The Aaron Day Show Episode 008: Fifty Shades of CBDC Tyranny

When the debate started happening about Bitcoin and the block size, initially I was quiet and I was just watching the debate and thought, oh, maybe there's something I don't 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, okay, 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. Okay, that settles the argument for me. 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

customers when you didn't payments from your need to go and move the money, even $10,000 plus to move you'd pay a thousand or 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 it 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 in the entire history of Bitcoin in which it had negative And it was a direct result merchant adoption. of intentionally these people allowing the blocks to become full under the

guise that they want and But if you look at what happened, need full blocks. there was this company called Blockstream. They received a whole bunch of venture capital funding. They came up with this other sidechain product called Liquid, where Blockstream, stream will receive 100% of the fees from anybody that uses this Liquid sidechain. 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 like, That's exactly what happened. it's really there. 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. You'll say, oh my God, And you'll be shocked. 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. But so the first So the first thing that happened was commercial adoption was absolutely off the charts. We were on fire. 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-sized war all about, just in basic terms? 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, stupid war last longer than which just makes this 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 It would really, really... all around the world. Reel 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 cryptocurrencies is that it's literally kryptonite to the size of the state. It'll shrink the state, Right. maybe even entirely if we're lucky. Right. Like, it's really, really, really an amazing tool. Okay. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Aaron Day Show. This is episode 008, 50 Shades of Tyranny. I hope everyone can hear me. It worked okay in the chat, so hopefully we're good.

Excellent. We've got another great show today. So based on feedback, I did some polling online and people expressed interest in me doing this on a weekly basis. And Thursday at eight o'clock. I did two more polls. And so here we are, here's how we ended up at Thursday at eight o'clock. So I'm going to be doing this now every week. And it'll be a combination of, you know, whenever I write a new article for Brownstone, we'll cover that, which is what we're going to do tonight. And then the other episodes will be, more kind of probably action you know, oriented about, you know, what we can do in terms of promoting alternative currencies. interviewing people as well, And then I will be

just as I've done with Roger Ver and others who you saw at the intro. Hopefully one day soon we'll be able to have him on live again. So with that said, we have a couple of guests again tonight. Adam Van from Alpine Gold. We have Direct from Philly and we have I Am for I Am again. So we're going to follow the same format of, I'm going to do a little talk here at the Just some back and forth. And as always, I'm open to questions from everyone. So if you have any questions or comments, feel free to pass them along. So with that said, I will jump right in. So just a little bit of housekeeping. So from last week's episode

was you might own nothing sooner than you think. I highly recommend. I put a link for that in the comments to actually to all of my Brownstone articles. That is a really long article that explains and makes the case for basically everything that I'm doing here. It's not just about the threat of CBDCs, but what they're actually trying to do is digitize all of our assets, of which money is just a small part, just 5%, and actually digitize those they're controlled by third assets in a way where parties and programmed. So This article lays out all of that and kind of what's behind it and goes into the detail of how they get to that end game. I'm going to talk about some

of the events that we have going on. My next event is in New Hampshire, September 13th to the 14th. This is Chris Martinson's event, the Peak Prosperity Annual Summit. So I will be doing a two-hour workshop They're specifically focused on more of the hands-on aspects of this. His group is pretty well versed in the threat of CBDCs. So I'm looking forward to that. Then next is, well, this isn't the next event, but the next non-workshop event will be the Bitcoin Cash Conference in Argentina. So I'm looking forward to that. We're going to be on a really interesting panel with the president of Liberland and some others to talk about CBDCs and other things. We're going to be in New

Mexico City for Mineratopia, November the 4th through the 17th. That one's going to be exciting. The Zeno crew is going to be there. A whole bunch of people are going to be there. I think it's going to be a real big opportunity to kind of have a workshop about how to market privacy, because as we talked about last week, that's an important issue. Somehow, privacy has been lost as a fundamental right or value, and especially so with younger people. And some of it is kind of the edginess of the marketing. It's kind of positioned as a dark web, dark market thing. But the truth is, everything that we buy and sell will soon be dark market. So trying to buy raw milk or

red meat or organic vegetables, those things will all be black market soon enough. Then we have November the 1st and the 2nd. This is the big Brownstone annual event, the Brownstone Gala. I highly recommend you check that out. It's going to be in Pittsburgh just a day or two before the election. So regardless of the election outcome, Brownstone is going to be important and very busy because I'm not seeing any quick resolution to lockdowns, mandates, vaccines, or the censorship industrial complex. So the work moves on no matter what. And then I want to talk about our workshops. So we have a couple of workshops now that are officially open for sale of tickets. our next one is in New Jersey on

Our first, October the 5th from 1 to 5 p.m. at the Bordentown Elks. So excited for that event. That venue holds 300 people. So we're eager. We've got a lot of great partners and a great team that's helping to pull all that together. And The next event, this is just scheduled, is going to be in Omaha. So we're gonna be at Creighton University on November the 9th from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Great group helping us out there too. They actually managed to get a venue that can hold 500 people for a really good deal. It happens to be a bi-week, so very excited about that. So we're gonna be putting in a lot of effort um in in promoting that and

what I thought I'd do I'm actually part of this is so going to do this now and I can record it and use it as a promotional video but I want to explain to everybody what these workshops are about and what's in it it's mirrored in part on my book the final countdown which um by the way I don't recommend you buy right now because I'm updating it with all of the activities of the last three or four months so uh you know the core of it is good but There are some important updates to be made in the crypto and gold section, but it follows the structure of my book. So I start out by explaining what the future looks like, what a theoretical future looks like in 2032 and beyond based on the agenda

of the technocrats. And so basically paint the picture of what the default situation is if we don't stop it. So that's the starting point for the event. And then I walk into an overview of the surveillance state today to give you a sense of how close we are to this dystopian picture that I paint at the very beginning. Then I walk through who's behind CBDCs in this technocracy movement, because there is a they, and that commonly gets thrown around. And it turns out you can find out who those people are and what their motivations are. And I spend a little bit of time discussing that as well. I then go into a discussion of the global state of CBDCs and describe what's going on um, everywhere.

I mean, in the short version of it is 134 countries are pursuing this. It's almost the entire global GDP, but I spent a lot of time on the U S uh, CBDC pilots as well for, for obvious reasons. Then I discuss the demise of the dollar. It's important that people understand that Fiat currency has a 0% success rate. And I'm going to walk through historically why that's the case and then show why the dollar is no exception. And then I'm going to talk about the great taking, which is this basically scam that's been engineered since 1994 by large financial institutions to make changes to the law that mean the next time crisis and there's a bankruptcy, there's a huge financial

our stocks and bonds won't go to us. They will go to the banks as secured creditors. And so that's important and it ties into the CBDC story. Then I walk through cryptocurrencies and explain just at a high level, audience that we speak to, because generally the most people have never had a cryptocurrency in their life. I mean, usually these people are starting from a position of no experience with cryptocurrency. So I explain the basics of what cryptocurrencies are and what some of the important parameters are when evaluating cryptocurrencies. Then I talk a bit about gold and silver as a currency, both past, present and future. And then there's a break and then we get into the

hands-on part of this. And so in my book, the whole purpose of the book was to be a self, a book that you could actually read on your own and follow the steps to download a wallet. It was meant to be something to empower people. But what I found is that many people said, look, I love the book. I understand the CBDC threat. But I just couldn't take that first step to download a wallet or get some crypto. So this is the real reason we did the workshop is to actually help people directly. So as part of this workshop, everyone will get a one or more actually crypto wallets. They'll get some cryptocurrency that that will give us part of the part of the program. We'll also give them some gold back.

And I'll walk through and actually, we're fortunate we have Adam van from Alpine gold. So he's going to talk about some of the exciting things that you can do with gold. And that's part of the program as well. And, and then what everyone receives that participates in the workshop is an autographed copy of my book, And at least for the next workshop, you're going to get some Monero, which is a privacy coin Zeno, which is a privacy coin and also something that allows you to create privacy tokens. a gold back and instructions on how to use Cake Wallet, as well as a discussion on how to actually use these things in your day-to-day life. So I have been living on crypto gold and silver since 2019.

So I live this every single day and it's not easy to navigate all of this. And so part of this workshop is for me to explain, I guess the update on what I'm doing, because one thing I wanna be very clear about is this is moving, this is a moving target. one thing you'll find at this workshop, whatever I'm teaching at the workshop, you're going to have to follow up because the industry and the regulations and everything are changing very rapidly. And at the end of the day, can build a movement, I'm going to discuss how we how we can actually be successful at getting enough adoption for these alternative currencies so that we can avoid having to get stuck with

central bank digital currency tyranny. So that's really what this is all about. And I touched on this last week, but the point of this right now isn't mass adoption. The point of this right now is we're just trying to get innovators. And this is a quick explanation of the typical adoption curve for ideas or technologies. We're just trying to find the innovators that already are familiar with the fact that the government is going after their particular industry, or they see the writing on the wall. aggregate those people We're just trying to and develop solutions in terms of wallets and point of sale systems that incorporate multiple assets so that when the big emergency strikes and they

try to roll out a more draconian version of the CBDC that we already have, which is actually the part of tonight's conversation. I think we already have a CBDC. People need an alternative and that alternative has to be easy to use and it has to be competitive with what they're going to roll out. So to do this, we're putting together an alliance of, this is 52 different categories. I'm going to narrow this down to the top 20, but these are organizations that are kind of already aligned and have resonant values with promoting alternative currencies. I'm building an advisory board. So once we narrow it down to the top 20, I want to bring in somebody from each of those areas to

help us navigate and understand how those how those areas work in terms of, you know, who are all the major players, what are the trade shows, and how can we figure out how to integrate and combine our message with their message? we actually have our first And to that end, advisory board member Dan O'Neill, who I know he's listening. I met Dan a few months back. He actually put together this Enemies of the State event in Washington, D.C. He's been just an absolute force in the Liberty community, was hugely involved with Ron Paul's campaign back in 2012, and has just been incredible to work with. And so he's actually been the one who's helped us build a network already of 20 volunteers.

throughout the country. He's going to be our representative representing the Libertarian Party in this effort. Then we're going to look to build. There's Dan in the comments. Hello from New Jersey. I hope you all get to meet Dan. I'm sure you will at some point. Just an absolute phenomenal guy. It's been great to work with him on this stuff. Now I'm going to get to the The topic of discussion tonight, which is 50 Shades of CBDC Tyranny. And this article should be published in Brownstone. I've submitted it. I had to go through some editing. But I'm going to walk through what I believe is that we already have a central bank digital currency.

