Yo, welcome to another episode of Simply Bitcoin IRL.
Today we have a very special guest.
We have Mark Goodwin, Editor in Chief at Bitcoin Magazine.
Absolutely love the guys over Bitcoin Magazine.
They're crushing it. Those are some of the best
conferences in the world. I'm really excited for today's
episode. We have so much to dive into.
Mark has been has made quite a bit of a splash in a recent
episode that he did with Whitney Webb.
You know and just people have seemed to have received it
really well. So we're going to explore some
of those topics. But, but but before we jump into
the show, I do want to give a very special shout out to the
Bitcoin company that powers simply Bitcoin IRL.
And of course I'm talking about Bitcoin.
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Bitcoin on RAMPS All right everybody, no more delay.
You want to bring up Mark on stage?
How you doing, Mark? What's up bro?
I don't think we've ever chatted before, so I'm excited for this.
Yeah, man. Nico thanks for having me
brother. Yeah, I don't think we have are
certainly not in on the show, but I think, you know I think we
crossed paths and packed Bitcoin a couple years ago as FTX was
imploding. I think we crossed paths there.
But yeah man, super happy to be here.
Love the show, love Opti, love what you guys do and yeah,
stoked to be here. Appreciate it.
Packed Bitcoin.
Yeah. So that's probably why I don't
remember because I literally just was running around like a
crazy person. The 23 so much things going on
running the stream panels. MC just nuts as like just it was
all a big blur. Anyways, bro, you're like super
famous now. You did this epic you know, this
epic interview like I was saying in the intro and you covered all
these, you know, all these crazy topics.
I I think a lot of people when like podcasts really blow up.
I I think it's because I think it resonates with a lot of
people. Like it connects with a lot of
people's, you know, it hits people's heartstrings, but it's
obviously you've you've hit on topics that I think maybe
perhaps people weren't aware of. So I'm going to rip their
Band-Aid straight off and just jump straight into it.
What is Tokenization, Inc? And this is something that like
Larry Fink has brought up. I've seen him talk about this on
legacy corporate media. What is that?
Yeah, totally. Yeah.
Let's jump right in. I mean basically, you know, I
wrote this piece with my friend Whitney Webb about, yeah, kind
of this concerning rhetoric that I was seeing from our boy
Lawrence Fink, the CEO of BlackRock.
You know, as BlackRock is getting ready to embrace Bitcoin
in in a really big way with, you know, their I bit or iShares
Bitcoin Trust, their their ETF, their SPOT ETF which now has
like 400,000 Bitcoin or something Insane, right.
But this was, you know, this was this was back around the around
the approval. So like you know the beginning
of January and Larry's getting up there and he's talking about,
you know what he how he basically, you know the
framework that BlackRock is looking at Bitcoin.
And you know something really struck me.
I mean literally it was, you know, I was writing out these
quotes in real time as I was watching him talk.
I think it was on CNBC. I'm not exactly sure what which
one was the first interview, but he did a couple interviews like
you know right around the 11th of January when the when the
ETFs were approved. And in one of them he literally
said, you know if we can ETF a Bitcoin, you know what else can
we ETF. And I definitely saw this as
kind of this like, First off, he's like inventing a new verb,
right, Like ETF ING. And and I saw it as kind of this
like arrogant, kind of like, hey, you know, look what we're
doing with Bitcoin, if we can reduce, you know, all of the,
you know, ridiculousness that, you know, the Bitcoin network
goes through to like, you know, have decentralized consensus and
a distributed network. If we can reduce all of that to,
you know, AQ SIP ticker that's traded on the New York Stock
Exchange, you know, what else can we, you know, reduce to an
ETF? And I saw it as kind of this
like, you know, I like to, I like to listen to what the
baddies say and and then also look at their actions.
And often times they're not aligned.
But I think in this case, you know, this one kind of worried
me a bit. And I was like, oh, my God, like
bitcoiners are rolling out the red carpet here for Larry.
And they're so excited about this ETF like so many, you know,
not everybody but a lot. And here he is basically, you
know, mocking us, saying he's, you know, he ETF to Bitcoin,
right. And so I think people kind of
just like forgot who Larry kind of is and what BlackRock is and
you know, maybe what Wall Street, you know, these huge
institutions like what their kind of plan is for Bitcoin.
So I started kind of digging into Larry and BlackRock and I
found a lot of stuff that you know, I knew he was a baddie but
I didn't really realize how connected he was to the the
public sector and in in such this way.
And so the piece kind of became a look at the private public,
you know, paradigm and this, you know, ability for these these
huge institutional players, you know, that have benefited so
much from the debasement of currency of saving mechanisms
for the, you know, the working class and have, you know, really
like taken advantage of arguably these private sector caused and
public sector exacerbated, you know, financial crises.
And BlackRock was a huge part of 2008, huge part of 2020
actually. BlackRock bought the iShares
brand from Barclays in the 2008 crisis.
You know, after Barclays sort of denied A bailout from the UK
government, BlackRock came in, bought iShares.
They didn't have any ETF products before and now it's,
you know, one of the biggest parts of their entire operation.
And ETFs are kind of like the most traded, you know, vehicle
right now. But anyways, yeah, kind of was
just like seeing what Larry was saying about Bitcoin.
And so that ETF of Bitcoin scared the shit out of me.
And then he said a couple other things that were really crazy,
specifically saying I don't believe Bitcoin is ever going to
be a currency. I believe it's an asset class.
And then he said that he, he called it a technology for asset
storage, which I think is really interesting.
Especially when you look at, you know, kind of the, you know,
maybe that you could argue the distraction.
But the debate going on now in Bitcoin culture, which I'm
hoping we kind of move on from, 'cause I'm kind of sick and
tired of it and doing it for so long, but with like the ordinal
stuff and Bitcoin as a database and all this.
But he's he's coming out here saying I don't want it to be a
currency we want to ETF of Bitcoin.
It's an asset class and we we, we look at the Ledger this
universal Ledger as being something that we can uphold
digital IDs with. We can uphold tokenized assets
And basically saying that tokenization is sort of the next
ETF ING. And when you begin to look at
the history of of Larry and BlackRock and all of their ESG
plays and their connections with the natural asset corporations
and and all of this stuff, you start to see this kind of
ghoulish picture of you know, what Larry and BlackRock you
know, are kind of planning to hopefully do with Bitcoin.
