Episode 004: Steven Nerayoff's Billion-Dollar Battle: Exposing Government Corruption in Crypto

Did you configure it to stream on yours? There should be an option. Did you configure it? I sent you a link. Jacoby, you configure it? Yeah. Hurry up. All right, here we go. welcome back to episode All right, everybody, four of The Aaron Day Show. We have an absolutely incredible guest today, Stephen Nuryoff, and I'll get into his bio momentarily. But before I do that, I want to do a quick recap on where we are. It has been a stressful. in chaotic week, to say the least. And if you're tuning in for the first time and you don't know what the show is all about, the purpose of this show is it's really built off of my work,

The Final Countdown. Really, for the last year and a half, I have been laser focused on sounding the alarm bell about the looming threat of CBDCs. And as we'll learn more I think we're even closer. We could be potentially even within six months of CBDC based on the recent development. So this podcast, it was intended to augment my book and to go into detail and to keep people up to date on the most pressing issues of the day. And before we do that, I want to take a step back. My last guest, was roger veer and I thought that was a terrific episode about his book hijacking bitcoin

hijacking Bitcoin fits into this CBDC narrative in a very specific way. Roger has been pushing for peer to peer digital cash since 2010. He's been steadfast on that. And his book proves very definitively with facts, not opinion. The book is not it could have been him ranting about how he was mistreated. And it's not it's it's very much a fact based account of of what happened with Uh, with Bitcoin and essentially what happened with Bitcoin in 2017, um, is a group of people came in and decided we're not going to scale Bitcoin. Bitcoin as peer to peer cash. We're not going to have We're going to make it digital gold. And, uh, in the process, it killed all of the momentum.

of people that were actually using it as cash. And so fast forward, it turns out the same people that funded the hobbling of Bitcoin also funded all three US CBDC pilots. But the big update since our last show is somehow coincidentally, Roger was arrested in Spain for tax evasion, or they're actually calling it tax fraud, just two weeks after his book hit. I believe that this is politically motivated, but we'll get to that when we bring Stephen in. I just want to say at the outset, I'm doing this, I'm able to do this podcast and everything that I'm doing across the country, thanks to the Brownstone Institute. I ran for president to try to bring awareness to this issue.

but I've known Jeffrey for 10 years. And actually my first presentation was at Porkfest at the Brownstone tent. And Jeffrey has really built an oasis for people who have been targeted, fired, sued for speaking the truth. And he provides a platform for speaking the truth and really was the only one to do this during the lockdown tyranny. So I encourage you strongly to follow the Brownstone Institute. And if you can support Brownstone, the Brownstone Institute because this organization doesn't have corporate sponsors or any large institutional backing. This is made up of individuals who are committed to the cause of freedom. One more announcement. I am doing these four-hour

workshops across the country on CBDCs. The next one that I have is in San Jose, California. And this event is May the 11th at 9 a.m. in San Jose. So I encourage you, there are still some tickets left. So I encourage you to go to day2024.com and get some tickets. The event is four hours. I need the whole four hours. The first half of it is to explain the threat of CBDCs. And then the last half is to actually empower people by giving them self-custody crypto wallets, showing them how to use it. And I actually give people... physical gold in the form of goldbacks and silver, because the point of this whole exercise is we defeat

CBDCs by using self-custody alternative assets in a parallel economy. And with that said, I'm going to, I guess, give a brief intro here. So Steve Nerioff is a prominent figure in technology, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. He has an impressive portfolio of 46 US and international patents. He's founded several companies across Silicon Valley and New York City. He's been instrumental in the development and success of major blockchain projects, such as Ethereum, Lisk, Bancor, T-Zero, Zencash, Zcash, Ripio, Aon, and Storm.

And as a blockchain and AI pioneer, he's credited with inventing the utility token, the ICO or initial coin offering and STO security token offering. His innovations in the legal framework of token sales have become a global standard and his advisory roles in over 25 blockchain projects have significantly influenced the industry's development. I'll tell you, I've been doing a deep dive on his background. And one of the things that's fascinating is if you know me, you know, I've been involved with Ravencoin from the very beginning. And it turns out the The primary use case, although there are numerous for Ravencoin, is to be the tokenization platform for equities to do

security token offerings. So Steven actually is the architect of the security token offering. So I actually find this to be truly fascinating. I'm grateful to have him on. And what he's going to talk about is this ordeal that he's been through as somebody that was there at the beginning of the formation of Ethereum that then led to a situation where he was basically targeted by the government essentially for his silence. and then pressured to try to give up information about key leaders in the crypto and pro-liberty crypto space. And so he has just an amazing volume of information that connects a lot of dots regarding what I've been talking about and everything else.

So with that said, let me adjust the screen here and introduce Steven Naryoff. Hi Steve, nice to have you on. Thank you Aaron. Thank you for having me on. before we get into all of this, I want to start, I guess, let's talk about Roger Ver for a second, because my understanding is that you actually had dinner with him last week. Yeah, we were in Dubai and we had dinner and spoke about a lot of the topics that you're discussing right now. I think that, well, what do you make of his arrest? So here's the thing.

We say in this country that you're innocent until proven guilty. The reality is that doesn't even exist. So from somebody who was under a federal indictment for almost four years, I can tell you there actually are benefits of actually being convicted rather than being indicted. I see a lot of people across different social media. I was looking at one guy on LinkedIn and saying, oh, Roger's so bad and he's evading taxes. And everybody thinks because he left the country, he's not there. And it's like, whoa, hold up a second. This is an allegation, right? And that's all it is. I'll tell you my personal

opinion in a minute. But, you know, first of all, I think people need to take a step back and understand that the U.S. Department of Justice and this is the criminal division of the U.S. DOJ. They have a machinery of in a public relations machinery that is unparalleled. So when I got arrested, Right. there were literally, you know, i don't know thousands of articles like that just made its way right you know the word ethereum was in there and so you know got picked up by everything by everybody and and I and I saw an x and at the time but you know later you know everybody just was like oh you know people that I knew

very well um you know I oh we knew all along he was this he was that so the first thing I want to say is like, just like, just stop assuming people are guilty because in my case, I proved that they fabricated the entire crime. You know, I actually, you know, I, I, I'm supporting Roger. I don't believe Roger is guilty on this one. I do believe this is politically motivated. So, and I don't think the timing is coincidental. And, and, Right. And I know some things behind the scenes. I've offered my assistance to help. I have a certain background.

I've gone up against the DOJ actually twice. I'm a tax attorney by training. This is a tax criminal case. I went up against the DOJ in a tax case that went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which we were successful in. Now, why is he being targeted? That's a separate question. Yeah. Why is he being targeted? And it just occurred to me, and I don't want to dwell but I had interviewed Roger, too much on this, and I knew he was going from, I think he was in South Korea, then he was in Dubai, but I don't think it was publicly announced that he was in Spain. So to coordinate and to have basically known enough to be able to surveil and coordinate with the

authorities in Spain seems like this was a pretty big undertaking. Well, I mean, so when you had posted that you were going to interview us back to back and then you and I had to postpone our interview because I went to Dubai, I texted Roger and I'm like, hey, it looks like we're going to be doing interviews back to back. Roger and I have known each other since pretty much the beginning. He did mention that he was going to Spain the next day after we had dinner. So it wasn't like he was secretly trying to go anywhere. He wasn't in hiding anywhere. And it's my understanding that there were some agreements in place.

And I'm not even sure that this is how much of this is even... this allegations and the indictment and the extradition is legal and will be shown to be legal. OK, great. Well, I look forward to digging into that. And actually, everybody that's following this, I mean, you can follow me on Twitter at Aaron Arday. I've actually created a community called Free Rogers. They're just for folks that want to stay connected on this information and kind of track what's going on here, because I don't think we want this to drop off the radar. I mean, of course, I've got all these people, you know, pinging me saying, well, hey, you know, this is this is this the same thing that happened to John McAfee.

who, you know, apparently was in prison in Spain, you know, waiting to be extradited. And, you know, I think people I don't think Roger and and John are in the same situation. So nevertheless, I'll kind of leave it at that. All right, well, let's hop in. So as I mentioned kind of beforehand, my audience is half very sophisticated and have been in crypto for a long time, but half of these people are brand new. So what is the, I guess, what's the easiest way for you to describe for somebody that doesn't understand anything other than they've heard of Ethereum, what your ordeal was with Ethereum? Okay, so that's kind of detailed, but in a nutshell,

I was they wanted to Ether is what the token is. They wanted to sell Ether to the public in order to fund the development of the Ethereum protocol. Everybody had told them at the time that this would be an unregistered sale of securities, which is illegal and under the securities laws in the United States. So they couldn't do that. So they contacted me to see if if I could come up with some solution that you know no white shoe law firm or the sec or anybody else could because I've already had tried everybody else um what what I ended up doing was you know there was this

I i worked with a guy named joe grunfest who was the former chairman of the sec maybe like the most prolific one in the last 50 years and you know we were working daily on this and it was like How do you figure out, you know, nobody knew what this, this token is. It's like a piece of code, right? And nobody knew how to define it. Right. So everybody just was saying, it's a security, you're selling it, you're making money off of it. Right. So it must be a security. Um, you know, so, you know, it was, uh, I had this thought for a second, which today may not seem like a big deal. It was kind of was radical at the time was this thing actually has utility to it. there's a function that it does.