And we actually probably have for a couple of decades. When I started doing this, the whole genesis of me getting involved with this was exiting political activism. and focusing on crypto and blockchain technology as a solution that's outside of the system. And after COVID tyranny, I was noticing that my friends and colleagues in the Free State Project were getting arrested by the federal government, whether it was Jeremy Kaufman, who started Library, who was targeted by the SEC, or Ian Freeman, who's now in federal prison for eight years for the horrible crime of selling Bitcoin without a license. I was scratching my head And, you know, because these are people that are very much

pro-peace and on the up and up. And so why would the federal government be putting all of these resources towards taking these guys out? And in researching this, I found that the central bank digital currencies were in a much more advanced stage of development that in fact, in 2020, 35 countries were just exploring them at the research stage. And today there are 134 countries with 11 of them already live and launched. And I think over 60 that are beyond the research phase and actually working on implementation. And so when I realized that it's the reason that they're going after crypto is they don't want competition for when they roll out

what I'm now calling the next level of tyranny for CBDCs. And so once I once I understood that, it became kind of my mission in life to warn people about it and to push people to alternatives, because once our money can be programmed and tracked and censored, then it's over. Then whatever your issue is, whatever your I mean, it's essentially the end of free will, because they're going to use that with social credit systems and digital IDs to basically implement a technocracy where they're making decisions for us from the top down. But the part of tonight is every time I do an interview and it's now been two years and I've been to 22 states, one of the first things that people ask me is, well,

what is a CBDC? And so now about two years in, you know, I scratch my head every time I think about that. What I've always thought it was, was this, this digital currency that was you know, highly programmable and something that could be monitored and tied into these other other systems that was that was centrally controlled by, you know, the central bank. And and and so I got to as I've gotten to explore this and look at how the current currency works. I mean, it already kind of works that way. So the dollar today is already digital. The dollar is just an entry in a database. The way money is created is in a very simplified way. The federal government issues an IOU to the federal reserve,

and then the federal reserve creates money out of thin air, but it's not the treasury. They're not printing dollars. They're not minting coins. They're actually using an Oracle database And they're just saying, all right, well, you just gave me an IOU for $100 million. Here's an Oracle database. And the Oracle database now says you have $100 million. Well, not to be semantic, but how is that not a central bank digital currency? It's issued by the central bank and it's digital. I mean, at its very essence, that's what a central bank digital currency is. And I'll get to this because when people ask me what a CBDC is, well, when you look it up, there is no common definition and I'll walk

through some things that are kind of eyeopening and, and, you know, I guess it depends. I'll be very curious to hear your feedback on what you think a central bank digital currency is because it doesn't have a, a widely agreed upon definition and there are a lot of variations to it. So, so with that as the starting point, um, so, As best as I can tell, this is the big differentiator at this point in time. So the way that it works is the Federal Reserve creates this digital money in their Oracle database. government writes checks on And then the federal that database. They pay vendors, pay bills, pay for investigations on cow farts and methane and everything that the government wars and all of

this other stuff. And then when those vendors cash those checks or employees cash those checks, they go to a commercial bank. And the commercial bank then creates their own database, usually with Microsoft or Oracle. And then they create their own money out of thin air using basically 10% of the money that they've received through the checks from the Federal Reserve as what's backing their database of magical money. And so this is literally how the system works. And so I guess what I can see is the only main difference between what we have right now and perhaps a full central bank digital currency is that the

individual commercial banks don't get the opportunity to create money out of thin air in their own database. They have to work through the Federal Reserve. That is, in essence, the only major difference. And to me, that's not much of a difference. And the reason why that's not much of a difference is the commercial banks own the central bank. So that's why I put the power strip plugged into itself. Because at the end of the day, you see these politicians trying to act like, well, I hate the Federal Reserve. I'm siding with the banks. Who owns the banks? I mean, what a joke. So as far as I can tell, based on the commonly accepted definitions, the only difference is that it's the central bank

issuing the currency. But I'm going to walk through some other things that are interesting here. to think about that you might not know as this issue has been discussed. So does a CBDC have to use a blockchain? I think one of the big issues with this is there's this assumption that in order for something to be a CBDC, it has to work on a blockchain like a Bitcoin. And there's absolutely no rule that says that. There's nothing that says that. It's not a central bank blockchain currency. I mean, it just says digital currency. Nowhere is it written that it has to be on a blockchain. And I think that as these politicians try to narrow the definition and as the Bank for International

Settlements and WEF try to change the definition, they try to make it like, oh, well, no, it has to have this, it has to have this. And then they keep you distracted. Meanwhile, realizing we've actually had a central bank digital currency probably since the late late 90s so it doesn't have to use a blockchain the other one is I think most people think and I even thought this originally as well that a cbdc by definition means that you're banning cash And that is not true either. There are no implementations that have been done so far that banned cash completely. Cash usually exists alongside. And while there may be an intention to phase it out over time, and it's unclear if that's

even fully the intention, in the implementations and most of what's being planned so far, cash still exists alongside a CBDC. So these things are not... are not mutually exclusive you can still have cash and along with the cbdc which I would argue is what we have right now 92 of our money is digital eight percent exists in physical form in dollars and coins and so um so so again I'm painting this as a picture of okay well what is a cbdc well it blockchain there's no rule doesn't have to be a on that you can still have cash This is a big one. So will customers have accounts directly with the Federal Reserve? I think part of the thinking on this is, if it's a central bank digital currency,

well, that means we're going to get rid of commercial banks and I'm going to have an account directly with the central bank. And a lot of people have this misconception. And a lot of people think, well, we're not going to have central bank digital currencies because, the banks won't want this of course, because this would put them out of business. There's no implementation so far of a CBDC that gets rid of commercial banks. None. China even has a two-tiered system where the central bank issues the digital currency to the commercial bank and then the commercial bank continues operating the way the commercial bank normally operates. And in fact, it's even possible, depending on what kind of

technology they implement for a CBDC, that you could have a programmable money that allows fractional reserves that still allows the commercial bank to create more digital money out of the digital money originally created through the central bank. not only are there no accounts directly with the federal reserve, nobody's even actually planning on accounts directly with the, with the federal reserve. So, so this is, I think, again, all of this is important to know. It doesn't need to be a blockchain. There's no getting rid of commercial banks. Um, and, uh, you know, so, so then, so then what is it? So, so what makes, um, this a special? What makes CBDC special?

Well, usually, like what I thought about it is, well, what I'm concerned about is it's the programmability of it. It's the added ability to really tighten the controls. So, you know, things like controlling spending, being able to track spending, being able to modify behavior through the uses of incentives, through through this digital currency. Okay, well, let's look at the current system. We have HSAs, health savings accounts. This is health equity. This is one of the larger players. The largest health savings account company, it's called Optum Bank. So it's a bank and they have 5 million customers. So what do we know about HSAs? Well, it's programmable money.

It's programmable digital money. They can restrict your spending. They monitor you in real time. They can give you conditional access to your funds. They can give you penalties for noncompliance. This exists today. Custom spending limits, automatic restrictions, behavioral incentives. In fact, it used to be before COVID, you couldn't buy over-the-counter medicine with an HSA. So there's a whole laundry list of what can I buy with my HSA? This is pre-tax money up to a certain amount, and it has all of these programmable features to it. that can be controlled at the level of you can only use this card at this place. You can only use Walgreens, but not CVS. You can only buy these kinds of items.

You can only, you know what I mean? Like it's actually very, very granular. that is programmable digital money Well, that exists today. And I've talked about it before. I won't go into all of the details, but there's that Doconomy branded MasterCard with the U.N., that using the existing digital currency system that we have, there is a system in place that tracks your carbon usage. When your carbon usage hits a certain limit, it cuts off your ability to spend money using that card. So to be very clear, we don't need a blockchain. We don't need changes in the system at all. We don't need to pass laws to make the existing system that we have programmable. It's already highly programmable.

In fact, even when you look at a basic process of buying a cup of coffee, everything that actually goes on There are multiple things being hit, databases being hit, screening happening. I mean, you've probably all experienced, you know, you travel somewhere and you go to use your debit card and it shut off. But while fraud, what is fraud prevention? Fraud prevention is a form of programmable money. And let's be realistic about this. These databases that these banks are using are either Oracle or Microsoft. People have been programming Oracle and Microsoft databases for decades. There are APIs that and interfaces specifically to do the programming. So I say all this to say,

because we're sitting here, these politicians will say, well, we have to protect American privacy and we don't want this tight level of control We already have it. over spending. We already have it in a very significant way. And one thing I'm going to do after the articles releases, I'm gonna start sharing stories of all of these different examples, personal examples where people can start to see how actually programmed our money is. Because we need to shift the mindset from CBDCs being something that we should prevent to understanding that CBDCs are something that we already have. So then the next one is, and the politicians love this one. It's all about surveillance.

So these mythical CBDCs, however it's defined, again, as I've gone through this, I think it's pretty clear that we really do already have a CBDC. But the politicians will make you think that, well, it's all about the surveillance. We don't want to have the surveillance that could come from a central bank And here are some quotes from some people. digital currency. I've actually talked to two. I talked to Ted Cruz. I talked to Cynthia Loomis at a conference yesterday. Last year, Ted Cruz, the Biden administration is actively working to create a new digital currency that will allow the government to spy on our transactions and control our financial freedom. We must stop this now.

Cynthia Loomis, who is the Bitcoin, she has her laser eyes and her bio, and she's the one who went to that conference and told everybody that she's excited about using taxpayer theft and theft through civil asset forfeiture to buy a million Bitcoin. And so she's spoken out publicly. I'm deeply concerned about the Biden administration's push for CBDC. It could be used to gather information on Americans and potentially even We need to ensure any control their spending. digital currency system protects privacy. and individual liberty. And then, of course, there's Elizabeth Warren, where even she claims publicly to be against the surveillance aspects of this, which she's a direct

proponent of more enhanced CBDCs. But even she said, if we're going to create a digital dollar, we have to make sure it works for everyone, not just the wealthy, and that it protects consumer privacy. So this is what we're hearing from the politicians. They really want to protect us from these CBDCs because they don't want us to be surveilled. Well, here's the reality of the situation. Our money is already completely tracked. And I wasn't even aware. I guess it's just eye opening when you put all of it together and you put it in a table. How many different tools they have in their toolbox? They can issue subpoenas and court orders, which is the rarest because, I mean,

that actually requires them to do something. They can do financial intelligence requests. There's Bank Secrecy Act reporting, where banks automatically have to report large transaction volumes. That's just a default situation. There is the Patriot Act, which gives the government the power to access financial records, often without a court order. There's bulk intelligence gathering by the NSA. There's something called a national security letter. And this is where the government can actually demand financial records without court approval and then can even shut down a bank account. But the kicker is that they can even put a gag on you so that you can't talk about it with anyone,

including your own lawyer. So I want to repeat that. They actually can use national security letters to shut down access to your funds and you can't even talk to a lawyer about it. And so this is just the first page. There's more. They can use suspicious activity reports. And they, again, we have programmed money. So they are automatically running algorithms. if our spending patterns look suspicious, Oh, then they have to file another report. And then that report can trigger an additional investigation. There's civil asset forfeiture, which, of course, is the basis of the strategic Bitcoin reserve that Trump wants to There are data sharing to put together. agreements with other countries.

There's automated transaction monitoring. There's swift monitoring. There are mutual legal assistance treaties. And then the last one and the new one is there's just simply IRS monitoring of all of our financial transactions working directly with the banks. When you review the contract that you have with your bank, the bank actually retains the right to sell or give away your financial information to third parties. And they are already actively doing that. So some of the new 87,000 IRS agents are going to be involved in using AI to analyze all of these transactions. So it's absurd for these politicians to say that they are concerned about surveillance. I've never heard any of,

not only have I not heard any of them talk about any of these things when they are putting their speech together about how they're champions for individual privacy for financial transactions. All three of the people that I mentioned, well, not actually not Loomis because she wasn't there yet. Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren both reauthorized the Patriot Act. So Ted Cruz likes to talk about not liking financial service or financial surveillance, but he voted for all of it. And there's one other misconception here. Because actually, Ted Cruz put together a bill and he's put it forward twice. And his bill was to prevent the central bank from for the Federal Reserve from issuing a CBDC without

congressional approval. And again, so now with my renewed thinking about this, well, does that mean that they have to shut down what they're doing right now? Does that mean they're going to stop operating their Oracle database for the Like, I don't even understand why. federal government? what that bill means. I mean, if it were a new form of currency, however you would define that differently than creating something in an Oracle database, then that would require Congress. But I'm not sure there was congressional approval when they upgraded from the database that they had before Oracle or from the system that they had before that. We've gone through three versions of what's called Fedwire,

and now we have something called FedNow. We didn't need congressional approval for that. So Ted Cruz puts this bill that he says is to protect us from The Federal Reserve. I don't like the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is an unnecessary Ponzi scheme. So I'll never justify or defend the Federal Reserve. But let's be very clear. Everything that I just went through in these two slides, all of these methods of surveilling us, these methods are being done by by the government and by Congress. And in some cases, the executive branch, the Federal Reserve isn't proactively doing this. In fact, they actually don't like doing a lot of this because it adds cost and it's burdensome

for their own business. So when a politician tries central bank is the bad guy. to make it look like the Meanwhile, they're reauthorizing the Patriot Act. You should you should question it very heavily. So here's the punchline is and I've come up with this as a this is kind of a cute tongue in cheek thing based on the 50 shades of gray. But but I'm saying and I want to kind of redefine this and say we already have a central bank digital currency and we're at the bondage level. And then there's a tiering system here. The next level is servitude. And then the final level is enslavement. And that final level of enslavement is a complete lack of control. This is where you have an

energy credit based system that is tied to a social credit score. That's the end game that they wanna go to. But what we have right now is digital money that's already programmable, surveilled by the NSA, that's already being Bank Secrecy Act and everything else. That's already where we are. What we have is already bad. We don't even need to, thing that we have. we need to get out of the But the important thing to understand is that the Republicans and the Democrats have two different approaches, but to accomplishing the same thing, which is to add tyranny to the existing system. And here's what their approach is. The Republican approach is, they'll say, we don't want central bank

but then they will push for digital currencies, monopoly control of stable coins and putting that in the hands of the commercial banks. So Cynthia Lumis, by the way, that's exactly what her bill does. Her Lumis Gillibrand bill. It bans what are called algorithmic stable coins. It puts a whole bunch of reporting requirements in place that companies like Tether and USDC or Circle can't meet. And it gives complete control over stablecoins to the largest financial institutions in the United States. Well, okay, what is a stablecoin? It is a programmable digital form of money. And so this doesn't really help anything.

if you're worried about the elements Again, of surveillance and programmability, that actually pushes it in the wrong direction. But they're positioning it as if it's a free market solution, whereas the Democrats are actually actively pushing more issuance directly from the central bank. And that's actually current government policy under Biden's executive order 14067. But at the end of the day, you get to the same place. So Loomis is is completely against privacy coins. She is for giving more power to the banks. Let's be clear. The the invention, the point of Bitcoin in the white paper was to be peer to peer digital cash that could be used without third parties.