And yeah, I wanted to just kind of get the story out there,
remind people who Larry is and and and sort of raise a little
bit of hell about, you know, hey, there's like a concerted
effort here to basically label Bitcoin as an asset class, as a
commodity and not as this peer-to-peer, you know, medium
of exchange. And I, you know, I do think
that, you know, thinkers like beauty on and are correct in
labeling Bitcoin as, you know, a database and not as money in the
legal sense. And I agree with that.
It's speech, it's code. But in terms of like the way I I
hope users sort of look at it you know Bitcoin really should
be upheld as this peer-to-peer thing and and the the the
further we get from that the more we go into this unit of
account you know store a value commodity class rather than this
peer-to-peer currency. I think we we lose a lot of the
power that that Bitcoin really gives us as being this thing
that circumnavigates the state and trusted third parties and
all that. And if we lose that and it just
becomes another Q SIP, another ticker, another paper eyes asset
like gold, You know, I think it it really defangs a lot of the,
the beauty of Bitcoin and the power of Bitcoin and it plays
right into this financial class and it can actually be a tool
that you know, not just empowers, you know, the unbanked
global self citizen, but also you know, empowers the state.
So you know, that's kind of the, the general idea for why, you
know, we worked on this piece, why we did this piece.
And yeah, I think I think the idea sort of resonated with
people because I mean they just literally say it.
It's like it's pretty wild. I mean these these are just,
this isn't really like you know, an extrapolation or some kind of
like schizo theory here. I mean these are just kind of
things, these are just direct quotes really from Larry and
you, you go look at his history and this is kind of the stuff
he's done from the from the get go, right.
So yeah, that's kind of the little overview of the story
here. But yeah, tokenized ink piece
for Bitcoin Magazine that I wrote with Whitney Webb, you
know we Co posted it on a limited hangout as well which is
her site. And yeah, we've been kind of
working in that realm for a bit now.
We've done three pieces now since, you know, basically
Christmas. And all of them have kind of
been looking at sort of the the dollar system players that are
now kind of encroaching into Bitcoin and using Bitcoin and
you know, and some other pieces of side chains of Bitcoin, but
using Bitcoin as this asset storage and using this
technology that's apparent in blockchain to basically tokenize
the natural world. And that's something that I
think Larry wants to do. And now he's sort of proven that
he can tokenize Bitcoin, you know reduce it to this Q sip and
now he's going to move on to other things.
They have to find a way basically to service this debt
of the US government and how do they do that You know they need
they they they basically reversed the the old oil Baron
you know mechanism of digging in the ground for oil and now
they're debt barons and now they're digging holes not
looking for assets but looking for places to to shove debt
dollar denominated debt. So here they are looking to the
natural world looking to green finance looking to carbon credit
that they can denominate with private issued stable coins and
basically blow out the the the treasury by tokenizing the real
world. You know this is this is a trend
that we're seeing. You know when we wrote this
article you know BlackRock hadn't even really started yet
and now they have this huge USDC fund on Ethereum.
It's called the Buildle like BUIDL Fund and they're like you
know working on securitizing, tokenizing, you know, real world
assets on, on Ethereum basically using USDC, which is pretty much
exactly what we we spelled out in this in this article.
And now we're kind of seeing it and I think we're going to see a
lot more of that. And I think Bitcoiners should be
a little, a little concerned about this.
Larry's not a good guy, but that's kind of basically the,
the, the overview there. I know I've ranted for like 10
minutes now, but that that's sort of the idea, yeah.
And it was. It was amazing rant.
I wish. I kind of wish she kept going.
Oh shit. But no.
But I have so many questions, So many questions for you.
OK. So Larry Fink's not a good guy.
BlackRock has a a plan you're saying to you know they they
they they essentially want to capture this, they they want to
tokenize it like you said. Do you think that has anything
to do with the US government, the the kind of the regulatory
situation currently in the states where like you can see it
happening in slow of motion like for example today Cynthia Lummus
basically tried to tweet out and say like look they're they're
basically going after self custody.
It's not legislation, traditional legislation, it's
like legislation through enforcement.
Do you think it's interconnected?
Oh yeah, absolutely, man. I mean I'm, you know, I'd like
to think I'm based in in you know logic and and in in the
real world. But you know, I'm at this point
I'd say I'm a pretty full blown, you know that there is sort of a
conspiracy with the regulatory arm and the governing body, the
public sector of the United States to embrace Bitcoin as a
method of, you know, basically extending the, the, the economic
Hedgeman that is the US dollar system using this sort of demand
in elastic energy commodity. So I wrote a book called the
Bitcoin Dollar. The Bitcoin dollar being this,
it's kind of an analogue to the Petro dollar.
So it's not a literal monopoly on the insurance and outs of,
you know, buying an energy commodity.
But just like the Petro dollar, you know, it's basically, hey,
you know, you want to industrialize and buy oil, you
know, seventies, 80s, nineties, 2000s, two thousand 10s, you
want to industrialize and buy oil, you got to buy dollars
first. So what that does is it, it kind
of increases demands inorganically $4.00 because
people want this thing that they've basically done a de
facto monopoly on the insurance and outs of and they've dollar
denominated it. So anybody in Asia, they want to
buy oil from the Middle East, they got to buy dollars first.
They've basically created the same mechanism for Bitcoin.
You know all you know 99% basically certainly 97 plus
percent of of like volume in the Bitcoin market is is U.S. dollar
denominated. And you know a huge amount of
that is now in stable coins but but U.S. dollars in general and
you know these these heavily regulated on and off ramps are
dollar denominated. And so oil and Bitcoin are
actually kind of similar in a lot of ways as sort of this
energy based commodity. You know, despite my wanting it
to be more of a currency like there is a an absolute argument
to be made that that that analogue is sort of there.
