SotN#21: POLITICAL! w/ @twhirty_ (ELECTION DAY! Repubs, Dems, Crypto, and YOU)

Transcript

youtube link is up ryan i'm throwing it around twitter yep okay thank you i think the fact that we're advertising

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exchange like coinbase or gemini or wherever you can just go straight from your bank account right into your monolith checking account smart contract wallet so check them out at monolith.xyz bankless nation welcome to another state of the nation this is episode number 21.1 21. david i've got a feeling we're going to talk about politics today what about you yeah just a little bit you know it feels like a good day for that happy election day i voted this morning i did my part yeah yep absolutely washington's a mail-in vote state so i voted a few weeks ago oh that's that's that's cool that's smart i was like um i was up bright and early doing it

there's already a line so i'm not sure wow maybe that bodes well for turnout but um you know everything's different okay we should talk about what we're going to do today um so state of the nation if this is your first day of the nation dave and i record these every tuesday so it goes live on youtube so if you're watching youtube now you're watching it live what we try to do is pick a topic bring in an interesting guest relate that topic to some things that are going on in crypto in the bankless nation uh during the week and then drop some insights and action items relate these to the topics that we talk about on the podcast so every tuesday you can get it on youtube every wednesday it comes out in the podcast stream so if you're more audio

centric and that's the way you digest this content we do that as well david what are we gonna be talking about today talking about a number of things all related to the election and i kind of wrote about this in the market monday piece yesterday who's better for crypto biden or trump that's i feel like a worthwhile conversation to have but i also feel like everyone in the the world of crypto is like it doesn't really matter crypto is crypto but i also think that that is a dangerous thought to have because you know as the saying goes you might not be interested in politics but politics is interested in you and so maybe today is not our fight as the crypto industry but there is a political fight that we are going to have and we are going to have

to fight for our right to crypto and that is going to happen yeah and so i'm super excited to have a guest on that can talk about that and we'll introduce him in just a minute but he is a crypto lobbyist basically he's in dc he talks to members of congress about these issues can really shed some light into the question democrats or republicans who hates crypto less maybe that's the way to phrase it uh but like seriously we got to know what the politicians are thinking about crypto and this is going to be the episode to do that before we get into the goods david we've got some special things going on as always in the bank list program in the bankless nation uh phil

binella we had a great episode with him that got released on monday about something i think both of us are passionate about that's the the sovereign individual thesis and he talks specifically about the investment thesis can you give folks a preview of that episode yeah and i think that's actually a fantastic conversation to have because it is pretty decently adjacent to uh uh politics right uh they we we were chewing on a title for that piece crypto is political in the sense that crypto is a political stance of anti-authoritarianism and pro-individual right uh but then we just decided to go with the the title crypto is empowering talking about all the way that cryptography not necessarily

cryptocurrency but the ins the concept and institution of cryptography is empowering and changing the world landscape which is relevant to politics that we might talk about in this episode but that episode with phil was just a fantastic gamut of topics about the many different ways that cryptography are is really putting the power in the hands of the individual and away from hierarchical institutions and so it's a worthwhile uh concept to understand and to learn about and and phil did a really fantastic job helping us walk through that subject matter yeah absolutely so check out that episode while you're at it if you haven't subscribed to the podcast you should do that because next monday we have raul paul who's on the podcast we recorded this episode

yesterday it is fire heat i think he said after the episode he talked about whole new fresh new content that he's never talked about before um maybe because we made him i don't know i feel like he challenged us as much as we challenged him certainly but um you know we got him to talk about d5 we got him to talk about ether too and like questions like we'll leave it to the podcast but what assets what crypto assets does raul hold in his portfolio we found the answers to those questions so a little tease for you guys check that out on monday um lastly david we should mention something that uh that you're involved in you're actually gonna be a mentor um to the file coin accelerator that longhash is putting on

so this is really a uh you know shout out to if we've got d5 developers entrepreneurs builders who are listening to bankless you've got to check out what filecoin is doing with this long hash accelerator it's the opportunity to build on the file coin stack that's a decentralized storage layer so if you got you know bankless application built on ethereum that's that's defy centric but the servers behind that they might be in amazon they might be somewhere else right to get fully decentralized you could deploy that in filecoin and uh if you do it through this accelerator they're providing a 20k grant and some follow-up funding potentially but you got to apply