So the whole point of this is not banks. The whole point of this is not all of these surveillance tools and all of this regulation. The point of it is to actually not need any of that and to work around that. So the Republicans and the Democrats are both pushing in the wrong direction. And so I think it's important moving forward that we frame the debate. Don't let somebody tell you that they're trying to prevent a CBDC. Ask them about what they're going to do to unwind the existing CBDC that we have. I want to start pushing again the number of stories. Most of my friends have been debanked. I'm actually going to start doing some polls on that because what always works

with this is sharing real stories. Most of the people that I know have been debanked. These are the criteria that I have for how we might think about moving the levels of CBDC tyranny, you know, kind of a points based system. So there's surveillance and monitoring. So minimal surveillance, moderate surveillance, which we have now, which I don't know how NSA Patriot Act and Bank Secrecy Act is moderate, but I guess it is moderate as compared to you could add an AI powered social credit system. monitoring system and a What are the control mechanisms? You know, no spending rules or restrictions. versus moderate control spending, you know, some spending rules and restrictions on certain

items to total control where it's, it's completely, you know, you, you can only buy things that are white listed and then based on your social credit score that even determines further a narrower field of what you can, what you can buy. Cashless, again, once again, you can either have cash or not have cash alongside of CBDC. I would argue that you're moving more into the tyranny realm if you do actually ban cash. Tokenized, is it tokenized or not? That does add a new level of programmability, but again, it isn't necessary. existing Oracle and Microsoft databases. You can still use the Who issues it? Is it the central bank? Is it a stable coin or is it a hybrid? um globalization is it a

national currency is it a regional currency or is it a global currency and then how is crypto treated alongside all of this are there no restrictions on crypto Are we dealing with, which by the way, this is what's next. The IRS is requiring that you report your self-custody holdings. And the next thing you're going to be required to do is register your crypto holdings on a common ledger that is tracked with CBDCs. It's called Regulated Liability Network. And I've talked about that. And then the last two steps are a ban on privacy coins, which certainly seems to be coming. I mean, there's nobody in Congress saying, I mean, whatever, maybe one or two people. Everybody else is, you know, oh,

we've got to stop money laundering and terrorism. And then the last is an outright ban on crypto. So these are kind of the things that I'm talking about. And I'll share this around. This is all in the article, but I kind of want to get people's feedback on this because I'd like to formalize this so that every time a politician talks, we refer to this. I think we need to control this. the language on this. I think it's important that we we reinforce that we already have a CBDC. We finalize this index and that we describe all of the political actions and in the context of these shades of tyranny. So So anyway, that's the basic overview of this. I'll open this, I'll bring people up for this,

but that's what I wanted to say is just a long, I've gone through a long process here to actually define what a CBDC is and where I've come out is we've already got one. I look forward to comments. Let's see, there we go. Adam, George and IM4IM. Are you guys unmuted? Let me see if, there we go. George, you there? Yes, thank you. Great. Good. Well, that's a big pivot, a big, well, I should say transition from the prevention to going from preventing CBDCs to now recognizing they're here just in a different format than we

shall we say, expected, but that doesn't mean that the tyranny is going to stop. It's only going to be increased. It's only going to be increased, but what I found, and part of this is just in doing the research, is how programmable the existing system is, people are not aware of. I will be putting out a flood of examples. people are not aware of how much we're being surveilled already through multiple different avenues, right? Because these are the things people are concerned about with CBDCs. So very simply, our money is digital. Its original source is digital out of the Federal Reserve. there may be also this situation And yes, where the commercial banks are also printing money,

but they own the central bank and they're directly tied to the central bank with reserves. So as I went through it, I'm like, yeah, how... How can I not say this is a central bank digital currency? So, yeah, it is. It's a big shift. And frankly, I'm stumbling through it now because this isn't the right language. This needs to be kind of cleaned up and tightened up. But yeah, I think it's a complete pivot. It's a complete and a completely different approach. And a lot of it is about educating people more explicitly on how bad the current situation is. So this isn't a we need to stop something. It's we need to wake up to the fact that it's already this. and that's a different

different thing agreed agreed no I also agree I mean uh we've already got fed now that's been you know used since december of last year and we've it's already the mechanism it's already the mechanism that's being used it's already it already has the capability to um to lead us into a new currency. it's not set up to actually Right now, convert currencies, but it certainly could be. So FedNow has the ability to accept currencies from all over the world and then convert them into one currency. These are features it already has. So I agree with you. We're already at the central

bank digital currency level. and we need to come up with alternatives out of that and you know there's I i I'm hopeful because there's many solutions you know we do have we do have stable coins we have for the time being physical cash slippery slope there because we're still issued by the by the Federal, not the Federal Reserve, but the Treasury. But it is still centrally produced. We also have traditional gold and silver, which is recognized all over the world. You know, some people have generics, some people have minted gold and silver. I'm a big fan of goldbacks. that's that's a gold that is in a You know, small enough measurement of, you know, I see you holding one up there.

I've got one here, too. We use these in New Hampshire. We use them daily in New Hampshire. businesses that are We have hundreds of accepting them and I just keep them in my wallet. What I like about that is it's gold. Everybody knows what gold is. Everybody likes gold and this happens to be a small enough amount of gold where everybody can afford it. They're at $5 today and that's pretty manageable. So I'm glad that we have alternatives. It looks like there's, you know, a lot of people that are waking up to this, already woke up to this. a lot of people that were And I'm, I'm pretty happy about that. I am too. And I, and I actually, I have one slide that I didn't go through,

which is what is the solution. And so this is the workshops that, And again, my thinking on this has changed, that I'm doing. which is why I need to update the book. What's really occurred to me in the last 90 to 120 days is how absolutely critical it is that we have privacy coins. And the reason for this is watching what these politicians are doing, but also knowing that a lot of people thought Bitcoin was anonymous and Bitcoin is not anonymous. And now they're able to use chain analysis and AI to track who has what. And the issue with this is that essentially makes it so that Bitcoin isn't fungible because now they can actually tie certain coins and say these coins are whitelisted,

these coins are blacklisted, which means that all Bitcoin are not equal, which so once you remove the fungibility, you've taken away a significant property of Bitcoin. So as a result of that, I've moved heavily into and I recommend actually privacy by default coins, Zeno and Monero. And then there are optional privacy coins. So Zcash, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin, these are all coins that There is you have to take an extra step or two, but you can have privacy with those coins. And so that's that's what I'm recommending at this point. specifically because I have And, you know, friends that are in prison. You know, it's one of those things where obviously we see it now with the telegram guy.

But the list of people somebody just sent around on Twitter, I believe it was a Archer Ships, spreadsheet of all the people that have been thrown in prison in the last six months. And it's and a lot of it, most of it is is privacy related. And, you know, The issue with this is all these politicians, they try to make it like we're the bad guys. Privacy is a right. I mean, growing up, we just used cash. This whole idea that we're guilty before we can prove ourselves innocent is is absurd, particularly in light of the fact that it's the governments that are the ones that are routinely engaging in all of the behavior they accuse people using privacy coins of. And these people

can't track trillions of dollars in their own audits. Those are the people that are telling us we can't have privacy coins. So but I love gold backs in silver. And one of the things I mean, Adam and I actually talked to some folks at Alpine last week about this. And I've said this on a couple of talks. I think there's a big opportunity here to create privacy tokens of gold backs, silver and and gold so that you can get the same digital benefits. Because if I if I get a a gold back and I go hand this to somebody, everywhere I go, I tip with these, assuming that the merchant doesn't take them outright. Once they have that, that's theirs. It's private. Nobody knows they have that.

And if we could have that parallel system, online, that would be a huge win. And if there's a way to kind of merge the privacy tokens with physical redemption, I actually think that might turn out being the default go-to. I can see merchants being in a situation where they take multiple crypto currencies, but then actually resolve it to a gold or silver privacy token that they can then redeem. I can see that being a very popular part of a solution And in fact, I'm working on moving forward. building or buying a point of sale solution that does just that. Because the number one problem that we have, all alternative currencies have, is the ability to make this easy for merchants.

And merchants need the ability to pick multiple different alternatives because they need enough combined buying power that it will actually impact their business. And unfortunately, today, there aren't any really good point of sale systems that do that. And then more problematically, If they're run by a centralized company, then that's a central point of failure. So all of a sudden that point of sale system goes away and your entire alternative system is dead. And we've seen that happen. I mean, BitPay used to be a big player. They didn't go away, but they're not accepting new merchants. They're heavily regulated and so they're not even taking new people. There was a point of sale

system here in New Hampshire called Anypay and the folks were tied up with the Ian Freeman thing and they just left. And so we really, we're worse off today than we were five years ago in terms of point of sale system. But if we could solve that, then I actually think that we could really ramp up adoption in a big way. waking up to the need for it. Because more people are We just need to compete at the product level. agreed yeah and our earlier adopters are those that value freedom over profit the next level of challenge that we're going to have is those that actually seek profit as they try to move up to the big house unfortunately today I

learned that there are startups that are actively working with um alternative banks. So, you know, basically the credit unions where some people have chosen to use a credit union over a typical bank because they think that the credit union represents them better. But there are startups right now that are trying to help credit unions integrate with FedNow and not just with P2P cash, but what they'll call P2P cash, not what we would define as P2P cash, but also with digital assets. And so the waters are getting so murky with the

definitions of what is digital cash, what are digital assets, and what is self-custody and what isn't. Well, that's an important point. And the important thing to know, this is why Zeno came out of nowhere as being like the top, the number one thing that I'm interested in, which is that When I was researching CBDCs, I found out that they're doing this regulated liability network thing. And so the way that the great taking can happen is with a click of a button. You tokenize people's stocks and bonds and 401ks. You put it on a platform with CBDCs and then boom, there's a bankruptcy. And with a click of a button, all of those assets get transferred to the big four banks. And so unfortunately,

and I'm going to be doing a lot of content on this. part of probably the weekly This is actually going to be podcast or every other week where I'm going to pick a a market segment for tokenization. I mean, cause the actual market segment, the total market size for, for tokenization is one and a half quadrillion dollars. I'm not even making that up. Literally anything can be tokenized and everything will be tokenized. That's, that's the thing. A lot of people will say, I don't understand tokenization. We don't need tokenization because they look at what's happened with tokenization and crypto. What is tokenization and crypto? It's NFT and it's memes. And the problem is that

that's all people see. In the meantime, Wall Street and everybody else, they're working on actually tokenizing all of our real world assets. So those real world assets will be tokenized. Whether they're going to be tokenized or not isn't the issue. The question is, are they tokenized in a way that's centralized and controlled by somebody else, or is it self-custody and private? That's the decision that we have to make. But tokenization is the natural evolution of the database. I think in my last article, I think there's something like $10.5 trillion lost every year because of issues related to hacks and things related to... to databases. And if you think about actually every industry

runs on a database, I mean, money itself is an Oracle database. But once you start looking at car titles, use this database, once you start looking at everything as a database and the fact that that database is that central point of of where trade happens, you'll see the opportunity for for privacy tokens. But you also see the threat of all of this going in a centralized manner. And the centralized part is winning. Let me be very clear on this. They are way out developing. People in crypto are sitting here saying, oh, yeah, I'm going to hold Bitcoin. And it still does seven transactions per second. When I got my first Bitcoin, it was better, faster, cheaper money. And then the traditional

finance has created Venmo. They have created Zelle, Google Pay, Apple Pay. Soon we're going to have X payments. And meanwhile, it's actually harder to use Bitcoin today than it was in 2017. We actually have to win in the marketplace. We all have to get together with gold and silver and crypto. And we've got to come up with solutions that work together. The good news is we can do it. And I actually think that that, you know. I'm glad Adam's on here. I mean, I think Alpine is going to be a big part of this. And I think that Zeno is going to be a part of it. And I think we put the right point of sale system together and we can really scale this up. Alpine definitely has a lot of solutions.