And so I think that the the dollar regime is basically
proven that they'll do whatever they need to do to keep the
dollarization of the world growing and you know a way to
keep servicing their debt. And I think that they've kind of
found this method with Bitcoin. And I think when you look at the
regulatory stuff that's happening right now, it is a
push away towards self custody and it's a push towards these
like highly regulated instruments like an ETF.
And I think we're going to see more and more of that.
They're going to make it really difficult to kind of run and
write code most likely in the United States and and and have a
push towards these highly regulated instruments like ETFs.
That's what, you know, Larry wants.
And and and I think it's not a coincidence, you know, there's a
white pill in here, right? Where why did this happen five
days that, you know, why did the samurai arrest happen, you know,
a few days after the halving? You know, why is that?
Is the Bitcoin economic policy like that important where, you
know, having a relative issuance, you know, now below
gold coming out of the ground, you know, below like 1% relative
issuance. You know that I think that
there's a signpost there that that this economic policy is
really important, that these things are being timed up.
And this was something that I wrote, you know, at the end of
2021 when I did my first piece on the Bitcoin dollar, when I
first introduced this, this analog to the petrodollar, you
know, I made a a claim basically that the petrodollar died in
March 2020. When we saw that quote UN quote
COVID Low, we saw oil go negative, you know, in the
futures markets and we saw Bitcoin drop to 3500 bucks and
you know, then a year later, you know a 20X by by the end of of
the next year. But you know what?
Why was that moment so important?
Well, obviously it was COVID, right?
But now we've kind of learned a bit more about COVID, you know,
where, you know, depending on which level you're looking at
it, even if you're really going with, you know, the the, the
mainstream story here still it was, you know, you know, that
was arguably, you know, funded this game of function research
funded by the US government you know, hits off and Wuhan around
then. And there's there's mass
coordinated global shutdowns, you know, world empire context,
mass shutdowns, the same policies in Russia as in
Ukraine, as in Israel as in the United States as in everywhere
just did the exact same thing. It's kind of world empire
context and that's what, six weeks before the 3rd halving and
the third halving of course, I think was sort of the most
important having in a lot of ways 'cause it was the first
time that the rate of issuance relative to total supply was
below 2%. You know, when we went down to
three and you know three and change.
So that's the first time it's below the dollar, the target
rate of inflation of the dollar. So there's there's not really, I
mean I think it would be kind of insane to think that there
wasn't some you know, thinking there by maybe some of these
powers that be that, you know, hey, you know the US dollar now
is kind of it's kind of economically toast.
And what did we see over the next year, right.
We saw Bitcoin 20X. We saw the US dollar print
trillions and trillions, you know, under Trump.
And then we saw, you know, Trump bring in Brian Brooks, Mnuchin
and and this, this whole group, we saw, you know, him sign
policy in the OCC to say banks can hold stable coins and hold
crypto assets. And we saw all this like you
know, you know, forward dollar system moves in the public
sector. Meanwhile Trump is tweeting out
Bitcoin, sucks the dollar rules, blah blah blah.
But like his actual actions behind it was, you know, the
digitalization of the dollar, you know and you know, through
stablecoins, you know that was really the action that was
happening despite the rhetoric. So I think there's a white pill
actually in this weird way, despite spelling out this public
sector capture is that these events are coordinated with the
having's which I think is important.
And again. I literally obviously can't
claim COVID is because of the the third having.
I mean that's ridiculous. But I don't know.
There's a lot of things that happened that if they want to
shut down the velocity of money in a hyperinflationary
situation, they know that we're, you know, over our skis, we have
to print trillions and trillions of dollars.
You know, the reverse repo market implode September 2019.
The Fed sets up these special instruments to sort of you know
bring liquidity to the repo market.
You know, you're starting to see issues in the treasury market.
You know all of a sudden there's a flu there's a thing shut down
boom, boom, boom, boom, boom and all these things kind of fall
into place. So I I I'm not really a believer
in coincidences anymore, Nico. I I think these things sort of
generally line up. So.
So here we are now it's days after the having a week after
the having it's Mayday and we're seeing all this fucking crazy
shit. I mean, I don't think it's a
coincidence. So yeah, here we are.
You know, one of my favorite quotes, Mark, is there are no
conspiracies. But there are also no
coincidences, and I have no shadow of a doubt the symbolic
nature of Roger Ver's arrest. C ZS sentencing the same day the
richest man to have ever gone to prison, you know?
Meanwhile, we're getting lectured on, you know, on, you
know, basically how the Samurai guys broke all these laws.
And I don't remember any notable or large or big banker going to
jail for what they did in 2008, 2009, even though they did
significantly more material damage to the American people,
to the world, frankly, than any type of dev writing code, Right.
That's that's utterly absurd. And I tweeted it out a couple
days ago, I said, you know, again to use your word, it's,
it's, it's not a coincidence that these arrests are having a
happening around the same time. It is extremely symbolic.
And one of the observations that I had, it was last cycle.
And I and Mark, maybe you appreciate this because I don't
see enough people talking about it, but the CCP mining ban came
in the middle of the parabola of the last bull run it it.
And I would even go on to say that was one of the primary
reasons we didn't hit 100K. Like if you take a look at the
hash rate and the price, you will literally see the price
peaking and the hash rate going down.
And of course all the cell pressure from those miners
having to sell Bitcoin, having to sell equipment to relocate to
a more favorable jurisdiction and it kind of created this like
double peak. It's like literally clear as
day. You see the hash rate, you see
the price going down, right. And you know it.
To your point, do you think you know a a nation state or a
government like the CCP, like in the United, they don't have the
sophistication to realize that they must attack the price.
I mean there is these leaked documents that were coming out
of European regulators that said we have to do something about
the price. We have to do something about
the price. So yeah, dude, no way is this a
coincidence. I, I, I, I.
It's not only symbolic in nature, but it's on purpose.
And there's just been so many actions by the current
administration that have been incredibly hostile towards the
industry. The proposed 30% tax.
The, you know, the the, I remember the the White House
came out with the Presidential Economic Report.
They dedicated 20 effing pages bro, to making the case as to
why central bank digital currencies are necessary.
And you know Bitcoin is not right.