And I said, And I said, in Ether's case, you need it to send it or you need it to fuel decentralized applications on the Ethereum protocol. So there's this utility. And so I started thinking, that's kind of like a stamp or, you know, gasoline, you know, so is this maybe a product? And so that's when the product narrative came in and, you know, that's when the utility, the word utility token came into play into play. Um, and I, frankly, I, uh, I wasn't sure how people would receive that, but we did contact, you know, a law firm that we were working with, um, The chair of Runfest thought

it was brilliant and that was kind of history. But the next part of it was kind of even more difficult. It was now, all right, this thing's now a product. how do we sell millions of dollars worth? Now, In that case, it was millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin and not accidentally turn it back into a security. I'll give you an example. If you buy a product, gasoline, for example, you buy a gallon of gasoline, It's probably a product. Maybe in case your car runs out of gas, you keep it in your trunk. But if you buy a million barrels, unless you're like American Airlines, it's probably not a product to you.

So buying more than you need is an example of how you could turn a product into a security. So I effectively had to work in this vacuum and just think of... every kind of possible scenario of what could go wrong that would turn this thing back into a security so those were the two primary things and that became the that's what became the ico right so you called the ico at the time know we didn't call I'm and you know we called it a crowd sale um there were actually three before us um but you know they didn't try to do anything you know in a legal manner um So then, you know, then we were able to actually, you know, sell these and we sold $18

million worth of Bitcoin. And that was by far the largest crowdsale in history. There was a ton of other stuff that I did at Ethereum, but those were the, you know, take homes. So, so I guess, so what, so what happened? I mean, I understand. And just so that the audience understands that you were there, basically you were there at the very beginning. I mean, you were architecting this, this token sale and from what I've seen from the research, I mean, at some point Vitalik was Is this correct? living with you. Yeah, it was. I rented an office for Ethereum. I paid for it out of my own expenses. Vitalik would stay with me. Basically, Toronto was one hub because that's where he started it.

There were some other folks involved, Joe Lubin and Anthony Delorio that were Toronto based. And then New York was the other hub. And Joe Lubin would go back and forth from here to there. And so when he would come, yeah, he would stay, you know, about a year to a year and a half, something like that. You know, it was on and off. Sometimes you could stay here for, you know, weeks at a time. Sometimes you could stay here for, You know, we have a talk that we did in, you know, a weekend. I think, 2019 And we made a joke, and I said, you know, it's nice to see you, not as a roommate. I said we were roommates at one time, and he laughed. He said, yeah, something like that.

those would be good old days, You know, until, of course, we weren't, and he denied everything. But that's another story. Well, so I understand that you were also offered a very substantial amount of Ethereum at the founding, correct? And you declined it. Yeah, I declined the ether that was offered to me. I also declined an even bigger amount, which was um the expenses that I had incurred which were well into the there were hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses I also signed um and I was on the hook for all the legal expenses and put down the initial legal retainer because nobody else was

credit worthy um and so uh I declined my expense reimbursement I declined and that was in ether by the way um uh and And I also didn't invest. And the reason I didn't do that is because money was not the motivating factor. I saw that this had the potential to really radically change society, you know, decentralize applications. That was really all I was focused on. I've shown the records online where I said I'm not looking for any compensation. Today it's probably $1.8 million, which is around $3 billion. There was one other thing. I didn't want a conflict of interest.

So I didn't take a position. I didn't take any money from the project. And so if the authorities, and I didn't expect quite the way it ended up happening, if they ended up coming after anybody, they could not go after the project. They could come after me and the project would be safeguarded. But, you know, I wasn't really thinking about and it wasn't just Ethereum. It was to me, this was much bigger and like Bitcoin is much bigger than, you know, Bitcoin itself. Right. It's what it can do to society. So the whole purpose of Ethereum starting to begin with is kind of related to this hijacking of Bitcoin story, isn't it?

Didn't Vitalik, at least as I understand, it wasn't the idea to build the functionality of Ethereum on top of Bitcoin, that there'd be one chain that would do this. And so in essence, the work that was done to hobble Bitcoin in 2017 led to the formation of Ethereum. And so now we're in this situation. And so you're in there at the very beginning. You're designing this crowd sale. amount of eth when did you you're offered a large start seeing red flags like what like what was there a specific point or was it an accumulation of small things that yeah I mean it was it was more the latter the accumulation of small things um and it was more like you know

the things that you heard that just didn't sound right like why are they saying this and you know um once we launched the crowd sale uh joe and I started a company which is today called consensus uh after I don't know how many months I was there um you know I just decided i was super uncomfortable you know in a working environment with with joe and I said you know what like it's yours you can just take it you know I'm like I don't have anything to do with this and um so that was fall of 2014. um by that point that's when I started like you know the I put a phone call like a three-hour phone call when

vitalik asked me to restructure the whole foundation um that's when I started recording some calls just to have um protection in case I i thought you know I didn't know what might be happening but I was being careful you've been careful and so so was there a one specific moment when you really the distancing started to happen I mean I saw something yeah so joe lubin is all of a sudden your name's left out or something along those lines right so actually you know you bring up 2017. 2017 is a really interesting year because uh 20 the ethereum foundation actually sent out an official letter uh

to a publication that had quoted me and some other people from Ethereum about the technology. And I even said, it's my personal opinion. advisor and they said that And they called me an I had never had any connection with the project in any capacity, including as an advisor, right? that was actually you know not true a couple of other people sent letters you know uh but what that was uh and then I also also told right before that um by joe um that my email was about to get cut off my Ethereum email.

I had an Ethereum.org email. Both of those were happening right around the same time as you were discussing. What's also interesting is we want to just throw more into 2017 because we can't make this stuff up. For people who don't, we can discuss later what ETHgate is, but who gave the speech that Bill Hinman, basically gave regulatory preferential treatment, a halo to Ethereum and nobody else, that he started at the SEC in May of 2017. And then he wrote the Dow report, which is,

if anybody really reads that and pays attention to what that was, or the Dow hack, There's just no explanation for that. The company that actually falsely accused me of extortion, they were introduced to me within a week of him and starting at the SEC. So you've got what you're talking about, are they related? I can't say that I know as a factual matter that any of this is related, but there's not only just a coincidence, it's just a lot of logic as to why they would be related. Yeah. So why do you think, so I mean,

I guess the way that I'm seeing this is that you are incredibly knowledgeable probably possibly more than anyone on how to structure these types of digital securities in fact it seems like that would in fact be probably an accurate statement um did they distance themselves from you do you think because they essentially wanted to discard your guidance and your your legal opinion on that proper way to structure this No, absolutely not, because in 2015, Vitalik called me panicked and said, we're running out of money, we're going to go under. And so I spent three months going through the entire organization and I put the recording of my

uh report to him which is a three-hour conversation where I told him everything he needed to do and one of those we should talk about because it talks about it was about scalability you know related to uh you know the roger and the you know the block size but but it was um I wasn't really dealing with Ethereum anymore. So this kind of came out of the blue. But what I started seeing was constant attacks and constant denials. I was removed from the Wikipedia. I was removed from the Ethereum.org website. I was erased from the history, basically. um and if anybody listens to

that recording I knew more about the foundation and contributed more to that foundation than anybody else um and virtually every single department of that foundation you know I i helped build or or restructure the finance human resources marketing um you know well beyond you know legal but I'm an entrepreneur so you know I just jumped it so why is the reason is is a separate point well I was actually good to do what what why is the what is the reason so yeah it took me a while to actually kind of figure this out um that I had information and I was the only person that had information that, you know,

that free pass that I was talking about, that a lot of people, you know, especially like people in the XRP community, because Ripple got unfairly targeted by the same people that, gave that regulatory free pass you know, to Ethereum. I had documentation quite a bit of documentation that would prove that effectively that speech could not have been true at the time that it was given. And both Vitalik and Joe Lubin met with the SEC under oath prior to giving that speech. So the fact that Bill Hannon gave that speech,

and they know that according to their own internal documents, I'm the only other person other than them and the one lawyer that knows this, they're not decentralized. I think the only way to say it is they took me out preemptively so I wouldn't blow the whistle. Actually, at the time that they took me out, I hadn't made the connection yet. I probably would have, so whatever. But what they were doing was illegal. That whole free pass is probably the most,

I think it's the most unprecedented government, private industry corruption in history. There's nothing else. And then you throw in that there's a big part of this was the entities that are closely aligned with the Chinese Communist Party. And then you just start saying like, wait, I thought I lived in America. you know so so let's so let's talk about that so what's so there uh there's a company called wang shang and I'm probably messing up the name uh w-a-n-x-i-a-n-g uh that uh you know some people have uh

plotted that in terms of online on-chain data that they bought upwards of 50% of all the ether in the ICO. And what they also showed was that the ether that was being given out to the foundation or contributors, not the ones to purchasers, but to the people that were involved in the project, actually went to Wang Cheng's wallet. So Wang Cheng actually set up Vitalik's wallet and set up the foundation's wallet. So there's that on-chain that's still there. Doesn't make any sense.