The UPMA network is one of the solutions where everything is accounted for and held in physical form. And so the solutions we have there are that we... We provide kind of a middleman type service or a liaison service where you can convert your paper dollars into gold. And then we also provide daily use tools so that you can use it in daily transactions. So it's not just gold bags. We also have debit cards and things like that. And so Alpine Gold in conjunction with the UPMA, which for everybody who doesn't know, that's the United Precious Metals Association. And they've been around since 2009.

I think we passed the Legal Tender Act in Utah in 2011. And it's just been it's just been a big, big kind of been growing bigger and bigger ever since. Now we've got over 60,000 members. So we are one of the solutions. definitely one of the solutions. Gold and silver is That's the one I like because I like to have those physical assets. I like to be able to trade with people. And it's a different type of negotiation. Even people who aren't part of the movement, even people who aren't interested in in financial freedom. And there's a lot of people out there. There's a ton of people that have no concern whatsoever about financial freedom. And they're just getting on with their lives.

They're raising their families. They're doing their job. They just want to do their thing. If a central bank comes down the pipe, they don't care at all. But even those folks, when you pull out a silver coin, I have one of these to remind me of when this started. Aaron, do you know what that is when you look at it? Are you familiar? That's from 2005, the Liberty Coin. And I keep that to remind me. But when you pull something like that out of your pocket and you start negotiating and trading with someone, that human in them comes out real quick. And then all of a sudden they're looking at negotiating. You know, they're looking. It changes their mind into a negotiation standpoint.

And then you can start trading with them, you know, with real, real money, which is gold and silver, in my opinion, is real money and it's physical money. And so even the regular people get it. You know, they don't they may not even know it. But when you pull out gold silver and you start trading with them, and when you pull out it activates that human inside them that knows that that's real money. And, you know, the people that get it quicker than anybody are children. So we have children that come into my office and, you know, their parents will be doing whatever, you know, depositing on their accounts or something like that. And then the kids will come

we want to we want some goldbacks, too. over and they'll say, And they'll give us their money. And, you know, we'll we'll play banker with them and and just kind of swap out some bills. And the one guy there was this 10 year old that came in and he said he said, this must be a scam. And I said, oh, yeah, why is it a scam? And he says, because I'm giving you paper dollars and you're giving me gold. He says, this is too good to be true. You must be ripping me off. And I said, no, man, I'm not. But you're right. You're right. You know, this this paper dollar thing is it's it's not you know, it's not what you think it is. And kids pick it up immediately. They hold one right next to the other.

And it's just there's no comparison. They're like this. You know, this gold is obviously worth something. I think that's when I did. There was a zero hedge article about this when we did our San Jose workshop. I mean, and the attendee even wrote about this. I mean, everybody, everybody got it. It was mostly a boomer audience. Everybody understood this. We struggled to get people set up with crypto wallets. I mean, I'd say a little over half were able to pull it off, but absolutely everybody. understood the gold back. And so I agree with you. That is always the reaction. And actually, probably the biggest complaint that I hear from people is, them so beautiful? why do they have to make

Because I don't want to give them away. They feel like artwork. I actually hear that on a common basis. And so it's like that. But if you combine the two, if you do privacy tokens with this, this is why I say, Then you can still do you can do international business. You can sell people. You can you can do sales with people that are not in your physical presence, redemption function. but then still have a And that's that's what I'm incredibly excited about, because I think that there's there's big interest in that. And I think merchants would like to be able to take multiple. And we do need multiple. We need enough combined buying power. to be able to offer a solution in an emergency.

So when they go to ramp up, whatever that ramp up is. So now I look at it differently. I used to look at it as when they go to roll out CBDCs. Now I look at it as, no, it's not rolling out CBDCs. It's rolling out some subset of the things on this index. So is it banning cash? That is the next thing. Is it adding a new layer of programmability? Is it trying to ban crypto? I don't know which the thing is, but I no longer look at it as a, They won't pass a bill that says, here's this narrowly defined dystopian definition of CBDC that we've come up with and we're not gonna pass it, but they are going to take the existing CBDC and add little bells and whistles to make it that much worse.

So anyway, the point is when that happens and enough people realize that it's tyranny moving on to like complete digital slavery, then at that point we have to have a solution that can handle onboarding enough people and there aren't enough gold backs there aren't enough of a single cryptocurrency to be able to onboard people in an emergency which is why it needs to be a combined effort and I think it can be an effective combined effort I do think I do think that it needs to be a combined effort because the more options we have the more likely we are going to be to have success. If we have enough cryptos and we have enough gold backs and we have enough private currencies,

physical silver and private mints that are producing precious metal rounds and things like that that people are interested in trading, if we have enough of that going on, the only option they would have is to ban private transactions. And just take a wide stroke and make an attempt to ban everything. And of course they're willing to try that. I mean, this is government we're talking about. So they're willing to try anything. They'll lock you in your house for two years and say it's for your safety. So I wouldn't put anything past them. But I do like the more options, more options, the better, because there's just it's going to be we're talking about billions of people

with 350 million people in America alone. That's just, you know, insurmountable. We've got to have teamwork and we've got to have multiple options. And and I like everything that you're saying. And I agree with you. It's diversifying the solution, isn't it? Yes, that's a great way to put it. We've got to have a diversified solution. And so as the innovators, we can do that. We can get that built and we can make that streamlined and easy to use. And then when, you know, and I got to the point, it used to be, and I know I've talked to a they get frustrated because lot of other people, it's this conversation of, well, the normies will never adopt this. But the normies never,

nothing ever goes to mass adoption right away. Everything goes through an adoption curve. And so the normies will accept it if it's gone through, you know, the phases of innovator to early adopter. And then by that time, there are enough people kind of evangelizing it that they'll just kind of they'll take it by default, just as they've accepted what they currently have by default. And, you know, to that point, it's not I didn't mean to interrupt you. But to that point, you know, it's not just the people and normies that are catching on to this. Entire states and governors are catching on to this. You know, the smaller governments that we have, you know, if government is a necessary evil,

then I'll take the small localized governments over the big one. But we have states that are picking up on this. Utah passed the Legal Tender Act. We work with Citizens for Sound Money. I see you've got their coin up there. We work with Citizens for Sound Money to pass Legal Tender and Sound Money Acts all over the country. They're doing amazing work out there. And these states are listening to that. These states are passing these bills. We've got Tennessee who's bringing in a repository bill. We've got Texas that has some sort of a repository bill. Utah already has legal tender acts. I could be wrong, but I think there's like 11 states now that have passed some form of legal tender,

specie legal tender instrument type of legislation. there's 22 that are planning you know 22 bills next year for other states that are that are looking to adopt this thing so it's not just the normies that are that are kind of missing the that it's it's not the normies that have to pick it up it's also the states and the states are doing with legal tender you know that they're doing that they're doing it with repositories and some of them are doing it with cryptos and so I'm happy to see that you know it's we're not just out here all on our own as individuals trying to develop something new that there is a little bit of sanity in some of the states. Well, I think I'm an advisor to Citizens

for Sound Money. One of the things that I've been saying is because I know it's tough to get politicians to do something that's theoretical or in the abstract. Once we can get a state that's using it so much and it becomes so popular, the other states will have to follow along for competitive reasons. I'm a fan of the concentration approach of um which is part of what you know I'm trying to balance doing but like I've all of the stuff that I'm actually thought about doing like a road show throughout new hampshire to try to get as many people in new hampshire signed up because if we can get hampshire where everybody's critical mass in new talking about it and people are writing about it and

everything else then that'll make it easy for these legislators because there's something tangible to point to it's like oh yeah these people use this all the time there's demand for it uh I think one of the reasons that At least my understanding is that didn't pass or go as far as people wanted it to in New Hampshire is that the person in charge of the Commerce Committee is like, well, you know, is there demand for this? And there are probably other reasons for that. And I testified to that. I testified that there's we have seventeen hundred members in New Hampshire and and people are clamoring. to be able to do something with their precious metals. How do they manage it?

How do they spend it? They're finding, you know, shoeboxes with gold coins and silver coins in them. And they, you know, they're nothing more than trinkets that they have to take to pawn shops. And they would much rather have a solution to where they could spend them and use them and put them into the commerce. And I testified to that at the Capitol in New Hampshire. Another thing about that concentrated adoption of it. When we get a state on board, Utah is pretty close. They've got a lot of gold out there, and they've already got a head start on gold. So I'll use them as an example. They've already passed the Legal Tender Act, the first one. And once a state already establishes some sort of

criteria and law that's working, the states don't have to take a big risk. It's a big risk for politicians and policymakers to take on something they're unfamiliar with and then try to develop that for the masses. Well, once one state does it, then there's a roadmap. There's a way to make this work. I like your idea about bringing New Hampshire to it. I'm a granite stater and I would like to see it happen in New Hampshire as well. We're also in New Hampshire small enough to where we can essentially drive the entire state in three hours. And we can actually manage a road trip type scenario that you have and really push for some adoption. So what did you call it? Concentrated adoption?

How did you work that out? Something like that, concentrated adoption. But yeah, and I think all your points are 100% dead on. And New Hampshire's We're already ahead of the curve, right? We already have, as you said, what is it, 150 merchants that are signed up for this? And I will tell you, so Porkfest is a leading indicator for the adoption of alternative currencies. Like Porkfest, people were using Bitcoin in 2012. At Porkfest. So way ahead of the curve, right? Right before it became really, really popular. Well, at the last Porkfest, the number one thing was Goldbacks and then followed by Monero and Zeno. So it was Goldbacks and privacy coins. Like Bitcoin fell off. And so to me,

I view that as a leading indicator. So huge adoption, even though it's a small ecosystem. I mean, it's kind of like people used to say culture starts on the West Coast and spreads, which we all hope that's not the case. Well, the cure starts on the East Coast. Yeah, exactly. Alternative currency Exactly. adoption starts at ForkFest. I'm going to go with that as a tagline. Nice. Yeah, Porkfest was pretty great. I saw, I think, all the merchants. I'm not sure if I saw any of the vendors that weren't accepting goldbacks. We had a tent set up there, and we were providing our member services, kind of like a real-time kind of ecosystem up there for how this can actually work.

I think there were about 2,000 people there, possibly, and well over 100 vendors. They were all using all types of currencies. including goldbacks. And people were coming down, they were exchanging them, they were depositing them on their accounts, they were withdrawing them from their accounts so that they could spend them. And they were able to use this in a scenario that's more typical for day-to-day life and day-to-day transactions. And it worked fine. It worked very good. Even with the limitations of being up in Lancaster with limited internet and everything else, it seemed to work just fine. But yeah, so Porkfest was pretty great. I like the idea that we almost had a good joke

there that progress starts from the West Coast, but the cure starts from New Hampshire, I think. Yeah. Don't forget us in Texas. You guys have all your own rules. You guys make up your own stuff. You sure do. Yeah. Oh, man. I'll tell you what. I'm excited. I'm excited about Texas. I really would love to see a Texas Goldback because, man, if anybody's going to do it big, Texas is going to do it big. And that would be exciting. So you get your work cut out for you. I'm going to hold you to it. Thanks. Well, you know, talking about that, this past week I took kind of a deep dive into eGold.

