The Aaron Day Show Episode 003

Hello, everyone. Can anybody hear me? There we go. All right. Well, I'm going to get started. I haven't actually heard from Roger yet. So I'm going to get going and hope that he pops in or maybe we might have to reschedule. But I have some things that I can discuss actually at the beginning prior to, to the interview with Roger anyway. So I will get going with that and then we will, we will see what happens with Roger. So, To begin with, not familiar with The Aaron for those of you that are Day Show or what all of this is about, I'm going to give you a little bit of background.

I'm a serial entrepreneur who turned complete liberty activist when my second company was destroyed by Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, and the DOJ back in 2008. And so I've been a hardcore liberty activist from that point forward. I moved to New Hampshire as part of the Free State Project. I have been very involved in political activism. I got my first Bitcoin in 2012. I learned about Bitcoin from Free Talk Live, hosted by Ian Freeman and Mark Edge, and also saw Roger for the first time either in 2011 or 2012 at a Liberty Forum Free State Project event. In 2019, after realizing political activism was

a waste of time. I went all in on crypto. I exited fiat currency entirely, moved out of a 6,000 square foot house, downsized everything, and have been fully focused on working towards freedom through sound money. After COVID happened and several other developments involving people that I know personally in crypto, I started researching what was going on, not only with COVID tyranny, but also with the crackdown on crypto and realized that this entire crackdown is designed to basically usher in central bank digital currencies. And in researching central

bank digital currencies, I realized that these really are the single biggest threat to human freedom. Basically, once the government can have a programmable form of digital money that they can monitor and censor at will, we essentially will have lost our freedom and our free will. So based on that, I wrote a book. I actually ran for president to bring awareness to this issue. And I've been going around the country, educating people about both the threats of CBDC and how we can do something about it, which is by adopting self-custody crypto gold and silver and using those for day to day commerce. Um, I want to take a step back and put a

little bit of perspective on all of this. So if you go back to the pre Bitcoin days, uh, Bitcoin was really developed, um, in some respects as a reaction to the financial crisis in 2008. So if you look here, you can see we had mortgage foreclosures. We had all of the activities with investment banks and, um, and mortgages and derivatives. And so that really sparked the launch of Bitcoin, the ability to have sound money, to have peer to peer cash that wasn't controlled by a central bank that couldn't be inflated forever. The idea was to put rein in central bank tyranny, to rein in government tyranny.

Well, fast forward now to the modern era. these are all things that have I mean, happened just since Bitcoin was launched. Assange wasn't in prison. pre-Bitcoin. Snowden wasn't in Russia pre-Bitcoin. We have now a world war situation brewing on multiple fronts in the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the Middle East. We have businesses that have been shut down. We've had mask mandates. We've had vaccine mandates. We've had TikTok dances. We've been mocked the whole time. This is essentially the state of play coming off of when Bitcoin was created and launched in 2009. And the future that we're, our future trajectory is much worse even than,

than where we are today. we're looking at social credit scores, I mean, central bank, digital currencies, vaccine passports, you know, they want us to eat bugs. They want us to live in pods. I mean, literally the new diet guidelines involve substituting beef protein with actual insect protein. So this is actually on the agenda. And this is not a theoretical idea. Everything that I'm talking about is actually happening. It's concrete. Ross Ulbricht, prior to 2009, obviously wasn't in federal prison serving two life sentences plus. Ian Freeman, who I mentioned I learned about crypto and Bitcoin from, I went to his sentencing hearing.

He is now in federal prison for eight years just for the act of voluntarily selling Bitcoin. Jeremy Kaufman, who's another free state or his business library, which provided censorship resistant free speech, basically an alternative to YouTube, was targeted and destroyed. the sec and then tomorrow at noon I'm interviewing steven naryoff who you might have heard about him recently he was involved very early on in the development of ethereum he was targeted by the doj the doj essentially made up a bogus extortion charge against him told him he would never see his kids kids for decades unless he again or wouldn't see his

spilled the dirt on other leading figures in cryptocurrency space. to him tomorrow about that And I'm going to be talking aspect of it in particular, because I know Naomi Brockwell and I suspect some other people that are very much pro-liberty, pro-free speech are the ones that the DOJ was looking for dirt on. So Stephen is now suing the federal government for $9.6 billion based on that experience. But a lot of what's going on talk about today relates to and what we're going to battles within crypto and forks and different approaches. But I think one thing to put in perspective is what's happened since 2009,

because we don't exist in a vacuum. Crypto doesn't exist in a vacuum. Since 2009, you can see here the free market, the traditional financial markets have actually come up with competitive offerings. They have Venmo, PayPal, Google Pay, Zelle, FedNow, and soon we're going to have X payments. And they're doing tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars of transaction volume. So I remember the first time I got my Bitcoin, when I first got my Bitcoin, I realized how powerful it was. Somebody sent me money without any third party in the middle, without any bank, without any government. And it was nearly free and instant. And the actual product itself, Bitcoin,

BTC, has degraded. It's no longer as good a product as it was in 2009, and it's not competitive with what traditional finance has put together. But the more alarming development is what's going on with central bank digital currencies, which again is why I'm doing everything that I'm doing right now. I was unaware of exactly how accelerated the pace of development was for central bank digital currencies. Today, there are 134 countries at various stages of researching, piloting, launching CBDCs. There are now 1.3 billion CBDC accounts, which is more than the number of

of crypto decentralized crypto accounts. And so this has absolutely skyrocketed. There were only 35 countries at the very early exploratory stage of CBDCs in just 2020. And what's more alarming actually to me is how far developed CBDCs are in the United States. President Biden signed executive order 14067 on March the 9th, 2022. And that authorized the exploration of a CBDC. It also authorized the whole of government approach to regulating all digital assets. And so we're seeing this whole of government approach, the crackdown that Ian Freeman experienced with five federal government

departments basically breaking in his doors and spending years Going after him. We're seeing that with local bitcoins being shut down, with most of the exchanges being shut down and the ones that are left are either being people are being sued either civilly or criminally. You're seeing even with FedNow, which was launched last year, which is basically a real time exchange. payment system between banks. Well, two of the banks that went under, Signature and Silvergate, had offerings that were competitive to Fed now. So I think one could probably make the case that those banks, there was an intentional run on those banks and that the Federal Reserve and others had a very vested

interest in making that happen. So there's an executive order. We know that. And we know that They're willing to play dirty to try to implement these CBDCs. They've also done three CBDC pilots in the United States. One, which is called Project Hamilton, was a joint venture between the MIT Multimedia Lab and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. And what you have to understand about that pilot is they've actually built a CBDC that can do 1.8 million transactions per second. So I want to reflect on that for a second. So the current traditional financial system can do about 50,000 transactions per second. BTC can do seven transactions per second, and we can discuss Lightning Network,

and we will further in this discussion. But they've actually already done a pilot that does 1.8 million transactions per second. All of these CBDCs that have been developed so far, they're all permissioned. They're not permissionless like Bitcoin where anybody can use them. These are actually controlled from the top down and they're programmable. So the retail CBDC has been developed. A wholesale CBDC called Project Cedar was piloted in the fourth quarter of last year. And then there's this thing called Regulated Liability Network, which is actually worse than the other two pilots. Regulated Liability Network is essentially a ledger that will track all CBDCs

and all digital assets. So imagine a situation where the only currency you're legally allowed to use to buy and sell things is CBDC, and you have to register all of your other digital assets in a registry that can be monitored, censored by multiple third parties. And so that's essentially what they're building with regulated liability network. And so my concern with this is, and I mentioned I ran for president, not because I thought there was any chance of winning, but to raise awareness of this. There's really no resistance to stopping a CBDC in the United States. We are dealing with a situation where it will

probably be implemented like the Patriot Act, like TARP, unlike the CARES Act. So the Patriot Act was implemented 45 days after 9-11. We got TARP 18 days after Lehman Brothers collapsed. And the $2.2 trillion CARES Act was passed 16 days after COVID was declared a pandemic on a voice vote. And some of these same people are actually still in Congress that have voted for all three of these pieces of legislation. Part of running for president I traveled around the country and I talked to other people in congress including the pro supposedly pro crypto people and basically what they told me was there

really isn't there aren't even the votes to block the federal reserve from violating the constitution and subverting congress in rolling out of cbdc ted cruz has tried to put that forward twice uh once last year and now he's trying to put it forward again this year but he even told me It's dead in the water. And so from a political perspective, if you look at the last election, 100% of US Senate incumbents won reelection and 94.5% of House reps won reelection. So it's Trump versus Biden. So a rehash of the tyranny starting with COVID at the executive level. And Congress is going to be basically 97, 98% the same.

We really can't count on Congress or even using the political process to stop this. And so what I've done is The Final Countdown, I've written this book, and it describes in detail the threat of CBDCs, why they're being pushed, the history of it, the history of fiat. But then it goes into explanations about crypto gold and silver, how they can be used as alternatives. um, for day to day transactions. And I have been going around the country doing workshops. You can see, you can go to day 2024.com and, and you can see these workshops that are based on the book. So at the end of the workshop, um, people will actually walk away with a self custody crypto wallet with some crypto in it.

They will walk out with a a gold back. So if you haven't seen these, it's one 1000th of an ounce of gold. So you can actually use gold now as a medium of exchange. And then we'll have some silver as well. And so this is the best solution I've come up with, which is the best way since we can't stop politically, is is to actually start using alternatives and to take direct action. And this has led me into why we're talking to Roger. I will say Roger isn't here yet. I know he's traveling, so I'm not sure if there was a, there might've been a disconnect on time zone. So I'm still gonna give him So I'm gonna chat a little a little bit more time. bit longer than I otherwise might,

hoping that he chimes in. But part of the book and part of my process for recommending alternatives to people has been to look at the fact that If we're going to compete with fiat before it gets forced into CBDC, we need to have a competitive offering. We need to be able to handle a similar transaction volume. If people end up exiting the dollar kind of in an emergency and moving into then we need to have the these alternatives, scale and the capability of handling that scale. And so in my book, I recommend, you know, I haven't been a maximalist. I've never been a maximalist, but I recommend a handful of proof of work cryptocurrencies that are decentralized, didn't do a fundraise.

So we don't have to worry about the government cracking down on them, but that can also scale. And so this comes into talking about transactions per second. So obviously I've used BTC. I actually used BTC for day-to-day commerce from 2009 until 2017 when it became not cost effective. And so I've been looking for alternatives. And since 2019, the coin that I've used the most has actually been Bitcoin Cash, not because I picked Bitcoin Cash for any particular reason other than it was actually the most useful in terms of it's easy to get and it's actually easy to spend, in particular using

services like BitPay and others. I've been very closely following the BSV drama. In fact, I've, I've been involved with the BSV community as well. I am not, uh, you know, again, I'm, I'm for scale and followed the trial every day of the trial. I watched, uh, very carefully to see what was going on with that, because at one point I thought BSV might be part of a solution to CBDCs. And from my perspective on this issue, there had been several problems. One, all of the lawfare against developers and exchanges and everything else has actually made it to date very difficult to use BSV. it's not available in any exchanges I mean,

in the United States. Some of the retail vendors that used to use it and some of the gift card options have slowly tapered away. And, and so, you know, and then we have this, this conflict, internally on the big block side, you know, but there are good people in, in BSV. I, you know, I think Craig and Calvin are, are make that chain difficult to work with, people and good ideas and but there are actually good good technology there. And I would be very interested to see what Roger has to say and see if big blocker communities there's any way to get the talking and working together. And so when I was excited about Roger's book, got it right away, read it like the first

night that I got it, and I posted a mini review of it, and immediately was bashed. I've been a political activist for a long time, so I'm used to people kind of going after me. But immediately, Adam Back blocked me. I had Samson Mao block me. I had basically many of the people that... Roger discusses and even quotes directly in the book, their immediate reaction was to block, to not even have a discussion about it. And so then I've had name calling. I've had every other thing that you can possibly imagine. My social media accounts were hacked. I think that's unrelated. So I'll give that a kind of benefit of the doubt. But nevertheless,

it's been a difficult situation in terms of seeing the reaction. On the other hand, the positive news is about what's in this book. people are very nervous And the book itself is incredibly fact-based. I mean, given what Roger's gone through in terms of his background and history of being Bitcoin Jesus and basically spreading Bitcoin, being the first investor in Bitcoin startups, and then going through these controversial chain splits with Bitcoin Cash and then being sued by Craig Wright, he didn't have to write this book. He certainly doesn't need the money. I've known Roger for 13 years, and anybody that has followed him knows he is

absolutely committed to voluntary exchange, and he's committed to stopping government tyranny, and that's why he's raising the alarm bells, knowing that that he's going to meet with the same controversy, uh, if not more coming out with this book. So now with this said, I, Roger's still not here, so I'm, I'm not sure what to do. Um, I think maybe we'll give it another, we'll give it another nine minutes. And, and if he doesn't show, um, we will reschedule, but, um, in any event, I, I can't express enough, uh, or recommend highly enough, getting the book and reading the book.

