Are they going to stay silent?
Are they going to buy into this false narrative that it's just like this rebrand for programmable money and modernizing our money because it's coming from their guy?
Like, what are your thoughts how the partisan angle fits into this?
Yeah, it's very interesting because I think, you know, as folks trying to figure out what the hell's going on for the last, you know, handful of years.
You know, I think one of the biggest tricks that the sort of ruling class, whatever you want to call them, use are these these dialectic plays and these, you know, us versus them bipartisan, you know, bifurcation of, you know, the working class, the masses, us, you know,
however you want to whatever school of ideology you want to label us with.
But I think the partisan angle is very interesting right now.
In the sense that I think you absolutely nailed it, right?
I mean, during COVID, the dissident right, you know, got a lot correct.
And, you know, I think there was there's a reason why there's a big upswell.
I think in sort of the culture of people moving towards the right and this anti woke, you know, kind of platforming because, you know, the left certainly were made to be the boogeyman of the COVID era.
But it's kind of to a bigger point of, you know, looks like basically the way I look at this current administration is, you know, and I'm certainly not alone in this, but it's basically a rebranding of the sort of lefts great reset, you know, the pillars of what they wanted to accomplish,
but now rebranding it an anti woke based sort of wrapping paper.
And people are just eating it up. I mean, Trump, I mean, in particular, right? I mean, he locked the country down.
He printed trillions of dollars. He pushed these inoculations out.
And then he leaves office with, you know, I'm doing air quotes here, but, you know, huge voter fraud, right?
Now he's coming in. They framed the immigration crisis as a, you know, basically an act of war.
It's this military, you know, jargon is basically being used for this.
And so now we're seeing a total rebranding of the digital ID, the digital money, you know, the militarization of the police, you know, oh, we've had voter fraud.
Now we've got to have digital ID for voting. We got the Palantir presidency.
We got databases tracking dissonance, tracking, you know, illegal citizens.
But obviously, if they're tracking illegal citizens, they have to have a regular citizens database to be able to counter check it, right?
So a lot of these like plays that I think the right, you know, really didn't like are now because they've got their guy in there that's doing it.
I think that they're kind of being played in this dialectic way that, okay, maybe Klaus Schwab isn't running the WEF anymore, but it's our boy Larry Fink,
you know, Trump's former money manager who really set up the going direct play.
And all of the financial bailouts that happened in the COVID era, you know, was really done in tandem with BlackRock and Larry Fink and Trump.
Now he's running the WEF. Now we're seeing digital IDs, digital currency being embraced by the right, you know, militarized border wall.
The nationalization of, you know, the militarization of the police.
You know, so many things that people were warning about under Obama, you know, we're going to FEMA camps.
People are just sort of lapping up and it's so base that ISIS, you know, scanning citizens' faces and, you know, doing this stuff, right?
It's very disturbing the dialectic play that we're seeing because I kind of hoped, you know, for the masses because this was COVID was such an obvious event to sort of wake up from.
And it's a little sad for me to see some of the people that I kind of thought got it fall right back into partisan politics after, you know, Poppy Warp Speed, you know, did his thing.
And now he's doing it again.
And he's supposedly this anti-Deep State, anti-globalist figure when, in reality, I think we're really speedrunning the great reset just with MAGA branding, if that makes any sense.
So I think as it relates to your actual question of stablecoins.
Yeah, I think the right is embracing it.
I mean, these people that got Trump into office, these tech oligarchs, all of them will be, you know, as it relates to Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk.
These guys are all going to have their own stablecoins within their company.
You know, Facebook very infamously, you know, kind of, you know, set the stage for all of this with their Libra DM project.
You know, there was a quite a quiet part out loud moment where the one of the lead guys behind that project was tweeting the other day.
And he was like, if you look at what the Genius Act is, which is the new legislation that just went past that basically solidifies stablecoins as the future of the dollar.
You know, he was like, Libra really like wrote the regulation.
You know, we were the ones that made all of that happen.
So it's kind of ironic to see it.
You know, Facebook was in the game at the very beginning.
These guys that put Trump in, they're going to all have stablecoins.
X is going to have a stablecoin.
They're going to have some interoperability with these stablecoins.
Bezos certainly will.
There's just too much money there to be had to not be a money printer.
Why wouldn't you want to do that?
I mean, these guys obviously fought very hard for Trump to get in and spent a lot of money.
So they're going to expect some returns here.
And I think a lot of the legislation we've seen is manufacturing consent for this stablecoin future.
And the right is lapping it up.
Like you said, man, it's pretty disappointing to watch.
To watch this like they'd be putty in the hands of the establishment.
It really is.
I mean, I, you know, I never want to, you know, talk down on anybody or make them feel bad for falling for stuff because Lord knows I've fallen for shit.
You know, of course, but I was really hoping after the insanity that was, you know, lockdowns that, you know, there would at least be some remembrance
of what happened, you know, five years ago under the first Trump administration.
But it really seems like that was forgotten.
Yeah, they certainly did.
Man, the little history lesson you gave when you, well, on Jason's first question was, it was perfect, man.
It's this, this con scheme has been going on for over a century, right?
Like since 1913 with the Federal Reserve and then with Bretton Woods and the global reserve currency.
And then, you know, like you said, you know, Nixon and Kissinger did the petro dollar and it's, it's, it's wild.
And I never looked at it at stablecoins like the next evolution of this until you just pointed that out.
But like you said earlier that, you know, we got the national debt that if you look at the chart, it's basically fucking vertical now.
Oh, yeah.
It used to be horizontal and now we're in exponential growth with the national debt.
So, you know, they're, and now they're tokenizing the debt.
And I think that I don't know what's going to happen with that either like it blows up or, or, or something else happens.
Like, do you think from your perspective, do you think this will have like an effect like it did with the petro dollar and like we'll get 50 years out of it?