And do I think it's a coincidence that now they're the
FBI is releasing a so-called tips for citizens stay away
from, you know, unlicensed money transmitters a couple months
after the ETFs were approved? No, I don't think that's a
coincidence at all. But before I continue my
rambling, I think my question to you is what do bitcoiners need
to do to combat everything that you're talking about?
Right. So we're seeing this happen in
slow motion. It's like kind of the slow
motion train, honestly, I love the guys at BPII love David
Zell, the guys at Coin Center. Great Dennis Porter on the state
level is doing good job. But it's not enough.
Like, I feel like metaphorically we're getting beat up by a 2 by
4. They're telling you, listen, you
can give up your US citizenship. Doesn't matter 10 years later,
doesn't matter what country you are in the world.
We're going to nab you and we're going to put you in a box and
we're going to make an example out of you, right.
So we're definitely heading. We're definitely in the then
they fight you stage. What can individuals, individual
Bitcoiners do? Yeah, I mean, we've been in the
then they fight you stage for a long time.
I mean they've made examples out of our brothers, you know in
these Titans, you know someone like a Julian Assange.
You know for being a journalist, for publishing things, for
telling the truth. I think this idea in general my
my only issue with again and I and I, I agree with you all
those people you mentioned, Coin Center, BPI, Mr. Porter, like I
think they're incredibly nice people and there's a lot of
people involved in those things that I really do respect quite a
bit. But I think the general idea
that we're sort of and again, you know this, you know, may be
clippable and kind of bad, but like I just don't think we're
really in a rule of law anymore. I'm not sure rule of law is
really intact. You know what the Samurai guys
did you know is not, is not money transmitting, it's not
money laundering. I mean Bitcoin doesn't even
really work that way. It that that's not how the
Bitcoin system works. There's no transfers.
I mean it doesn't work in that same way.
Bitcoin can't be taxed as property and then be regulated
as a money transferring when you know when the regulatory arms
pick and choose. It's just not it's just not fair
in a in a rule of law, you know in a in a land with consistent
law. And so I think we have to sort
of realize that we're past that and realize especially too that
post COVID, post lockdowns, warp speed and and these mandates and
these things that you know we're in a world empire context and
the rule of law is, is, is is dubious at best.
And so I think that's the framework we have to kind of
understand that, yes, compliance will get you pretty far until it
doesn't. And what happens when you can't
comply anymore, when they don't let you comply anymore, then
you've really lost all of the ground that you maybe could have
spent fighting while you were so busy complying and and licking
boots. And so I'm not calling out any
of these organizations at all because I think we need to
attack on all fronts. We need people doing those
things. We need people going through the
compliance angle. But I think in terms of
individuals, it's like, like, no, we need to kind of stand up
and you know, think about what's happening here.
You know, the rule of law is not being, is not being promoted,
not being protected. We we shouldn't expect it to be.
They're changing definitions at a whim when it when it suits
them. And so that's kind of the you
know the framework that we have to operate in So understanding
that we need to make sure that you know we we keep Bitcoin as
permission less as it was when we found it.
I think that's the only responsibility bitcoiners have
to Bitcoin and that is not really you know that's that's
becoming increasingly more difficult as you know they're
pushing these self custody solutions you know further and
further out of the you know the the the reach of of American
citizens and of app stores and of you know kind of the more
traditional not quite so public squares that people download
these the software in. And so I think we need to kind
of think adversarially and and build more sustainable systems
that can withstand state sponsored attacks.
I think we need to reject the notion that Bitcoin will scale
through stable coins. It's fucking ridiculous.
It's it's very clearly a state sponsored mode of discourse that
that's an option and that is the way that we should go about it.
No. Like Bitcoin is a technology and
like John Nash said, you know it's technology that we can, you
know tweak and grow and make better and make more efficient
for its purposes. It's a technology so we need to
figure out scaling mechanisms that allow billions of people to
use it in a in a self sovereign, self custodial, permissionless,
censorship resistant way. I don't think it's appropriate
for me, both in terms of my technical lack of knowledge and
also my editorial position that I don't think I should be
pushing specific, you know, past.
I don't think it's really appropriate, but you know,
whatever it is, I think we need to, we need to build those tools
in those systems. You know, of course, use
lightning, use E cash, use these other L twos that are coming up,
consider coming in proposals and and make sure that Bitcoin is
ready to, you know, to to to service.
You know, when Fiat, you know, 'cause let's just be honest, you
know, as much as we love Bitcoin and it's given us so much
freedom, you know, if if a huge world currency collapsed and
billions of people needed to be on boarded overnight onto the
Bitcoin network, that just wouldn't really be possible
right now. You couldn't open a billion
lightning channels. It would take years at current
you know, channel factory, you know, inability and you know,
the self creating a billion UTXOS would take an incredibly
long time. So there's a lot of things that
we need to kind of like build infrastructurally, you know, to
allow citizens or not even citizens, but just people to
have access to this, you know, permissionless Ledger.
So yeah, the attack is coming. The state is here.
Bitcoin is for enemies. Our state is the enemy.
Bitcoin empowers the individual. And you know, in a world where
corporations are individuals and countries are corporations,
therefore countries are individuals, it's like countries
and nation states can be and powered by Bitcoin, whether
that's, you know, like an El Salvador scenario or even kind
of more maybe like a a shadowy U.S. economic hedgeman
perpetuation, you know, using Bitcoin.
So I think we need to think more adversarially.
We need to think of Bitcoin as a technology and make sure that we
keep it this peer-to-peer, you know, medium of exchange.
Make sure we optimize for that. Because I can tell that, you
know, these Ghouly goblins want us to look at it as a commodity,
look at it as a store of value. Only look at it as something
that can be ETF and reduced to AQ SIP.
And look at it as something that, you know, they want us to
look at it as something that just sits on a balance sheet and
appreciates. You know, there's this rhetoric
of never spend your Bitcoin, you know, use credit cards or use
tether and, you know, and keep your Bitcoin, you know, and it's
like, no, Bitcoin's a means to an end.
Use it to build a better world. You know, it's that that that's
really what this is for. It's about perpetuating freedom,
building more sustainable infrastructure that will allow
the individual to thrive as the state sort of, you know, loses
its, its, you know, both, you know, right now at the, the
state is, is, is is a burning ship.