It actually goes through with facts and with references exactly what happened from 2009 until 2017. And I think most people aren't aware. I think probably a lot of the people listening to this now are already in crypto and you're kind of like, oh, well, one of the common things that I hear is, oh, we're rehashing the same thing that happened from 2015 to 2017. But the thing is, I've traveled to 20 states giving talks on my book. And you can see this picture here. This was actually of all places, Silicon Valley, 350 people showed up to listen to me talk about the

dangers of central bank digital currencies. And I always ask people, I do polls throughout the talk. And here's some interesting results. So when you get outside of crypto Twitter, when you get outside of the space and you start talking to people, a lot of these are boomers. A lot of these are people that, because of COVID tyranny and because of inflation are asking questions and getting engaged and they're pissed off and they're trying to figure out what's going on. So these are people that actually have financial means and they've just woken up to kind of the magnitude of what we're dealing with in terms of overreach and of government authority. So when I survey them,

more people have heard of Sam Bankman Freed than Satoshi Nakamoto, and it's not even close. So the general public has no idea who Satoshi Nakamoto is. The majority of people don't know that cryptocurrency can be used for day-to-day commerce. That use case is not something that people are even aware of. They only know about it as a speculative asset. Usually, actually, And because of the SBF connotation, it usually has kind of a sketchy connotation as well. But people don't know anything about fork wars. They don't know about Bitcoin cash. They don't know about any of this.

And so the actual market, you know, I'd like to say we're so early because, I mean, people like to... We are early in the sense that the general public... is not aware of or using cryptocurrencies for daily transactions. We're late in that the people that do know it can be used for this purpose, the banks, companies, Venmo, the Federal Reserve, the central banks, they're aware of it. And they've used the hijacking and the infighting to basically leapfrog everything that we're doing. So now we started off in an offensive position, having a better product. And now we are on the defense having to basically fight our way to stop digital tyranny.

And so that's kind of where we are. And so I like to say, Roger's still not here, but remember who the enemy is. Again, there's going to be a lot of infighting, but we're really fighting against Larry Fink, Augustus Carstens from the Bank of International Settlements, Jerome Powell, Klaus Schwab. These are the people that want to centralize money. These are the people that want programmable money. These are the people that want social credit scores. If we don't zoom out and really take a look at who we're up against, then we're going to be sitting here celebrating our relative positions or relative market caps, not realizing that we may have won some trivial battle, but the war is definitely

not going our way. So that is a longer intro than I wanted to do. And I apologize, Roger has still not responded. I think I will... Well, I guess I'll take some questions. If people want to ask me questions, and I'll save all of the Roger-related questions for when we reschedule with Roger. But if you want to ask me some questions related to the things that I've been talking about with CBDCs in this broader context, I'm happy to answer that. If not, happy to cut this short now and reschedule. Let me see what we have here.

having this point here bch has never been associated with craig wright he was exiled from bch and started bsv that's a whole separate I so the book itself I guess I'll talk a little bit about the book um just kind of my my perspectives on it so it covers primarily it does talk about the early days of Bitcoin and kind of what the purpose is. And it goes through the white paper and a lot of these other things, but most of the focus is, is regarding kind of the, uh, what Roger calls the hijacking of Bitcoin itself. So I know I live this. anybody must have PTSD from I mean, December of 2017 when all of a sudden transaction fees were $52 and you had

to wait eight days to, um, to clear a transaction. So it was at that point in time that there was a big split in the community with respect to small blocks, layer two solutions and everything else. And so he kind of walks through in detail what happened with all of the different iterations and attempts to do things like Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic, Segwit 2X, which was the original idea and agreement was to implement Segwit and then six months after, double the block size. And so there was... So he goes through all of that and it's kind of fascinating to see the details of it. And as much as I followed a lot of it,

I was unaware of the specifics and they're horrifying when you look at it because... when you read the white paper and if you have any kind of an economics background, you know that it was designed to be an economic system and that it's incentives that drive behavior to secure the network. And it's kind of moved towards almost a technocratic view where the devs really do have a lot of control, have exercised incredible control over this protocol and, you know, in ways that people probably don't realize. And so everybody likes to talk in general about outsource, you know, open source software and how great it is.

But at the same time, you know, what are the incentives for developers? I mean, who's really going out? source projects that have There are a lot of open all kinds of holes. People aren't, necessarily just voluntarily going out and for free doing security analysis of software. You still are dealing with people. And so there's a whole set of questions around how do you fund developers? And in the case of BTC, there are actually a lot of questions around who funded the developers, who actually was responsible for funding a lot of the changes that happened to BTC. And so he goes into detail on that in terms of Bitcoin Foundation and then MIT stepping in and then Blockstream,

you know, essentially from there. And so it is interesting to sit back and kind of think about, oh, okay, well, yeah, how are these devs getting funded? Who are these devs? What are their incentives and their motivations? Because Bitcoin itself is an incentive-based system, but you have devs that have incentive and the dev incentives based on who's different than the funding them may be incentives of the entire network. and the entire economic system as outlined in the white paper. And so that's, that's something that he describes in great detail. He does not go in to detail in this book. I suppose there could be a second book. There's not a lot about BSV.

There's not a lot about the BSV drama. And I did a, my second podcast was actually about, it was, it was shortly after the, uh, preliminary decision, um, against Craig and kind of what the implications were for that. But that's not really touched on in the book. That's a whole other separate situation. So, all right, I'm gonna answer some of these questions. Let's see. What was your first purchase using Bitcoin P2P? I bought a gift certificate. I don't know if it was my first one or not. I'm trying to remember what exactly my first one was. Um, it was probably a restaurant in New

Hampshire, but I remember buying gift cards. Um, and I also remember I used Bitcoin a lot for direct political activism. So I formed a super PAC in New Hampshire and we helped get a hundred people elected. And so we basically had a field operation. We had people throughout the state going out and handing out campaign literature and everything else. And we were actually paying the campaign staff using. Bitcoin. So we raised Bitcoin. We were paying people in Bitcoin. So, I mean, that tells you how long ago that was when that was a thing that you could do. And so 2017 was very, was very demoralizing from the standpoint of, oh, there was this cool thing that I could actually use and do some,

I'm not Survasive or subversive things, but but things that were it's kind of a cool way to introduce people to being paid using Bitcoin. And that was sad to see. I see a question here. How come CBDCs are being developed in secret? They're not all over the news. So the media doesn't cover this. So I've done a lot of political activism. I've actually gotten a fair amount of press coverage in the back in the past. And. When I ran this time, my main message was, you can't see the shirt. It's like bank run now. It's halt CBDC, stop World War III, end the Fed, which I thought would be provocative, even if not to provoke a, hey, this guy's got a tinfoil hat.

But basically, I put together a bank run manifesto. I sent it out to 3,000 people in the press, including people that had covered me in the past. They do not want to touch CBDC. this idea of people moving money out of the banks. They do not want to touch any story regarding the history of fiat currencies and how fragile the banking system is. The mainstream media absolutely will not touch this. Furthermore, the stuff that I said, and you can look all of this up and it's in my book, you can look up Project Hamilton, you can look up Project Cedar, you can look up Regulated Liability Network. It's all there. All of this is in the public. But the press never covers it. And in fact, even FedNow,

the way that was rolled out, that was rolled out like really quickly for a financial system to to put in place a whole new real time payment system. And so they basically put that out and. They got that done in like 90 days with very little fanfare, but in reality, you know, it has the ability to really cut into Visa, MasterCard and a lot of the existing offerings. Also, whenever you see the chairman of the Federal Reserve interviewed about this, he'll say things like, well, we haven't even decided if we want to pursue a CBDC. So he's literally lying. He's just directly lying in the press. He knows they've completed CBDC pilots.

They've completed three pilots. In fact, the Project Hamilton CBDC is At the end, they said, well, look, we have the technology working. The only thing that we need to figure out now is the marketing and the legality of it, which to me means they're waiting for a crisis to usher it in. Which, by the way, when I watch the news, I'm waiting at any particular moment in time. What is the crisis going to be? Is it a cyber attack? Is it a... Something in the Middle East is a terrorist attack, but they've already drafted legislation. There's already stuff moving through even this week. The way they're going to implement CBDCs is they're going to say either for cyber reasons or other reasons. Cash.

and cryptocurrencies are a threat because of money laundering and terrorism. both political parties to sign off on it. And they're going to get They've already drafted the legislation and they have the technology. That's why, that's why I'm like sending, setting off the alarm bells on you know, this and doing what I'm doing because people don't know. And you're not going to find out about it in the news, even though everything that I'm saying, please do independently verify for yourself. Uh, you'll see that it's absolutely, um, Absolutely happened. are you having more of your I see here, events in different cities such as Orlando? Yes. My goal is to do as many of these workshops as I can.

And if you go to day2024.com, there's a signup page and I'll collect your email address. Basically, I need help arranging these. And so the one that I'm doing in California, we have four different... cost as low as possible. So I'm trying to keep the So If you're interested in attending, fine. If you also can help in your area in terms of finding a location or finding some other partners in the area that might be willing to help promote the event, this is 100% of what I spend my time doing. So any help in that regard, it would be very much appreciated. So please let me know if you're in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania. Um, yeah.

So please again, go to day 2024.com and, you know, shoot me your email address. So we actually have hundreds I'm actually trying. country right now that have of people across the expressed interest in this workshop. So right now I'm actually trying to spend, I'm figuring out where the best place, what the logistics are that will optimize getting the most amount of people there. Is there a CBDC that has developed to have full ZK privacy? Not that I'm aware of. In fact, privacy is not So I'm going to say this because this is frustrating for me with respect to kind of Bitcoin and CBDC. So on the BTC side, and there's a quote from the Bitcoin Standard Guide. This narrative has shifted

from P2P electronic cash for the world to it's going to be a store of value and that central banks are going to back fiat or governments are going to back fiat. currency with BTC and that's nobody's moving towards sound money. you may hear the bricks and some I mean, other people talk about moving towards gold or silver, but in reality, what's going on, if you actually look at what's going on with, for instance, the UN agenda, 2030 development goals and ESG, the actual end state for this is more centralized government moving towards one world government with one digital currency. And that digital currency is actually intended to be backed by carbon credits.