It was started in 96. And, of course, the Secret Service and everyone else, FinCEN, came down on them. And it went bust. But the reason I took a deep dive into eGold and the founder, Dr. Douglas Jackson... um was I wanted to study what they were doing right and what they were doing wrong because the way I saw it is they were essentially tokenizing gold and one of the first tokenizers of gold pre-blockchain and um and it's funny I was listening to a two-hour interview it was about four years ago four and a half years ago um I feel like the poor man hasn't learned his lesson but uh about centralization but

just my opinion uh but the point I i guess I'm trying to make here is that having I wanted to see what could be learned and gained from the tokenization of a physical asset and say, you know, plugged on to Xano in a privacy world. And what could be gained or learned from Eagle? And to make sure that we don't go down that same road and make those same type of mistakes. He wants to resurrect it, but he thinks he's going to get the blessings of government and adhere to all the regulatory problems. And I think that's where he

hasn't learned from his lessons. So what do you folks know about e-gold and Dr. Douglas Jackson? I certainly don't want goldbacks to get into that kind of – I would like to see them tokenized in some way, but I don't want it to fall into an e-gold situation where the Secret Service calls it counterfeit, which it's not. Any thoughts, ideas, questions? Well, in our situation, it's not a digital gold. It's not something. So I can see where there would be problems with e-gold because they're They're creating something

that represents gold, and that's dangerously close to a security. And goldbacks are not that. Goldbacks are not backed by gold. Goldbacks are gold. And you can think of the name goldback as we're bringing gold back. We're bringing that back into vogue. So it's not digitized or tokenized and it's not, it's not, um, it's not a virtual currency the way e-gold was trying to be. Um, so I think in that regard, it's a lot different because it's a physical asset understood. But I can see where it gets in the weeds really quick, you know, uh, If I'm going to be devil's advocate,

I can see the point of the SEC. That if you're going to create something that represents someone's wealth, you have to be accountable and held responsible for that. And you have to be able to produce documents and proof that that security that you're creating is indeed backed by some sort of a value. And that's the challenge that I get into in my thinking when I'm thinking about digital currencies and tokenization and things like that is where is that line of separation from

creating a security that's representing wealth? And that's the part that I have a hard time with. The Secret Service was coming after him, I think, well, for various reasons. They were able to successfully compete against the banks from an ACH or a bank wire or international wire. And they were certainly working against what's the Western Union because they were so much cheaper. And they were growing rapidly. But they were actually had pleaded guilty. But it was more of an issue of not operating with a money transmission, transmitting license. Right.

And not that it was a security where the crypto world has gone down the route of being named by the SEC as a security. So it's a little different in that respect. But he was certainly centralized. And I think of, you know, as one of our solutions, like we said, is the privacy tokenization of physical assets. And I don't know how that will, you know, all the mechanisms behind that. But I wanted to learn from eGold. And that's kind of where I'm at today. and when you start saying money Yeah,

transmitter, then you get into the money laundering laws and things like that when you get into money transmitting. Now you have to follow... It's a boggling law. I think it's called FinCEN. I forget what it stands for, but... But I've read it, and it's very challenging to understand. And, man, when you get into the money laundering side of things, you have to be able to guarantee transactions and verification of who's sending what and who's receiving. KYC, AML, all of that that came out of the Patriac.

Bingo. I was going to finish with it all came from 2001. Yeah, that's exactly right. I think the point is, though, if we're going into an emergency and they're trying to add tyranny, compliant with tyranny and that we're not going to be we need a solution that actually the thing that appeals to me about Zeno is it's actually you can't track it. It's not it's not like Bitcoin where it's like, oh, here's what the person was doing. The invention behind this is that, OK, what do you what? OK, track it. Show me. Show me what I did. Show me my my privacy token. Right. And by the way, I wasn't suggesting this 90 days ago or 120 days ago. It was the combination of studying how the full court

press against crypto, reading the legislation that's being proposed even by Republicans, And and then seeing what they have in store on the other end of this. So I was not I was like, yeah, Monero was on the list like it was on a list of seven coins that I was recommending. And now I'm like, we're going to need this because they are they're throwing people in prison and they want to roll out more tyranny. And so we're not going to comply our way out of tyranny. They're going to add more laws that we can't comply. You know what I mean? Like that's not ultimately going to be the end game. but certainly I'm not advocating to do anything illegal now, but I suspect that what

people are doing now will become illegal. And I mean, look, they've confiscated gold, right? I mean, there is no end to what they're going to try to do. And to me, there's an aspect of this that's looking at technology that actually is way ahead of the curve is probably gonna be one of the ways that we might have a way out. Yeah, I agree. I like the physical side of it. as well as the tokenization so um I i can I think I can live in both worlds I'm old enough and still have a brain that's young enough to live in both worlds um I i was kind of I was an early adopter to crypto so um and got it very quickly

you know even though I i still believed in silver and those kind of things so I i feel like We have to be diversified. We have to be diversified in how we fight back tyranny. And this is, you know, that's a true life lesson that you need to be diversified in all your actions and your decisions. This isn't, you know, just there's no one safe procedure for anything. So if you're doing, you know, financial investing and things like that. Everybody wants to be diversified. That's the number one recommendation is to be diversified. You need to be diversified in your thinking so that you're not closed minded

and you're open to other ideas and other opinions and personalities. That way you can be influenced by them and make educated decisions. And it's the same thing with currency and financial freedom. You know, we're going to need a multifaceted approach in order to protect ourselves because who knows what's coming next. And so I agree. We've got to be diversified and we've got to have a lot of options. And Aaron, you're right. I mean, the transaction speed is just not there with crypto. So we're going to all have to go, you know, pick different funnels. Yeah, no, we have to. And at the end, we need tools, right? that are easy to use for consumers and merchants that present these things.

And this is, I did a, I'll do another one because I need to do an update and the audio was bad on the last one. But the criteria are a merchant needs to have enough aggregate buying power, but the fees need to be competitive. Like that knocks out 95% of crypto. You can't use it. A merchant can't use Ethereum. A merchant can't use Bitcoin, right? Um, if, if their purchase, if their average ticket price is 20 to $50, that is, that is a no go. So you have to give them a combined solution that works and it's gotta, it's gotta be a combination. That solution needs to be quick because you can't have people waiting in line for a transaction to settle. Exactly. And so it's gotta be a combination,

but those tools, but it, No merchant wants to have five crypto wallets and four different, you know, point of sale systems and everything else. And so so then the question becomes, how do you have those tools without that becoming centralized? So ultimately, in the end, it has to be an open source solution so that it's not not at risk as a central point of failure. But. But in order to get to early adopters into larger adopters, if the tools aren't as easy, like I look at what's going on now, I mean, you know, they have stable coins that are working touch to pay with Apple. And of course, I mean, I saw the guy, you know, I troll him all the time. He's like, oh, this is the this is the

evolution of crypto. And I'm like, the whole point of crypto is. was peer-to-peer commerce you've added literally eight layers and I outlined all of the different people that are involved in in making touch to pay happen now with all of that said the whole point of crypto was touch to pay the first you know what I mean it's like or even if it wasn't tap to pay I mean it was still okay I'm standing next to you scan my code that the money there's no bank and there's no third party and now he's like well this is really easy to use but here you know here are the eight intermediaries and I love the idea that a stable coin is something that's pegged to fiat, which that's actually hilarious.

I mean, in the case of Circle, who actually makes USDC, they had $3 billion at Silicon Valley Bank. So when I say that the levels of risk involve the stable coin, when you take the technical risk, plus the regulatory risk, plus the financial risk of even how they hold the, quote, stable assets. And the inflationary risk. And the inflationary risk, it's probably the most absurd use case. It's the most popular, but it's the most absurd because we added this Rube Goldbar machine in order to be able to have people use. Anyway, that's how far off track we are. But at the same time, we need tap to pay with alternatives that are self-custody and that are private.

We still have to get to that level of usability. And we're far off because people haven't been focusing on that. A lot of it's been too niche. It's been like, oh, We're doing black market stuff and we're this niche. And it's like, no, everything's gonna be black market. Again, meat is gonna be black market. Driving your car more than 50 miles a week is gonna be something that's gonna be black market. So we need to make privacy great again. This is where you being a granite stater is really starting to show meat is already a black market in most states. And so is milk and other things like you can't just make pickles and sell them in Texas. You have to have a special food license.

You have to be FDA approved. You have to have all these licenses. we're fortunate in the granite state Now, you know we have enough where local farms and enough peer-to-peer stuff where we can still buy raw milk and eggs and meat from our neighbors uh but that's not the case so we've already got black markets for for meats and and milks and pickles yeah and and that's why we need things like counter economics and agorisms all about you know because uh we have to counter their tyranny and we have to be able to transact We have to be able to know our community and know where we can get our eggs, you know, and make choices by voting with our wallet that I'm

not going to buy my eggs from the store down the street. I'd rather buy my eggs from my neighbor, even though I might pay a little bit more. But my neighbor, you know, has the same way of thinking that I do. And and we want to support each other and use that counter economic. And actually, right now, since we've come through the pandemic, the homegrown eggs were actually cheaper than the store eggs for a little while. Because we got up to $7.50 a dozen here. And I was still getting my eggs from my neighbor for $5 a dozen. So I was saving money. I can buy them from my vet for $3 a dozen. Oh, man. So I can only tokenize the eggs, right?

You should tokenize that. Yeah. I just put a link in the chat to all of the New Hampshire businesses that take goldbacks. So I encourage you to check that out. You can see the map and you can kind of dig in on all of the different of the different places that are already accepting goldbacks and and and I will tell you like it was you know it's amazing for me I i need to to I was talking to some of the talking to ronnie last week it's like yeah I need a a quick onboarding kit because I will tell you so certain industries Barber shops should be all over this. First of all, you go to a barber shop and the sign automatically says cash discount. They're doing everything

that they can to encourage you to use cash at the outset. And I went in there and I got my haircut and the guy, Spanish was clearly his first language, but he certainly understood goldbacks. And I actually asked to talk to the owner and the owner wasn't in, but the next time I go back, That place, and it's a huge barbershop. They have like eight different chairs or whatever. And it's like that entire segment would be widely open to this. And so there are certain industries that'll just jump all over this. It's pretty serendipitous that you brought up the barbers because we've had a couple of barbershops call us and call our office and say, hey, we're down here doing some

haircuts and some people paid us in goldbacks we accepted them but we don't really know what these are can you tell us what this is and then we tell them about it and they immediately sign up and get there's several barbers on that list that you posted and those barbers I don't think that those barbers were recruited I think they called us and said hey we like gold we we would like to to cut hair for gold please and And they went on our, they volunteered. And it's funny that you brought that up. No other industry has ever contacted us and said, hey, we want to do this too. Well, I'm sure someone has, but it was a new one for me. That's a great point. Maybe the way that we get

quicker merchant adoption is by having an employee adoption for tap to tip. Because if both sides of the political aisle are both claiming that they're not going to tax tips, then why not just get it in gold, silver, or crypto? That's a good point. That's actually a great idea. Yep. That is a great idea. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You've got someone in the comments that said something similar. David said UPMA should add a merchant plugin so purchases can go straight into gold or silver. That's an interesting feature that I'm going to mention to the development team.