by the 15th i think that's how it works right david you're the you're the mentor yeah so you probably know more i think about this as like an east denver hackathon uh but happening on the internet and specifically with filecoin right and i think this is actually an insanely relevant uh subject matter to exactly what we were talking about on the phil binella podcast where we talk about how cryptographic systems like filecoin uh promote the sovereignty of the individual right imagine if humanity can just come together to build out this like library of knowledge that we all deem is worthwhile to keep stored in a way that is world war three resistant right like that's that's really the through line i think uh about filecoin and why i'm excited to be a mentor to

this program uh and so if you are a developer team and that is interested in money uh go and apply to the file coin accelerator program and get a 20 000 grant for building something on file coin link in the show notes guys so check that out uh david let's start this episode man are you ready i'm ready all right so all right well let me start with the question i ask you every single episode to stay the nation david what is the state of the nation this week my friend the state of the nation is political it's so it's such an easy one like i was also thinking about chewing on the we are activists uh because i think one thing that we want to come out of this

podcast is you know some actionable items for individuals who want to represent the world of crypto cryptocurrency in their local politics and and maybe um national politics what can people do to make sure that crypto is well represented uh and that's why crypto is political today yeah absolutely i mean folks listening they're a citizen of their respective nation states right um but they're also citizens of the crypto nation state we've talked about these digital nation states before you might be a a citizen of the bankless nation of course you might be a citizen of ethereum you might be a citizen of bitcoin and uh as such if you want that vision and that value system of the world moving forward you've got to get involved in politics

either politics of your network right there's certainly bitcoiner and uh ethereal politics and bankless politics but also in your nation state because all of this is one social experiment i guess that's what humans are doing these days right there's one big civilization social experiment uh and you got to get involved in order to get your value system out into the world so david with that we should introduce our fantastic guest want to introduce to the nation uh tyler werty who is a venture capitalist and advisor at the tacoma group he's also the founder of hoddlepack so this is a a pack political action group

um that is specifically focused on crypto he was formerly of the cato institute where he was a researcher studied crypto put out some research papers on crypto at cato he is in washington dc he talks to legislators and lawmakers about these issues tyler welcome to bank list i i'm hopeful you can shed some light on on uh some of these questions here but how are you doing today sir it's election day is dc going crazy i'm doing well and thanks so much for having me uh i'm uh i've i've told you guys this before but i'm a huge fan of bank list and it's and it's exactly because of uh your your what you guys touched on in the introduction there i thought that's

that's uh you know we we are activists uh hotel pack is a is a activist uh more than a lobbyist i say and and i'm i'm also on a mission to find people to uh help take part in in these nation state politics on behalf of uh on behalf of crypto so uh it's great to be here thanks for having me tyler i hope after this episode is done we can help recruit a few more activists to help join the cause that'd be great that would be great you know tyler um we just got to start here could you do you mind david if we start here i i want to start with um predictions election predictions all right because it's dangerous we have to start um tyler who's going to win biden or trump

what's your what's your hot take all right well so i don't um i don't know uh is the best answer that question i did tweet out a uh a 270 to win chart this morning uh with my with my predictions with with the caveat however being that my fantasy football team isn't very good this year so i haven't been good at 2020. uh but uh my chart has uh biden 271 uh in trump 267 final electoral college that i stamped it this morning that's my uh that's my prediction we're looking at it right now is there a is there a hash of this on the ethereum blockchain so that's immutable and you can't delete it if you're wrong unfortunately not now

you caught me there uh however the uh a couple other predictions i think we're going to have record turnout i don't you know i think i i think that's uh been widely uh widely expected this year given all the you know the increase in in absentee ballots and mail-in uh ballots um and uh you know besides from that i think we're gonna see a lot of uh partisan bickering i think that's a good uh safe prediction as well oh boy yeah i'll uh i'll bet on that and you speaking of bets i was i was fascinated by this i don't know if you saw this tyler but like there's all of these new prediction markets of course in crypto in in ethereum this is uh poly market we've talked about a little bit before and i you know it's i it's