But then you, you know, and this is documented by, you know, I think it's the CEO of the company himself in China. But they, I tell Vitalik, here's all the things you need to do to save Ethereum. Here's what you need to do to build 2.0 so it can scale, so you can actually do the dApps and actually change the world, which we still have not done. And he goes and goes works for Wing Cheng in Shanghai. for two years. He went to work for, he became chief scientist of Wencheng Blockchain Labs. He keynoted like all of their conferences and he became a general partner of Fenbushi Capital,

which is a subsidiary of Wencheng. And they publicly have stated that they bought $500,000 of Ether because they were running out of money. So they bought $500,000 worth of Ether sometime later, 2015, and then continued funding the foundation. So what it looks like is they have a controlling position in the ether for the protocol itself. And then they're actually funding the foundation. And they took Vitalik, who effectively, we'll just call it what it is. Vitalik's a figurehead. yeah I mean he's he's done

nothing you know I mean like great he's a human calculator like so what you know he writes great he does right he's probably one of the best um writers because he used to write for Bitcoin magazine. And so he's really adept at that. But what has he actually done? He took smart contracts from Ripple. And so what they did was they ended up creating this like myth in him and putting placing him as a figurehead. But between him and then Then you go to look at Joe on the other side, who looks like he also took a very large position in Ether. Even according to the chairman of the SEC,

Gary Gensler, he bought 9.5%, though it's rumored to have been two, three, four times that. So now you've got two entities that are basically controlling Ethereum. And that's not the way crypto is supposed to work. They've got a database. They can do whatever they want. And that concentration, I believe, has gone up since then because those same entities, and this isn't hard to figure out, we're doing like 90% of all the mining. So their concentration level probably increased to this day. And what other kinds of businesses or activities is

that Chinese company involved with? Bizarrely, they're an auto supply company. That's what they're listed as. Somehow they're There's other companies, we could talk about like Promethean, that is wholly dependent upon them for their technology. So clearly there's, I don't know, their acne court, right? And then what do they really do? I'm not here to point fingers, but there's some people, I can't validate this, but some people have posted that they were, an assured number of

meetings between the CEO of Wencheng and Obama and or Biden in, you know, somewhere around 10, 12 years ago, whenever it was. I can't verify that independently, but it was, I've seen it repeatedly shown. So do you know much about the rest of the distribution of the initial token sale? I think I overheard you say it had a very, the distribution of the tokens is not something you would expect from an organic offering, I think was essentially what I gathered. So, I mean, there's two ways of looking at this. There's like actually looking at the on-chain data and the on-chain data,

There are some people that actually looked at that data. And I was able to help them with that because I had a list of everybody who was associated with the project and how much ether they got. So you can see that this person got a 40 253 ether then you can go and find that wallet because there's only one wallet that has that so now you know that's their wallet and so basically everything that goes on from them you know through history pretty much you know that comes out of that wallet um that just gets associated with it um you know we were able to locate joe's wallet in that same manner so there's there's that one approach there's another approach um that

I think at the time Preston Byrne put out an article where he showed a graph and it was like, you know, just a perfect, you know, let's say 90 degree, but anyway, yeah, angle. And that was too, you know, It was not organic. And for somebody who's done more ICOs than probably anybody on the planet, I agree with him. It was completely inorganic. It's not the way you would see. And then what I'm talking about, that chart means how people were buying. And so usually in an ICO, you see a huge surge at the beginning,

right? And then, you know, it may die off. And then, you know, there may be other periods. But then you may see like a huge surge at the end. But you certainly don't see just a straight, you know, it's more of like this, right? You know, I've never seen this. And the only reason you see this, and it's backed up by some other data, is if it was like programmed, right? It wasn't even human trading. There were trades that people have shown where in one second, 200 buys came in. That's not a human being. Nobody could do that. That's a buy that was

programmed to send in somebody that works at a hedge fund that could do something like that. So this is the actual crowd sale itself. So, but my understanding is, I mean, they're just selling a portion of the tokens. What do we know about the distribution, the founders distribution? I have the list of the founders' distribution, but what did they really do? It's another story. It's also been shown that they went into the address that they were getting the Bitcoin from purchasers. Bitcoins miraculously left that address during the crowd sale, went into wallets and came back into that address. So meaning they were recycling.

Like, imagine you have an IPO. The company itself takes money from the IPO and goes and buys its own shares in its own IPO. Like, it's like, that's just kind of, you know, bizarre. You know, the question, you know, is there were... a number of founders, Joe aside, that also bought in as a purchaser into the crowd sale. So they were very large and interested participants and their actions later on down the road make sense for that. So that was probably, I would say, maybe

There was 30% of the entire amount. And so 70% was allocated for purchasers and 30% were allocated for contributors like the founders that you're talking about and for the foundation. But I will say this, even though, and I know this for a fact, even though it was agreed upon and this list, and I think I'm the only person that has the list other than, you know, Joe and Vitalik, Vitalik chose not to have a group send out the ether to all of the right addresses. He said, he's going to do it in by himself.

And it looks like Wang Sheng actually ended up doing it. Right. So, but why would you want to take on that whole responsibility? Like you want transparency and why wouldn't you just let a group do it if it's, and it was suggested to him to do that. And he declined and said he wanted to do it by himself in secret. That's not suspicious. uh what have we learned about Hinman so what what were Hinman's motivations I mean have we have we learned why he he might have been willing to do this kind of once in a lifetime one-off deal financial I think you know I mean it's yeah and there's been so much like stupid debate about, you know, like there's one that it

was Charles and Joe Katz from Ripple, you know, were arguing and Charles was saying, you know, it's a conspiracy theory that Ethereum bribed, you know, the SEC to go after Ripple, which, you know, and arguably, you know, this free pass in there, you know, at the end of the day, like, let's just look at where's him in right now, you know, and nothing against the firm, it's a great firm, but he's a you know, the number one firm that has the largest interest in entities on Ethereum, as far as I understand. A prestigious one, and he's a partner at that firm. He also was getting, you know,

I think $15 million a year from his law firm and his law firm was a member of the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance. And so the conflict of interest is just insane, right? You know, like why did he do it? It's clearly for money. How did he make that money? He's clearly making it now. Did he make it then too? I doubt there was an envelope of cash that's like to 1980s. There's other ways for him to have his interest. It wasn't just him, it was Jay Clayton too. And Jay Clayton was the head of the SEC. Jay Clayton was the head of the SEC and Jay Clayton ended up going to a firm right now that divested itself of XRP, which is Ripple's token, and

invested more heavily into Ether, And so it's been holdings or Bitcoin and ether. And he's, I don't know what his title is there. Uh, but he's all over TV and now he's, you know, they, they've made a ton of money because of that particular speech and he ended up, so they both ended up going to firms that directly benefited from that speech and they're directly benefiting from those firms directly benefiting. It's kind of pretty simple. So, so, so you. having knowledge of what's going on was a threat. Apparently. So where are we in time now? We're still in 2017? Yeah, well, we're in 2017.

The speech was in 2018. My prosecution didn't start until 2019. And, you know, the threat was obviously big enough, you know, what we uncovered, and I got a dismissal with prejudice, which is kind of like a unicorn of a federal indictment. But what we uncovered was really a unicorn. It was that The SEC was leading this prosecution. The SEC is a civil agency. It's not allowed to do criminal prosecutions. But it was clearly leading it, and it was a coordinated effort

between the SEC, the FBI, and the DOJ. That's at least what we can prove. And we also proved that the evidence that they were using to prosecute me, we proved on their own letterhead and emails that they fabricated it. So this was, and it was in the government's own files that we found this. So you had this interagency coordination that kind of never had been proven before. And so, yeah, obviously they thought it was super important. The SEC thought it was important, but the hell, the DOJ and the FBI were willing to jump in. And you're talking about like, let's put it in magnitude,

like dozens of people, were directly or indirectly involved in knowingly prosecuting an innocent person amongst three different federal agencies. So forget about meaning. Anybody that lives in this country, that should scare the living crap out of anybody that lives in America, that that is even possible. Because normally what you see is, oh, we had this rogue agent. He was just one bad apple, and we got rid of him. Or a rogue prosecutor, right? But here it's like three rogue agencies.

How else do you put it? Because it wasn't one or two actors within any of those agencies. And this is just what we have been able to identify. I'm sure the circle is much bigger than we understand it to be. So as you're going through this, you're distancing yourself from Ethereum, but this is before Ethereum. They're going after you. You then had a stint. They were distancing themselves from me. Okay. They were distancing themselves from you. Great. And then you went to T-Zero. Is this the correct order sequence? T-Zero happened in 2017. That was in late 2017. Patrick asked me to come in.

and of architect uh what he wanted to do is the first security token and that would be the first security token offering so there was two like things that had to be created there and I have a tremendous amount of respect for patrick and what he was trying to do and and he really brought legitimacy to the industry you know he he accepted Bitcoin overstock, which was a $1.2 billion company. And I think prior to that, like there was like an $800,000 revenue restaurant in Australia that was accepting Bitcoin. Like nobody had accepted it. So like the minute he did that, that was like a watershed moment that any of us that were around at the time were just astounded.

Yeah, no, it was amazing. I know there's a big Wired magazine, and I actually want to take a step back and tell people that I got very involved, I think I mentioned at the beginning, with a project called Ravencoin, but to explain a little bit more about what happened here. So Patrick, as Stephen was saying, really understood the power of Bitcoin early, not just from the perspective as a digital currency that he could use, to sell products through Overstock, he understood that the underlying blockchain technology had the possibility to impact and transform a wide number of industries. And the whole point behind blockchain is that you have this decentralized ledger. No one controls it.