Or is this just like, like a very short kick of the can, if you will, like a final desperate, like high tech kick that's going to just surveil everyone to the last minute.
And there's no value to the dollar, but the state holds all the cards of surveillance and own you with what little value this, you know, this technocratic money has.
I mean, that's the question, man.
That's, that's a 38 trillion dollar question.
And, you know, just to be clear, anybody that says they know exactly what's going to happen is, is full of it because no one does.
I don't know.
You know, I'll put that out first humbly.
I'm not sure.
But what I am decently sure of is that the US dollar system is going to do every single thing that they can and their power to retain the economic hegemon.
It's just it's too important.
And also, I mean, that's that's sort of there's two ways to kind of look at this question, right?
There's one sort of within the, you know, the, the political, the global political landscape being actually multipolar, right?
Where there's like actually competing factions, completing nationals.
And it's really is sort of this China, Russia, US, you know, Europe, like there are these kind of, you know, competing, competing factions under the multi, the multipolar angle,
which I don't even necessarily, I'm sure I believe in anymore after sort of the lockstep COVID, you know, everybody did the same thing.
It seemed like there was coordinated central banking, all interest rates went to zero, if not below.
You know, we all had the same, you know, lockdown policies, more or less.
You know, there's a lot of evidence to be said that maybe we're not actually in this multipolar of a world as we think, you know, we're sharing military secrets with China and tech transfers.
And, and, and, you know, all of these, these things, right?
So from a multipolar standpoint, if you do buy into that, which I think is reasonable, I think you can, but I do think there's a lot of reasons not to.
But if you do buy into it, you know, how does the US come out of this on top?
Because when your debt goes vertical like this, you know, we're now paying more money just to service the interest payments on our debt.
Then we are paying the budget of the, of the Department of War and the Pentagon and our military budget, right?
And that's a really good metric for when, you know, theoretically a reserve currency should, should stop, right?
Because what's actually holding up the reserve currency trade deals, sure.
But, you know, trade deals sort of backed by this military industrial complex, right?
The military industrial complex is now, you know, costs you less than it does to actually just keep the dollar going.
You know, that, that A is the debt spiral and gets out of control really quickly.
You can't take, you know, taper this Ponzi, but also sort of like, well, why would you want to keep the dollar going if, you know, it's costing you so much?
And I think the US system actually has a lot of reasons to keep it going from this, you know, we're in this super, super important time.
Right now, what we're going to see in the next 10 to 15 years, which if I had gone to my head to say how long this debt play would work, I'd give it at least 10 to 15 years, which might be just enough.
Because what we're going to see technologically the advances, a lot of it is smoke and mirrors, of course, with AI and whatnot, but a lot of it isn't.
As it relates to drone technology and the militarization of, of a lot of these technical advances, whoever can really be on top, have the data centers,
have the computation, have the energy creation that's going to be necessary for this, you know, next global system, they're going to be able to get in front and stay in front.
And so I think the US military industrial complex understands that.
I think they knew in 07 that they were going to have to do something to figure out, you know, how do we solve this debt problem without losing to China or India or Russia.
And so that's why I sort of think that, you know, this debt problem is, you know, is potentially solvable for 10 to 15 years using this Bitcoin dollar system.
That's much like the Petrodollar system, where stablecoins kind of do all the things we just talked about, get users on, find a way to, you know, find buyers for the debt.
But then Bitcoin can basically act as this debt sink, whereas oil did previously in gold before it.
These are both energy currencies.
Gold is, you don't think of it as an energy currency, but it takes a lot of energy to get out of the ground and process.
It is an energy standard in its own way.
And Bitcoin, you know, comes out of nowhere, extremely likely came from US intelligence.
It's certainly very possible.
I have a whole kind of theory about that and we can talk about it.
But, you know, who owns the Bitcoin right now?
So if we were, we could solve this debt problem tomorrow if we just repriced gold to, you know, $30,000 an ounce or whatever.
And boom, we could pay it off tomorrow.
But what would be the second order effects of that?
You know, Russia, China, Brazil, India, anybody else that's all the private citizens of the world, anyone that's holding gold, any reasonable amount of gold, which there are a lot of gold owners in the world,
certainly at the national level, central bank level, they'd become unbelievably rich overnight.
And the US wouldn't necessarily retain that purchasing power on net, which is what's so important for the US economy.
So while they could solve the debt problem in a few ways, if they did that, the remonetization of gold, which I do think will happen to some degree.
Of course, I think gold will be very bullish over this time.
But why not look at this Bitcoin thing?
You know, who holds the Bitcoin?
It's all Americans.
You know, it really is.
And there's such a small user base of people that hold Bitcoin meaningfully and in any sort of way.
When you look at the UTXO, which is sort of the coin element of it, who actually holds these things, there's not that many holders of Bitcoin and certainly not at the mass level that we're seeing.
Since Trump, we've seen this explosion of the ETFs.
BlackRock has almost a million Bitcoin micro strategy, which basically shares a parking lot with the CIA's Langley headquarters.
They have, you know, another 600,000.
All of the owners that just are in the US themselves, the US government, I think they just the other day picked up another 200,000 Bitcoin and they already had about 200,000.
So the vast majority of like active, you know, usable coin is in the United States.
A lot of it is literally held by publicly traded companies within the United States.
You know, probably would make a lot more sense for the US not wanting to lose purchasing power to actually inflate.
You know, that's how you deal with this debt crisis in this scenario is you debase the money makes it a lot easier to pay the debt when the debt, the dollar as an instrument is worth a lot less.
Unfortunately, if you just debase the currency, you know, you'll have riots, you'll have people abandoning the the dollar and all this stuff.
If it's getting into real estate, getting into groceries, getting into all the things we're seeing car prices.
But if you really create a very direct instrument like a stablecoin that has such an intimate symbiotic relationship with Bitcoin, they drive demand for each other as the issuance goes up.