And this concept of flipping the entire economy from being a price-based system to a energy credit-based system goes all the way back to 1931 with the technocracy inc movement. So when you saw the big ESG push, which is part of the big UN agenda, when you buy airline tickets now, it will tell you basically how green the flight is and what the carbon credits is. That's the basis for how they think society should be operated. The entire thing is based on, on a scarcity based system. And they basically, so your social credit system and your digital currency are all going to be in this self-contained system where energy consumption and energy

production is all in a closed system that they manage and use to kind of run society from the top down. So BTC is not going to be like central banks are not sitting there. Governments aren't sitting there saying, Oh gee, We really want transparency and we really want sound money. Nobody's actually moving in that direction. And so I think the idea that BTC would be what backs a currency is absurd. And on the flip side, and this was frustrating for me, I will say, because again, I liked the BSV big block stuff and I like a lot of the people and a lot of the stuff that they're building, but Craig Wright was going out and saying that... his chain is going to be the only chain and everything

is going to run on it and there can only be one chain and all central banks are going to use his chain and first of all they're not there are 1.3 billion uh cbdc accounts globally no one's using bsv they're all looking for permissioned solutions and I understand that his argument is that okay you you have one protocol for the internet and and everybody shares that and it doesn't make sense to have multiple but we're talking about money Governments are not interested in parting with their control over the money supply. It's a completely different analogy. So whereas I thought BSV might be something that people could use as an alternative to CBDCs,

they've been out actually pushing this as a primary use case. They filed patents and it's just like, so I'm just venting a little bit of frustration there. This has been a bit of a, a difficult situation to kind of deal with. And so, you know, Roger's book coming out and actually the developments with BCH are actually great because, because frankly, you know, BCH, maybe Monero and a couple of others, we only have like three or four different options that can actually get us to the transactions per second needed to be able to be a viable alternative to fiat. So that's why I was really, um, I was very excited about the book and very excited about what the BCH community is doing.

And again, I don't know if there's a way to, I, there are good people in both camps and I, you know, I don't want to speak for Roger. I wish, you know, again, this is, this is probably a time zone issue thing on my, on my end, but, um, it certainly would be nice to get some unity amongst the big blocker community. I think one of the points of contention is this, because I've heard people say, oh, BCH is crime coin. But I mean, if you looked at the images that I put at the beginning, I mean, who are the real criminals? Are we worried about people buying drugs? Or are we worried about governments censoring people? Are we worried about governments putting in social credit systems?

Are we worried about central banks and governments across the world continuing to foment war for the purpose of enriching the military industrial complex? What is really the problem that we're trying to solve. I mean, I think about this, you could say, well, you know, it needs to comply within law. Well, I mean, would you want to be the blockchain that that IBM used, you know, at Auschwitz to to catalog all all of the Jews? I mean, there are so many cases right now globally of of governments misbehaving and violating the law themselves. You can even look at what's going on with Brazil and Elon Musk and X and everything like this. Governments are getting out of control.

Most of the COVID tyranny was unconstitutional, and yet they violate the Constitution and almost don't care because they're going to violate it for this thing. And it's like, okay, they might have done this with vaccines, but they're going to be on to something new. So by the time you litigate that, it takes four to five years for something to happen and so they can go on and move tyranny in a different way while resolving whatever the last tyranny was. So, all right, let me see here. What can we do to protect ourselves about these CBDCs? This sounds very bad and terrible. I don't know if I answered that. So the issue with that is, and I could go through this at great detail.

So I've been involved in politics for 30 years and I've completely given up on politics. I will say my stepmother started out as a lowly person and the Republican party and ended up the co-chair of the party ended up Trump's ambassador. process up close at the very high level. I've seen the political And I've seen it in the weeds and I've, I've been involved in the process. And so there is not a political solution. There's no motivation. It's not how the funding works. It's not how the incentives work. Just a couple of basic thoughts here. Two thirds of Americans can't identify the three branches of government. And, and actually the, It's the political parties that control the outcome of

the election using big data and AI. So the Democrat and Republican parties have huge databases. They have anywhere from three to 500 data points on each voter. And simply what they do is the last week of the campaign, they target messages around, if you're Democrats, you're going to go to people in nursing homes and say, unless you vote for the Democrat, you're going to get kicked out of the nursing home and you're going to be thrown out on the street and you're going to starve. If you are A Republican, you're going to, you know, send out mailers saying that, you know, they're going to mandate sex toys in school, right? And basically, they have the data, and this drives things. Truly,

Taylor Swift probably will have more of an impact on the election than the sum of all of the debates combined. So you can't really win in a system where people's perception has been hijacked to that degree. So at this point, I am... rooting for radical noncompliance and people literally just exiting fiat and buying, you know, crypto gold and silver and using it for day-to-day commerce. That is the single biggest, uh, I think it's the only thing that we have left. And if enough people do that, and if we get parallel economies going, then, then we have a chance. There's a One of the things that I think you can see happening in American society is

we've lost the ability to think abstractly. We've basically, which is by design through the public educational system, but I'll give you an example. The American dream used to be a concept. It used to be about self-actualization. So what the American dream would be for me is completely different from you. It's all about living up to our potential, whatever that individual potential might be. And now it's morphed to the American dream is about owning a house. And in fact, it's not even about owning a house. The American dream is they've actually sold you is owning a 30 year mortgage. Actually having debt is what they've sold is the American dream. about this is that this is

And the reason I'm talking the challenge that we have are people on here that are to the extent that there pro-liberty people. I'm assuming that that that's at least somewhat the case. Here's the challenge that we have. So the WEF guys in the United Nations, they're out there putting forward a concrete vision for the future. They're saying, 15 minute cities. They're saying they're going to no poverty. They're putting together. I mean, it's almost like reading A Brave New World. It's complete doublespeak. But nevertheless, they've got, you know, nice drawings and architectural sketches of what it will look like. And, you know, this, again, utopias version of what a technocracy would look like.

And we know it's going to mean, you know, depopulation and we're all living in pods forever. with VR headsets eating bugs, but that's not how they sell it. Well, what do we have? So what we have is in actuality, infinite, it's unlimited. What 8 billion people are capable of doing voluntarily in an infinite number of combinations, you can't imagine what that is. You can't predict what that is because it's based on free will and people exercising choice. It truly is infinite nature. So how do you communicate an abstract concept like infinite potential to people that have been whittled down to believing that a 30-year mortgage is the American dream, as opposed to it being

about self-actualization. So that's a challenge that we have. Because if you've been trying to promote liberty for a long time, people are actually looking for the concrete thing. And I'm always trying to express what I've just expressed, and people are not necessarily you know, open to that, that kind of conversation. Let's see here. What is the recent controversy going on with BTC with the developers being paid by arc or something? So, you know, part of this Rogers book was, was, was eyeopening. And, and, and there was another, there's a documentary on YouTube called who killed Bitcoin, which I highly recommend.

that you check out. I was just made aware of it from the BCH podcast over, over the weekend. And, um, I, you know, I tuned out sailor a long time ago. I didn't realize when he first got involved, he, I, it seemed like he was at least talking some pro Liberty concepts. He was talking that, you know, this, you know, this is a hedge. You get this governments are out of control. We've got to keep governments in line, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And now he is switched. And there's a clip where he's saying... We're going to comply with KYC. We're going to comply with AML. We're not going to be a threat to Visa. We're not going to be a threat to MasterCard. We're not going to be a

threat to the dollar or to the Euro. That would be too inflammatory, was the word that he used. And it's all going to be now about this digital gold concept. And this could be a $300 trillion asset, was his explanation of it. So it's like, give up on everything. Just concede to the central banks. Concede to traditional finance. The only thing that matters is this idea. And what I've heard about this is that ARK or somebody basically offered to fund a dev, a BTC dev, which I don't know why you need a dev to keep the protocol at seven transactions per second, but whatever it is, and I heard it was ARK, What's been claimed is that

Saylor threatened in some way, shape, or form whoever this ETF was. And so they didn't move forward. And now what I see trending recently in the last few days is ossification or ossify. This is the new... laser eye this is this is one of the new propaganda campaigns ossify the protocol so they want to fix the protocol now 15 years later arguably after it's been hijacked and hobbled the example I use you broke somebody's arms with somebody that's like and legs and then didn't give them a cast that's to me what what's going on with this but I mean obviously I have a particular opinion I look forward to learning more about that, but there certainly seems to be

a split even within the BTC maxi camp with this Matt Odell versus Michael Saylor and people trying to pick sides and whatever. But I will tell you, the people that we're up against are trying to build a one world technocracy and they've been at it for 50 years. and they have a lot of money you have the un the wef bank of international settlements world bank imf you have just the top 10 out of 1 000 wef partner companies have a combined market cap of nine trillion dollars they employ six million people and they have like one and a half two trillion dollars of cash on hand that's just the top ten and these people have been pushing everything that we're seeing they've actually been pushing

pronouns and equality. They've been pushing ESG. All of that is driven. These groups like the WEN and IMF, or excuse me, UN and IMF, these are not the groups calling the shots. pushed kind of behind the The stuff's actually being scenes by some of these larger corporate interests. And so they're moving towards these things. The surveillance state has been expanding. There are 100,000 new surveillance cameras installed in the United States every day. And our pictures are taken 75 to 80 times a day in addition to whatever pictures we take of ourselves and upload. So we're in this situation right now where every time there's an emergency, we get more surveillance infrastructure.

No matter what the emergency is, they never take it away. I mean, they implemented contact tracing. So basically wireless tokens that track our movement as a result of COVID. Do you think they remove that? They did not. So we're getting closer and closer to the point where it would be very easy to implement CBDC because they've already added the surveillance and taken away our rights through other channels. Blockstream sounds like the Comment here, most evil company in the world. Yeah. And I wasn't going to talk about that much. You have a couple of slides about kind of MIT and Epstein, but Roger actually doesn't really go into the conspiracy stuff. He makes it very factual about things that

he can prove, he can prove that these devs did this. And then there are questions as to why and who funded it, which he doesn't do a lot of speculation. Other than to say, I think the one point I know that was interesting is that the Blockstream's lead investor, I think in their first round, AXA, the CEO of AXA literally was the president of the Bilderberg Group. So, I mean, you can't make this up. I mean, you can show and you can see who the investors are in these organizations. And it is... traditional finance and globalist organizations that are pushing an agenda that's moving more towards global centralization that I mean that's absolutely true what the specifics are

and how that works behind the scenes we don't know the specifics of but but yeah now blockstream seems seems like they've hobbled the l1 on purpose and then they're out selling l2 solutions for a profit I mean that's so counter to the white paper and the whole spirit of this thing that I hope more people are made aware and appreciate this. Bank of Canada says they have no plans to phase in CBDCs, but they've done a dozen stress tests. Yeah, again, all of them have. The Federal Reserve actually has listed CBD sees as a goal. So, um, it's on there. It's literally on their agenda, but that's not what they say in public because they

don't want to frighten people again. How are they going to implement this? They're not even people will say to me, well, what kind of incentives are they going to use? Kind of like with the vaccine, you know, you see the, um, whatever the governor of New York offering people French fries or you have people using donuts or whatever. There isn't going to be a carrot approach. They're going to bring in CBDCs using the stick approach with some kind of emergency manufactured or otherwise where people are in a state of fear and then they're just going to put it in and they're going to say it's to protect us. Same I'm sure will be true with Canada. What's your opinion on ZEX?