I mean, the $34 trillion of debt, you know, the rats are
escaping. They're jumping off this
burning, you know, runaway debt service.
It's a zombie company. the United States, you would never
invest in it. You know, it's it's it's debt
service is now outpacing the growth of its GDP, you know,
taking around the back, Old Yeller it, right.
So people are jumping off and removing themselves from it.
And that's why I think there's this big rhetoric shift like
we're moving towards the malaise.
You know, at the after AUFC fight, we got Joe Rogan holding
a microphone and we got a guy going, I love private property.
You know, it's like, yeah, they want us to love private
property. Now that they've stolen
everything from our, from our grandkids, from our
grandparents, you know, that they've looted the treasury.
Now they want to push private property in the Austrian school
and all these, you know, badass great things, sure, of course.
But like, it serves them now to push us towards this, you know,
kind of Malay mindset now that they've looted everything.
So they want us to blame the central banks, Fuck the central
banks, but fuck the private banks that that pushed the
private, that pushed the public sector to blow up 2008 and make
them too big to fail. You know, it was, it was
Greenspan who was at JP Morgan, you know, who wrote the
rethinking Glass? Steagall who pushed for the
dissolving of Glass Steagall. You know, these guys jumping in
and out, private, public whenever it works for them.
You know, they're all kind of in the pub in the private sector
now, you know, sitting on their, on their, you know, COVID money,
you know. And you know, of course now
they're pushing, you know, this, this, you know, free market
capitalism. Malay is talking at Davos, you
know, saying how badass capitalism is.
It's like, yeah, sure, capitalism is badass, but you
know it there, there's a, there's a reason why we're
seeing that, you know, that you don't see anything by mistake.
There's not an accident when you see something.
There's a reason why this person is being promoted and it's
because it's useful for them to push us towards, you know, cheer
on the free market as they tokenize the carbon in your
backyard and and shove it on a Bitcoin side chain and throw a
satellite in space and they observe you to check on your
carbon. And it's Steve Mnuchin and Howie
Lutnik, who you know is the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald who holds
all of tethers, you know, treasuries like they're running
this private sector intelligence company.
The CIA has gone private. It's in Palantir now.
Like, this is so good. It's so based the free market,
like, not really. Like, fuck all those guys, you
know. Fuck Palantir.
Fuck Peter Thiel, you know, Fuck Mnuchin.
Fuck these guys. They're they're ghouls that
have, you know, taken advantage when the public sector has
allowed it to accrue massive amounts of wealth and they're
using it as a way to control and observe us and sell our data.
Like, I don't. I don't think that's based, I
don't think what Peter Thiel is doing with Palantir is based at
all, even though I'm a free market capitalist and I'm not.
I'm not trying to say we should put regulations in to stop it.
Just like I would never argue we should filter out tether shoving
fucking, you know, petrodollars and the witness Merkel of
Bitcoin. Like I don't want to filter that
shit either. It's a permissionless system.
Let them do it. But we should talk shit about it
and say how this is dumb. Let's scale Bitcoin with actual
scaling solutions that don't perpetuate the military
industrial complex of the United States via the treasury.
Ponzi, right? Like let's let's do that.
So that would be my answer. That's my long winded answer is
call these fuckers out and let's let's let's make Bitcoin.
You know the this, this ship that can that can service 8
billion people that need to get out from underneath the
encroaching tentacles of of the nation state collapsing. 100%
dude and and you know I I bro it's it's like I hate saying I
what I say is I say Bitcoin or slavery right.
And you know, I, I, I said it very early on, and I think a lot
of people interpreted it as this hyperbolic statement.
But once you really understand that there you really only have
two options, right? It's a future of of it's a Fiat
future. It's a Bitcoin future.
It's a it's a future of of peace, prosperity, optimism,
hope versus future of nihilism, endless war, slavery.
You know you name it. Right.
And I think the the battle lines are a little bit obfuscated
right now. I think people can't really see,
you know, the two options ahead of them.
But it's it's clear as day for anyone who's paying attention.
And you actually reminded me of of something you said was like
we're living in this era of no laws and actually and you were
mentioning beauty on earlier, love, beauty on what he's doing
with this Stecco is is amazing. And it reminded me of one of the
one of the tweets, I don't know if he originally quote wrote
this, but this comes from his Twitter account.
It says the FBI calls Bitcoin money so they can arrest you for
for money laundering. The IRS calls it property so
they can tax you on capital gains.
The SEC calls it a security so they can sue every exchange.
And the CFTC calls it a commodity, so you can't use it
as a currency. So it is a currency when it's
convenient to them, when they, when they need it for law.
Fair it's not a currency when you know it can't be a currency
because if it's a currency then capital gains WTF And then but I
I I also think that they're in this like pickle man like
they're in this pickle I I think if we get to a we get to a point
and the Overton window is shifting the Internet and
peer-to-peer mass level communications brother like you
know your podcast for example that you did with with Whitney
Webb and you you start to see this it's the the slow death of
the legacy corporate media and the rise of independent content
creators and it allows people to circumvent the gatekeepers of
information and we're seeing like this great awakening in the
process because of that. I think people are are are are
starting to question the the official party line and I think
most importantly you know as as bitcoiners is to really push
this message forward of of like if we get the mainstream
consciousness and and the mainstream populace to just ask
the question number one what is money and #2 why should I be
forced to use the money that steals from me.
Like they don't have a good answer for that.
Like they don't have one. You see them struggling trying
to justify the CBD CS with we need more efficient payments.
Like they completely ignore the inflation aspect side of things.
So you know like I'm, I hear you and I I think we we we, we do
have a tremendous amount of work to do education but I also think
that by the day more and more people join our ranks.
What would you say about that? I I totally agree, Absolutely.
I think the the the sort of false dichotomies that's been
presented to us. You know if if you're if you're
really still buying that up and lapping that up after COVID, you
know I think there's really something wrong with with your
perception. No offence if you really are
buying the red versus blue, like I mean I we watched the 180
phase shift happen where? You know, Trump was pushing the
vaccines and then three months later I was in the Bay.