You know, you could inflate the majority of the of the of the trillions needed to pay off the debt, not entirely, of course, but to just to keep it going.
You never want to pay off a debt based system, but just find more issuers.
You know, you could argue that there's a that there is a play here designed by the intelligence and technocratic class to create this new digital reserve asset that appears decentralized and appears anti state.
And they they lean into that community, do this dialectic play as they always do.
You know, hey, fuck CBDCs, Bitcoin's so cool.
Stablecoins are so cool.
But in reality, the combination of them and this time period is actually going to very likely empower the state and not only the state, but like the state, the United States government, which I would argue is, you know, probably the biggest, you know,
certainly the biggest empire, potentially biggest terrorist organization in the world.
And now, you know, this this this very likely or rather, I would say very usable solution sort of appears out of nowhere, exactly at the time where the US government needs something exactly like this, which is why I do think if they can successfully pull this off and kick this
in AI, get ahead and drone technology, get ahead and database surveillance technology, get ahead in all of these things that, frankly, they've been doing for the last 50 years.
Silicon Valley is basically a DARPA Petri dish, as we all know.
You know, I think I think they have a pretty good chance of kicking the can just enough to then get ahead and then just smoke everybody and not let anybody else catch up.
So I do think it will be potentially very successful if they are able to, you know, garner the consent and pull this off.
Jesus, man. This is why I love this podcast. I've never heard that perspective before ever.
Like using Bitcoin as a to offset inflation, that that makes perfect sense, especially if the fucking CIA created it to do such a thing, man. That's wild.
It's, it's, it's, I mean, you got to kind of almost tip your hat. It's pretty, I have all of the plan. I mean, it's pretty smart.
Also, you know, I think there's a lot of things to break down within that, both from a mechanism standpoint, from a societal standpoint.
And, you know, it gets, it is impressive. It also is very scary. But also, I think there's a lot to, you know, financial stuff is always very personal.
And I think everybody should do what's best for them and their family and figure out how to hedge, you know, what's coming.
All I can say for sure is what's coming is certainly in some form, it may be a lot slower than people think, it may be way faster than people think.
But some sort of economic dollar debasement will happen just due to the numbers of, you know, again, you can't taper a Ponzi and we're at 38 trillion and it will just exponentially grow.
So they're going to have to print money. So money printing is coming. So that's the only thing I'm pretty certain of.
It's just that it's death taxes and quantitative easing, you know.
Yeah, it's a mathematical certainty. It's just, you don't know when that date will come.
Exactly. So how do you prepare yourself for something like this? I mean, it's got to be very personal. But I do think just understanding, you know, what are the inevitability of this scenario?
What are the inevitabilities? And I think stablecoins growing to be a humongous class, it's just it's too important for them having, you know, we'll get into the specifics of stablecoins.
And then that monetary debasement is coming. So, you know, just educate yourself so that you can make a choice personally, I would say that's the most important thing.
I'm not saying rush out and buy Bitcoin. They may rug Bitcoin and throw it into some other debt sink.
I mean, we don't know. But I do think, you know, there's a lot to be said that, you know, maybe this entire anti-state libertarian movement around the Bitcoin space was very carefully crafted to be yet another bait and switch from the intelligence and media departments of the U.S. government.
Yeah, 100%. And I'm sure there's people out there. I mean, I know personally I hold Bitcoin. I know Jason holds Bitcoin, you know, and there might be opportunities for people to make some money in this.
But stablecoins and Bitcoin, you know, they lack something very important. And that's privacy, right? And but back to like we were giving shit to MAGA for, you know, supporting these stablecoins and everything.
But it's bipartisan. I wanted to point that out and make a point that like the embracing of these stablecoins, you know, is bipartisan. We saw that with the Genius Act.
We saw how it easily flew through the Congress and Senate, and they couldn't wait to put their name on it, right? On one side, it's like they're both the right hand is washing the left hand.
They were unbacked and unstable. So they stoked all this massive fear before Genius Act was passed. And then playing right into it, you know, the right played their role.
And they had the pro-crypto politicians. They're like crypto bros now when Trump is running for office and they ride in as the saviors offering the solution.
And, you know, they rail against the state run CBDC while pushing their federally approved stablecoins, which are fucking state run CBDC.
They pass legislation. They, you know, they get the Fed approved framework that does the exact same thing as the CBDCs. It just has like a corporate logo on it.
So I mean, at worst, it's even worse because it's fascist, if you will. But it was like the perfect Hegelian dialectic.
And we saw both sides just play that game perfectly. Like now we have a fully regulated surveilled and permissioned monetary system that's coming and not only coming, it's being embraced.
And it's also exponentially growing. And with that insight that you gave about the inflation offset, that makes perfect sense.
So, so we can get into stablecoins a little bit here. So from where you sit, like, are there, is there any meaningful political opposition to stablecoins?
Or is this like the entire political class? I mean, I haven't heard anybody talk about it in Washington, like trying to call it, not even like the Thomas Massey or Rand Paul.
No one in MAGA, no one in the left is saying anything. Is there any opposition to stablecoins or we're just fucked?
Well, we might be fucked, yeah. But I mean, there's some opposition and most of it is surrounding, you know, the Trump family's, you know, connections to these businesses, you know, financially.
The Trump family themselves started their own stablecoin, you know, USD one part of this world liberty financial play that they're doing.
So there's been, you know, the Elizabeth Warrens and types that have basically come out and said, you know, there's a huge conflict of interest here.
And I don't often find myself agreeing with Elizabeth Warren, but every once in a while, you know, a broken clock is right twice a day, as they say.
And I think she's absolutely correct. I mean, it's absurd. The things we're seeing, you know, everybody cared so much about Biden and Burisma and 10% for the big guy and, you know, Pelosi's stock tracking insider trading record and all this stuff.