And that's also similar to what you're saying, that tap to tip. We already have member to member transactions that you can do. That's always in development and coming along. So you can already... do that, uh, member to member, but I like, uh, I like the, the comment by David, um, to where you could receive a payment, uh, and have it automatically go into gold or silver on your UPMA account. I'm going to, I'm going to take that up, uh, with development right there. So thank you, David, for that. I'll look into that. Well, and that's one of the things that I, with the point of sale system is again, if we could tokenize this stuff, there's a way to have a, P2P exchange where it's like

somebody pays with Bitcoin Cash or Monero and then behind the scenes it converts it to a token that they can physically redeem so that the merchant gets one reference payment, which I would think there preference for gold because would probably be a of the actual stability of the store of value if they're concerned about managing their business. I see that as something... So, yeah, I and, you know, I definitely want to talk about this. And I had a conversation, like I said, with Ronnie about this last week. I do believe that there's a way to integrate these privacy tokens in a way that that can rev all of this up. And it's still backed by it. It's still backed by Goldbecks. It's still backed.

It has all of the benefits of the current system that you currently have. It's just that the online system is uses privacy tokens instead of a centralized database. that's essentially one kind of I mean, simple way of looking at it. But if we could create plugins for a point of sale system where people could take multiple currencies and then have it resolved to whatever one reference currency they have, that's a game changer. That is truly a functionality that would massively increase adoption. That was something, too, about eGold was everything was priced in gold. So between the payer and the payee, they weren't thinking in their country's currency. Aaron, if I was transacting with you,

and let's say that I was in the peso world, maybe in Mexico or something, and I was trying to buy something from you in the U.S., you told me, well, it's going to be three grams of gold. and I could understand that in my head I'm converting 3g into my native currency and you've already converted the cost of your product and your upcharge in in dollars to to grams of gold and that's how I think um uh things will will progress even when it becomes tokenized and to go back to one of your older points adam um when you talk about the kids you know really get excited about because they're looking at these gold backs um well

in you know I think all of us can recognize in the last five years 10 years 15 years whatever you want to call you know time frame the word fiat was thought to be maybe a car and more and more people realize now that that means um you know money that's not backed by anything So the definition of and the use of the word fiat is becoming more and more popular and understood. And people probably may not understand the whole crypto or tokenization or maybe gold and silver. But what they've now realized is the inflation and the pain of inflation has been inflicted upon them. buy their fiat. And even if they don't know the term fiat,

they certainly feel it and know it about inflation. And when you start flashing goldbacks or, you know, a Liberty, you know, silver, you know, they recognize right away that, whoa, it's going up in value. That's what I really need to do. I need to be able to start using these and not lose so much to inflation. The kids get it right away. You're correct. And the kids see the logic behind it. This isn't just a shiny thing that they want to play with. They get it. When you put gold in your pocket, it goes up in value. When you put paper dollars in your pocket, it goes down in value. And the children are the ones that taught me that. They're the ones who get it. They're like,

this is going to be worth more money. This is going to be worth less money. I'm going to go with this gold. Yep. Yep. It's an opportunity that we have now with inflation growing and growing and climbing. It's actually going to make our job that much easier and has. I drink raw milk here in Oregon. Let me see if we've missed anything here. So if somebody goes to Alpine website, they can order gold backs and they can have them shipped to them now, right?

That's right, yeah. AlpineGold.com is an e-commerce just like anything else that you buy online. At the top of that Alpine Gold website, you'll see that UPMA link. I think, Aaron, aren't you set up with an affiliate link? I put a link in there. I put it in there. Unfortunately, I haven't used it. I've been going around telling everybody about it, and then I forget. Yeah, well, we're going to use yours this time. So when you click on Aaron's link. That helps Aaron out. That helps promote the cause and the message that he's delivering to everybody. And that's very important. And that will also get you to the service where you can purchase gold backs and

open a UPMA account and do all those things for sure. The UPMA, I don't know how familiar you guys are with it, but the UPMA offers many of the same services that a traditional bank might offer, only we do it with gold and silver. So you can deposit, withdraw, exchange. You can get prepaid debit cards. So you liquidate some of your gold and you put it onto a debit card and then you go spend it anywhere you want. We're trying to narrow that to where it's more kind of live action as you swipe. But that's, you know, a lot of processes have to be put in place. But for now, it's as close as we can get it. So. Uh, you can do member to member transactions. Uh, we've got, uh,

leasing accounts where you get paid 2% interest on that. Uh, and we pay everything in gold. It's all gold. Uh, the UPMA is a trust. It's a 501 C six member to member exchange. And the idea there is that a trust is the most guarded entity from the government. And so, uh, whenever you have something in trust, then, um, then it, it, It's the oh, I don't know how to word it, but it's a very private organization and it's private from government. And so it's one of the one of the best ways to protect yourself and your wealth is with gold and silver. And of course, if you don't own it, or if you don't hold it, pardon me, if you don't hold it, you don't own it. That's what all the gold and

silver guys say. But at some point, you have to manage it. And when it comes down to managing your gold and silver, that's where the membership of the UPMA comes in key. As we offer services for managing your gold and silver, that are more modern and online and digital and so forth. At least with the management side of things, it's more digital and convenient for modern times. And this is why when Aaron and I talk about doing merchant adoption and incorporating what you guys are doing, you know, all the merchants that I know and have known throughout time are know they don't know what crypto is going to go up what crypto is going to go down they don't want to

play the number go up game but if they can be crypto agnostic which basically for a merchant is I just need customer acquisition so I put out coupons I do groupons I do all these other things to get people through the door into my counter and so if they want to give me any form of money that is valuable to them And I can real time convert that into some sort of physical gold or silver or gold back and then withdraw it or use a debit card so I can go to my vendors. Then it's all money to me. Yep. yeah and so back to the

physical side of gold another thing that people are familiar with is is physical tangible assets so once you start trading in gold and silver you learn a lesson once you get used to the to the logic behind it and you get and your understanding of precious metals changes a light bulb goes off and you realize that the value of gold has actually never changed. 60 years ago, you could buy a house for 156 gold coins. You can buy that same house today for 156 gold coins. The value of the house didn't change and the value of the gold didn't change, but the value of the money is what changed. So in the short term, you know,

gold goes up, gold goes down. But in the long term, gold stays the same. And going back to eggs, the price of eggs was you could buy a house with 136,000 eggs 60 years ago, and it's the same price today if you go to egg currencies. Oh, wow. Never looked at egg currencies. Interesting. Interesting. Well, we're going to be onboarding a lot of people to Goldbacks. I think we've got, I don't know, eight events. It's crazy what's going on. I I'm just trying to, uh, get a breath, which I haven't lately. I I'm a little sleep deprived right now, but, uh, but yeah, the, one of the values of doing

the workshop is that you get hands-on experience when you're sitting in a room with a hundred or 200 people, and you're trying to explain this and, and, and onboard them, you learn 10 years worth of market research. Right. And so like every time I do this, it's like, oh, well, you know, it would make my life easier if, you know, A, B, C and D. And so this is why it's where I do think we will we will hone in on a on a scalable solution. And it probably won't take, you know, maybe a dozen more of these big workshops and some iterating. And I think that we'll actually have a product coming out of it that's going to be easy to. easy enough to onboard that we might even be able to

have an online version of the workshop and an online version of merchant adoption. And Adam, I'll talk to you about this offline. I actually did another interview today with somebody who was interested in talking to, he was gonna call Mark about trying to get a workshop going or a webinar with small farmers. He wanted to actually do that as a specific slice. And so anyway, a lot of really interesting insights opportunities. So the real question is, even going back to the whole point of this article, is I used to be like, we've got to get people doing these alternatives before they implement CBDCs. And now that I look at it as, okay, well, we already have CBDCs. So what is that level of

bell and whistle that makes it so that we can't pursue these alternatives anymore? That's now kind of the reframing. And I've got to tell you, I still, I don't know My sense of urgency has not has not dwindled. If anything, it's actually worse. I look at the political situation and I think that that that Bitcoin National Conference set us back six months. Actually, I thought it was really bad that And it's related to specific attributes with Bitcoin, but using civil asset forfeiture and taxes to when we're $35 trillion in debt to buy a seven transaction per second surveillance asset is not great. But it's not only just that,

it's the fact that Trump said that he'll pass legislation within 100 days. But the baseline for that legislation is this Loomis-Gillibrand bill. So I can tell you, having reviewed all of the bills, there are no pieces of legislation that are good. And didn't, I don't know, Adam, did you look at this? Wasn't Cynthia Loomis, isn't she proposing that we sell gold to buy Bitcoin? Isn't that part of her strategy? I'm not sure about that one. I haven't looked into that at all. So that one slipped by me. But I agree with you. I think it's a great idea to sell crypto to buy gold. So I'm going to go with diversification. There you go.

Yeah, I know. I know. I know, you know, the big boys are also really focused on buying gold and silver, too. We're talking a lot about central banks. Well, central banks all over the world are buying gold and silver as quickly as they can as well. And the EPA standards that these countries are putting into place are restricting and and causing gold mines and silver mines to shut down because they can't meet the EPA standards. That's causing more more supply demand inside you know, And whenever when you have supply, the market. when you have less supply and more demand, then the value goes up. And those are things that are taking place. So governments are are doing two things there.

They're hindering companies' abilities to extract these precious metals, and they're also buying up as many as they can. So it's not like they don't understand the value of precious metals and physical assets. If you're talking about diversification, you can buy property too. Property is another thing that's finite, and it's a good hedge against inflation, and it's a great store of value, and it's a great thing to have in an emergency. Buy property, buy physical assets. and the government's shirt certainly understand that they're buying physical assets gold silver properties um you know all these things uh they're they're doing that so I just encourage people to do what their government's

doing you know diversify and buy physical assets and And, you know, the governments want a digital currency. So we should invest in digital in bitcoins and cryptos and things like that, too. That's what they're doing. We should create our own Oracle database and create our own account and put our fabricate our own money in our own Oracle database. We should get a job. Get a job at Oracle and then work your way through the corporate ladder and just take it over. There you go. Eagle just used a SQL server. Microsoft. That's what a lot of commercial banks. So again, part of the article was I did just a deep dive. So how does this money actually work? How does it technically work?

What systems do banks use? And so this is a little bit nerdish, but each bank has five different databases for doing different things, for doing online transactions, for doing this, for doing that. And a lot of the commercial banks, they use COBOL for their transaction processing. Most commercial banks use MSSQL, Microsoft SQL. And so, you know, and then I just got to thinking about that. I'm like, how does this even work? And by the way, we people complain there are 20,000 cryptos. But if you look at a blockchain is essentially one way that it's a it's a database. Right. There are 50 to 60,000 databases that are running the monetary system. that we currently have. If you take all of the

central banks and then all the commercial banks and then five accounts each, so we're actually dealing with 60,000 databases that all can be hacked and everything else. And so I'm impressed that it hasn't completely collapsed already, but you know, who knows? We got our social security numbers last week and who knows when the Fed's gonna be next. But I certainly think, I saw somebody here said, you know, tape the, uh, tape, record, record the workshop. Hold on. Anyway, record the work. I taped the workshops and post with links. Um, I I'm going to, after I work out the kinks, I, and I'll tell you part, part of the reason why, and I want to be very careful about this.