So I don't know actually a lot about this. So this is probably where I have the least amount of expertise, other than to say I looked at it when the split happened. And one of the things that concerns me, and let me preface this by saying, I hate the SEC and I don't think the SEC should exist. But my understanding is that there's a minor... a percentage of each block mined goes to a dev fund. And I actually think that might turn out to classify that ZEX as a security. And again, I don't like the SEC, but at the end of the day, if we're trying to have an alternative, a censorship resistant, scalable alternative, we need something that

has as few centralized points of failure as possible. And that's my understanding that that is a risk factor for that. um all right there's no unity between bch due to bch devs permanently splitting the chain I mean I can't again I can't speak to that I i I look forward to to hearing what roger has to say on this um all right well I guess I'll give it another four minutes and then uh probably probably wrap this up and reschedule um is scaling bitcoin more important than not being associated with craig wright so so here's This is an important so again, my proposition is that CBDCs are imminent,

and that we need a solution immediately. Like we don't have like we're 15 years and they've been doing all of the development, we need something that we can use now. And I think it's a mistake to say that the best tech or even the most scalable tech always wins. And in particular, bitcoin is a system it's an economic system you have to have miners you do need exchanges I mean as much as people want to say exchanges or bucket shops I i don't care people need to be able to acquire the uh the token if it's going to be used and and again and I'm talking about the use case as a replacement for cash I understand the micro payment use case and all of the,

all of that other stuff. But what I'm saying is we're like the bottom of the ninth inning and we need to be able to get people on boarded. Like what if there's a bank? So here's what if there's a bank run? And by the way, it's not, I mean, we, we started to see that last year, but at this point, banks aren't backed by gold. they don't even have any reserve requirements thanks to COVID legislation. So banks aren't even required to have 10% deposits. So when you go to withdraw your money from the bank, you're depending on their ability to get repaid principal and interest on commercial loans, real estate loans, which are collapsing, residential loans, which are starting to collapse,

credit card debt, which is the worst it's ever been in terms of delinquency rates. That piece of news came out. Auto loans, student loans, where they had paused student loans, but when they started them up again, I think 42% or 47% out of the gate said, I'm not going to repay my student loan. So the banks are broken, highly subject to runs. And we learned from the bank runs last year that the FDIC insurance can be wiped out almost instantly. they drained almost the entire FDIC I mean, So the question is, reserve. how do we have a solution where we actually have security, have the ability, you know, access through exchanges and also an ecosystem for

people to be able to use the crypto as, as cash in the real world. So, and I'm gonna say this. So again, because I know BSV people are attacking me. I use BSV. I actually got involved with BSV on day one. I got BSV on Bittrex. I have played around with the ecosystem. I've used wallets. And for a while, I've used a whole bunch of it. it was one of the things that I was using as a mix for day-to-day transactions. I've used BCH the most because it's the most usable and because of BitPay and some other things, but I started using BSV. For a period of time, you could use BSV to buy gift cards. there was a point of sale For a period of time, system that was accepting BSV.

Oh, there's Roger. Okay, great. Hi. Hi, Aaron. We're right on time, yeah? I'm not late, right? well we're an hour late but that's all right it's it's okay it's it's good I was able to uh uh give a good good intro so I'm uh this is great I'm I'm glad glad you're here okay I'm so sorry I had the time zone wrong apparently um it might have been my bad I i sent you the thing and I calculated and I might have calculated wrong so my my I don't know who it was so sorry about that uh Happy to begin now if you want or we can reschedule be exactly on time. for another day where I'll Sorry for the time zone issues. I'm happy to do it now if you're game. Okay, terrific.

Well, I just gave an intro where I basically said why I'm here in terms of as a longtime liberty activist, I see CBDCs as the biggest single threat to human liberty and that there's no political solution to this, that the only way out is direct action and by people exiting the fiat system and using self-custody crypto gold and silver for day-to-day transactions. So I gave everybody a much longer kind of introduction to all that, which is actually good and helpful. And so I just want to say, I, you know, for, for everybody now that Roger's here. So I saw Roger speak for the first time in either 2011 or 2012 at the, at the Liberty forum. And he has been consistently on message from day one.

And it's very clear. If you watch any of his videos that he is for voluntary exchange and he is for stopping government tyranny, he's never wavered from that. And so I've followed what he's doing. And for those that aren't aware, he got into Bitcoin in 2010 and I'll let him tell the story. quickly earned the name Bitcoin Jesus and introduced a lot of people to Bitcoin. His company, Memory Dealers, was the first retailer to take Bitcoin. He was the first investor in Bitcoin related businesses. And he has been through hell and back in terms of trying to retain the message of peer-to-peer digital cash. for the world with first

with the BCH um situation and everything that happened with that and then again with BSV um and so he's been sued he's been smeared he's been the subject of propaganda and so um I'm really grateful that that he's here and I read the book when I found out that the book was coming out I got it right away and read it and I've been strongly promoting it online um and peep to the point where people like oh you know roger's paying you I've you know I'm now I'm some fake account roger's not paying me I'm promoting this because I believe in it and because cbdc's are a threat and what roger's talking about is he's bringing to the forefront um I this this hijacking of bitcoin this hijacking of

btc which has now put us in a position where we've gone from having an innovative payment system in 2009 that was better than what traditional finance had to now we're playing defense. Traditional finance has better offerings and CBDC accounts have leapfrogged crypto accounts. And so his message is really important and really timely. So Roger, thank you for coming on board. And I just want to say one other thing. The audience here, I'm sure a lot of these people are people that are in crypto already, but I'm going around the country talking to people in doing four hour workshops where I explain the threat of CBDCs. And then I actually give them a solution. I actually give them a self

custody crypto wallet with crypto in it. I give them some gold and silver to start them on the path. And one of the things that I've found is, Because a lot of people here will say, oh, this has all been rehashed before. 99.9% of the population has no idea about Bitcoin wars. They have no idea about what's going on. I survey people, and I was saying this earlier, more people know who Sam Bankman Freed is than know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, hands down, when I do a survey. People are not aware of cryptocurrency being used for day-to-day transactions as a use case. This is the overwhelming... batch of people that I talk to. And there are millions of people out there that because of covid tyranny

and because of seeing what's going on with inflation are now open to these alternatives. So so, you know, so that's that's part of who we're kind of addressing and talking to here as well. So I guess I yeah, so so what's your background kind of before getting into Bitcoin? Like what what kind of what's your back story? Yeah, before Bitcoin, I started two tech companies in Silicon Valley, both very successful selling computer products all over the world. So I had some in-house engineers who design, manufacture and produce our own memory modules and later fiber optic transceivers and literally sold them all over the world. And every single day, especially for the memory

module side of the business, every single day we had people with stolen credit cards trying to buy my product. And it became a really big headache every day to figure out which orders were real with legitimate customers with credit cards they own. and which ones were thieves with stolen credit cards trying to buy computer memory and the reason they would target computer memories because they could turn around and resell it for maybe you know 85 cents on the dollar 90 cents on the dollar and so it was one of the most targeted things for for credit card thieves to buy at that point and so when bitcoin came along it was like oh this solves all of those problems I can now accept a

payment from anyone anywhere in the world without having to worry about you know credit card fraud or chargebacks or any of that sort of thing And I knew, I knew without any doubt whatsoever, people would start using it as money. And I knew it was better than other systems that I like PayPal that can close had used in the past, your account or even before that, eGold. I was a big fan of eGold. For those that don't know, eGold was a really cool system in which you would own gold, but the gold would physically stay put in some vaults around the world and you would just transfer the ownership of the gold around electronically through this company called eGold.com. and once egold.com started

to get popular enough what happened the u.s government came in and physically stole all the gold and shut down the entire website and so myself and you know their other million plus users lost all the gold holdings we were trusting a third party to hold for us so when bitcoin came along it was like oh this is like egold but even better because I can hold the gold myself and zip the gold around the world you know instantly and at that time wasn't basically free it was for free if you uh you if you hadn't moved your coins for a long enough period of time like it wasn't even very long a couple of days the transaction was completely free if you just moved the coins recently you'd pay a

very small fee as like you know less than a penny type of thing and uh I knew that this was going to change the world so my first step was to buy a bench bitcoin my next step was to invest in businesses that would make it easier for people to start using bitcoin so things like uh you know bitcoin.com blockchain.com bitpay.com uh help see money for kraken.com for ripple like anything out there that I thought would be potential new tool to enable people to have more control over their own money. That's a good thing because more economic freedom leads to more economic growth. More economic growth leads to a higher standard of living for everybody. And so the more we can have

a separation of money and state, the better off everybody on the entire planet is. And so these cryptocurrencies I saw as the best tool to to speed up this separation of money and state. And so that's why I got involved full time every day, all day and I want to point out to this book, Hijacking Bitcoin. It's not a hyperbole to say Bitcoin was hijacked. It's absolute, you know, indisputable fact. Everything's right there in the book with citations for everything. Anybody that reads this book cannot come away without realizing that, oh, Bitcoin was hijacked. You can think the new version of Bitcoin is digital gold that Michael Saylor is promoting. You can think that that's

better than the original version, but you can't think that like it wasn't hijacked and morphed into this other new thing that isn't at all what it was intended to be from the very beginning. So I'm going to play a video real quick. And just to give a little preface for this, I think this is where I first saw it was either 2011 or 2012 at Liberty Forum, where you're talking about Bitcoin. I'm going to show that video and then I'm going to show a recent video from Michael Saylor. So I think it's to provide an interesting perspective on what's going on here. So I got to stand up because I'm just so excited about Bitcoin. I can't talk about it while sitting down. So Anybody here that's sick of

the government inflating the money supply to pay to kill people all around the world? Stop using their money. Use Bitcoin. The answer is here. We can put a stop to all of that. You don't have to support them in any way. Start using Bitcoin. There are so many websites that accept Bitcoin now. More and more are coming online every day. If you have a business, you need to start accepting Bitcoin. What Bitcoin allows every single person in this room and on the planet who has access to the internet, you can have your own private bank account It's called a Bitcoin account, and it's impossible for the government to seize your account. It's mathematically impossible for anyone to

block you from sending or receiving money with anyone else anywhere in the world. And if you're careful about how you use it, it can be done anonymously as well. This totally strips governments' control over the money supply away. There's nothing they can do about it. There's no way they can stop it. The only way they could stop it would be to shut down the entire internet in the entire world. And that's not gonna happen. This is what every libertarian's absolute dream come true. It's here and it's called Bitcoin. And we need to spread the word to everybody about it. And I'm glad you guys are here. And we're here to answer your questions about it. And when you're done

learning about it here today, tell your friends, tell your family, help them set up Bitcoin wallets. Help tell everybody that you know about Bitcoin. Anytime you need to buy something, ask the merchant if they'll allow you to pay in Bitcoin. And anytime you receive U.S. dollars, convert them to Bitcoins, then use them as Bitcoins. We need to spread this, and the world is going to be a much, much, much better place because of it. And it's not a question of if this is going to happen. It's just a question of how soon it's going to happen. And with your help, we can make it happen sooner rather than later. At the end of the day, I think there'll be know your customer this,

there'll be anti-money laundering that, there'll be some tax regulations, there'll be some back and forth over what you can do, there'll be concerns about privacy. That's why I look at Bitcoin and I think, It's pretty clear. If the use case is store of value, well, like 7.8 billion people on Earth need a store of value, and probably the value of that is $100 to $300 trillion, right? That's enough. That's good. If the use case is currency, replace the dollar and the euro, that seems like it's, I mean, that's just intentionally inflammatory. We don't need to replace the euro and the dollar. The bankers are going to be upset about replacing the euro and the dollar. I don't think it's going to

happen and not in the next decade or two decades. So we don't need to get wrapped around the axle on that. And if the use case is medium of exchange and payment, like we don't really need to pay for a pizza with it. We don't need to pay for a Starbucks coffee with it. that's already solved by Alibaba I mean, and PayPal and Square and Apple Pay and Amazon and Google Pay. And it's, you know, they can be regulated and Visa and MasterCard. So you can leave Visa and MasterCard alone. You can leave the dollar and the euro alone. We can agree to pay taxes together. We cannot, you know, we cannot. So one question, what happened? What happened to Bitcoin?