And now literally we have like the Trump family doing like pump and dump true social network plays, you know, really in the crypto space specifically because there's not really regulation about, you know,
what kind of things you can get away with or can't do. But, you know, we've seen a crazy market manipulation with, you know, a truth, so true social posts will go out, you know, three minutes before the markets close.
And it's saying 100% tariffs in China or this and the markets all dump, you know, someone opened up a short, you know, for millions and millions of dollars, you know, right before the tweet went out.
And I mean, we've just seen enough of these things that I think there's there's meaningful pushback on, you know, should, you know, politicians that are actually writing these regulations like be able to hold crypto be able to,
you know, invest in the issuers of stable coins. And the Trump family is at the vanguard of of the new the new fun types of corruption.
That can come from, you know, digital assets, right? I mean, I think the Trump family is even putting, you know, a stake in the US iteration of poly market, which is like, you know, a perfect symptom of the hyper financialization state we're in where
everything is gambling, everything is a speculative asset. Now you can bet and gamble on, you know, who's going to be the next Fed chair who's going to win the Nobel Prize.
And when you have people invested in owning the casinos, who also can manipulate the results by, you know, the Trump family knows who's going to be the next Fed chair.
You know, should they really be able to have a stake in the platform that it lets you bet on who's the next Fed chair, right?
So there's a lot of conflicts of interest innate to to this digitalization of finance. I'm generally, you know, a free market anarcho capitalist kind of guy.
I'm not really a fan of state regulators, you know, imposing their will on the people, elected officials being able to do a lot of this stuff gets a little more complicated.
But that's really the only meaningful pushback I've seen. I haven't seen anybody outside of a couple tweets from some libertarian caucuses here or there saying that stable coins are just as bad as CBDCs.
But that's, you know, not really a meaningful pushback in the partisan, you know, environment. So no, I really haven't.
I mean, I think they did an extremely good job at, you know, generating all of this disdain for CBDCs, rightfully so.
No one wants a surveillable, programmable, seasonable money.
No one wants that when it's run by the government, it can be diluted by the government. That's terrible.
They really, they did a very good job of getting enough people to hate that.
But then you saw, I mean, very ironically, like in one of the first day EOs that the Trump administration signed as it relates to this, it was, you know, we're going to ban CBDCs in the first paragraph, right?
And everyone's cheering, you know, no development of CBDCs, like, hell yeah, like Trump, let's go.
And then like four paragraphs down, it's like, we're going to embrace stable coins to extend the dollar.
And, you know, that's where we're going to, we're really going to be focusing the Fed, the Treasury and the commerce.
And obviously commerce is run by Howard Lutnick, who is, you know, the longtime CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, who actually holds all of the treasuries for the biggest stable coin in the world, which is obviously not a conflict of interest at all.
And, you know, so why are stable coins better than CBDCs?
They aren't.
I think in many ways, they are worse in the sense of they are just as available, if not more available, because they are, you know, their transactions are published on these public blockchains that don't require warrants to be able to get access to these transactions.
They're all published out in the open on these public blockchains.
Ironically, in a CBD system, it would be a closed, you know, settlement network.
Yes, everybody in the government that needed to know that was a part of the transaction, yes, you would be giving your transactional data to the government.
But, you know, there would have to be some sort of public sector restrictions, you know, based on constitutional protections of, you know, can they just blacklist the citizen?
Can they just seize money?
And there has to be a crime committed.
There has to be XYZ.
And if you want to see who made these transactions, you're going to need a warrant.
Public blockchains, that's not true.
You can just look at the blockchain and analyze it.
And you can, you know, get a pretty decent overview of someone's transactional history with just very small amounts of internet footprint.
You know, blockchains are all internet native and trying to be private on the internet is pretty much impossible.
There are obviously tools and techniques you can do to mitigate the leakage.
But for the most part, anything you put into a computer is, is available.
A little bit doomer of me, perhaps, but I think it's somewhat reasonable to, you know, you should pretty much expect anything you put in a computer to be able to be read by somebody at some point.
So, the availability is probably even worse for a stablecoin.
Seizability and programmability, it's just as programmable as a CBDC.
Once money becomes digital, you know, the issue is no longer how do we ship $3 billion worth of gold?
You know, we got to have trucks.
We got to have boats.
The issue is no longer physical transport.
You know, it's digital money.
So then the issue sort of becomes, you know, the programmability that comes from digital money.
And when someone can program your money when it's not, you know, a permissionless system and you're in these closed sandboxes,
they could theoretically program your money in the same way we were fearful of CBDCs, carbon credits.
You bought too much meat this week.
You know, you drove too far out of your city.
You used too much gas.
You can't buy steak or whatever.
Those are a little bit, you know, intense examples.
But, you know, something like that could theoretically happen if the people in charge wanted to go down that route.
And then, you know, seizability and blacklisting, private companies, you know, have a lot of protections of who they actually serve
and who they let onto their platforms, the no shoes, no shirt, no service sort of element of being a private sector company.
You know, we saw this very much so during COVID, right?
I mean, all of these, I mean, you guys know it as well as anybody with what Facebook did, right?
I mean, they can just kick somebody off a platform that people spent a long time building because they're a private company.
So they don't have to adhere to sort of First Amendment protections or anything like that.
They really can just, you know, kick a customer off because they violated some terms of service that you probably didn't even know existed.
So in reality, you know, by all the pillars that were afraid of CBDCs, you know, the last one sort of being economic,
well, the central bank, it's still their currency.
It's still the Fed's currency, the Treasury's currency, and they can still dilute it at whim.
So you're trusting so much within the private, you know, sector and the public sector.
It's kind of the worst of both worlds.
I'm certainly not arguing that a CBDC would be good.
But I think there is an argument to be made of which I've certainly I have made that I think in many ways stable coins are actually worse than CBDCs.
Not to keep ranting, but it also leads into sort of the next, you know, issue here is sort of, well, what does this mean globally?
Because a CBDC would be a closed system.