You can't edit it. It's immutable. And so when you think about money is essentially being a ledger on the one hand, but think about other markets where you may have third parties in the middle that are creating a lot of mischief, like the stock market, like land titling, issues related to the supply chain. There are voting, voting is another one. So what Patrick actually was doing was he was trying to get out of the e-commerce business. Patrick's vision for Overstock was to sell the e-commerce business and he formed something called Medici Ventures, which was this what's called a kuretsu of companies that would uh they're independent companies but they kind of share know-how

share vision um and work together uh you know sharing and innovating and um I can't remember how many companies there were maybe a dozen different companies and ravencoin which is an open source project that is a fork of Bitcoin. And what it does is it's specifically for tokenizing assets. So you can create a token. So Ethereum, you have to go through a process of creating a smart contract. and you have to get these smart contracts audited. With Ravencoin, you can just create a token on chain without any programming. And that was the specific application. And I think one of the original ideas was that T0, which was going to be kind of a new way of selling equities that didn't have

the naked short selling and the lack of transparency of the existing markets. And Ravencoin was gonna be a piece of that and was gonna be a piece of the entire ecosystem. So that's how I got involved in this. And from my perspective, You know, when I look at when people talk about kind of rug pulls, what Patrick was creating was, again, he called it the blockchain tech stack for human civilization. So basically replacing all of our institutions that have historically failed for thousands of years because of the inevitable corruption and corruption. and human, you know, power struggles and to replace it with the blockchain. And, you know, I was, we need that right now more than ever.

And I don't know, we were just talking before this. I don't even know if you have any insight on that, but I feel like, I feel like, Patrick was pushed out of Overstock to make sure that Medici didn't happen and to make sure that this suite of companies didn't happen. And most probably prominent amongst the list is T-Zero because it was a threat to Wall Street. I mean, do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, so... I haven't spoken too much publicly on this. Everybody talks about the ETH gate component of this, but there's another scandal that's just as big, and that's T0. And so what had happened was... Patrick for years has been

fighting naked shorts and those are shorts and you have only a certain number of days to borrow the stock and otherwise you're illegally shorting it. And he had gone to the SEC and I don't know how like a thousand percent of the float was like illegally shorted for a year or two years. It was just like absurd. And the SEC wasn't doing anything. to enforce its own rules. So Patrick It was, you know, if I didn't have negative repercussions the way I did, it would be, you know, a little bit more amusing to me. He checkmated the shorts. And what he did was he

created a blockchain dividend that was one tenth of each share of overstock. And you needed to buy that. So if you were short, you had to buy that. You couldn't. play the games of, because it's on the blockchain, you had to buy it, right? And so he forced the shorts and all of a sudden you started seeing the shirt squeeze, right? And the stock started going up, up, up, up, up. You know, it was at the time that, you know, he happened to come out about the Maria Butina story and whatever, I have nothing to do with that. I don't know, you know, anything about that. But what I do know is that,

This was a perfectly legal dividend. It was a security. It happened to be a blockchain security. And there was nothing wrong. The legal shorts had to cover their positions, right? Or they had to buy this, and there wasn't enough of this to buy. So he was basically forcing the legal shorts to do what the SEC was refusing to do to enforce its own rules. What happened? Patrick mysteriously was pushed out of Overstock and He left the country. That was a couple of months before this dividend date.

There's some disagreement about if it's September 19th or 18th or whatever, but it was like one of those days. And the day of the dividend, the SEC, well, I should say this, the SEC canceled the dividend. They worked with the company and they canceled the dividend. What you have here is scary. You have a totally captive agency that's supposed to be protecting investors that is actually not enforcing its rules and then preventing a company from issuing a totally legal dividend in order to protect hedge funds that

are illegally shorting that company. And that's what you had. And the day of that dividend was the day I was arrested. and like and that's not a coincidence because patrick's out of the country I'm arrested this security tokens are so new this really was nobody else out there that could have spoken on them you know like like right before that I had said that I believed within you know a certain number of years it was going to replace the new york stock exchange well surprise right now ice which is the parent of the new york stock exchange took a majority position in

t0 so it didn't replace it they actually bought it right so I mean that was pretty you know that aged well uh and so they I was speaking very publicly about security tokens so was patrick and so the only two people that could unmask what they had done so It's kind of like bizarre, but I'm like kind of crypto Waldo because here I actually had the information to blow the whistle on the Ethereum free pass. And then on the other hand, I had the information to blow the whistle on this T zero scandal that was done not coincidentally by the very same people within the SEC.

So it wasn't a different group of people. And there was a FOIA request. There were a bunch of emails of Hinman and his calendar and everything came out. And that's when it really dawned on me what was really happening. Why did they pick that date? I guess what I'm saying is, you know, I haven't really said this that publicly before, you know, I was being silenced from blowing the whistle on two different events. And the second event is really important because, you know, when we just say, all right, so they kicked this guy out of his company and they took, you know, the T-Zero, like, what's a big deal? All right, well, let's fast forward a few years.

Gary Gensler, you know, T-Zero doesn't have this, you know, he gives... T-Zero, which has done everything perfectly the way they wanted. It's now owned by the New York Stock Exchange. It has products trading. It has the best technology. It's clearly the leader in the industry. And this other company Prometheum comes along and he gives them this like magic bullet license, you know, for like all digital assets and this, which where it gets really crazy is Prometheum is by its own documents is owned in part and completely dependent upon

that same Chinese entity, Wang Cheng, that looks like it's controlling Ethereum. So you've got that happening on both sides here. Wow. Wow. So I remember Prometheum, I'd never heard of it until they were looking to get approval. Literally, it flew under the radar from my perspective. They had an address. I don't know whether or not they got tokens in their Ethereum ICO, but they were around a long time. It's been shown that in their address, they have two domains.

And it's their corporate, it's one of their company addresses, it's confirmed. And it's called killtrump.eth and killtrump.crypto. But actually they minted those and they sit in there and look, there should no American companies should have, you know, whatever your politics are, you know, we should not want any American company owning domain names about killing any president for, you know, past or present. And so that's, you know, bizarre. Yeah. So that, yeah, no, that, that is, that is very bizarre. So we have this link. Hinman connected to both of these companies, but which are in essence, in some respect, the same company.

And you happened to be arrested right at a focal point so that you couldn't blow the whistle on either of these. So let's walk through what happened then. What was kind of the drama? Did it come out of the blue? What was the... What was it like? What happened? What was the play-by-play when you were arrested? Yeah, I mean, 12 agents busted into my home while I was in my bed. And I just had had some major surgery where, you know, like two days earlier. And so I was still on medication and in a lot of pain. And then there's 12 agents.

And when I say, like, it was like I was Pablo Escobar or something because they were coming in and they all had their guns and they were all walking into my bedroom with their guns drawn and I'm like, can I help you? I mean, I was remarkably calm. It's just kind of my temperament. As things get more, the situation gets more anxious, I tend to calm down more. And so it doesn't get any more anxious kind of than that. And frankly, what was going through my mind is, are these really FBI agents? Like, you know, we've seen a lot of really bad stuff in crypto. And so even when I was taken away,

there was concern amongst a number of people that were these FBI agents or was I just kidnapped? And then what they did here, it was a ton of illegal stuff. I've put it in detail in my lawsuit. I also have, as a consultant, Alan Dershowitz on the case for constitutional issues. So he's also spoken about it. For anybody that wants to hear his words on it, go to my ex-account. It's at Stephen Deringoff. But I think where you're getting at is

what did they do after they arrested me? You know, they searched my house, they put my phone to my face and I turned my face. They asked me for the code. They did not have a search warrant by the way. So all, everything that I'm telling you here, you know, is illegal. Then they took me and they threw me in a van with two agents and I'm sitting on the floor of this van And they, you know, they hand me this clipboard because I had surgery on my shoulder. I was handcuffed like this. I'm like holding this clipboard. I'm like, kind of like looking at it. It's like 530 in the morning, right? And I'm looking at this clipboard and I'm like trying to come into focus. I'm like, what?

And then I'd start looking and it's, it's a who's who of crypto. And then one of the agents, you know, I'm not even really paraphrasing. If you ever want to see your kids again, or you're going to be locked up for decades, we want anything on anybody. So we want you to tell us. And they said, quote, we want dozens of convictions, like dozens of convictions. And I had no idea. So when I looked at this list, I didn't know anybody that was a criminal in the industry. And there were a lot of friends of mine. And in fact, I told Roger at dinner that I

didn't remember. This list was like page after page after page. I couldn't remember everybody on the list. I mostly remembered people that were close to me. And I told Roger, you know, you were like, your name was number three on that list. And so I'm not sure if they did it in any order of importance or not. But it was clearly at that point I said, whoa, this is like some kind of witch hunt. I didn't understand what was going on. I did not speak and that continued for I was being prosecuted for over three and a half years but that pressure to speak and give

up information went on for about a year and a half and the amount of pressure that they put them they literally destroyed every aspect of my life And every time they would put more pressure, more pressure, more pressure, they got multiple companies to agree to lie, to say that I extorted them. And they were going to bring more indictments. So that's like you're being accused of rape and they say, we're going to bring another rape victim. But you know that they're all lying. But it doesn't matter because if you're in front of a jury, you're probably going to get convicted anyway. And so it was an extreme amount of pressure. At the end, one time they came to me,

what are you going to plead? It was like guilty, not guilty. And I put it on a square and I checked it and I said, go F yourselves. And I handed it to my attorney, I'm like, give this to the U.S. prosecutors. And he thought I was kidding. I said, no, I'm not kidding. I said, give it to them and tell them to go F themselves because I'm not giving them anything on anybody. This is a goddamn witch hunt. This is like what Stalin said, show me the man, I'll show you the crime. And so, you know, that started my three and a half years, you know, more of that, but the prosecution was three and a half years. I mean, this is, you know, I'd like to say it's unbelievable, but, you know, it's almost...