Bitcoin was hijacked, plain and simple. So, and you can see, and if you look at what I was saying, I think that video was at Liberty Forum in New Hampshire in, I think January of 2012, probably was that video. And the things that I was said in that video was, are still completely true about Bitcoin Cash today and a number of other cryptocurrencies. They're no longer true about BTC today. So like the vision of this peer-to-peer cash for the world that would liberate people to have more control over their money, it's dead in the version of BTC, but it's not dead in a bunch of these other cryptocurrencies like BCH and a bunch of others though too. And it's a good thing that there's thousands of

currencies competing at this point in the marketplace. People can choose which ones work best for them, whether it's a Bitcoin Cash, a Bitcoin SV, Monero, Dash, Zeno, Take your pick. There's so many of them out there that really are doing a great job of empowering individuals to have more control over their own lives. Whereas with the people that are building on BTC at this point, I'm really afraid that they're busy building the prison walls around themselves. And that's really frightening to see just how unaware so many people are that Bitcoin BTC could potentially be converted into like this giant tool of mass surveillance and mass control and where government monitors and

gives you permission for every last transaction you have. In fact, we just saw recently, it looks like every single customer of the shiva wallet in el salvador which the government you know forced on everybody it looks like all their private information just got leaked out onto the internet a hacker initially was selling it and he just released it all for free so I think it was something like five million you know names and emails and contact details for you know five million el salvadorians that were forced to this custodial account right it's not a wallet let's you know words have meanings let's use the the correct words for for the meanings we're trying to convey here if someone

else is holding the crypto for you it's not a wallet it's an account and so many people are doing such a huge disservice by calling things that are accounts wallets. If you're not holding the private keys yourself, it's not a wallet, it's an account. And so don't be fooled. So many of these people think they're using Bitcoin or think they're using the Lightning Network. They're not. They're just using an account, which isn't much different than PayPal or Bank of America from that perspective. I'm going to pull up because, again, a lot of the people watching this are are new to this, or again, they only know Bitcoin as a investment vehicle. I have this quote from the Bitcoin white paper.

This is the very beginning of the white paper. A purely peer to peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. That is the basis of it. So if you're new to this, this was the creator of Bitcoin. This was the original vision and you know I'm showing here just so that there's no confusion this is an early ad for for bitcoin comparing bitcoin to western union showing how much cheaper it is you know one cent versus you know five dollars for for western union so this was meant to be peer-to-peer cash for the world. So I'm going to put up here. So this is, I took this. So you've described that

there are four Bitcoin eras. Do you want to kind of talk about that at a high level? Does that make sense? Yeah, we've seen it happen, right? So I guess the best way is buy the book and you can see all the exact details there. But the first era were just like the libertarian techno nerds that were super interested in it. Satoshi Nakamoto was the guy who put this out to the world. and uh you know there wasn't there were no coin bases there were no bit pays there were none there was there was nothing other than the idea and so it was like you know really nerdy libertarians and and technologists were the one only ones that were interested in it and then from there it started to

move on to like the early you know grassroots adopters that were just trying to spread this to the world and then I don't know today we wound up with a you know michael saylor's telling people to pay their taxes and and not replace the euro and the dollars like a 180 degrees different culture than what it was uh originally when things got started So in that first era, so what was it like? Do you have any idea how many people you introduced to Bitcoin kind of in the early, early years? A lot. So in the early, like one of the earliest activism tools that I used to spread Bitcoin to people is on my own Facebook. I just had people that I knew, but I posted on my own Facebook said, hey,

this is one of the most important inventions in the history of mankind. Go and get a wallet. There was only one wallet at that point. It was the full node wallet from Bitcoin.org. I said, go and grab this wallet, download it, and then post your Bitcoin address on my Facebook. And I'll send you an entire Bitcoin. And so I gave hundreds, if not thousands of people entire whole Bitcoins that way. And a lot of people did it, but I'm sure a lot of people didn't also. And now they probably regret not having done that because that would be worth a huge amount of money today. But it was possible to do that sort of thing. Today on BTC, without using a custodian, right? it's not possible to do that

You can't give someone a Bitcoin because it'll cost couple of dollars worth of a couple of dollars to send it to them. And when they receive it, it'll cost them a couple of dollars to spend it. So if I pay $5 to send someone $5 and the person that receives the $5 has to pay $5 to spend the $5 they just received, they've received nothing but a waste of time. And that's the current state of Bitcoin today. And it's really sad how many people don't realize that. or attack me for speaking the truth I feel like I'm pointing out hey the the one that's here that's emperor has no clothes btc doesn't work as peer-to-peer electronic cash and and when you're using a custodian with btc

it's probably even worse than than traditional uh financial institutions and using you know traditional paper cash because they can track and control you even more clearly and even more accurately than they can with traditional bank uh paper cash and so it's really really frustrating to see like it's literally the exact opposite today like The entire point of defunding or replacing the euro and the dollar is to control of the money supply strip away government's because they cause so much trouble all over the world. I think most Americans that haven't been completely brainwashed are completely against this war in Ukraine and what's going on. It's certainly against the U.S.

funding it with tax dollars. If the U.S. didn't have control, if the U.S. dollar wasn't around and everybody was using cryptocurrencies in which they have control of the money themselves, they wouldn't be able to send billions and billions of dollars to Ukraine, which just makes this stupid war last longer than it would otherwise. They wouldn't be able to fund NATO with all this stuff. They'd have to stop funding all this stupid violence all around the world. It would really, really... scale back the size and the control and the influence the governments have around the world. And for me, that was one of the most attractive parts of Bitcoin and of cryptocurrencies is that it's literally

kryptonite to the size of the state, right? It'll shrink the state maybe even entirely if we're lucky, right? Like it's really, really, really an amazing tool. And instead it's been co-opted to be like this new tool of financial impression. And it's really, really frightening for me. And so I guess I was one of the very first people sounding, you know, raising my voice about Bitcoin being exciting for the world. Now I need to be one of the first people, you know, raising my voice and sounding the alarm that, hey, Bitcoin can be a really dangerous tool of financial oppression for the world too. And so we have to be really, really careful, similar in the sense that like AI can be an amazing,

amazing tool that benefits all of humankind. or it could wind up being this tool that potentially even extinguishes traditional humans. We really have to be careful with this sort of thing. And I think both AI and cryptocurrencies can be these amazing, amazing tools for good, but it doesn't mean that they're automatically amazing tools for good. We have to be really, really careful on both fronts there. Well, I think the irony with this, and I had at the beginning of the presentation, is that Bitcoin was truly innovative and You know, it was better money. I remember receiving my first Bitcoin and it was instantaneous and it was a fraction of a penny. And immediately I was like, wow,

there was no bank involved. And since 2009, Venmo, Zelle, Apple Pay, Google Pay, FedNow, and now X is coming out with X payments actually offer, compared to BTC, superior products from a user experience standpoint. And I think a lot of the crypto community is they're placing energy on what's the relative position of crypto A versus crypto B and not realizing that traditional finance has dwarfed the user experience and that there are now 1.3 billion CBDC accounts globally more than there are. crypto accounts. And there are 134 countries pursuing this, including the U.S., which has already done three successful pilots. So there's not this sense of competition.

I'm not saying in general, but definitely on the BTC camp side, because there's this sense of we've already won in the marketplace. And the marketplace is we're actually competing against central banks. We're actually competing against traditional finance. And so that's just a point of And the arrogance, the hubris of these people saying, oh, BTC has already won. The debate's over. The market has decided. Well, the market's never done deciding ever, right? The horse and carry, what do they call, horse and buggies? At one point, that was the main means of transportation. The market had decided. No, it hasn't. The market's never done deciding. And then for another century,

automobiles were the main method of transportation. But we're not too far away from having human transportation drones flying people around like The market is never, ever, ever done deciding. And the reason these arguments are still going on about BTC and scaling is because it failed to scale. It did not scale. They promised the world in terms of scaling, you know, seven or eight years ago. Here we are seven or eight years later. It didn't scale. It's still a failure. And that's why people are still arguing, complaining about it online. So for these people to say, oh, the market's decided the debates over like, These people are either willfully blind or intentionally blind or just

intentionally misleading the public because that's their agenda. It's really, really frustrating to see. You know, the only thing we can do is keep speaking out and pointing out like, hey, BTC does not work as peer to peer electronic cash. And if you keep building these custodial platforms with cryptocurrencies that and if people no longer have the ability to transact directly with a cryptocurrency, you're just building the financial prison walls around yourself. So like people really need to wake up to this fact and not allow it to happen. So for people, which again is most people who don't realize that Bitcoin can be used as cash, what was the peak like? So in other words, in 2017,

when we were kind of the maximum adoption for kind of retail transaction, what did that look like for people that don't know about it or experience it? Like how popular was it becoming before it was throttled? It really felt like it was in 2015, 16, and then until 2017, it really felt like we were on the verge of taking over the world and becoming the world's money. And we had new businesses pretty much every single day announcing they were taking cryptocurrency payments or Bitcoin payments at that point. So we had companies like Microsoft.com, Expedia.com, Steam.com, like all these major, major retailers were starting to use it. Payroll services were popping up, which you could pay your

employees around the world using Bitcoin for the payment rails. it was really really amazing to see and then people like myself and others were sounding the alarm though hey don't let Bitcoin wind up having a bad user experience because if the blocks were to become full the user experience would become bad and sure enough in 2017 when the blocks finally did become full the user experience became bad and people like on the internet they love to call me a liar but it's right there on the blockchain you can see for yourself the average confirmation time for Bitcoin in the end of 2017 became longer than two weeks. And the average fee became more than $50. And some people were paying

thousands and occasionally even tens of thousand dollars in fees for a single Bitcoin transaction. And these aren't like normal people. If you have a business and you're accepting lots of payments from your customers when you didn't need to go and move the money, you'd pay a thousand or even you know ten thousand dollars plus to move that money on bitcoin and that's when we saw companies like microsoft stop accepting bitcoin expedia stopped accepting bitcoin they still don't even accept bitcoin or cryptocurrency to this very day right they tried it once and they would left a bad taste in their mouth and they're done you had all these major major businesses stop accepting bitcoin it was

the first time the entire history of bitcoin in which it had negative merchant adoption and it was a direct result of intentionally these people allowing the blocks to become full under the guise of that they want and need full blocks. But if you look at what happened, there was this company called Blockstream. They received a whole bunch of venture capital funding. They came up with this other side chain product called Liquid, where Blockstream will receive 100 percent of the fees from anybody that uses this Liquid side chain. They then intentionally broke Bitcoin and told people, oh, we have the solution to this broken Bitcoin. You can use Liquid. Never mind the fact that

we'll collect all the fees on every transaction you make on Liquid. And so it's really there. That's exactly what happened. It's outlined right there in the book with citations for everything. It's not my opinion. This is a fact about what happened. And we have quotes from these people in their own words saying, so go and buy the book at hijackingbitcoin.com. And you'll be shocked. You'll say, oh, my God. Bitcoin actually was hijacked. This is insanity that this happened, but crazy things happen in the world. Well, it seems like it's being hijacked again, and I guess we can get into that because obviously there are multiple stages with this. So the first thing that happened was commercial

adoption was absolutely... off the charts. It was really, really ripping and rolling every day. It was incredible. And not just in the US, all over the world, businesses were starting to integrate Bitcoin. It was really, really exciting. So for people that don't know about this or understand all this, what is the block size war all about, just in basic terms? So sometime around the year, maybe 2014, they started really starting to push that like the right block size for Bitcoin was one megabyte per block. And so there's this thing called a blockchain and a blockchain is just a fancy name for an accounting ledger. And this blockchain ledger keeps track of who has what Bitcoins at what address.