It might be interoperable with some exchange, you know, between these foreign currencies.
But, you know, the who is the user of a CBDC, it's the citizens of that central bank of that government.
So there's how many people can use a CBDC, you would think, but stable coins, that's certainly not true.
Anybody that has access to, you know, a smartphone or an internet browser now has access to dollars.
And now what we're really going to see the next battle is going to be, you know, can central banks around the world,
the 170 something central banks, are they going to be able to compete with dollar stable coins?
You know, maybe even some that offer a yield.
Are central banks around the world going to be able to prevent capital flight from their citizens from taking their money out of their local currency?
I don't think that they will.
And the only ways that they're going to be able to do that is really intense choke points on the ins and outs of the financial system of exchanges and digital IDs.
And that's really the only way that they could really keep currency local is having really intense surveillable and money and digital IDs to try to keep citizens money within the country.
So, you know, you could argue that actually maybe the Bitcoin and stable coin crypto system is actually killing the central banks in the way that, you know, a lot of people, you know, were hoping it would.
But unfortunately, it's probably not going to kill the biggest central bank and the most important central bank.
And what we might actually see, ironically, from the promise of decentralization, we might actually see the greatest centralization of monetary policy.
In history, where 8 billion people now have access to dollars with the yield with their smartphone and the local currencies all go tits up because their governors can't keep anybody in their local currency without crazy draconian pressures.
And so we'll see draconian pressures, but we'll also see a rapid dollarization.
Ironically, at a time where we are expecting de dollarization.
So the stable coin has a lot of issues that people are not really thinking of the second order effects of when they just, you know, in a vacuum compare it to CBDCs.
Absolutely brilliant breakdown, Mark.
Thank you for that.
Yeah, I echo Matt's sentiment there as far as just learning a lot from this podcast is our podcast. We still learn a lot from it.
It's pretty awesome.
That's why we have great guests like yourself on.
Thank you.
And yeah, this is another example as to, you know, why the digital ID is kind of the backbone of this whole system and why it should be the hill that we, you know, die on because it really does kind of connect the dots.
We really do need more libertarians speaking out about stable coins to it is kind of, I don't know, abysmal. It's kind of pathetic.
Such a little, such a small percentage of us, you know, people that really talking about the technocratic class and all this shift that's happening.
I mean, even that alone is a very small percentage, but even a smaller percentage of us calling out the stable coin bait and switch and everything that's happening.
I mean, you think more anarchists would be kind of stepping up to the plate.
More Austrians, you know, be talking about this.
The Mises Institute for crying out loud, but it's just us here battling this alone, you know.
Well, that goes to sort of the play of the genius of this play is that it's like, well, why would capitalist anarchist libertarians get mad at the free market?
I mean, don't we want free banking?
Don't we want private institutions to be able to create money?
It's like, of course we do.
We do want that.
But that's not really what the stable coin issuers are doing.
The stable coin issuers are heavily connected.
You know, the bigger ones are heavily connected to the intelligence community, incredibly connected to Treasury and commerce and the Fed and the banks that run all of those departments.
And so it's like it is sort of confusing where it's like, well, you know, I want free banking.
I want people to be able to create their own credit unions and even use technology to create their own money.
Like that's kind of the difficulty of this whole scenario is that, you know, in a vacuum, blockchain is not a bad idea.
I think it's an amazing idea.
It's actually incredibly genius, the creation of currency that doesn't have to touch fiat and doesn't have to have governing bodies determine monetary policy.
I mean, Bitcoin is a genius, genius, genius thing.
It also has a shit ton of problems.
But it is like that's a great idea from a libertarian standpoint and anti-state standpoint.
That's fantastic.
But stable coins don't fulfill that promise by any means.
They actually further control towards the private intelligence community and these governing banks.
They empower them.
And so it's like, I think in a way, that's probably why we haven't seen so much pushback because it's sort of hypocritical to get mad at the private sector for getting.
Like the idea that a company can create their own currency in a vacuum that's beautiful.
I'm glad that the government is letting people issue their own currency.
The issue is that they're not really letting them do that because the Genius Act basically says you have to back these things with U.S.
Treasuries or some sort of foreign currency reserve.
So it's forcing people to recreate the fiat system in a much worse way on public blockchains.
There are a lot of cool things you could do with blockchain to create stable coins that don't touch U.S.
Treasuries and therefore don't perpetuate the Ponzi scheme and don't play into the hands of the U.S.
government.
I mean, that's really the big issue with something like Tether.
Excuse me, they hold $135 billion of treasuries, right?
They're not domiciled in the United States, but you better believe they're going to do every single thing the United States government asks them to do
because otherwise the U.S. government will confiscate their $135 billion of treasuries.
These are not permissionless systems, the things backing the dollars.
So we have seen Tether integrate the Secret Service, the FBI, the CIA-funded chain analysis.
I was funded by Incutel onto their platforms, local law enforcement.
I mean, all of these arms are on these private issuers systems because they are beholden to the U.S.
government because they hold $135 billion of treasuries.
And if you want to play in the sandbox of the U.S. regulatory regime, you have to play by their rules.
So it's not in a nutshell or in a vacuum.
It's not a bad thing that people are printing money and using technology to create private currency.
That's great.
The issue is that it's really not private and it's really just an extension of the arm of the state and the dollar system
because regulation has king made these companies and has basically forced them to play ball with the U.S.
And that's really the issue.
So there's nothing wrong with the dollar stablecoin in a vacuum.
The issue is that it's backed by U.S. debt and it's paying for U.S. empire and it's available,
seasonable, programmable and at the beholding of the public sector.
And once you start adding up some of those and to start to look even worse.
But there are many layers of nuance here and obviously much more so than the average person
is really able to comprehend or has a bandwidth for with distractions and everything else that's going on.
Not to mention, you know, Tether has been, we've covered multiple times on the Free Thought Project.
Tether has been frozen at the behest of authorities.