I go to so many court hearings and sentencing. I mean, here in New Hampshire, I went to Ian Freeman's sentencing hearing. And, you know, I just after a while, it's I'm trying to find out what the motivate. So on the list. So I know you said it was pages, but I'm just curious if I run a couple of names by you because, you know, I have some thoughts and then I've heard some things. So, I mean, you mentioned Roger. I thought I heard somewhere. I did put it in our public filing when we put in our motion to dismiss. As many names as I could remember to the best of my recollection. I mean, it wasn't like Because the next year and a half, they were just give us information on anybody.

They weren't showing me a list anymore. That was the only time I got a list. It was just we want anybody in crypto. And they just kept saying we want dozens of convictions. And so you go ahead. I can tell you if I recall. No, it's just a few. And part of this is just I've watched some of your other stuff. So these are just Naomi Brockwell. Yeah, she was on those. Was Jeremy Kaufman on the list? I know Jeremy. I don't recall. Patrick Byrne? I believe Patrick was on the list. I believe that's in our finding. Okay.

Those are really the big ones. I guess I'd say Eric Voorhees and Ian Freeman are the only two that I'm curious about because Yeah, I don't know if those ring a bell. You know, it was interesting because at one point, you know, I really started thinking, especially after the case had ended and I had a much better understanding of what was going on. So there is certain players in crypto that were basically turning in all the rest of the players in crypto. And so, you know, clearly the Ethereum know whoever you know that was behind you know there was but um that was getting me prosecuted also knew

that they were trying to get to everybody else like so anybody in crypto that doesn't care about me no problem yeah we don't need to be friends but they were coming after you too right and they knew it and so that they knew that um and then there were two other companies that um you know there was a storm x was the one that falsely accused me um and then there was another company that I was both of which I was instrumental in um that they were threatening to bring as a superseding indictment um and I know I'm not going to mention that one right now but I will they will be probably mentioning them so then I guess the question is so for you were kind of

well this started it went on for three and a half years but this initial thing was in you know what q3 2019 why do you think So we have Executive Order 14067, which was signed on March the 9th, 2022 by Biden, which authorizes a whole-of-government approach to regulating digital assets and the authorization of the expiration of the CBDC. So we know at that point, at 2022, we shouldn't be... should always be surprised about what's going on in the last couple of weeks with you know the arrests of people like roger and what's going on with lightning network and coin mixing services and kyc and everything else we should always be you know surprised to a certain degree but at least we knew

what was going on what was the motivating factor in the third quarter of 2019 for wanting to get as much information on as many people in the crypto space as possible yeah I don't think it actually played out that way. It was... I spoke to my attorneys and clearly I was the target. Because of this free pass and the T-Zero, I don't know what you want to call these because corruption doesn't even do it justice. Just insanity. Anarchy. And so... But I said,

what are they trying to get from me? And it was interesting because he's an old Italian lawyer, this one guy. He was involved in prosecuting Gotti. And he said, you're Sammy the Bull, but you just didn't kill like 100 people. And I said, what do you mean? He said, you know, he said, you're saying, you know, use some expletives in there. You know, that's a clean version of it. But, you know, it was he said, look, they think that crypto is a mafia and that everybody is kind of coordinating their efforts and working together. and that they need somebody to to show them the map the way like sammy the bull you

know that's how they got finally got you know the teflon don you know john goddy because sammy the bull turned and there was only two or three people that understood you know like the whole you know, enterprise, and Sammy the Bull was one of them. And he knew everybody and knew how everything worked, so he could lay it out for them nice and neat. And so that's what they were really expecting from me. But that, not only was that a secondary thing, because they did drop that at some point after about a year and a half, two years, somewhere in that, and they still continued prosecuting me. I'm not so sure how much the SEC,

which was leading the prosecution against me, was really doing that. It was really more... What it appears to be is you have these overly zealous prosecutors that this bag of gold, me, in terms of information, fell into their laps. Now that we've got them, let's get him to talk about all this other stuff so we can become famous. one of those and I'll tell you to the two two main prosecutors is mark beanie uh who's at reed smith right now and um archery specter s-p-e-k-t-o-r right

those two um look at mark beanie mark beanie went to reed smith And he listed on his website, on his bio, that United States versus Nureyev, the first crypto extortion. And he was now marketing himself as a defender, as a criminal defense attorney for people in crypto. while he just was trying to conduct a witch hunt against crypto, right? Then the name of that changed and now it's gone off its bio altogether, right? So, Audrey Spector had what was considered my co-defendant,

but was actually an attorney agent provocateur, FBI informant, plead guilty to and implicate me in an extortion that never happened. And he had to know at the time that he was presenting that to the court. So he presented a fraud to the court, right? And both of them bolted, right? And both of them left the DOJ, you know, at some point, you know, I guess what they figured, you know, this is not going to end well with the fact that I'm not giving in. And I, and I had the, you know, make it look more ludicrous. I, the extortion that they're claiming happened was during a negotiation for,

you know, contract contractual terms, and it was on Skype and video, and I had the entire thing recorded and we gave them the recording. And they were in complete shock because they never expected that I would have this recording. I keep a lot of receipts. And so I gave them this recording. And the person, it's Ari Yu, who used to work at StormX. And she's saying, we're giving you more than you're asking for. That doesn't sound like an extortion, right? You know, there was nothing in there that was an extortion at all. Even with having that, this is the country that we live in.

Even with having definitive proof that I could, that there was no crime, they've got it on video. So like, imagine, you know, there's a murder and there happened to be, you know, on the building, there's a camera, it catches it. And this guy gets accused, but then they look at the camera footage and it turns out it's another guy. But they continued prosecuting the first guy anyway. That's what happened to me. And they actually set trial dates. And there is no method for, this was the really frustrating part, is there was no legal methodology for us to get this information to the judge. We had to wait until and go to a trial.

And then at that point, they could try to get the videos excluded, which means I may not even have them as a defense. But there was no way to show this to the judge. And they were just proceeding with the prosecution. So they've got this completely fabricated case for extortion and they're using this fabricated case and all of their their. the legal process to try to pressure you to give up as much information on, well, anybody that you can, but in particular, knowing that you have these two specific, very important pieces of information regarding the free pass and regarding T zero. So, so now, so now here we are in 2024. So looking back on this, you know, so who,

who ultimately benefits? And I'll say, I'll take a step back. It's, it's, I kind of look at the world in a, all of this technology, blockchain, crypto has a freedom aspect to it and a tyranny aspect. You know, for instance, on the, on the freedom side of it, you have, you know, Raven coin, which is, which allows for tokenization without third parties. It's, it's, it is the Bitcoin, the original version of Bitcoin of tokenization just allows anybody to trade anything of any size wherever. And then you can put layers on top of it for compliance, but, but at the heart of it, it's a bearer asset. And, And Bitcoin is ultimately P2P cash without any third parties.

And that was initially what Bitcoin was. And now we have this other tyranny aspect of this, where the opposite of what Bitcoin was supposed to be is central bank digital currencies, a completely programmable, trackable, monitorable form of currency. that is controlled by central banks and by governments. On the tokenization side, are you familiar with Regulatory Liability Network, RLN? I've heard of it, but I'm not intimately familiar. Well, the reason I'm throwing this out is I'm trying to connect the dots to see if we can figure out what's going on. Because I remember T-Zero, I remember the whole concept. They had a deal with Box, with the Canadian Exchange.

I mean, they were really going to do these security token offerings. And actually had quite a robust pipeline. And then all of a sudden, the entire thing dried up. Well, what they're building with this regulated liability network is it's one ledger that tracks all CBDCs and then all other digital assets. So if you think about this in the future, so you have a security token. You have to register your security tokens. You have to do all the KYC AML stuff. And this is going to be on one common ledger tracked with all of the CBDCs. And this is a pilot that's going on right now between the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of International Settlements, a bunch of large banks.

But I mean, in essence, it's kind of, I looked at it, you know, my background as a serial entrepreneur, the first company I raised a bunch of money and I had 180 angel shareholders. And this was back in the late 90s, which was, which was very complicated and all the paperwork and everything else. And I knew how much time that ate out of my life. I always look to the day where small businesses could easily access capital markets. In fact, one of the things that Ravencoin always talked about, you use this fictional idea of somebody being able to tokenize a lemonade stand. But what we're looking at here the regulatory burden and the cost of the systems that they're putting in

place now isn't really going to, it's going to add more impediments. It's going to add more barriers. It's going to add more cost. It's not actually delivering on any of the promise of what tokenization could be all about. It's actually adding the surveillance piece without the frictionless low cost peer to peer piece. And so that's kind of my map for how I look at this. And I'm just wondering to what extent, if we look back at this, killing off T0 and whatever's happened with Ethereum. I don't know. I'm just throwing that out as a framework, but I guess I want to ask, because you had mentioned this early on. I spoke with some of the developers regarding CBDC and we have this retail

CBDC called Project Hamilton, which actually has a common developer from Bitcoin. One of the developers that worked on SegWit and Lightning Network, is the co-author of the US retail CBDC pilot. No one knows this. This is a piece of information. In fact, if you look at the general public, the chair of the Federal Reserve has said they haven't even decided whether they want to research CBDCs, despite the fact that they've completed three pilots. But I spoke with a dev who used to work on this pilot, and he was claiming to me that somehow Ethereum is going to be involved in all of this. And that didn't really make sense to me because From everything that I know about Ethereum,

it doesn't seem to meet any of the specs of the pilot, which are their published results. So what have you heard regarding Ethereum or maybe consensus as it relates to CBDCs? Well, I was at the largest tech conference in the world. We were talking about some topic and I happened to, it was like a fireside chat, and the interviewer told the audience, everybody remember where you're sitting today. I'm about to tell you something that's going to shock you. I didn't know where she was going, but it was something that I had told her earlier in the morning when we had coffee preparing for our talk. And she said, you know, Stephen believes that

governments are going to start issuing their own cryptocurrencies and replacing cash. And it's going to have detrimental effects of like privacy and all, you know, so forth and so on. And so, you know, we had it. I wasn't expecting that. And I don't know if it was talked about before that. What I do know, though, is after I got finished explaining that, look, this is just logical. I don't have to be a fortune teller. Government's job is to control the people. At least that's how they view it. And this is another tool. So the tool that Satoshi

gave us to free us, the government was like, hey, we could take this to more imprisoned people with CBDCs. She said something quite interesting. She said, out of nowhere, she said, you know, I spoke to Joe Lubin, and he says, what you're saying is FUD. And that's fear, uncertainty, and you're just spreading thoughts, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And that he doesn't believe that in your dystopian empire, future rather, and that maybe in some fringe countries, but certainly not something like in the United States, right? And I responded to that.