the polls are one thing and nate silver is one thing right that's one piece of the predictive puzzle here but when people start putting money on it that's when i start paying more attention right now this has been an interesting graph to watch this is a prediction market on will trump win the 2020 us presidential election so um 61 say no he will lose so biden wins 60 are saying biden wins for about 40 percent are saying trump wins and they're betting money on this um to the tune of there's been about 3.5 million in trading volumes lots of trading volume that's a high number for prediction markets especially in a cryptocurrency context yeah like pretty pretty impressive pretty interesting i guess uh it mirrors your prediction but

i'm going to be watching this actually myself for the rest of the day because it goes up and down based on new information coming in um kind of interesting all right i think i i do so real quick though i think that i think is is super interesting i'm very i'm primarily interested in seeing uh obviously whether it's right you know i think yeah this is like our first like we're having finally we're having liquid prediction markets yeah and probably not as liquid as they need to be to like really truly be uh you know predictive uh or trust like you know we can trust it to be predictive um who knows whether people are hedging their positions or doing you know who knows what the people that participate in the prediction markets uh are like

what their motivations are so um i think it'll be interesting to see how that shakes out compared to the polls later later this evening well hang on i do want to bring up a point there because it's not a job of a prediction market to be right it's only a job of a prediction market to illustrate probability right and so trump can still win the uh election even though he was quote unquote the underdog for a prediction market because it's just about the the probability of the winning rather than the actual what's going to happen or not that that is actually that's a very good point very good point that's why you host banquo's and i don't fair enough well i i do think i do think that what's going to be interesting is like how quickly this market responds to new information coming in right so

if one candidate the other starts winning winning states you'd expect the favorability to increase or decrease that's right like in one direction or another based on information coming in um anyway fascinating we should get to the the main event here um tyler it's great to have you on so can we ask about like joe biden versus trump all right so these are our two alternatives at least in the us how do you how are you thinking about these outcomes as they relate to crypto is biden better than trump is trump better than biden what's better for our bags tyler that's what we want to know well so that's a very good question i

think um you mentioned in your intro uh you know some people say it doesn't it doesn't matter because you know politics doesn't touch bitcoin or in crypto generally uh i think your point in in refutation of that is a is a very good one uh but some people think it doesn't matter just because uh you know what actually matters is the is the bigger picture what happens in the election overall what happens in the you know in the house and the senate um what happens after after the election whether trump or biden wins uh you know depending on who they staff uh in their you know um at the at the agencies in in in the administrative state uh if you will uh

um that matters a lot too so whether it's biden versus trump um you know obviously has repercussions and we i'd love to get it and i plan to get into those with you but uh it's a bigger question right it's a what happens uh in the overall picture of our of of government uh uh you know post post election but that really that that staffing thing is important right because absolutely does the executive branch correct me if i'm wrong but they they pick a lot of the probably the administrators that we hear of a lot in crypto like the sec uh the folks that are sec chair men and women like hester pierce it's kind of crypto mom known in the space that would be an executive branch pick is that

right that would be the presidential pick it's as well as um you know cftc chair like the folks that recently brought enforcement against bitmex i mean these are things that are impacting our industry and is this all coming from the executive branch essentially the president absolutely yeah so there's this saying in washington and you know maybe your listeners have heard it before but you know personnel was policy right and um yeah stamp that uh everybody take notes uh the uh you know that that has a lot to do on the regular when it comes to you know the pertinent regulators to crypto um you know who who the uh the uh biden or you know trump second term trump administration appoints uh to head these

agencies have a have a has a big impact um you know i think the the there's a and you mentioned a few of them there's the sec uh which you know deals with securities laws uh there's the occ uh which we've heard a lot about recently with brian brooks uh as as comptroller of the currency uh who's been doing a lot of yeah and he's he's um you know uh he's pretty bullish ethereum last quote so i think you're thinking of cftc chairman eve tarbert there he said so he said he was he was bullish ethereum by by name which was great uh brian brooks on the occ side has has um issued a lot of guidance in recent

months he's been very active since coming on as comptroller uh he's you know uh basically giving the green light in some ways for banks to get into crypto which is very you know pertinent to to your uh to to your your guys's thesis giving them the green light to custody crypto assets that was a big thing right is that custom crypto assets there's also guidance related to stable coins and stuff like that too um there's uh so yeah so the you know the the alphabet soup of financial regulators as they say you have the sec the occ the cftc the cfpb uh which is the consumer financial protection bureau all these things all of these places uh you know we'll have either uh new new