I'm going to add a whole section to the website that basically says, go here and always refresh. Because if somebody caught a workshop from 90 days ago, um or you know 90 days from now it's going to be different information so I always want I want to be clear as someone who lives on alternative assets it is like being in a video game it there's a lot of back and forth by the way I was a hundred percent crypto And then I've moved more into gold and silver because of the crackdown and all of the issues with this instability of pricing. Not that I didn't mind it. Like there's some aspect that's kind of like with exercise now, We've realized that for a right? long time in the West,

people are doing like cardio for two hours a day. And it turns out that's actually not very, very helpful. It turns out people were having heart attacks doing, you know, this level of cardio that we work better when we do sprints And then have recovery time like that's kind of a better approach. And so when you're living directly on crypto, you kind of get that. It's kind of like when the price is down, you're like your burn rate is as low as possible. And then when the price goes up, it's like, oh, it's time to make some capital expenditures. I'm getting a new computer. I'm getting this. And that can be fun for a while. And then that also cannot be fun. So I have enjoyed actually moving it,

moving a little into into precious metals. I don't know if one thing. that's cool is actually you can set up one of these upma accounts and you can actually uh keep your wealth in gold and silver and transfer it to a to a debit card so I have a visa card that I can use so I don't have any fiat at any point in time but actually there's there is something uh really valuable about being able to hold, actually have a store value that is actually stable. And so that's one of the really unique features that Alpine offers. Yeah, and it might be that, you know, the price of bread goes up to $2,500 a loaf. And at that time, you would be able to liquidate some of your gold,

probably because at that rate, you know, gold will be up at twenty five thousand and you'd be able to liquidate just enough to go buy a loaf of bread if you needed to. So that's that's what that service is there for. Well. Well, Goldback outperformed and out-innovated Bitcoin. And by the way, when I say that, it pisses off Bitcoin maxis, but I'm like, the transaction fees last week, the transaction fees for Bitcoin hit $210. And I'm like, so, so this is a better medium of exchange, hands down, better medium of exchange. Yeah. And on the UPMA, whenever you buy, let's say $20, you know, $25 worth of goldbacks,

you get $25 worth of goldbacks. And when you withdraw goldbacks, you, you get 25 goldbacks. So you can hold them on your account. You can transfer a member to member. You can put them in, you know, a leasing program and have it grow. while you're saving it. And then when you withdraw it, there's no fee to withdraw it. You withdraw it and we give it to you is the way that works. And so you can do that member to member as well. And you can pawn your own gold to yourself. Yeah. And I like that. Now, I can't, I got to be careful not to give any advice. But if you think of it as a secured loan, I think who's the guy that the big investor is? billionaire and he makes a ton of shorts uh he said uh

he said that he doesn't um he doesn't get paid what he does is go and gets loans so if you think of a pawn as a secured loan you're loaning yourself your own money and uh loan is not a taxable event so Uh, I forget, I can't think of the guy's name. Uh, see his face all the time. He's, I think he's Japanese. Um, but he's American. Kawasaki, the rich dad, poor dad. Uh, yeah. Yes. Rich dad, poor dad. Yeah. He says, don't, don't spend your money. Get a loan, go get a secured loan. And then that's, you know, that secured loan is, is, is, uh, is a debt. Right. Gentlemen, I need to leave. We got a family thing. That's going to start here. It's a game night with the family. Ah, uh, Enjoy.

I'm going to sneak out. It was a pleasure meeting you, Adam. And Aaron, I appreciate what you're doing. And Godspeed, my friend. Yeah, reach out to me if you want to. And we can talk some more. We can talk in a more relaxed setting. But reach out to me. Send me an email. I will. I will. Watch for it. And Aaron, sometime soon I'm going to DM you with a question about tokenization on Xenon. Okay, sounds good. Got an idea. Awesome. I look forward to it. Thank you so much, gentlemen. Thank you. Have a good night. You too.

We've got 912 people on here now. That's pretty good. While we have a second, if you could just explain to people when they want to take physical... If they want to physically get their gold back, you ship them to them? Yeah, we ship them. You can come to one of our office branches and you can withdraw them. So we have a branch in every state where there's a gold back now, I think. So we have New Hampshire, South Dakota, Wyoming. Nevada, and of course, Utah, because that's the home office. And then we're also hopefully going to be opening up other small branches throughout the country. It's a growing process. You can't just open up a bunch of

offices right away, but we're hoping to be opening them up in a state near you, if not in your state. So you can just come in and withdraw them and you can have them shipped to you. We're all about that physical possession. We're all about it. But at some point it becomes unmanageable. At some point you've got more gold than you're comfortable keeping under your mattress and you have to be able to manage it and do something with it. And that's where the UPMA comes in to help manage those metals. Have you started to work with any pawn shops? I mean, those guys are all about gold and silver, right? they are uh you know jewelry stores love us um uh we have a lot of coin shops

that really love us uh the numismatic community um the the collector community they really like goldbacks uh they actually uh we have what's called a silverback uh which is not we don't advertise it as a currency because you simply can't you can't put enough silver into um into a a I think it's called decomposition sputtering. I'm not saying that right, but you just can't get enough silver in there for that to be... We already have coins. We already have silver coins and so forth that are denominated small enough to where we can transact in small transactions with them. So we don't really need a silverback. But the collector community loves these silverbacks.

We come out with purple ones and red ones, and they're gorgeous as well. I may even have one. Actually right here in my desk. I think I do I Have one here Try to hold this up a little bit. It's hard to get with the glare, but these have a dragon on them and And that's the silverback dragon and this is one of the one of the purple ones. That's graded 70 and Yeah, so pawn shops a lot of people love us a lot of people like these things because they're they're just fantastic and We do have pawn shops that accept them as payment. We have silver mints that accept them as payment. So you can walk into a silver mint and you can exchange your gold backs

for silver if you need to. And we also have a silver mint that sells gold backs right here in New Hampshire. So yeah, we've got a lot of fans. We've got a lot of fans and pawn shops are just one of them. They deal with a lot of gold and silver and you can go into many pawn shops and usually negotiate a deal. And that's another thing. You don't have to be a member of the UPMA. You don't have to be, you know, buying these things from Alpine Gold. We want you to buy them from us. But, you know, these things are everywhere. They're all over the place. You can buy them from Alpine Gold and you can go spend them anywhere. It doesn't have to be a UPMA gold back, a go back accepting merchant.

And it doesn't have to be someone with a UPMA account. It can just be anywhere. I keep them right in my wallet. I mean, I keep them in my wallet just like that. And the first thing, when I go to buy something, I pull them out and I'll say, do you accept gold for payment? And, you know, it doesn't happen. It's pretty common. I get one out of ten, you know, maybe two out of ten people that say, what is that? And I'll explain it to them. And then they want it. You know, they just want it. They want that gold. And so, you know, everybody likes these things. Everybody likes gold bags. Everybody likes gold. And you can transact with anybody's. So yes, pawn shops do like it.

Good. Well, let's see any, anything else here? Gold, it's old money, a little woo woo stuff for you guys. Don't take what I said seriously. Oh, I don't know. It's, um, Oh, I will say this. So I got, I got a tip. I actually integrated this thing called a XMR chat, which is a, it's a Monero tip bot. So I have to say it's really, it's really cool. So somebody actually tipped me and then we, we get a notification in this stream yard chat window that says what their message was along with the tip. So, Way to go, XMR chat. I think that's a cool feature for tipping. So I'd throw that out. So, Aaron, can you talk about some of the other workshops that we're

getting close on? I've got a significant other that's dying to go to Nashville, and she asked me at least once every other day, when is it? We had to reschedule that one. along with Captain Austin Fitz. We were trying to do it And so we had a venue fall through and then we had the dates fall through. So I've got to decide whether we're either going to do it without Captain Austin Fitz, in which case we might do it in December or we might wait until early next year. So unfortunately, my schedule is already packed. I've got this New Hampshire event coming up and then we have Omaha and we have New Jersey and then I've got Mexico and then Argentina and then actually two other events in Mexico.

So coming up. So the actual calendar is getting kind of full. We only have like a couple of weekends left that we can actually schedule through the for the rest of this year. And then we're already kind of looking at next year. So it will happen. It's just if anything, I probably had to guess that it would be next year. If she can't make it, then I'm just going to go hock toke. Good deal. She wasn't happy about that comment. Let's see. No, get Catherine. We need to convert her to at least understanding crypto, somebody said.

I've talked to Catherine quite a bit. She is rightfully skeptical about Bitcoin. There's another conversation that needs to take place with her about crypto, but she's not wrong about her her view on Bitcoin and she certainly loves gold and silver. And Tennessee is gonna be a big one. And I think a big focus on, Gold and silver is legal tender. If they didn't, didn't they just pass it? Either they just passed it or they're about to, I can't remember what happened if those are, if they were on the, they were either close or they did get it over the finish. My understanding is they did pass it. Uh, and they're definitely getting some sort of a repository,

but it's only the first step. It takes a lot. to really put these things together and put them into action. So there's still there's still a lot of sorting out that has to happen. And in that regard, you know, it's not what we're asking for is not impossible. You know, in New Hampshire, we only just came off of the gold standard in 1978. Now, the Nixon took the country off the gold standard in 1971. But New Hampshire was the very last state to come off the gold standard in 1978. When I went up and testified at the Capitol, uh, in favor of the sound money act, uh, my position was we need clarity on this. You know, people are clamoring for this. People need this. We have 700 members just

here in new England. We have, and we have people who, who have gold and silver in their houses and they're clamoring for a way to use it. So we need clarity in the law. That was my position on that same day. They were tearing down the, uh, the the vault the old vault right behind the chairman the chairman that said he didn't really uh like it you know but right behind him they were tearing the vault down that they had been using in since 1978 you know of course it's outdated but the point is it wasn't that long ago that we were using gold and silver so there's not a big learning curve and we have a history with this we can manage it we just need to update these processes for modern times

Well, I have to, I have to say, I it's, it's great that, uh, Goldbacks are expanding to different states, but if you are a pro Liberty person, I have to, it's my duty to try to recruit you to come to New Hampshire. Um, if, cause if you're in a, if you're in a hopeless state, I mean, if you're in California, I, cause I did a couple of workshops or a workshop and a talk. called the Liberty forum, Silicon Valley, California was a group which is a great group. I was actually stunned that this even existed in California. And I talked to them. They love the goldbacks, and I actually even brought up the Citizens for Sound Money stuff. I'm like, hey, do you have any folks that legislative process?

can help us through the And they're like, yeah, no, that's dead in the water. So I'm like, okay, well, move to New Hampshire. So if you're in a state where you can get it over the finish line, If you're not, move to New Hampshire. great. That's my advice, my plug for the Free State Project. It's definitely the most liberty-oriented state. place that I've ever been. So I came from Tennessee and there's a lot more liberty and libertarians in Tennessee than in most places. But even there, when we would go, this is 10 years ago now, we would go to a libertarian event and there were maybe 15, 20 people, unless you went to Nashville.

In Nashville, there maybe were 50. Now there's a lot more than that. There's a few hundred, which is a testament to how much the liberty movement is growing. But then I visited in 2013, New Hampshire, and I went to the Liberty Forum down in Nashua is where it was. All of a sudden, I was plugged into 350 people that were liberty-minded. An extension from that was 3,500 people in state that were liberty-minded. An extension to that is it's a live free or die state. Most of the people are halfway there anyway.

And so New Hampshire is definitely a beacon of liberty to be surrounded by Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont. And then now we've got Canada up here. We've got Trudeau, who's magical in the ways of tyranny. It's incredible that New Hampshire is this little bookend right there in the middle. It's just a beacon for liberty internationally, in my opinion. right surrounded by all these other states that aren't quite so friendly. I agree with you. I've lived in New Hampshire. I bounce back and forth as often as I can. There's a reason why the license plates say live free or die.

The reason why I'm helping and so happy to be working with Aaron on these workshops is because I've been involved in politics for many years. If you've ever seen somebody saying, sign my petition in multiple states, well, there's a good chance they're getting paid out of one of the offices that I know. And I could go deep down a rabbit hole on how screwed that up is and how I've come to the conclusion that your vote really doesn't matter because it's all a scam. But what I have really discovered is that there are liberty minded people everywhere I go. So one of the reasons why you'd want to come to these workshops is not just

because you'll get caught up to speed on where Aaron currently is at with what the solution is. It's to be part of something so you are in the know. Just like you talked about when you went to your first Liberty Forum, and I've been to many of them, there really is a group of people that aren't just drinking the Kool-Aid they're actually active and finding solutions that are fair for everyone and in their own personal self-interest. Yeah. that's a little bit of a dark That's a, reference drinking the Kool-Aid. We're making the Kool-Aid here, I guess, Yeah. but, uh, that could be, uh, but, uh,

but no, it is, uh, it is, it's pretty interesting to be here in and, um, I forget, you know, I forget I traveled this this summer. I traveled back down to Tennessee, back home to go see some people, you know, family and so forth. And I forget whenever I leave New Hampshire that there's a lot of people that just don't hear that message, you know, of. of liberty and freedom and so forth. And I'm trying to think of where I was specifically, but I'm always talking some sort of politics or sound money or something like that. And man, it's just rich up here. We're rich with liberty.