I chose not to get vaccinated. I'm being called a Trumper
because I didn't want to get vaccinated.
And it's like what? How did, how did we get here?
What happened? I don't even understand this.
Like Kamala was saying she didn't want to take the vaccine
because it's Trump's vaccine and now I'm AI mean it's just the
phase shifts are happening so fast.
The cycles are compressing so fast that yeah, maybe you didn't
quite get that everything was fucked up after 9-11.
Maybe you didn't quite get everything was fucked up after
2008. But COVID was a really quick
turn around and I think that you know our generation were so
hyper connected. There's so much information
being exchanged that you're right, there's a huge
opportunity to to gain inroads into the consciousness of, you
know, 'cause I think humans are really, they're they're a social
group. There's there isn't mass
consciousness. And I think there's a huge
opportunity now for bitcoiners, for freedom loving people, you
know, to stand up for the truth and and you know, perpetuate,
you know, this idea that Bitcoin is a means to an end for a
better world and how do we, how do we actualize that?
But I do think there's also you know some danger in the
Internet, in the hyper connectivity and there's a lot
of Co option within you know the the counter narrative as well.
Also something I noticed with COVID.
You know, I think at this point, you know maybe I'll get roasted
for this, but at this point I kind of see a lot of the vaccine
discourse as basically just being a distraction from the
fact that they shut down the fucking country and told us that
we couldn't walk around and do stuff.
So we're all worrying about clots and this and blah blah,
blah and whatever. And it's no one even cares that
they literally locked us in their homes and and destroyed
the working class and and and so much of the discourse from that
was so controlled and Dom and now we're learning like oh man,
a lot of that was actually kind of paid by these sort of private
you know intelligence. And so we're seeing, you know,
the great example, not to tie it all the ways, always back to
Tether, but who took Rumble public?
It was Cantor Fitzgerald. It was our boy Howie Lutnik
taken Rumble public, who's a huge investor in Rumble, Peter
Thiel. You know, he's dabbling on both
sides here. And so there is this huge
controlled narrative also on the alternative side.
You know, of course, no one trusts mainstream media anymore,
but I think it's it. It's pretty easy to buy a
podcast. It's pretty easy to buy a
company, a Bitcoin company. It's pretty easy to tetherize a
Bitcoin company, right? And so much discourse in the
Bitcoin space is sponsored by the US Treasury system via
Tether, which is just something that needs to be talked about.
Doesn't mean they're bad people, doesn't mean that everything
they say is a lie or whatever. But they're not going to go as
hard at that, you know, You know, at a tether or something
if that's just paying their paycheck, right?
And. You and you're you're burying
the lead there a little bit because I think not that many
people are aware of of that of what you just said, right.
The fact that Tether is one of the largest U.S.
Treasury holders. I think the IT just they just
posted their their profits. I think they made like 4.7
billion or something like that, yeah.
They have, they have 110 plus billion dollars of Treasuries,
like China is like barely over a trillion.
So they're at like a 10th of China, like already like what?
Think about that, guys. Think about.
That it it's it's pretty crazy. So Mark, I I wanted to ask you,
'cause you you mentioned you said they who is they?
Like, who is this, this, this this cartel.
Like who is this? I'm, I'm using Andreas's words
when I say cartel here. Who is this cartel?
Who is this cabal of people that is pulling the strings?
Yeah, totally. I mean, I'm not necessarily here
to name, you know, specific names.
I like to look at mechanisms and I think it mechanisms are more
important. I wrote the Bitcoin Dollar
basically not naming any names, obviously had to list a couple
companies. But you know, I'm, I don't think
Paolo's name is even in that book, right.
And nothing personal against Paolo.
Again, it's about the mechanisms and I think that's how we have
to really look at this stuff. It's who's building the
mechanisms you know who who who's encouraging stable coins
on lightning. Who's who's building these
things you know and and and those are those are the kind of
you know you begin to kind of follow that money And you you
know I got Joe Rogers our boyfriend of the show friend of
all of ours. You know hooked me up with a
with a crunch base account and I'm going through looking at
fucking every single VC seed raised.
You know everything of all of these companies and you start to
piece together this kind of cartel of people that have
really infiltrated the Bitcoin space, the crypto space and you
start to see this tokenized Inc take form.
This dollarization Inc take form.
And I think unfortunately a big part of this group is directly
connected with the like the what is known as the PayPal mafia.
And I think you start to look at PayPal and these players and and
who's, you know, the big shakers in scene now and a lot of them
can be connected back to PayPal. So, you know, like someone like
Reed Hoffman who's, you know, PayPal OG, you know, he was, you
know, the founder of LinkedIn, you know this, you know, it's,
you know, it's kind of wild. A lot of these PayPal guys, you
know, became billionaires like multiple times.
They hit gold multiple times in a row, kind of interesting.
And you know, someone like him. So, you know, he invests, he's
the lead of the of the, you know, the Series A, The Seed
found seed round for Block Stream in November 2014.
Well then October 2014, Block Stream releases a paper that
basically explains how side chains work and that, you know,
basically allows them to, you know, put other assets onto
Bitcoin and create this, this, this peg mechanism.
Kind of interesting. You look at, you know, who was,
you know, this, the, you know, these early founders of PayPal.
And you know, you look at this guy, there's this, this guy with
Bill Elkus who was one of the main founders of PayPal in 97.
He was the cosignee of the Jay Epstein Foundation.
And then he goes on to form Clearstone with William Quigley,
which is another VC firm who considers himself one of the Co
founders of Tether. You look at Howie Lutnik, he's
buying assets, real estate assets out of off of the Epstein
estate. You know he owns I believe 1170
First East St. Epstein owned 9.
And and the the the fund was that he bought it from Comet
Trust was connected with Guido Goldman and and and Wexner and
all these guys kind of connected to this cabal.
They're all, you know Reed Hoffman is an Epstein guy.
You know obviously Peter Thiel and and Elon and you know you
kind of start to see these guys that you know well what Epstein.
What was Epstein really. Yeah.