But why is Joe discrediting me? It's kind of a bizarre thing. And now you look at it, not only is the United States issuing a CBDC, so that aged pretty well for me, and it didn't age pretty well for dumb Joe. But... dumb and rich Joe, because his consensus is now working with I don't know how many countries on CBDCs. And it's pretty clear to understand that the whole regulatory corruption surrounding Ethereum was not really to capture a smart contracts platform,

right? So if they wanted to do that, they would have made it scale. Now we go back to Roger's argument with Bitcoin. It's the same thing happened with Ethereum, right? But neither one of them was allowed to scale. Both could have scaled, right? And neither one of them chose to scale. JP Morgan had put this thing called Quorum onto it which consensus now owns and jb morgan invested a ton of money into consensus and that would became a direct competitor ripple and so that's cross-border payments um don't like I mean it's it's a longer discussion but it doesn't take too long it doesn't take you know a a lot of connecting dots especially if you control this network right and you

control cross-border payments that you actually you know become the reserve currency um and that reserve currency you know is a cbdc so like if you're going and but it looks the the the reason jp morgan put it on ethereum kind of funny, is that they wanted it to appear as if it was decentralized. So they wanted to put it on a supposedly decentralized net. The joke of it is JP Morgan is more decentralized than Ethereum is. I mean, like, you know, so And in reality, I mean, you know, you probably have a couple of parties just make a decision and do whatever they want with the network.

And so if you look at it from that angle, not from the angle that Ethereum was sold as, but as this is a home where we can put the new monetary system and have our cbdc sit on it looks decentralized so everybody looks like you know we're kind of like doing the fair thing and you know we're not you know um being draconian or whatever but we actually control it although the Chinese also, you know, the CCP entities are also largely in control. So like that's like a big another issue that is almost unexplainable.

But that's kind of like the long and short of why I believe it's a logical reason. And then that's why they had to go after Ripple, because they couldn't catch Ripple. And Ripple was just too far ahead, and its technology was too good. And so they needed to, you know, Quorum was invented in order to be a ripple killer and they just couldn't do it. And so Chris Larson, Brad Garlinghouse, they just did a bang up job. And so they had to slow them down in any way they could. So, you know, on Bill Haman's, you know, on Jay Clayton's way out the door, literally the last day that they were at the SEC, they filed the enforcement action against them.

interesting so so so it does seem like there's there is that obviously there's the the ethereum ripple dynamic but I keep on going back to the fact that this this project hamilton is a you know homegrown project and I've talked to people that now say it's 1.9 million transactions per second and it's it's ready to go basically subject to marketing and legal which means it's where they're waiting for a crisis to put it in. They didn't stop. They published the results up to 2022, but they didn't stop in 2022. So, I mean, maybe all of this is just a way of, of clogging up all of the free markets and, and then allowing, you know, allowing them to build whatever their proprietary thing is,

because the last thing Congress wants to do and the U S government wants to do is give up. And the federal reserve wants to do is give up their monopoly control of money in any way, shape or form, or be beholden to any, any type of structure. So, so when you, all right, so at some point, and I, sorry, I apologize. And I'm jumping around here because there's a lot of different pieces to this. So, so, so this fabricated a case against you ultimately after three and a half years falls apart, right? They dismiss it. Yeah. I mean, we, we filed a motion to dismiss and we showed the documentation of the fabricated evidence that they were trying to use against us, you know, by FBI agents.

And so the government said, I'm crazy and it's not true. They also pointed to the Asian provocateur who pled guilty, who now vacated his plea. And they said, why would he have pled guilty? But now he's not guilty anymore. So there goes that argument. And then after trashing me and telling me I'm crazy, in the very same motion, the government says, we move to dismiss the case with prejudice. I don't think you've ever seen a motion. I don't think a motion like that's ever been written. He's wrong about everything. And they don't address a single... I don't even know how many allegations that we proved with facts.

The FBI agent perjured every single aspect of the criminal complaint in order to get that criminal complaint to get me arrested. They don't address any of that. They don't address any of the fabricated evidence. But they moved to quickly dismiss the case because my belief is that we also at the same time asked for discovery evidence. We hadn't gotten much evidence from them. And so the evidence I think it's pretty clear that evidence is super detrimental, right? So the stuff that's got my name on it. And if you looked at like the emails from the FOIA requests that were released on Hinman,

you could see these guys were not being very careful You're pulling off the corruption of the century. Maybe you should not be doing things on your government email. But they were. It makes you even more concerned about how prevalent is this that they're so comfortable doing it without even trying to hide it. i I think that really is was like the I mean obviously the case blew up right there I mean like what were they gonna do I mean like I'm showing them evidence is fabricated we showed the video of the extortion there was no extortion like

you know what was she gonna do um and so the judge dismissed the case um but their biggest they spent half of that motion saying why I shouldn't get the evidence because they're concerned and that's why one of the reasons I think they dismissed it with with prejudice is they didn't want the judge to say in any way say okay but because we said still we are we actually thought they're out you know like this is probably a first the government moves to dismiss my case We filed a reply motion to that saying, do not grant their motion to dismiss the case because the reasons that they're saying, we're still smearing me,

but we can't prove beyond a reasonable doubt. You can't prove beyond a reasonable doubt because I'm innocent. We proved evidence that they knew I was innocent and had documentation that I was innocent a year before I was arrested. But they don't say, in the interest of justice, he was innocent. We just said we can't prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. So they still tried to smear me on the way out. But that was their concern. And I think that's still their concern. In that same filing, I asked for documentation from the SEC, because we knew the SEC was leading this. And the DOJ, in a court-filed document that you can see publicly filed,

said the SEC was not part of this prosecution. Well, I filed something that's under what's called the Privacy Act, where you can file any federal agency. And if there's something that's personally identifiable, like your social security number, your name, they have to give it to you. It's much more stringent than a FOIA request. It actually has criminal penalties and all kinds of stuff. But it's a sister kind of regulation to the FOIA regulation. And I filed that with the SEC. And the SEC said, yeah, we're going to get it to you. We're going to get it to you. We're going to get it to you. And this went on for a number of months. And then I get a letter saying, we're going to consider

this in three years. but so consider it in three years. They didn't even say they're gonna give it to me in three years, but they had to tell me the volume of information they had. I mean, it was 14 gigabytes. Like for anybody who understands, like 14 gigabytes of data and they're not part of the prosecution, like what is, then what else would they have? And so of course they don't want to give me that. And it's probably not even so much about, it's clear what they did, that they fabricated the case and they prosecuted it as a person. Okay, that can't be the reason that they're keeping this from me. It's my name. I'll give you an example.

There was task forces. My name had to be involved in this. There had to be approvals. These task forces were happening at Treasury, by the way. And Bill Heyman was going every couple of weeks physically to Treasury on a task force, FSOC, something like that. To show you how plugged in they were, in 2014, I think it was May of 2014, some government agency issued a report that analyzed all of the tasks and forces and cryptocurrency initiatives by government agencies in

order to try to collaborate because nobody knew what anybody else was doing. that's fine and but but you know they they list all the agencies that they spoke to and there was a lot of agencies pretty much like you know a litany of agencies and but the first one that you know they're taught you know they said they'd be spoke to you know mem you know people at this agency people spoke to people at such and such agency they the first one though it says We spoke to the governors of the Federal Board of the Reserve. Sorry, I'm saying it improperly, but the governor actually spoke to them directly. Right. So the Fed.

mean like like the head guys the chairman probably yeah I'm assuming the chairman is included in that um actually met with the people that are writing this report in 2014. so that means that cryptocurrencies I mean really it was just bitcoin right I mean there wasn't really much else a few other I mean there were other coins but like you know they were they were play coins it wasn't like anything else was like you know But they were so interested in this that it went that high up. And then I also found not too long ago, and I put it onto my news feed on X, where when I was working with Joe,

when we were starting consensus, that I had, and I had forgotten about this, we had a call with the Federal Reserve, and this is in 2017, I think it was October, 2014. I mean, I put it up there and, and I remember like, why are we talking to the federal reserve? Like, why are they interested in what we're doing? And like, why, why do we want to talk to them? Um, you know, so they were obviously to your point, as much as people think that the government was behind the ball on crypto. I would beg to differ. I think the government was ahead of the industry on crypto. I don't necessarily think

the government invented Bitcoin, but I don't really want to get into that argument. But the point is they were on this really early on because If you read that report, and it's publicly available at crypto-law.com, where John Deaton is located, you can find it there. The amount of task forces and the amount of agencies, this was not something that just started in 2014. This is obviously that had been going on for at least two, three years, which means it started right after Bitcoin came out. So they were on this pretty quickly.