But unlike PayPal, where maybe they have their accounting ledger of everybody's PayPal address and they have it on their main servers in their office somewhere, and then maybe a couple of backups around the world. bitcoin blockchain and now cryptocurrency blockchains instead of it being on one person's computer or one company's computer it's on everybody's computer that downloads a copy of this full node software and so bitcoins you know on tens of thousands of computers around the world and all those ledgers update in real time with each other and so they all stay in sync and they're all matching each other and that update to the ledger each time is called a block on the blockchain and so

the update on bitcoin btc they limited to one megabyte per per block and they've They've tweaked that a little bit around the edges since then, but for discussion's sake, it's somewhere between one and four megabytes today, effectively still basically one megabyte, a little bit more. Anyhow, they decided that that was the right amount, and inside that one megabyte of space, you can fit around 2,500-ish transactions, and every 10 minutes that update happens, which means that if more than 2,500-ish people want to make a Bitcoin transaction every 10 minutes, there's not room for them. they have to get in line and wait for their transaction to be included in a block and they set up so there's

a bidding system so whoever pays the most money gets included in the block like normally that's fine in the market when people you know supply and demand there but they have an artificial production quota on the amount of block space that bitcoin's allowed to produce right so all these people were wanting to use bitcoin at the end of 2017 they all had to start bidding to get bidding against each other to where like literally the time for your transaction to get included in the next block on bitcoin became more than two weeks on average And the average amount that people were bidding became more than $50 per transaction. Two weeks and $50 is significantly more expensive and slower than

an international bank wire transfer. It's just crazy how badly they damaged Bitcoin. And these people that damaged it were literally cheering about, oh, pop the champagne. This is a huge success for Bitcoin. This is great. Whereas merchants like myself that have been using it for years and years to from people all over the send and receive payments world and pay all my employees in Bitcoin and pay everybody in Bitcoin and receive payments for everybody in Bitcoin. It became a disaster. It became unusable. And that's why I stopped using Bitcoin for payments. Microsoft stopped using Bitcoins for payments. Expedia stopped using Bitcoin for payments. Everybody stopped using Bitcoin for payments.

And companies like Coinbase.com, one of the biggest cryptocurrency businesses they changed their logo. in the world today, Their logo used to be Accept Bitcoin. They then changed their logo to what's no longer a Bitcoin-focused company. They started focusing on Ethereum and a bunch of other coins as well, which... which they had to do because Bitcoin stopped working for payments. And like Bitcoin has this cool brand and cool reputation. Now it has like cool spokespeople like, you know, billionaire Michael Saylor, who like is a black belt in technobabble. If you listen to what he says, it's most of the time it's just technobabble. cyber hornets of encrypted

energy traveling at the speed of light. What does that even mean? It doesn't mean anything. It sounds cool at first glance, but if you look at what he's saying, most of it's just empty platitudes or technobabble. And so the goal here with cryptocurrencies is to replace the US dollar, to replace the euro, and to have a separation of money and state. Not too many people today will argue that it wasn't a good thing for the world to have a separation of church and state. Well, the same is just as true, to have a separation of money and state. if not more true, The government used to control everybody through religion, and they'd trick everybody and think, oh,

the head of state is appointed by God, and so you have to follow the government or you're disobeying God. Well, now they kind of do the same thing. The government issues all the money to everybody, and you have to obey everything they do with the money, world will fall apart. or you think that the whole had a separation of money and state. It was a good thing that we I'm sorry. Now we need to separate. separation of church and state. A good thing that we had a Now it's time for a separation of money and state. And that's what cryptocurrencies enable with the great big giant exception being BTC. Bitcoin BTC is not enabling a separation of money and state. If anything,

it's giving the state more control over people and their money because everybody has to use a custodian. If you're using a custodian, you're at the complete mercy of the government. So like. You have to be able to use a cryptocurrency in which you have control yourself. And so like there's a bunch of choices out there for that in a bunch of different things. So like, you know, go out there. The Bitcoin.com wallet is just one of many, many, many examples. Others are, you know, Electron Cash, There's Monero Wallets. Cake Wallet. There's all sorts of things out there. Go and give them a try. Use whatever ones work well for you. Edge Wallet is another great one. run by somebody that I know

has the right philosophy of like, hey, let's have a separation of money and state here. If you're using BTC, you're busy building and supporting and constructing the financial prison walls around yourself. I'm sounding the alarm. I'm calling it right here right now. Again, don't let that happen. Use cryptocurrencies that you can actually have control of yourself. So back to when the system got congested and clogged. So I've read the white paper. My understanding is that the way that the system works in a decentralized manner is through competition, that miners that are solving these math puzzles and adding transactions to the blockchain compete against one another. And that's their motivation

for staying honest and for continuing to participate in the network. And that furthermore, And people might not know how this works, but it started out in the very early days that every 10 minutes a block was mined and you'd get 50 Bitcoin. And every four years, the amount you get gets cut in half. And that the whole purpose of the block rewards was to serve as a financial incentive system for miners to secure the network until such time as there were enough transactions in these blocks where miners could have sustainable businesses from the transaction fees themselves. Is that a correct kind of description? Yeah, that's right. And there's two ways of doing that. The way Satoshi envisioned

was having a whole bunch of transactions, each paying a very small fee. And the way the people that hijacked Bitcoin now envision is that having just a very small number of transactions, each paying a very high fee. Well, I have news for you. People prefer to pay low fees rather than high fees. And rather than people paying really high fees on Bitcoin, they've just moved to other chains. And so that's why we've seen massive uptakes of things like Ethereum and Avalanche and Solana and this and that. You can argue day in and day out as to how decentralized these various ones are. But at the end of the day, if you have a beautifully, perfectly decentralized system that nobody's using,

it doesn't matter. And that's kind of the horrible trade-off that they tried to make with Bitcoin. First of all, Bitcoin is no longer decentralized at all. If everybody's using a custodian, you can't claim to be a decentralized system. And second of all, all users or a huge number of the users all move to these other chains and other platforms. And some of them aren't even using cryptocurrency. They're using Zelle or Venmo or whatever else out there today. So like a really, really... A golden opportunity for the entire world was squandered and choked and strangled to death right there on the vine. And that's why I fought so hard in the Civil War, because I saw we had this

amazing window of opportunity. The politicians hadn't figured out what cryptocurrency was or how disruptive it was going to be yet. They hadn't passed all the regulations. The IRS hadn't issued their ruling saying, oh, you have to report every cryptocurrency transaction due to us. None of that existed yet. And yet we were having massive uptake around the world. All we had to do was make sure that Bitcoin continued to give people a good user experience. And we really had a good chance of becoming money for the entire world with it. And instead now today, it's just this, I don't know, it's being morphed into a tool of financial oppression. And it's really disappointing to see that happening.

What was the rationalization for keeping these blocks small? So the best argument that the other side had was that if you allow the blocks to become bigger, it would require a more expensive computer to run a full node and would require more bandwidth to do so. And so therefore fewer people would run full nodes. And so there would be a fewer percentage of people running full nodes in the world. And that was their goal. But if you look at the other side of that too, like if you have, a couple thousand computer nerds running Bitcoin full nodes, and those are all the people in the world using Bitcoin. As a percentage of people using Bitcoin, I guess you could say maybe it's more decentralized.

But what if you get billions of people using Bitcoin, but only have 1% of people or 0.1% of people running full nodes, you still have way, way, way more full nodes around the world, which gives it more censorship resistance. And I think a lot of people really get confused. They think that decentralization is the goal. Decentralization is not the goal at all. Decentralization is the tool to receive censorship resistance against the money supply. governments meddling with So decentralization is just one tool of many tools to empower individuals to have more control over their own money. And I think that the the BTC Maximus have really lost sight of the fact that decentralization is the tool,

not the goal, where they're treating it as the goal rather than just a tool, and that's been real disappointing. Then also, if you're on the side of freedom and liberty and personal responsibility and self-ownership, you have to support free speech. When the debate started happening about Bitcoin and the block size, initially I was quiet and I was just watching the debate and thought, maybe there's something I don't oh, My heart and mind was understand. already on the big block side, but I thought maybe there's an argument I haven't understood yet. And when I saw the small blockers go out and do everything they possibly could, including illegal tactics like DDoSing websites and

cyber attacks and hackings, to silence and censor the people that were making the big block arguments. I thought, OK, there's two sides of this argument. One side supports free speech. The other side is doing anything and everything they can to stifle free speech, including illegal cyber attacks. OK, that settles the argument for me. I'm on the side of free speech. I'm on the side of big blocks. And so that's when I decided to speak out. Whereas for multiple months before that, I was quiet and just reading and listening to the different arguments out there. And so and to this day, we still see this massive attempt to silent the big block side of things and censor those people.

And to this day, the censorship still going on on our Bitcoin, which is one of the biggest discussion platforms for Bitcoin. on Reddit and a number of other places as well. And really, really disappointing to see that. Like, how can you be peer-to-peer electronic supporter of you know cash the world and opposed to free speech at the same time because money is speech when you send money to somebody you're transmitting information it's a form of speech if I buy starbucks coffee that means I support starbucks with my money if I buy something from walmart it means I'm supporting walmart if I buy something from the mom and pop coffee shop that means I'm using my my dollar as speech or

my cryptocurrency as speech to support that thing so like cryptocurrency is speech and so If you're trying to stifle traditional free speech, you shouldn't be surprised that these same people are going to be just fine with stifling financial speech as well. So this whole idea of decentralization. So Bitcoin was released in 2009, and one megabyte was just an initial limit to kind of work the kinks out. Satoshi had always said the block size was supposed to increase. But are these people that are pushing- It's a little bit more nuanced than that, if I can interrupt you there. When Bitcoin first came out, there was no block size whatsoever. but there was no price for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin was free, right? Nobody cared, there was no price. And so there was something called like a flood attack where if there's no price of Bitcoin, and even if you're paying like a fee to make Bitcoin transactions, the fee is paid in Bitcoin that's basically free. there's nothing to stop someone from just making a zillion Bitcoin transactions on the network and flood the whole network with a whole bunch of transactions where there's no, you know, there's nothing financial going on. It's just people causing trouble. And so someone for, you know, maybe we'll cause trouble a couple of dollars, on the internet with Bitcoin for some laughs. So it wasn't until later. They implemented that one

megabyte block size limit to prevent people from doing that. But once Bitcoin had a price and even if you're just paying a single penny per Bitcoin transaction, there was no longer a need for that block size limit there. And the miners wouldn't mine a block that was too big or include those transactions if something nefarious was going on. Yet that temporary one megabyte limit that was always meant to be removed. In fact, Satoshi literally wrote the code to remove that and increase that block size limit later that wound up being weaponized into a tool to stifle Bitcoin adoption around the world and really disappointed to see that happen. So initially there was no block size limit with what

Bitcoin whatsoever. And it was implemented just as a temporary short term measure to prevent this flood attack vector until Bitcoin actually had a price. So when this arbitrary block people have then now made size was put in, this argument about decentralization. They've made an argument about computer hardware costs, about hard drive costs, about bandwidth costs, about memory costs. And, um, But what are the trends? if we're looking at technology So, I mean, from 2009 versus today, what's happened to the cost and availability of hard drives, internet access, and memory? Yeah, everything goes down, down, down, year after year after year. They get cheaper, faster, better,

more reliable, and more accessible. I could almost, not quite, but almost forgive somebody in 2010 or something or 2011 or 12 even saying, oh, we need, this is too much, this is too big. Now we have a decade of additional hindsight, and we can see without any doubt things got faster, better, cheaper, more reliable. And even worse than that, the actual end result of them limiting the block size made Bitcoin more centralized, more censorable, more controllable by government. So even if the intentions were good, like Milton Friedman always loved to say, We have to judge a government program by its results, not its intention. So even if the government program had good intentions,

the results almost always wind up being horrible. even if the intentions of the small Well, blockers were good, the end results were horrible. Bitcoin is more centralized, more sensible, more controllable than ever before because of the small block. So we now have the empirical evidence and the advantage of the high side. And it's shocking to me that these people are just so either willfully ignorant or intentionally blind or maliciously, you know, hiding the fact. that's limiting the block size and Bitcoin made it more sensible, more centralized and just like an inferior product compared to what it could have been. And it's right there for anybody. Just look at it.