Everyone focuses on the trafficking and sure he did
that, but he was kind of an economic hit man and he was a
big part of of a lot of the things that happened in O Wade
and was kind of bopping around doing you know running some
estate stuff for the Bronfman's. And then you look at the
Bronfman's, they're directly connected with this group
endeavour, which is sort of this like kind of you know, advisory
group that's that's all over. You know, MercadoLibre, which is
the biggest market in South America, was Zappa with Winces
Cassaris, who was kind of the patient zero of Silicon Valley
for Bitcoin. He brought Bitcoin to all of
these guys there, got these guys.
So you start to kind of piece together the money.
You follow the money and you start to see a web of of these
people that are directly connected to some of the
spookiest people around. And you know, a lot of these
guys are, you know, building satellite companies and doing
all this crazy shit in South America, in Argentina.
That was the piece that we just wrote, Debt from Above.
It kind of focuses on this satellite company.
That's Howie Lutnik and Mnuchin, General Dunford, who is the
chief of staff under Trump. Marcos Galperin, who's the
richest man in Argentina and Endeavour Guy who runs
MercadoLibre and then Howie Lutnik, you know, so you're
beginning to kind of see these connections.
You're seeing Larry Summers on the board of Zappo, you know,
and he was a big part of the, you know, dissolving of Glass
Steagall in the United States. You just start to see all this
stuff. It's very hard to ignore.
So I think that there is a cartel there.
There is sort of this dollar system, private sector cabal
that has been sort of pushing things from behind the scenes
for a really long time. You look at, you know, at a
dozen times in the in the 90s, a new trade agreement is
happening, which ends up kind of blowing up the Mexican peso who,
who does the George Soros thing and shorts the peso all the way
down. It's Joe Lewis.
Who's Joe Lewis? He's the Deltec guy who's the
banker for Tether. You start to see all these
connections, this kind of conspiracy all comes together.
And yeah, there's there's there's some, there's some shady
stuff going on in the dollar system, in Bitcoin, in some of
the Bitcoin infrastructure, in the stable coin infrastructure
of their bankers. And yeah, I mean that that's to
my best, you know, hours and hours of pouring over these
things, looking at all these Series A series BS that going
through the portfolios of all these people.
You know, I like to just do kind of all public information, you
know, kind of open source intelligence stuff, 'cause it's
just it's much safer and you don't you getting in less
trouble, 'cause you're not speculating as as much.
You know, I think people sometimes, you know, accused our
work of being doomed, hilled and just loose associations and all
this. But it's like, well, they're not
really that loose associations. I think they're pretty direct.
So, like, no, I don't think that there's like a weekly Tuesday
meeting where all these guys get together and then they say, OK,
you know, three weeks out from the halving, OK, let's get ready
to charge samurai. Like, I don't, I don't think
it's directly that. I think it's a lot more, you
know, people operating. Some of them are willing, some
of them are unwilling, some of them are useful idiots.
I think it's a whole smattering of things.
I think that's how a lot of these kind of societies and
cabals kind of work, that there's someone who knows what's
going on, but most of the agents don't.
So I think we're kind of in that in that zone where you can only
really begin to see the sketching out of the cabal, the
cartel, whatever you want to call it when you like, you know,
really zoom out. So there's a lot to look there.
But I would, I would tell people to look at the PayPal mafia,
look at these guys, look at look at, look look at all the things
that they've done all their VC firms and how they've really
integrated, you know, you know from Goldman and Morgan Stanley
and JP Morgan and that you know they've really like digitized
the dollar and and really created these information
networks. You know, all these guys have
moved on to LinkedIn and Kiva and you know these these other
product X, right. You know these other products
that are really networks more than kind of anything Palantir
is a is a, you know, they sell data to the government, right.
It's like so you know there's there's obviously a great power
in data and so many of these guys have have understood that
and you start to look into the the the cartel behind the data
markets. I just did a piece on that for
the last magazine called Random Access Markets.
That's all about data markets. And you know, you, you, you get
some really spooky stuff. The Maxwell sisters, Jolene
Maxwell sisters were like some of the biggest proponents of
early Internet search engines. Magellan was a Christine Maxwell
project. And you, you start to see this
connection unfortunately. And so information runs the
world just as much as dollars and information.
You know, it's it's kind of like a Web Three talking point.
But like, it's the new oil. It's like, well, it kind of
always was like, that's how they control people, right?
That's why these blackmail schemes exist.
It's to catch you in a compromising place where they
can control you, not 'cause they want you to be doing nefarious,
gross stuff. It's so they can control you.
That's why we're seeing the Diddy shit.
That's why we're seeing this crap.
It's about control. So how do you control people?
How do you create a cartel? Well, if you get a group of
people that are controlled from the very beginning, like say
maybe a PayPal mafia and then you use these same players for,
you know, 3 decades, you know, that's maybe how we get in this
situation that we're in. So I would say look there.
Absolutely, Man. This is this is fascinating
stuff. So, so fascinating guys, go go
check out Mark's writing. This is, you know, this is, I
can't, I can't imagine how deep this rabbit hole goes but it
seems like you've you're connecting the dots and yeah,
it's it's it's just interesting. Anyways, so we did have a really
interesting question from the audience and I I do wanna ask
you that last 'cause we are getting very close to the top of
the hour, but high higher calling was higher callering.
Was wondering if you thought that they could pull off their
plan and he commented that Whitney seems to think that
there is a real chance. And then lastly, this kind of
goes against a lot of the theory from a lot of bitcoiners, which
is you know like Safedeen for example, love the guy, super
great writer and enjoyed his works, but you know he believes
that Bitcoin has already won, right?
We we've heard this many, many times.
So where are you on that camp? Yeah, I mean, it depends on what
you mean by one, right? I mean, I think Bitcoin is
inevitable. I think that it's it's it's here
let me, let me. Let me interrupt you and let me
rephrase the question. Sure.
Will Bitcoin Enable the Separation of Money in State?
OK that's a much better question with of all due respect to your
first question which was also a good question but that's a much
that's a much better question. I don't know I think on this is
a time frame based question and this is something that you know
you know CK you know long time epic Bitcoin magazine guy who
who brought me and he he has this philosophy that everything
is good for Bitcoin. And I think on long enough time
frames that's probably true like an ETF probably is good for
Bitcoin long, long long, long term but I think short and
medium term it could potentially be very, very bad.