And you kind of forget until you get out there in the world. Maybe I was in New Jersey. I think I stopped somewhere in New Jersey and got gas and was talking to someone. And I was just like, man, this is a lot different. I forget that you can't just expound about stuff and talk about stuff because people are just, you know, they're blind to it. Yep. That is indeed true. See, somebody asked, Where can I buy your book? I actually recommend you don't buy it right now because I'm updating it. But in general, daylightfreedom.org and you can go to that's where all of our stuff is on the workshops and links to the book and links to interviews and all of the calendar of events

and everything that's going on. But I'd hold off a little bit. It's probably going to take me another month to do a big overhaul on it. All right, well, it looks like we're done with any questions. Any other topics for discussion? I don't know. You got me for two hours, so that was... Yeah, if I could, Aaron, I don't know if you've gone down into this yet. I've only looked at the headlines, but we're talking about the... assets being digitized.

And I saw recently the SEC is going after open seas. Now I'm not a fan of ETH or NFTs on ETH. And I was very often telling people that people that were issuing certain NFTs on open seas were really not gonna pass a Howey test. But to me, it just seems like this is another avenue that the people that are going to introduce their own digital assets on a confiscatable blockchain are taking out the competition? Yeah, well, so it's called Regulated Liability Network. It's a pilot between the

Federal Reserve Bank of New York, MIT, the Bank for International Settlements, five of the largest banks in New York. And so they've been working on this for quite some time. And in fact, there are different countries working on regulated liability networks. And the whole design is to have them link up to one another. So yes, they are actually spending all of this time designing these regulated liability networks to plug into CBDCs for all other assets. The way that I like to say this is this is the default. You have to understand when I say that one world global technocracy backed by energy credits, this isn't a theory and it's not a conspiracy theory. They're actively...

MasterCard has already built this out. Building it. They're working with WF partner companies. This has been the goal of technocracy since the 1930s. And they have built a lot of this technical infrastructure. understand is we're not So what we have to going back to pre-COVID unless we actively come up with an alternative. That is the default. And no one that I've talked to has heard of regulated liability network. And I've been all over the place. I have not found one single person that's heard of it. And by the way, you can Google it. It's there's no they have a white paper. It's incredibly boring. It's boring. But when you read it, it's you know, they talk about the threats

of cryptocurrency and how we need to protect the stability of central banks and how we have to integrate digital. I mean, it's it's very dystopian. There are quotes that I'm going to pull out of there because, I mean, they have pull quotes in this white paper that you're like, wow, they're confessing. You know what I mean? It's kind of like you wouldn't think that they would put that in writing, but it's very overt in the regulated liability network what they're planning on doing and they are building it. And this is the challenge because... you bring up a good point. People are focusing on, uh, it's frustrating for me. Crypto is all, I blame the federal reserve. I'm not blaming the people

that get involved in speculating on NFTs and everything else. There's a, there's a reason, uh, there's that ad in the 1980s, uh, for trying to get, you know, get people to stop drugs or to not start drugs. And there's, there's this scene. It's like, I learned it from watching you. It's a, it's a kid who's, uh, trying to explain to his dad why he's using drugs. And it's because his father set the example. the Federal Reserve set the example here. Well, But nevertheless, people are working on NFTs and not building anything of, I mean, because these things are zero sum games and they're Ponzi's. That's all that's being developed primarily in crypto. These other people are

dealing with real world assets. And it's frightening because almost no one has heard of it. So it's real and it is the default situation unless we come up with an alternative. That's why we have to come up with an alternative. By the way, I will say this. If you think you're going to work with Congress and get crypto to work, you're out of your mind. I have to be very clear about this. So it's like I love Caitlin Long and she worked on Custodia Bank. And I just saw today she is laying off 25% of her employees. Well, I mean, to be honest, what did she think? Did she think the Federal Reserve? was going to allow her to start a bank and work within their system and have it focused on crypto.

Central banks will fund both sides of the war. They'll commit genocide to get an extra 5% return. These people don't care about innovation or technology, and they will utilize any means necessary to protect what they have. So these people that are that are hiring lobbyists. Every time I see these crypto people, like I'll give you one slight diversion here. There's this pack. It's called the fair shake pack. $200 million raised. And everybody in crypto is like, oh, I'm excited. Now we have a voice at the table with crypto. And I looked at it. It's a bunch of VCs. The first candidate they supported is they gave millions of dollars to Adam Schiff to win the primary.

So he's going to become the next U.S. senator from California. So our pro crypto pack with $200 million, their first big win is Adam Schiff. So if you know anything about Adam Schiff, you'll realize that this is not a pro-liberty position. And so everybody, it's kind of like Anne Rand said, if you mix food and poison, the poison wins. And that's exactly what's happened with everybody in crypto that has tried to get involved in the political process. They have all gotten tainted. They have all sold out. There are no exceptions. I've read all of the legislation. Congress does not want to give up its power of the purse. That is its source of power. They are not interested in

competitive currencies. And unless people understand that, you're going to have a hard time and a lot of wasted effort. And that we are seeing, unfortunately. One of the things you often point out is that when you go around and poll people, more people know who Sam Bankman Freed is than they do Satoshi. And what I often find is when people are coming to me, when they first discovered Bitcoin and crypto, they don't understand peer-to-peer digital cash. They don't understand micropayments. And they don't understand

that it really was the people's token, the people's coin. No, they have no idea. They truly have never heard of it. They've never read the white paper. They don't know that Bitcoin is even, crypto is actually supposed to be a currency. They actually dropped the currency part of it. They just call it crypto. They don't even talk about it in the context of it being a cryptocurrency. So yes, that is outside of the echo chamber. And I want people to keep in mind, last month, only 0.4% of Americans used cryptocurrency to buy something. So this is something that is on the decline. And I think it's hard to get the exact number, but it's possible that only 5% of Americans total in

aggregate have actually used crypto to buy something. So when I travel, when I travel around the country, and especially when I did this, when I was running for president to try to raise awareness. So I'm now not in New Hampshire, right? I'm outside of the, I'm outside of the Liberty. I'm outside of crypto Twitter, and now I'm not in New Hampshire. And so when I'm talking to those people, it is a whole different world. And that's 95% of America. That's not like I was meeting the people that were engaged enough that they wanted to come to a talk about CBDCs. So those folks are a lot further along than even the rest of America. Most people think crypto is a scam.

And I don't watch mainstream media. I don't have cable. I don't have a TV. But what I can tell you from interacting with people is certainly Sam Bankman Freed has been successfully portrayed as the mascot for crypto. for most people that watch television and the news. So this is something we have to overcome and it's problematic, but yeah, no, that's the default of where people are. What's the next article that you are working on? So the next article, so this article, I walked through the article. I thought the article might be out today, but it's not. So basically what we just went through today is the subject of my latest article. which is 50 Shades of

Central Bank Digital Currency. The next article I'm going to do is probably on the politics, crypto politics. So based on this new paradigm of we already have a CBDC and it's just layers of tyranny, I'm going to use that as a framework to explain the legislation that has been proposed and what the various candidates have talked about. So that when you understand this lens, you'll understand that there is no good crypto legislation and being drafted and that all of it moves based on that index more towards a greater level of tyranny. And then after that, there may be something in between. I'm going to do an article about privacy because I've always assumed privacy and, you know,

that's just been kind of built in. But when I saw that Cato poll that suggested that 33% of Gen Z individuals would be OK with the federal government installing security cameras in people's homes to watch for domestic violence. I started to realize that the younger generations have no expectation of privacy and they actually haven't been taught it at all. The indoctrination is actually to the point. I mean, can you imagine growing up the idea that a third of people would be OK with government cameras in the home? So I think that there's been a war against privacy. Politicians on both sides of the aisle, again, this thing that I talked about earlier, we're assumed to be guilty

if we want or respect privacy. And so I'm going to do an article that looks at privacy from a philosophical perspective, from a legal perspective, but then also looks at it from a practical perspective in terms of what the surveillance state truly is like today and what it's projected to be. We're adding somewhere between 10 and 100,000 security cameras per day in the United States. Our pictures are taken between 80 and 100 times per day, in addition to whatever we take of ourselves. We're close to rivaling China for surveillance. And so I want to open up a conversation about that because we need to rebrand privacy because they've been effective at making it privacy is only something

that drug dealers have. and human traffickers and terrorists want. And that's just so not the case. So those are the next two, unless something else comes up. Yeah, I mean, if you're gonna look at looking at the world through first principles, then one of the first principles has got to be privacy. Yeah, I mean, again, I'm doing a lot of research on it because I am really truly trying to understand when did this shift happen in society and where does it come from? Because, you know, even going back to Plato, Aristotle, I mean, most people in Western tradition, privacy has mostly been valued and it's actually only totalitarianism and

technocracy that has pushed the view that privacy is something to not be valued. And so that's kind of where we are on this. And unfortunately, I guess that's, I'm not surprised by that. That's winning. And so, We have to counteract that and we and we actually kind of need to organize around that and and and present it. So to me, you know, if I think about a meme, it's the government wants you to think of, you know, when when you think of privacy, it's it's a cartel member wearing a face covering, holding an automatic weapon, selling drugs. And in reality, it's somebody at a farmer's market trying to buy organic vegetables or somebody, again, trying to buy raw milk.

And the good news is there are people that understand that. We need to go a little bit more mainstream on privacy and, again, make it cool again and reverse this stigma. Because, again, people using Monero are not causing problems. terrorism around the world are not the major people involved in drug trafficking. It's absurd that it gets pigeonholed like that. But I want to talk about this at Mineratopia because I think we really do need to work together and figure out how to market it better. So. Well, I know it's getting late. I'm exhausted. I've like, I've not slept well the last couple of days.

So unless there are any other burning questions, I think I might actually call it a night and see if I can get a decent night's sleep for a change. All right. So one last thing, anybody that's listening to this, other than following you on whatever social media channel they're seeing this, if they want to learn more about the workshops and they want to participate, help us find venues or sponsor, or just get involved, what should they do? I should go to daylightfreedom.org. And that actually has, there are three things on daylightfreedom.org. There's the section called build, which is involved with

building a point of sale system and a wallet and there's uh empower which are the workshops and so that you can see all the cities and if your city isn't listed there's a form there that you can fill out so we're not capping it at the cities on that list we do it based on demand and then inform which is where all of these podcast interviews are and by the way if you have any suggestions for podcasts that should be on I am targeting the two and a half percent early I'm not trying to get to mainstream media it actually would be wasted to get a negative reaction I'm looking for for groups of people that are engaged. And so if you have any, all of the interviews that

I've done so far have been word of mouth. So if you have any suggestions, I encourage you to tag me in a post or reach out to whoever you think should interview me, because that's how we've been able to get the word out so far. And it does, it is growing. I feel like I'm doing anywhere from five to 10 interviews a week at this point. So we're getting word out. All right. Thank you. Good night. Adam, any final thoughts? Man, I can't think of any. I mean, we covered so much of it. You know, interview wise, I'll talk to you. You know, I'll send you an email with all the contacts that I have. We talked to a lot of the same people, but there may be a few people on that list.

Yeah, I can't think of anything else. Um that I would want to cover it. It's in my realm. Uh, you you bring a lot of data you started off really strong with just a I love the uh, the 50 shades of oh The name is escape. It was at 50 shades of tyranny. Is that what you call it? Yep. Yeah Um, no, I thought it was great. You really put on a good show you put in a lot of good data Um, I think you could probably watch the first half of this show Um 10 times in order to absorb everything that you brought in. I thought it was really, really nicely done. I really appreciate you having me on. It was really fantastic. I'm glad you could come on and I'm glad we can get more in front.

So I'm going to take this and chop it up into clips and share out the clips on multiple platforms because I thought you did a great job of... of educating people on goldbacks and on some of the wider things. And so I want to get those out in bite-sized chunks so that we can get the word out. Well, fantastic. I'll come on anytime. So you let me know and I'm happy to help. The people of Alpine Gold support you and support your message. You're doing good work. Great. Well, I appreciate that. All right, thank you, and thank you, everybody, for joining, and we'll be back next week, same time, 8 o'clock Eastern time on Thursday. Have a good night.