It's right there for anybody. But these people want to ignore that or censor that or hide that fact from the world. And it's really disappointing. So I've read the white paper and I haven't seen anything in there that said that a small group of developers should have say over how the network operates. How, where did this, where did this come from? How did, how did this get hijacked by, by developers? Yep. They, uh, managed to get control of all the main like social media platforms. And if, if I had to, I guess the biggest thing I learned in, in life from the block size war is how incredibly effective censorship is. Like when the censorship first started within Bitcoin, like the big blocker

position was the vast majority of the people involved in Bitcoin, uh, But wow, everybody that came to Bitcoin afterwards was influenced by the censorship. It made a huge, huge, huge difference. And I think that's why governments employ censorship. And we're seeing right now in Brazil, the government there wants to censor Twitter because people being able to talk about things They can hear new ideas. They can be exposed to new things like censorship. I really underestimated just how powerful a tool censorship is at shaping public opinion and really disappointing that this small group of developers or small group of people that wanted to, for whatever reason, stifle Bitcoin adoption and

stifle Bitcoin's ability to become money for the world. They managed to gain control of the main discussion platforms for Bitcoin and heavily censor them. And that had a huge, huge, huge impact on the future trajectory of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. You know, I know in your book, you don't go into a lot of conspiracy theories. that was one of the things And in fact, that really struck me about the book, because I would have thought, you know, if I were in your shoes, I would have been really pissed off about what I'd gone through. And the book, very rarely do you actually insert what your opinion was, even at the time. Most of the book is from the

perspective of and using quotes from the parties involved, including a lot from BTC devs and from the other people involved. But it does bring up the question, so why did this happen? And what is fascinating to me, so at some point in time, there was a Bitcoin foundation that I understand that you co-founded that was a community-driven effort that was funding the the developers at least to some some extent what what happened because my understanding is it went from the bitcoin foundation to mit and I find that that process whatever happened there to be interesting yeah I i think part of it is is I whenever there's money involved people start squabbling a bit over the

money but uh a lot of a lot of that did go right on over to mit at one point. But I think the clear, less conspiratorial thing, like Blockstream raised $100 million plus. They have this liquid side chain. They collect 100% of the fees. If Bitcoin works and works well, there is no need for any of the products that Blockstream was trying to make. If Bitcoin was broken, suddenly then people would have a need and demand for the products that Blockstream was making. So they intentionally broke Bitcoin. and said, oh, here, we'll sell you a solution for the things that we broke. And they tried to hide the fact that they're the ones who intentionally broke Bitcoin. But it'd be like if I went

out on the street with a baseball bat and started whacking people in the legs and say, hey, I have these crutches for sale. Do you happen to need any crutches? And then when people started using the crutches, I just sold them after I'd hit them in the leg with a baseball bat. I said, see, if it wasn't for me and my crutches factory, you wouldn't even be able to walk. You should thank me. Look how great a person I am. I gave you the ability to walk. And ignore the fact that I'm the one who whacked you in the legs with a baseball bat. crutches in the first place and made it so you need and that's exactly what happened to bitcoin with these people they intentionally broke it and

then tried to sell tools to people to fix the problems first place so I've been that they caused in the researching this and the guy that ran the mit multimedia lab is a guy named joy ito and joy ito in addition to running the mit multimedia lab was the called digital garage which co-founder of something is a venture capital firm that invested in a lot of companies and what I found interesting and I'm still trying to piece together the timing, but he basically simultaneously, well, he funded the devs that implemented SegWit and Lightning on the one hand, while his venture capital firm invested in Blockstream on the other. And a few years later down the line, the MIT Multimedia Lab has

been involved with all three United States CBDC pilots. There's Project Hamilton, which is the retail CBDC, Project Cedar, which is the wholesale CBDC, and this horribly dystopian thing called Regulated Liability Network, which is basically a ledger that will track all of your CBDC purchases and all other digital assets. It's a system that will require you to register your assets and only be able to transact in CBDCs and have multiple third parties like the BIS and the Federal Reserve and others watching what you're doing. I found it very fascinating that this one guy is at the nexus of the funding of all of that. And again, this is the conspiratorial side, but he did receive funding

from Jeffrey Epstein for both MIT and for some of his private fund efforts. I haven't tracked down the, you know, I can't say this went specifically to this, but, you know, it's only recently that I saw this quote from 2017 from Jeffrey Epstein. So traditional currency is money that has a sovereign guarantee behind it. A government promise that the value is secure. But because Bitcoin is backed by technology, it misses that mark. When we talk about gold as a store of value, that just means a lot of people agree to pay the same price for one ounce of gold. In 2017, enough people agree on the value of Bitcoin that it can serve the same purpose. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins,

but this limit comes from computer code, not by how many Bitcoins are left to remove from the earth. If we learn tomorrow that half of Montana contained a secret cache of gold, the value of gold would decrease instantly. Bitcoin doesn't have this problem. I find it interesting that in 2017, as SegWit is going on and all this other stuff is going on, the only time he comes out and makes any public statement about Bitcoin is to say that Bitcoin isn't currency, that it's digital gold. So I guess there's nothing to respond to on that. I don't know if you have any specific... But like I because because when I read your book and I and I like it doesn't make sense that you would keep

the blocks small. Like I'm trying to figure out the why. And because they put so much effort on propaganda and censorship, this wasn't just like this was very intentional and there was a lot of effort and there's been continual effort. to lock in this digital gold narrative. And so I think pursuing more and trying to find out the why and the who's behind it is interesting. One other thing is when I look to see who these devs are, I've looked up like Greg Maxwell and Luke Jr. I can't find out any information about these people. I don't know where these people come from. It's bizarre. I don't know if you've had a similar question of how do these people even pop into this entire narrative?

Yeah, it's bizarre, but if you look at it, and that's what intelligence agencies do, if you read the CIA's handbook, they try and get... For movements that they want to disrupt, they try and get leadership positions and then cause infighting and cause all sorts of issues. That's exactly what happened So these are like... And within Bitcoin. even the phrase conspiracy theory itself was like an attempt by the CIA to dissuade people from talking about these sort of things. And it's like... Stranger things have happened in the world. Maybe that's the case. But in my book, it's just fact after fact after fact with direct quote from direct quote with citations for everything. So it's indisputable.

Maybe some of these other conspiracy theories are true and things happen and there was other stuff going on. But in the book, there's basically none of that. It's all stuff that can be 100% proven with direct quotes from the people involved. And it's like Bitcoin, without needing any conspiracy theories, Bitcoin was hijacked. Yep. No, that's 100% true. And when I posted a very brief review about it, Adam Back blocked me, Samson Mao blocked me, the people that you talk about. Realty blockers are the ones engaging in blocking people in censorship. I've never seen that much of a reaction and it has nothing to do with me. It has everything to do with the contents of this book.

People are frightened about what is in this book. I've gone through the book, I've read it twice. The first time you read it, it's like, yeah, I remember some of that. And boy, that's annoying. And then when you post about it and then the people that are discussed in the book start blocking you, start calling you names, start doing all this other stuff, then you become- But not refuting the evidence or the citations. They're not refuting anything. They're just attacking with ad hominem attacks, right? Exactly. So then you read it a second time and it's just kind of like, what radicalized you? And I put up, I created a meme, what radicalized you? And I put a picture of the

book because seriously, now it's like, okay, these people are clearly trying to suppress this information and they have a handful of arguments that they use all of the time, but no one has refuted a fact. I mean, the best you'll get is, oh, well, next week I'll have somebody spend three hours going over this. no one is actually refuting a single No, fact. And I find that to be really interesting. And I recommend that everyone read this book, regardless of whether you're in crypto or if you have a family member that's invested in BTZ or whatever it is, you need to understand what's going on because it is, is not what you, think it is. Now, I'm not going to go into a lot of the

details because, you know, there are all these different attempts at expanding the block size, Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic and all this other stuff. But could you talk a little bit about Bitcoin Cash and how Bitcoin Cash came to be and what that whole split process was like? Yes. So I'd love to clarify again, and I clarify over and over and over. And this just shows how willfully dishonest or inaccurate, the media is like I had absolutely zero to do with the creation of Bitcoin Cash. It says all over the internet that I'm the creator of Bitcoin Cash. I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I wasn't even wasn't even paying attention to Bitcoin Cash. Other people were worried

about Bitcoin not scaling and that these like the small blockers, to use a loose term, they were scared that they weren't going to go through this thing called the Segwit 2X agreement, which was to implement this thing called Segwit and increase the block size to two megabytes. And everybody had come together and signed an agreement. And like, I assumed, okay, that was going to happen. I was on board with that. Like, I was confident it was going to happen. Turned out like for whatever dumb reason, somehow the, they agreed to allow the Segwit portion to happen first. portion was supposed to And then the two megabyte happen after that. Everybody was saying goodbye and everything seemed fine

until they implemented the Segwit portion. And then instantly all the small blockers came out and they said, Oh, to abide by our half of the you thought we were going agreement to do the two megabyte? No, we're not. And, uh, and that's what happened there. And, uh, When I realized that Bitcoin wasn't going to increase its block size to two megabytes there, I realized, OK, Bitcoin has no chance of becoming money for the world. It can't onboard everybody. There's no chance. And so I started looking around at the other cryptocurrencies that were out there and thought, OK, which one is most likely to have the best chance of becoming peer-to-peer money And I had three contenders for the world?

in my mind at that point when I look at Ethereum, Monero, and Bitcoin Cash. them and for various i looked at all three of reasons I decided I thought bitcoin cash had the best chance out of the three I think all three of those are still awesome projects all three of them are wonderful I was also the owner of bitcoin.com so like I had felt like I could have a bigger influence on the bitcoin cash chain than the ethereum chain or the monero chain but that doesn't mean I didn't love monero or ethereum either as well um all of those are fantastic projects and uh and going on and even today um you know, there's other projects out there that are interesting, like Zeno.org,

I think is really interesting. It's basically Monero for tokens. So anybody can issue their own token, but the token itself is super, And like, super private. that's going to be really interesting. And there's all sorts of other, you know, EVM chains out there. Like there's a competition in the marketplace for who can, become this peer-to-peer cash for the world. And I just want it to be anything other than a centralized government, central bank, digital currency, which they control every last aspect of you financially. It needs to be something where people have control of their own money themselves and their own lives. And I don't mind if it's Bitcoin Cash or something I

haven't even heard of yet. control of their own money, As long as people have I'm on board with that. So let's talk about, so what happened with BSV? So the big problem with BSV wasn't BSV. The big problem with BSV was Craig Wright and Calvin Air supporting him and his horrible, horrible attitude. Like I had zero problem with BSV and what they were talking about. The problem I had was with Craig and suing everybody and basically doing everything he possibly could to prevent people from using BSV. Like no business is going to implement BSV when Craig's busy suing everybody, suing software developers and Calvin Air is right there behind him, funding everybody for it. And it's like,

Craig being Satoshi or not, and I think not, but it doesn't matter. If you treat people like that, no one's going to want to do business with you, even if you were Satoshi. Basically, BSV destroyed itself with lawsuits and bad attitudes and just being rude to people. There's a lot of great people in the BSV community. I hope a lot of the sharper ones come back to BCH or any form of peer-to-peer electronic cash. If you want to know why BSV really fizzled out and failed, it's because of craig suing everybody uh you know suing every exchange and just guaranteeing that nobody's going to want to do business with the bsv chain even if you could say you know every which way left right center bsv is

superior for this that and everything else if craig's busy suing every single person nobody's going to use it and that's you know I don't think bsv is superior in every way about was with craig suing everybody everything but even if it That's it. It doesn't have a chance. There's a Chinese proverb, friends are better than enemies. Don't turn friends into enemies. And that's exactly what Craig did with everybody. Every chance he got, have been friends and allies, he turned people that could he turned them into enemies. And Craig, for better or worse, being the face of BSV, made it so nobody wanted to use BSV. And it was really disappointing and sad to see that happen. And I think in the book,

we gave a really fair treatment to BSV and the role it played there as well. I've never had a problem with BSV despite Craig suing me, I think five or six times. I think he still has one lawsuit ongoing against me, but I think he'll drop that at this point because Calvin seems to finally starting to be realizing that he was scammed by Craig as well. Even if Craig's not, I'm sorry, even if Calvin's not stating that publicly, it seems like he's starting to realize that privately. Yeah, well, so I spent... So as I look at the CBDC threat, the challenge that we have is this. So, I mean, the traditional system, financial system can do at peak at most like 50,000 transactions per second.