And I think that there's a lot of ways that Bitcoin can
monetize like that. It kind of depends on what your
metrics for success. So if the if the metrics of
success is separating, you know, money and state, well depending
on the axioms of that, it has already won.
I think you know if we look at you know, the monetary policy
landmarks of the having, you know, being right around these
humongous geopolitical macro events, I think you could argue
that the the economic policy of Bitcoin is already a world
changing certainly country changing, you know, the events.
So in that sense, yes, I think you know, the, the new kind of,
you know, federal funding rate or whatever, the new interest
rate, you know, in many ways you could say is the issuance of
Bitcoin, the block reward, which I think is a state change of
money, no pun intended. And I think that's important.
But can the dollar system use Bitcoin in the same way they
used oil as a way to increase dollar demand and perpetuate the
US dollar system another 80 years?
Absolutely, they can. And I think when you're seeing,
you know, a million or so Bitcoin, you know, within the
borders of the United States, whether through DOJ seizures or
micro strategy or the ETFs, that can be seized basically by the
United States government almost inevitably seized by the United
States government or already seized by the US government.
This idea of Bitcoin being unseasable money, I think is is
sort of a joke when it has been seized, you know, a million
times or whatever, right? Yes, I understand that's not how
cryptography works, yadda yadda. But also we have seen it.
We have seen the US government, you know, seize, seize funds.
So it is possible. It's like, it's like, I think a
lot of people have the conception where it's like,
they're gonna seize it the way that they seize money.
But they forget that human beings operate in meet space,
and you put a human being, you break down their door, show up
with a bunch of guns, put a gun in your face, and what are you
gonna do? You're most likely gonna hand
over the keys, right? Absolutely.
Like, yeah, we talk, we talk big games.
And I think there's a lot of badass bitcoiners that probably
would start blasting, you know, and and and and fuck, yeah,
dude. I mean, I'm condoning.
I don't want to. I'm not condoning on video
attacking law enforcement. I'm not saying that.
I just want to be very clear to the YouTube gods.
I'm not saying that. But you know, like, you know,
hey, there are people that will put their money where their
mouths is in their blood, where their, where their mouths are
and and and defend Bitcoin. But I think a lot of people,
that's not what they're in here for.
And so if the situation gets presented where they go, hey,
we're going to shove you onto this Bitcoin side chain where
you get a, you know, an IOU, but we let you keep your limbs.
You know, you still want $1,000,000.
Those people are going to go do it.
You know, I think the majority of bitcoiners will do that.
That's sort of how they'll win. They'll dangle this thing and
kind of get us to, you know, hey, you want you want all the
carbon credits that are offset by the forest in your backyard.
You know, all you got to do is get this digital ID and sign up
for this blockchain and we'll give you a hundred, $133,000
because of your forest. You know, people are going to do
that because they're going to be like, well, fuck yeah, I don't
have anything else. And then where do those land
rights go? Where do the you know the the
world is going to end in like unread user agreements that's
gonna kind of be that that's that's the apocalypse here.
So I think Bitcoin in many ways can monetize to millions and
millions of dollars and not actually increase the day-to-day
freedom of most people. I think that there will be a lot
of us that will you know have increased purchasing power in
the short term before things get kind of crazy And that This is
why I think this is kind of the most important time in Bitcoin
sort of ever it we're we're getting split between the state,
anti state. Compliance, degeneracy and I
think we need to kind of lean into anti state, lean into
degeneracy and build these tools.
Lean into freedom, bro. Freedom.
Right, Absolutely. Yeah.
And our enemy is not again and not to get preachy, 'cause I
think a lot of the ordinal stuff is really dumb, but like our
enemy is not a guy in a Pepe hat who is throwing some fucking
stupid gifts on fucking Bitcoin. That's not our enemy.
Our enemy is the state and the US Treasury system.
So let's like remember who it is and you know, let's not cheer on
the arrest of our brothers and and the the encroachment of the
state. And you know, you know, let's,
let's, let's remember who the enemy is here and let's, let's,
let's hopefully have Bitcoin be a means to an end for freedom,
for for individuals. And I think, I think we can win.
I do think that they'll, that they'll do some damn good damage
with their fucking plans. But I believe in humans.
I believe the good comes together in the end.
I believe good is coming together.
I believe people are more aware of this shit than ever.
And I do think in a lot of ways they are scrambling too.
You know, like I think these are plans they've had for decades.
But I also think they've made some big mistakes.
And maybe their biggest mistake was letting people like myself
and yourself and and Opti and our friends, you know, get a
little scratch and put together a little some and we get to
build a little thing where we get to fight back.
And maybe that was their biggest mistake.
But you know it. It's only a mistake if we use it
wisely. So that, that, that, I guess
I'll leave it on that. Opti put in the chart in in the
chat. Absolute bars, Yes, 100%.
The state was not ready for the Internet and all the things that
came with it, even though they were responsible for developing
a lot of it, but they didn't, they didn't realize the
Pandora's Box that they opened the Pandora's box for freedom,
which I think is is a good thing.
Anyways, Mark Goodwin, it's been an absolute honour, an absolute
pleasure to have you on simply Bitcoin IRL for the first time.
Hope to see you in Nashville for the Bitcoin 2024 conference.
Really, really excited for that and I'd be an honour to have you
on again in a couple months or so.
So thank you Mark. Appreciate it.
Anytime, man. Thank you guys.
I love what you guys are doing. Stay free, do your thing and
definitely see you in Nashville. And yeah, check out writings at
Bitcoin Magazine. Check out the print mag, what
Joe and AB does. They're just incredible.
Check out the Bitcoin dollar book.
And yeah, I guess see my Schizo posting on Twitter.
And yeah, we'll see you out there for sure.
We need you fight like hell. Appreciate it, man.
Yeah, dude. Honored to be in the trenches
with you man. This is that was that was an
incredible podcast. Incredible episode.
Highly enjoyed it. Mark dropping the hot fire.
Anyways guys, see you tomorrow for another episode of Simply
Bitcoin Live and peace out everybody.
Catch you guys later.