I don't know how many times, at least a dozen.
But there is a solution.
There is a newer stablecoin that's come out.
That's a privacy oriented stablecoin that runs on the Zano blockchain called Freedom Dollar.
So definitely check that out, guys.
I think most smart listeners know that we're sponsored by Zano.
Great people over there.
A wonderful tool.
All privacy focused.
And we are getting a little bit low on time here.
So we'll just go ahead and jump ahead to my last question.
And then I think after that, Matt will probably serve up a white pill.
Good.
Yeah.
We'll need to end on that for sure.
Exactly.
But you know, speaking of the next battle and owning the casinos, as I think you mentioned,
a couple of questions back, you know, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.
You know, he recently declared the beginning of all tokenization of all assets, everything
from mortgages to cars, stocks, bonds, real estate, all on the surface.
Of course, it's, you know, efficiency and transparency.
But this is about putting the entire economy on the blockchain that they control, right?
Like the same financial cartel that basically orchestrated the 2008 crash.
So nobody's really talking about this.
Again, you know, same thing with the stablecoins, like kind of goes hand in hand.
It seems like there's a lot of things that people aren't talking about or focused on.
Why don't you get your take on it?
Because it seems incredibly significant to me.
So like, what do you make of this push to tokenize life itself?
And like, what do you think are some of the implications when, you know, it's all owned
by the same institutions that essentially kind of profit from any type of destabilization
or collapse?
Yeah.
Well, hey, not to toot my own horn, but I will for a second here.
In 2021, I sort of figured out the Bitcoin dollar idea.
And I wrote my first piece on the kind of introducing the Bitcoin dollar system
and how stablecoins and Bitcoin, you know, might replace the petrodollar.
Certainly well before there was any embracing by the state.
Now we've seen that, you know, pretty, pretty, pretty obviously.
In 2022, I wrote, you know, stable, the stablecoin monster, that CBDCs are a red herring
and that stablecoins are really, you know, the thing that we need to be worried about.
We were so busy worrying about CBDCs, we missed this giant disfigured elephant in the room.
And then 2023, I wrote a piece called Tokenized Inc.
And that was all I wrote, I co-wrote with Whitney Webb.
That was all about BlackRock and, you know, their role in basically the creation
of the instruments that led to the 08 crisis, you know, Fink was a pioneer of the CMO
and the CDO, these, you know, collateralized debt and mortgage obligations
that they would package into these little, you know, basically tokenizing
a combination of mortgages and spreading them around
and creating derivatives based off of these instruments
and creating this giant financial bubble that exploded.
And very interestingly, you know, in the 08 crisis, you know,
BlackRock hadn't really gotten into ETFs yet, these electronically traded funds,
which are now their biggest business.
They didn't have an operation for that.
But during the 08 crisis, Barclays had this ETF program called iShares,
this division run by this guy, Peter Knez.
And they were supposed to get a bailout from the UK government
and they declined it and they got bought by BlackRock.
BlackRock acquired the ETF department.
And once it got into BlackRock, they knew it was such a good idea.
Once they got it into BlackRock, it exploded and it became, you know,
they're the biggest ETF players in the world.
Tokenization, once again, you know, you look at history,
that's how you learn what's going to happen in the future.
And BlackRock understood, you know, Fink specifically understood,
okay, here's how we can make financial products based on mortgages,
package them up, create derivatives.
Here's how we can create, you know, these ETFs
and, you know, blow it up into a big bubble.
They were on the forefront of all of these things.
Now they're on the forefront of ETFing Bitcoin, right?
They have the fastest growing ETF in history is their iBit, iShares, Bitcoin ETF.
They have almost a million Bitcoin, I think like 800,000 Bitcoin,
just unbelievable growth.
The next phase of that, you know, Fink talked about this very openly,
was, you know, the future is going to be all of these instruments
traded on chain, each one with the unique Q-SIP,
which is like this identifier,
and we're going to tokenize everything.
And I mean, my mind exploded when I heard him say that in 2023.
I was just like, oh my god, yeah, that's, you know,
I understood Bitcoin could be used as a debt sink
to drive demand for dollars.
But if you tokenize everything
and you have some token representing real-world assets
or stocks or carbon credits or whatever,
and then you pair that to a dollar
and you have a stablecoin backing that value,
you can generate, I mean, that market, the real-world asset,
you know, pie is trillions and trillions
if not even literally quadrillions.
I mean, it's insane.
What is the price of the earth, of trees,
of water, of carbon, of oxygen?
I mean, just how far this can go is so crazy.
And you can drive dollar demand
by denominating all of these things in dollars.
And that's what BlackRock is.
I mean, that's what the Aladdin system is.
That's what Fink has been doing forever is, you know,
let's find instruments that have velocity
and people use for trading
and let's add the dollar pair to them
and make sure that's denominated in dollars
and increase the dollar system
because Fink is, you know, and BlackRock
are so important to the government succeeding.
I mean, they've just been,
they were big players in the OA crisis.
They helped, you know, deal out the bailouts
and were a huge part of it.
And then in COVID, they were even more important.
I mean, they arguably wrote the plan
that you could even argue,
perhaps the whole lockdown was, you know,
manufactured for, right?
I know this is the end of the pod,
but 2019 in the fall, we see the banks,
their reverse repo markets explode and go crazy.
And all the banks aren't trusting each other.
No one wants to lend money to each other overnight.
I mean, there's a huge issue that Fed has to come in
and backstop all of these national banks.
Fink and Trump get together
and they release this paper, this plan
at the World Economic Forum in 2019 in the fall,
basically saying we need to print trillions of dollars
and hand it to Wall Street
to be able to divvy up to the banks
and deal with this liquidity crisis that we're having.
When you print trillions of dollars,
the issue is if that money gets into circulation,
you're gonna have massive, massive inflation.
You need to crush demand and crush monetary velocity
when you print.