Well, I mean, I think it's pretty clear at this point. Unfortunately, because of the infighting in crypto that they've actually leapfrogged. I mean, we're in a situation right now where there are 134 countries pursuing CBDCs. There are 1.3 billion CBDC accounts globally. There are more CBDC accounts than there are decentralized crypto accounts. So they... I don't know how early they were, but they absolutely caught up. And obviously, you're bringing in some information here that says they certainly weren't that late to the game. And so now what you're doing is you're suing and presumably to be able to get Discovery to be able to actually unravel all of this. Is that right?

Yeah, I mean, so we filed what's called an FTCA, Federal Towards Claim Act. And you actually can only sue agents with like arrest power. So like FBI agents, you can't just, you know, sue anybody like the SEC or whatever. But, and it's, I would say next to impossible, like we had a hard time finding any cases that, because mine's malicious prosecution that actually won, they all get dismissed without going into the specifics of it, you know, this is a high probability chance that this is going

to succeed and they're not going to be able to knock it out. So that means that Let's say they file a motion to dismiss, which is their normal course, and that should get denied because we have the proof to overcome what is necessary under the law. Then the next step is we're entitled to depose people and get discovery. And given the vastness of the activities surrounding my prosecution, which goes from Treasury to SEC, even the New York AG was involved.

And so they tried to set me up. And so the amount of this 14 gigabytes that the SEC has, I don't know how they handle that. It's like they can't stop me from getting it. They can pay the claim. We didn't just make up a number. It's the largest claim in US history. It's $9.6 billion. But it's not for pain and suffering. It's for damages, financial damages that they did. So, you know, it's, it's kind of up to them right now at this point, you know, that if they pay the claim, then I, then I won't be able to

actually get to the discovery. Right. And if they don't pay the claim, then I'd be able to get to the discovery. So there's, you know, there's a game of chicken that's kind of going on and I threw mine in and, you know, I told everybody I'm going to do this. Um, and I'm suing everybody that was involved. you know so I'm a suit stormax that falsely accused me I've got a lawsuit you know going against them michael lady the fbi agent the informant agent provocateur I filed a lawsuit against him um and there's like three or four more that I'm gonna do and we're gonna file lawsuits against every single person and most you know a lot of them are not yeah they're not about the financials

you know none of them actually are about the financials And I don't mean to say that tritely because it's such a big number and people are like, you know, how could it not be about the financials? You know, it's that when you've been through, I've been through, you know, it's like, you kind of like, you know, a lot of things lose their meaning, you know, and you, you know, you want to see justice stop. And so, you know, it's not, it's not even so much that I want to get the discovery. I want, what I really want is, Two things, I want accountability. So people like Handman or Lubin or Vitalik,

or, you know, that's, you know, one group of people and there's other people at the SEC, these prosecutors, you know, whoever that was culpable that they're held accountable. And however they're held accountable, they're held accountable. Some people have immunity and some don't in the government. The second thing that I'm looking for is a level playing field. And that's why, that's what, you know, like the XRP army, like, that's really kind of all, you know, you notice the Ripple case is sort of kind of over, you know, even though it's not, but it is. And they haven't stopped one bit because they were never about the money. They wanted a bubble playing field.

And to me, that's really important. And when you were talking earlier, like in twenty nineteen, there was legislation which was based upon my utility token concept introduced by Warren Davidson in the house called the Token Taxonomy Act. And it gave a safe harbor for utility tokens. So he gave it, you know, and I worked with him on it. And he was like, here, here is a solution to regulate cryptocurrencies in the United States. And it couldn't get out of committee. Yep. I mean, that's a that's a common I met Warren at a conference last year and actually had a chance to chat with him about my book and CBDCs.

I also talked to Ted Cruz and Ted Cruz said there's I mean, this is the challenging thing. Even on something like CBDCs, Ted Cruz can't even get a bill for a vote that says that. We won't allow the Federal Reserve to unilaterally pass a CBDC without Congress, which you shouldn't even need to have that bill in the first place. But he can't even get it up for a vote. Like it's a very frustrating place right now legislatively in terms of, as he described it, the level of the lack of knowledge about how all of this works and I guess the lack of curiosity to learn. I guess that powerful combination and probably the lack of financial incentive given the incumbent financial players

and their role in funding a lot of these campaigns. Yeah, I mean, for me, while I understand, while I understand, I was the first person to talk about CBDCs. I didn't call them that. I called it the crypto dollar or whatever. If there's anybody out there that's not going to back down from a fight, I think I deserve to be on that list somewhere. But I think the fight about whether or not CBDCs are going to happen, I think that's over.

They're going to happen, right? And it's almost like not worth putting your effort in, right? They understand exactly what you're saying, right? You know, they know what the interest is. And, you know, both sides of the aisle, like, you know, have their own, you know, reasons. And they're... ability to control the population is such a great incentive through CBDCs, especially the loss of privacy, right? I mean, they know everything you do, right? And so cameras will be next, right? And so I think there's another way to look at this, right? And there's hope, right?

So it's like, there's going to be, and this is the future that I see for, you know, next 10, 20 years, there's going to be this rise, and we're already seeing it. CBDC is an example of technocracy, right? And social media and social media sharing, you know, the Twitter files and all of that, you know, that's all technocracy. And so that's, you know, using technology they're using technology in order to further imprison the population, control the population and maintain power, right? And so, and let's not think about it as being a US centric thing, right? You know what I mean? It's kind of like a global cartel thing,

you know, every country will be doing it. But here's the good news, right? And this is where the hope lies. And at the same time, If we get our act together and we clean up crypto, and I call it crypto 2.0 because crypto needs to be revamped. There's not even a single dApp worth talking about. there will be this parallel system growing that will be a decentralized system that will be outside of the control of any governmental entity. And that system, it sounds crazy,

but it's not. Decentralized government could end up coming out of that system. Then you'll have these two competing systems. And I think if you look at 10, 20 years, that's really what's going to be happening, these two systems that come on. Now, what had happened, the problem was that, you know, these guys that wanted control got control of the other, the supposed, you know, decentralized, independent, you know, one that we thought was ours, but actually was being controlled by them too. And so, you know, if we actually build our own and that they really are decentralized and you know, We focus not on just the casino aspect,

though they'll become way more valuable by doing this. So any investors should not like the threat. This is actually a really good thing. But we should focus on the functionality that they can deliver. And so what it allows for is, again, going back to the basics, what Satoshi did is he took the middleman. And he did a lot of stuff, but he took the middleman out. So you don't need the bank anymore. And so if a huge system comes up, It was supposed to be Bitcoin. Who knows whether it will or won't be. But if another system comes up and has real, they call it DeFi, but it's kind of a joke so far. But let's say it goes further. Then I think what you'll see

is a moment of truth. And that moment of truth is which system eats, crushes the other. At some point, they're going to clash. And I mentioned this before, but when Gorbachev signed It ended the USSR. The whole world thought this was an equal superpower to the United States, except it had been corroded from the inside. And so once the Berlin Wall fell and we got in there and we said, whoa, there's no bread on the shelves here. This is like a third world country, basically. They were spending all their money on nukes and arms.

And so, to me, the institutions that we're looking at right now that we think are so powerful, and they are, in a sense, are also insanely corroded from the inside. And it wouldn't take... a lot, it would take the right event. You know, I mean, you know, so you look at, you know, George Floyd, you know, why George Floyd? I don't know why it was George Floyd, because there's so many other people that could have been, but that started, you know, an entire movement, right? It was, you see these one incidences, so, and it could be something benign,

it could be something not so benign, but I think One thing is for sure that they're not as strong as they appear to be. And this system eventually, decentralization is too powerful and will overtake centralized services, you know, centralized governing. I think I agree with you conceptually on all of it. I think I view the world very simply as this is, you have technocracy driving one side of it where there's a world where It's all deterministic. You have no free will. It's based on fear. It's based on centralization. And it's based on a scarcity mindset. And the opposite of that is you have a world based on free will,

based on love, based on abundance and decentralization. To me, that is ultimately the big battle that's going on. I think the time scale here is a lot more compressed. In fact, next week, I'm going to give a talk because I... With what happened with Roger and the crackdown just in the last two weeks in particular, in addition to everything that's been going on for the last two years, that signals to me that CBDCs are close. And so what I'm going to call for is, and I've been talking to people about this, we need to build open source multi-coin wallets that are easy to use, where the end user is a boomer and it has to be able to compete with Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay,

and to build a multi-coin point of sale system that equally will enable a merchant to have a very easy to use interface that can accept multiple coins and restricted to a set of coins. I mean, or at least the initial focus that gives you a combined transaction per second and a cost factor that is actually competitive. Because the way I think they're going to roll out CBDC is the way they rolled out tarp uh the patriot act and the cares act it's going to be in an emergency and it'll pass with bipartisan support I i spent enough time talking to people in congress if there were a terrorist attack or a cyber attack they would say unless we implement the cbdc everybody's going to

die and they'll probably pass it on a voice vote that's just the sad reality of it I mean I think if we look at covid COVID tearing everything out. So I'm going around the country trying to onboard people today, whether it's crypto gold or silver, it's a patchwork solution. And unfortunately, I think had Bitcoin not been hijacked, we'd be in a completely different sphere right now. But I still think it's possible that we can at least provide an alternative. So when that emergency happens, it's not either you have CBDCs or you starve, you're going to have CBDCs or hopefully something that has a user-friendly multi-coin wallet and point of sale system. So to me,