It doesn't usually hit that. And in my book, I actually outline, you know, cause I'm introducing people to crypto and I'm saying, well, you know, how do we get to 50,000 transactions per second? So this is how I started to get involved with BSV. So that, so I had some appeal. It had appealed to me in terms of the scalability. And I, um, And I play and I know a lot of people in the ecosystem and I've tried using things and it's been kicked off of exchanges. What you said is and I was before you came on, I was trying to explain to somebody if you can't buy it anywhere and if you can't use it anywhere, I don't care if it does 10 trillion transactions per second. This is about network effects.

This is about putting together an entire ecosystem. And at this point in time, my fear and the reason that I've dropped everything that I'm doing to go around and try to educate people about the threats of CBDC and how to use these alternatives is that out and they're going to they're going to roll it roll it out in an emergency. Just kind of like we saw with the Patriot Act or TARP or the CARES Act. In fact, they've developed the technology. There's already an executive order. They've even drafted the language for a digital dollar in Congress. So I don't think we can fix the political system. I mean, you and I have talked on and off for like 10 years and I gave it a try.

And yeah, 100 percent, it's unfixable. And I think the only thing that people can do is is exit fiat and move into crypto gold and silver. But how do we get enough capacity and scale if we had to onboard a lot of people in a hurry? yeah, I don't think the onboarding is going to happen in a big giant hurry, but as long as you have a decent overhead, you're, you're, you're fine. Right. So like, And now there's so many different cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrency is close to being ready. But now, you know, things like Venmo and PayPal and this and that, they've kind of leapfrogged where like there's not a big demand. If you're only 10% better than what people are using already,

they're not going to switch. You have to be like 10 times better than what people are using currently to switch. And back in 2000, you know, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, Bitcoin was 10 times better than what everybody else was using. But today, how much better is your cryptocurrency experience than Venmo? Not all that different today, unfortunately, so. A bit different, but not 10x different maybe. Well, I hope I'm wrong, but I feel like it's going to be put in an emergency type of situation. I don't think it's going to be like a slow implementation. And I think Fed now- You're bank digital currency being implemented? talking about the central Oh, that I think, yeah, they'll try and shove in

with an emergency. They'll say, oh, virus attached to them. dollar bills have some You can't touch cash and credit cards spread them too. So you have to use our central bank digital. They'll come up with some crazy nonsense excuse and push everybody onto it. But the adoption of cryptocurrency, we want it to happen as fast as we can, but it's harder to- force that on everybody all at once not that you should force it on anybody so I know you should so I guess do you have any as someone who's onboarded more people to crypto than anyone do you have any so I'm doing these workshops I found it doesn't scale but I found that meeting people in person and actually interacting with them is is

can't be beat in terms of educating them and getting their involvement and their feedback, but any suggestions on what we might do to really ramp up adoption? And also on the merchant side, Yeah, I try and use cryptocurrency for everything I possibly can every time. Anytime there's a new business I'm going to start dealing with, if they're not already taking cryptocurrency, I onboard them. I pay my lawyers in cryptocurrency. I pay everybody with a cryptocurrency at this point. And then I take the dollars or the fiat that I would have normally used to pay those things. I just buy more cryptocurrency with it. then it's up to us you know tell your friends tell your family set them up with

wallets show them how it works one of my favorite tools for onboarding new people is uh the bitcoin.com wallet has this thing called uh if you hit the send button and for bitcoin cash you can send via a shareable link and even if the person doesn't have a wallet or anything yet you send them that link it automatically downloads the wallet and when the wallet's done downloading boom the money's right there in their account so I send those links to people all the time uh even on twitter when someone says something rude to me about bcash I send them a dollar worth of bitcoin cash using this link not using a custodian either right it's all on-chain transactions there's no middleman there

and I say hey do the same for me with with btc or with lightning and they can't right and so like it's really a powerful tool to spread uh you know bitcoin cash and cryptocurrency adoption to new people and so yeah just uh you know all we can do is tell everybody we know in our own lives and big people around us and of course you know doing social media like this like the word spreads like every single day I get multiple emails from and messages from people all over the world saying you really influenced me with that or thank you for saying this or thank you for doing that and it's like And those are just the ones that bothered to take the time to message me about it.

I'm sure there's plenty more that we don't know about it. So thank you, Aaron, so much for your amazing, you know, spreading the word on social media there as well. I see you're really prolific on Twitter there, letting them, you know, hitting people with hard facts. And I appreciate that. And I'm appreciative of you. For people that don't know, the Brownstone Institute definitely deserves a shout out as well. This is really the premier voice speaking out against the scientific censorship and the crazy stuff that went on with the lockdowns and COVID and just the scientific propaganda that's going on in the world. If you're not aware of it, go and take a look at the

Brownstone Institute as well. It's really an institution that I'm a big giant fan of and proud to have played a role financially in supporting them as well. That's great. Yeah, no, the Brownstone Institute is basically ground zero for this. All of the liberty groups that should have spoken up during the lockdowns and during all the mandates didn't. And so basically, Brownstone is sanctuary for people that told the truth and continue to tell the truth and have faced tremendous consequences for it, whether it's, you know, losing their jobs, being sued, you know, whatever it would happen to be. I can't say enough positive things about about Brownstone. So is there any way to

reconcile or I guess, what is some advice for, I guess the BSV community? I mean, I guess what, you know, cause I talk to these folks every day, like what, is there anything we can do to get some unity on big blocks? Yeah, great question. Good question, hard answer. I don't know. I don't see all the BCH people jumping over to BSV now that Craig is gone. I don't see the BSV people jumping over to BCH so much either. Other than BCH does have a lot more of an ecosystem and exchange listing and that sort of thing. It would be nice to see some reunification there. Other than one side selling Yeah, I don't know.

their coins for the other, which I don't think either side particularly wants to do. I don't know. But it's nice. BSV, I think you guys have a better shot now that Craig is gone or Craig is even more thoroughly discredited than he was before. But I guess the big call to action there is like, don't spend your time attacking BSV or attacking BCH or even attacking like, Anything that works as peer-to-peer cash, spend your time on attracting new users to cryptocurrencies. And by cryptocurrencies, I mean ones that people can actually use as cash. Like BTC, I'm really concerned it's become like a tool for financial oppression rather than a tool for financial liberation. I think it's probably fine

And so that, like, to attack BTC at this point. cryptocurrencies that work But all the other as cryptocurrencies, like, hey, cheer them on and promote them and call for action. today is, you know, go and buy a copy of HijackingBitcoin.com. And if you like the book, leave a review on Amazon, because I think it's really important for the truth to get out that Bitcoin was hijacked. It's not just my opinion. It's a fact. And all the facts are right there in that book. So go ahead on over to HijackingBitcoin.com or Amazon.com and buy your copy of Hijacking Bitcoin. It'll really open your eyes to just how crazy the history of Bitcoin was there. Do you have a hard stop now or do you have time for a

couple more questions? I, I, five more minutes at the most. but I'd have to be happy to And then, uh, do a part two at some point. Uh, and sorry, I was off by an hour for what time we were supposed to start today as well. No worries. I, so I just have a couple of just, that would be, I'm going to call it a lightning round. We didn't even talk about lightning network. So that's, conversation. that's a whole other separate So get, get hijacking bitcoin.com, uh, But we covered in the book. get the book and you'll learn all about how lightning network does not and cannot work for peer to peer cash. I've compiled and asked you, I'm getting this list of standard response from BTC Maxis.

So I just thought I'd run some questions by you just to get a response because interview and cut it up into segments. I'm going to take this So this, one of the things that I hear over and over again is you need to be a store of value first before you can be a medium of exchange. This is like, so this is part of this whole, this digital gold narrative. But what is your response to that? the medium of exchange comes first before it's a store of value. And the medium of exchange has to have some additional So all the Austrian use case as well. economists are very clear about that. It's very clear, like anywhere that money, like the dollar was a layer two scaling solution for gold, right?

It's like gold was, but gold was money, not because it was a store of value. It was a store of value because it had these additional use cases. People were using it as a medium of exchange. And before that they were using it for, you know, gold fillings and this and that, like, you know, ornaments and decorations because it didn't tarnish. it has to be have some other use case before it's a store value you can't just have it as solely as a store value uh very very clear empirically and philosophically uh there so like and the reason bitcoin's working so well as a store value is because people still do use it as a medium of exchange the problem is they're using it for big giant expensive

transactions not you know normal transactions that can benefit people all over the world right nobody wants to pay fifty dollars and wait two weeks for a normal transaction But I guess you could pay $500 and wait 10 minutes to do, you know, a half million dollar transaction. And that's, you know, Bitcoin's being used much more for that sort of thing at this point. Well, any thoughts on this? It's a little off topic, but I guess Michael Saylor is out now talking about pushing this concept of ossification. This is the new buzzword from the BTC camp, which I guess is ironically to freeze the protocol now. and not do any more development. As I understand it, and I don't know if this is true,

these are just theories that have been put out, but that one of these ETFs had offered to fund a BTC core developer. And I guess he allegedly put some pressure on the ETF to make that not happen. Do you have any thoughts on what's going on there? Any insight? I don't know. Although I do have a question for Michael Saylor at some point is like, Now you're a big giant BTC proponent. Where were you before? You heard about Bitcoin years and years ago and you were opposed to it or ignoring it or didn't care about it at all. What made you change your mind to where you like BTC today, but you didn't like it five years ago or 10 years ago? Where were you? What made you change your mind, Michael?

Why is BTC today better than BTC of 10 years ago? That's a great question. All right. Well, I guess we can wrap it up from there. Do you have any final thoughts that you want to share? No, I'd love to implore people, you know, please go and buy the book from hijackingbitcoin.com. It'll really open your eyes. You'll become a much more knowledgeable person about the entire history of Bitcoin. And then try using cryptocurrencies as money, any chance you have in life. And I want to thank you, Aaron, for the platform today. I didn't pay you a single penny for any of this, just to be clear. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation and thank you for spreading the message that's so

important to the world. Well, thank you for coming on and thank you for your steadfast commitment for the 13 years I've known you to fight for free exchange and to fight tyranny and even at personal cost and expense to yourself. So thank you for coming on. Thank you. Thank you. Just to let everybody know, so tomorrow, I haven't been doing these podcasts on a particularly regular cycle, but I have another interview tomorrow with Stephen Nerioff. If you're not familiar with Stephen, he's been in the news recently. He was one of the people early involved with Ethereum. And what he's been, the story that he's been putting out there is that basically the DOJ came in and basically threw

him in a van and accused him of extortion. And what they really wanted from him is they use this made up extortion case to get inside information on people in the crypto space. And I've heard parts of some of his other interviews. So I know, for instance, Naomi Brockwell, And others are part of this. So I'm going to be interviewing him tomorrow. He has just filed a $9.6 billion lawsuit against the federal government because they basically dropped their extortion case and he is going after them for damages on that. So tomorrow at noon, I'm going to be interviewing Stephen and hopefully we can maybe... peel back a little bit more of the why in terms of why are these, why are these government

agencies cracking down on Liberty related crypto people and, and, and who's funding all of it. So, so stay tuned for that. I will be putting out a, a note and a tweet on that later tonight. So thank you very much for, for joining me. Sorry for the hour delay and look forward to the next podcast. Have a good night.