A virus is an extremely good excuse
to crush demand and velocity
by locking everybody in their homes
right when you print $4 trillion
and then more trillions and more trillions.
So Fink was integral to all of this,
the monetary stuff behind the lockdowns
and now his boy is in charge.
He used to manage money for Trump.
Trump is now in charge and he's going full steam ahead
with the crypto sphere.
Hey, we're gonna do project crypto at the SEC.
We got this guy, Paul Ackens there running it
who used to work for this teal funded stablecoin project.
He was an advisor for reserve.
Now he's running the SEC
and they're putting plans together
to put everything on chain,
all stock markets, all assets,
let's tokenize gold, tokenize earth.
And BlackRock really stands to win
very substantially from that
because they're so integral to all the parts of this system.
They're the custodians and issuers of USDC.
They are hugely affiliated with Coinbase
and they have a lot to gain
by the tokenization of everything,
both from a public sector standpoint,
from all the debt sync stuff we've been talking about,
and then of course from a private sector standpoint
when you own all the assets,
how do you create yield off of them
and make money off of them
when you own all the land and real estate and all that,
you have to tokenize it.
So it's a natural evolution of the plunder
to use sort of the John Titus, Catherine Austin,
Fitz, the plunder economy.
They were the ones that I really learned
a lot about this going direct stuff from.
John Titus is a genius and so is Catherine.
I highly recommend checking them out.
That's just the next evolution of this stuff.
So when I heard him in 2023 say this,
the future is tokenization.
Everything clicked, it just made so much sense.
And then you look at, well,
BlackRock's done so much with natural asset corporations
and green financing and blue bonds
and let's create financial products based on nature.
You combine that with the Panopticon surveillance state
of satellites and sensors and drones,
upholding what's tokenized a rainforest.
Well, you got to have satellites and drones
and blockchains and all these servers running everything
to make sure everything's good.
We're going to see the financialization
of the build out of the Panopticon as well
through these tokenization instruments,
not to mention the plunder
and the stealing of the land rights,
of the mineral rights, of the air rights,
of the water rights, all of these things.
So by financializing everything,
someone has to own it.
So it's a natural evolution for Larry Fink.
Fucking digital pirates, man.
Yeah, but digital pirates are cool, Matt.
Digital pirates are cool.
Yeah, that kind of pirate,
not the pirates that plunder.
Exactly.
Man, this has been a mind blowing conversation, dude.
You're a true wealth of knowledge
and this perspective is so unique.
I know Jason and I both had our minds blown
of several times during this, dude.
This is an incredibly valuable conversation.
I'm so glad we had you on, dude.
Thank you so much.
Hey, free thinkers, this is Matt Agarist
and I'm going to take a quick pause
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That brings us to our final question.
As our listeners know, you know, we always like to
end on an important question,
like we call it the white pill,
but it's like, what do we actually do now?
Right? It's a solutions-based question.
So, Jason mentioned Zano,
and I want to be 100% transparent to, you know,
they are a sponsor of this podcast,
and as you probably heard in the beginning
when you started listening to this,
but that's because we reached out to them, right?
We found Zano, and we were talking about Zano,
and I was reporting on Zano's privacy qualities
and everything like that.
We're not shilling.
We're fucking looking for solutions,
and they happen to be one of them.
So, Mark, you made a point earlier,
you know, that anything you put on a computer
is probably not private.
And I tend to agree with that.
You're right, you know, to a large degree.
We live in a fucking digital panopticon.
Like you said, you know,
but we have to use the tools that are available, right?
The core of the problem as we've laid out
is these compliant stablecoins.
The USDC, Tether, whatever fucking FedApprove coin comes next.
They're a complete trap.
They're not crypto.
They're instruments of the surveillance state.
We didn't get into it,
but Cato did a piece where they said,
you know, stablecoins are not CBDCs in disguise.
And like you said, they're fucking worse.
But it was like they were defending them,
and I got into an argument.
I'm not going to digress that much,
but I got into an argument with a guy
that wrote the article, Nick Anthony,
and he refused to answer any of my questions,
and he called us out,
but then didn't answer any of my questions.
But he didn't mention that they're, you know,
that they're forced to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act,
sanctions laws, KYC, SARs, record keeping.
They're required to, like you said,
to freeze, burn, fucking seize, block, reject
over a night that just and, and, and, and,
and they have to do that in order to be able to,
to, to do business, right?
And that's not a fucking choice.
That's, that's a gun to the head.
We have no option but to use something else, man.
Like I hold zero fucking stablecoins.
I think that's just so dumb.
And you know, the, our other option is privacy tech
and it's tools like not just fucking Zano, right?
It's like Monero and Zcash.
And, you know, Zano does have its own stablecoin, FUSD.
These aren't compliant, you know,
they're by their design permissionless.
And like, here's the white pill.
Okay. Sorry, I'm ranting here.
Oh, good man.
Even if a lot of our fellow libertarians,
like Jason said,
are still caught up in the stablecoin trap,
it appears that at least the market is reacting.
Right.
We've seen, we've seen these recent spikes.
Jason shared it with me this morning, in fact,
of Zcash, you know, shooting up 300 fucking percent
and Zano going up.
And Monero, it's under attack in Europe.
So it's not been,
it's not seen the gains like everything else,
but the market is speaking,
fucking privacy is not just like desirable.
It's a fucking necessity for what's coming.
So, you know, as we watch the state
and then it's corporate partners,
successfully build their digital prison,
if you will,
do you see this parallel ecosystem of like true privacy coins
as like the last best hope?
Is this where like we can see some real fight
for financial freedom?
Well, I mean, I think we could do a whole podcast
on this question for sure.
I don't want to keep you guys all afternoon,
but it's very complicated
and it's a very good question.
And in many ways also it is the, you know,
$38 trillion question too,
because this has so many implications on
if the powers that be will be successful
with this digitalization tokenization of everything.