that's at least that's kind of the, the, the backup part of this. Oh, I know it's, I know it's getting late. I really do appreciate your time. I do have a couple of questions, just a few more. If you don't, if you don't mind just a few more, I was going to ask you. So I, you know, It's really hard to explain this to people. I've been involved and I spent five and a half years in litigation and it was civil. So it was nothing like what you've experienced. And I know people, Ian Freeman, you know, it's almost a pastime here. We're either going to see our fellow freestaters at an event like Porkfast or we're going to see them at a court hearing. But Can you explain the personal

toll that this had? To express to people, just to understand, this is a fabricated case to keep you quiet. What did this do to you and your life and your family? So, it was... The system is set up for this purpose and it accomplished, it was utter and complete 100% destruction of every aspect of my life. And they're very systematic about how they do it and dismantling each part of your life,

cutting you off from the system. And I couldn't get a bank account. Like, literally, every time I opened up a bank account, they closed it, right? And like, why were they not letting me have just this checking account? But, you know, that was only part of it. It was, you know, I'm working 18 hours a day trying to uncover this, and I was able to uncover this, you know, and then I was able to uncover the Evegate thing. Then I was able to uncover the T-Zero thing. I mean, like, these are a lot of rabbit holes I'm going down, and these are kind of unprecedented things. you know, corruptions and they kind of happened organically as I wasn't expecting any of this. And then there's the, you know,

on-chain fraud, right? And that's a whole nother story. I've got, you know, if you have children in a situation like this, you know, forget that. You lose your relationship. I lost relationships with close friends, family members. It's kind of like thinking about a tsunami coming through your life. and everything. So imagine every person in your life, every part of business, all your social, your entire social construct, and all of it just gets washed away. Then when you look around, I don't think I could count

on more than one hand the people that stuck around. You know, before that, like, you know, I would go to a conference and I need to bring two assistants because of how many people wanted to talk to me. And now it was like, you were dead, except you're still walking on the earth, right? But like nobody acknowledged that you were alive and you've got thousands of articles that you're an extortionist, you know? the health toll that this takes is tremendous, right? The only one thing that I was able, really able to do other than unwind this thing was somebody that was involved in the process with me, who's been in the system

for like 40 years. He said, you did something I've never seen anybody do. He said, you never let them get into your head. And so at no point, despite not even finding any examples to point to of dismissing a case with prejudice, which is what I was, my only objective was, at no point did I not believe 100% that that was going to happen. You know, and every lawyer that I had, except for one, Michael Scotto, I fired. And these are celebrity lawyers. And every single one of them were telling me to take a plea. And knowing that I'm innocent, I tell them I'm going to take a plea. So, you know, let's just put it this way.

You come out a completely different person than you went in. And if you did it right, and I tried to think about it, pretty carefully while I was doing it, hopefully come out a better person. And, you know, I'm not looking, something I was, one thing I would make clear is that like everything that I'm doing is not benefiting me in any way. It's actually harming me. I don't get any benefits out of it. And none of this stuff benefited any of my lawsuits. I just had to delay them. I have a huge project that we're going to be announcing, which is an immersive AR experience. It's a digital twin of the entire Earth called Clone,

which I haven't announced, and it's technology I've worked on for a dozen years. But I'm not doing any of this for revenge. you know, because I knew that the revenge bucket has a hole at the bottom of it and it will never be filled, right? So what I am doing it for is accountability, the best that I can do to contribute to having a level playing field. And the lawsuits are really kind of just, you know, the financial aspects are like, I'd just like to be reimbursed for the money that you cost me. You know, that's about it. Well, you seem remarkably calm after going

through all of this. And I applaud you for everything that you've done to stick through this and to remain principled and not focused on the revenge aspect of it. I think what you're doing is amazing. exposing this is huge. And even doing this interview today, I, people don't understand what the government is, how they're abusing their power. I, the average person is so far removed from what your experience is that, that, I mean, they're still thinking that this is whatever was in a, you know, some indoctrination they got in a public school textbook. And that, that is, that is far from, far from the truth. I I'm, you know, fascinated by, um, All the stuff that you've done, I mean,

major contributions so far to blockchain and AI and 46 patents. I look forward to learning more about Clone. Where can people, I mean, obviously people will be following the lawsuits, but where can people follow? You can go to clone.io. The clone.com we own too. I don't know if it's redirecting yet, but you can go in there. It'll give you a little, it's a glimpse into what we're doing. It's part of the Crypto 2.0 that I think can really bring back this decentralized and non-controlled systems.

We believe that the next version of the internet or this thing is going to be an immersive environment. And the one that really makes sense is one that looks like the real world. So we're going to make a digital twin of the real world. I happen to have built and patented technology that does that. in a number of different ways in machine vision, which is a section of AI. And it does a lot of other things, but it's probably where a lot of the dApps will be written for.

and you're not going to be looking at screens. Apple came out with this ProVision and hardware is going to go away or just decrease in importance. Your computer screen will be in front of you and you'll just be able to use it and then just remove it when you have the glasses. The glasses are going to shrink down to like Ray-Ban size. So you can take a look at that. we'll be announcing a lot more soon. That's great. Well, I've always thought about applying this blockchain tech stack for human civilization within a virtual environment. I mean, I guess it's kind of a way of simulating what a different governance structure might look like, but, you know.

So that's a really good point. You know, one of my, I have these ulterior motives, right? But, you know, I think they're good. They're for humanity. One of the things that I, I recognized my whole life as a civilization, we've never really had the opportunity to question our values. Let's take war, for example. Our generation, for millennial, there's war that has been happening. Somebody at some point made, it was the first war, and at that point they decided war was okay, right? And we've never questioned it ever since, right? So what we're doing is we're

giving a construct of a very familiar environment it looks like the earth you know um and you can make you know your house a digital twin of your house immersive to a digital twin and you can go into that um except we get to re-question like you know this is you know uh the structure but this you know the the spirit and the breath of it and the governance of it is left up to society. So we can now decide, is war allowed? So maybe we say, no, in clone order. We'll leave it up to people to decide. War is not allowed.

The relevance of that, why is that important? If you look at your screen time right now, for most people, they're pretty embarrassed by how many hours a day they're on their screen. If you imagine that as you dive into your phone and you're in this immersive environment, you probably will be spending more time. No, you will be spending more time. I'll go on record and say that. In the immersive environment, then you will be in the actual physical world, not clicking the glasses on and off. And when you're in that world and then you come back to this world, right? People are gonna start questioning like, I like it better over there. you know, why do I like it better over there?

You know, and like war is just, you know, one macro example, right? You know, you could get to all kinds of examples, right? And hopefully that, those decisions, you know, get pulled in, you know, and I know that, you know, people have started like these little mini utopia, like Burning Man, it's like supposed to be a utopian society and go there for a week and then you're supposed to bring it back to the world. And it's, you know, set up on some great ideals, right? But, you know, what if you had eight billion people or like, you know, a large chunk of them actually in this utopian type society? Hopefully I should be careful when I say utopian society. Hopefully society makes the

right choices this time. That we learn from our mistakes. And we don't decide that someone like I is going to make decisions for all of us. We're going to have decentralized governance and figure out how that works. And when you do that in this environment, Now you can take that. And this is where I'm talking about this growing and crypto 2.0. This is real life. You're feeling it. You're building it. And then it's then then movements start. Right. And then they can bring over, you know, into the physical world. Yeah, no, I like that a lot. I think a lot about.

first principles and and kind of similar to what you're saying if you made a few fundamental adjustments to the way you think about think about the world even think about time uh it could have a big impact uh is there anything else that that you want to uh kind of parting words or thoughts that you want to share um you know it's this isn't you know I mean it's I appreciate your time. I appreciate everybody that's been listening. For anybody who's heard my story more than once, I apologize. The issues, this isn't... I think the real take-home is this is not a crypto issue. Roger aside, that's a crypto issue.

But in general like this level of corruption reared its ugly head in crypto we don't know where else it's happened you know it could have been way worse in many other places and we just have no idea right and I just happen to stumble on to these different things fall down these rabbit holes and I'm not sure why this you know I am where I am right but but I am um and understand that this is like so in our face and so clear and so prevalent that this is not an exception to the rule. This is the system that we're under, right? And so now people need to

start really thinking about and questioning that system and questioning, do we, you know, I think one takeaway that I had was I don't live in the country that I thought I lived in. I thought China was really bad and we were really open. I'm like, no, they can throw you in a van just like in China and just prosecute you. But for one in a million thing that happened that I happened to get lucky, otherwise I'd be spending the rest of my life in prison. How is this any different than countries that we look down upon? Probably the best I can say is, and this hurts me to say it because I'm a huge patriot

and I'm willing to die for this country. I'm grateful for everything this country has given me, but the best I can say is we may be just better marketers. We came up with McDonald's and Disneyland, and we also came up with, we're spreading freedom around the world. but are we spreading, you know, is it really freedom? And do we really have it at home? And so that's hopefully people just think about that. All right. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you for everything that you've done for tech and everything that you're doing to, to expose what's going on with, with the federal government. And thank, Look forward to chatting with you soon, and hopefully people take notice of this,

and hopefully Roger isn't about to enter a similar situation that you experienced for three and a half plus years. We'll do what we can to help him. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. All right. Have a good night. Good night. Actually, can you stay on for one sec? Sure.