Because if you have financial privacy
and in a digital sphere, you know,
you can get a lot done with that.
That can be, you know,
you can coordinate local communities
and create your own bartering systems
and really make, you know,
keep your currency local
and keep, you know, your finances,
you know, at the neighborhood level,
I'm using technology.
Like, again, technology is technology.
You know, there's wonderful things
that come downstream from
the gunpowder revolution
and there's terrible things that have come to you.
You know, it all kind of depends on
who's using them and how they're being used
and I think digital finance,
you know, there's a lot to be said
about the benefits of it.
I remain an optimistic
skeptic
of privacy
online in the sense that I know
that there are brilliant people working on stuff
and there are brilliant projects
and brilliant ideas
of how to use cryptography
and encryption successfully
on the internet.
And I think those people need to be supported
and those projects need to be
to be talked about
and brought to the forefront.
But I do have sort of an overall
kind of, I'm a little nervous
about whether or not
these tools can actually do
the things that they say
that they do
and that's not a comment on any of the projects
you specifically mentioned. I have used some of these projects
and I do think that they're worth looking into.
But as it relates to an investment
I'm not so sure. I see privacy
as sort of a tool
in the way that cash
is a tool for privacy.
Right? I don't think you should invest
in cash because I think the dollar
is going to be debased.
But at the same time, if you want to go buy
something, the best thing to possibly use
to buy something is cash.
So I think that privacy tool is kind of in the same
way. Ironically
I'll flip the question on you.
I think that the brilliancy
of blockchain
and bitcoin specifically is that it is
transparency technology.
Not very good for dissonance
wanting to do anti-state things
with it. But there is something to be
said for the transparency that's
involved if the financial
system and central bank settlement
ends up being used on
digital ledgers that are public.
We actually gain more
insight into the issues of the dollar
system and into the government spending
than we would if it was on these closed
black book
what we've experienced for the last
hundreds of years
in the fiat experiment.
So ironically, you could argue that
the transparency of blockchain could actually
work to our benefit
as long as we are able to
find some sort of solution
to be able to go in and out
of these products and exchange them
with each other in a way that's
private. So
I'm pretty sure that
you know the base layer
transparency is a positive
thing for us
for the people
as long as we are able to have scaling
solutions that
are private and we are able to
get in and out and into cash or into
foreign exchange
currencies in a way that is
as private as possible
while still remaining
a settlement network that is
transparent and everybody can see.
So there is actually something to be said about
the lack of privacy in blockchain that actually
could be a positive
if the government is using bitcoin to settle
things we know instantly
if the US government is selling their bitcoin
or moving their bitcoin
that's positive. We
can see it on the blockchain
PYUSD
which I think will be one of the biggest players
PayPal Stablecoin fat
fingered and accidentally printed
$300 trillion worth of
stablecoins
but hey, guess what
that happens all the time
but we actually all saw
it in real time
and were able to say oh geez look at that
and they had to rectify it
immediately but the biggest issue
with the dollar system is not
that there isn't privacy it's that there actually
is so much black book
operations going on
and so much black budget stuff
that they're able to just slosh around
these meaningless integers
on you know bank ledgers
and be able to generate and finance
all of these black book operations
you could argue that there's a transparency
element that is positive about
blockchain that might actually help the small person
create some sort of
you know transparency
for government so
I don't know I think cash is king
use cash buy
assets and things that help
you and your family you know build
your community go meet your neighbor
all the classic things everybody says
because what's going to happen
next is going to be
we're going to see the decentralization and
balkanization of everything of states
of countries
of communities we're going to see
a hyper individualism be empowered
and then immediately that will be
decentralized that's sort of
the the dialectic play
here the irony of stable coins
being a decentralized technology
that's actually re-centralizing everything back to the
Fed I think we're going to see that in
other technologies and in other ways
and so I think the more that you're able
to you know get yourself off the grid
be less dependent
on these social structures
you'll be able to opt out of the coming
things so figure out whatever
those whatever that means to you
buy solar deal dig a well
plant a garden go shake
your neighbor's hand whatever whatever that means
to you but they're going
to get everybody to comply
with crisis and with
convenience and if you're
able to opt out because
you've set yourself up using whatever
financial tool is
necessary to get there if you can avoid
the crisis and the convenience
you know you'll probably stand a pretty good chance
because that's really the only tools they
have which are damn good tools
but those are really all they have so
I don't like to show specific projects
because I just don't know
but I think from a broad stroke standpoint
you know that that
that's what I would recommend
another brilliant perspective dude
the transparency for the state through bitcoin
ledger her
if they put the if they give those public like
how many wallets have they seized that are private
and we have no idea who they belong to and they could just move
that shit around right in their black ops
CIA and so yeah I definitely
I agree with you on that transparency should flow upward
but not downward it's transparency
for the state privacy for the people and
I'm you know I'm
not pushing Xano or Zcash
or Monero is like the complete solution
but it's definitely a tool in those tools that you just
mentioned to be able to survive
anything that might be coming down the hill man
Mark dude this was an awesome
conversation thank you so much for coming
on I loved it dude I learned so much
I mean I can't wait to go back and listen to it all
again before we go man tell everybody
where they can find and support your work
yeah thank you so much and likewise
I had a great time
you can find me I'm writing now and working
with when you have on a limit and hangout.com
we're about to start a publishing
company we got a couple books in the canon
and a magazine a print magazine
trying to get off the online
platforms and move towards some physical media
you'll hear more about that coming up
for sure and then you know I'm on Twitter
and some other things Mark Goodwin
or sorry Mark Good W
underscore IN Mark Goodwin with
an underscore between the W and the I
and that's where I publish everything
you know links to whatever so that's really the only
social media I use for now
and
yeah thanks so much Jason
and Matt for having me it's been an absolute pleasure
thank you Mark hell yeah man
thank you again take care
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project podcast
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