appoint appointees uh in abiding administration or they'll have uh you know possibly new or continuing on from uh from a trump administration in the last last four years of the trump administration real quick i i want to get back we want to get back to like which one's better and that sort of thing in a second but real quick fincen is that all executive is that one of the acronyms you just threw out there who who so so vincent vincent is actually vincent is within treasury uh okay now that i'm live i'm you know i'm hoping that i'm not wrong on that but uh vincent is uh is is part of his treasury that is actually not a politically appointed position uh that is that's administrative but of course obviously

you know whatever treasury is right treasury secretary is there are plenty of political appointments in the in treasury that decide basically the the priorities of treasury yeah um uh yeah so so so i'm glad you brought fincen up i was gonna mention them later also department of justice i guess you know yeah william barr has had more to say about this kind of thing lately absolutely this is what you know this is what happens the the administrative state uh has you know bloated to it it's a big weapon that either side can pick up and point at the other uh that's why elections have consequences and we're going to see what happens in the you know hopefully the next few hours or days rather than weeks yes hopefully yes so tyler i think your

answer was more or less like the actual people of joe biden and donald trump and those two individuals don't really have a lot of implications but it's the party that they bring along with them and make appointees that's where really the fulcrum relies on and so may could do you have an opinion as to maybe it's maybe the real question is you know democrats or republicans who would be with a more crypto friendly political party do you have an answer to that yeah well so i think uh you can you can look at that in two ways one one is the uh split that i'll split my answer up into two buckets one is the regulatory state which was exactly what we were just talking about and one is in in the legislature and in the house and senate

so taking the regulatory you know uh agencies first um you know uh they're it's it's it's hard to say exactly how the any democrat appointees will will uh you know uh either will react to um some things that have happened in the trump administration for example you know will the new occ person on the democrat side uh undo things that have brian brooks has done or will they leave those in place and then maybe you know add on to them or whatever else it's hard to say again personnelist policy it's gonna it's gonna come down to you know whether there's a huge uh huge democratic wave right maybe they

get a mandate uh to do to be a little more progressive on in certain agencies uh and then we might see you know different than if there was a slight biden victory versus where moderates are more in charge and so all these things are going to be uh you know watched very closely by people in dc um on the legislature side um uh you know i hesitate to say whether republicans or democrats are better uh hotel pack is is explicitly non-partisan we like to you know make friends on both sides of the aisles and support uh the existing the champions that do exist on both sides of the aisle um i think if i if i were to press to say which one is better i think republicans have a slight edge just because you know

they're i think instinctively a little more you know pro innovation uh less regulation um in so far as that helps crypto develop um and you know the democrats are of course the party of of of brad sherman our uh which i'm sure your listeners know you know is not the biggest fan of crypto uh in the house so we have does he have a nickname by the way i don't know i would have heard it probably but yeah crypto hater is he's the anti-crypto dad crypto crypto step dad yeah that might be a good one yeah okay so like but um i guess

philosophically um are there wins for both parties here right if you think about the the platform the things that democrats historically care about and the platform and the things republicans care about are there ways to paint crypto in you know in both of those lights i guess that's part of the job of of you know something like the pack that you run absolutely and i'm glad you brought that up uh because i you know i didn't i didn't really finish my answer there on the legislature yes the yes the democrats you know maybe i give the slight edge to the republicans but there are champions on both sides uh it is it it really is a nonpartisan issue at this point i think it's more about education and outreach for for our industry

um the you know uh you know to name names there's darren soto from florida has has sponsored a and he's a democrat has sponsored a bunch of um you know great legislation uh pertaining to crypto uh we have you know sean maloney from from new york is another great democrat on these issues um you know and even you know there's actually you know i've heard rumors that um you know uh a democratic financial services committee in the house might actually uh be motivated to to to um to to to do some crypto assets specific you know legislation or uh crypto asset related rather legislation um if if if they retain their their

leadership position so um you know i i think both both sides uh there are champions on both sides it's really a non-political issue at this point um i think that's a good thing for us because if it is if it does become a political football then you know it gets caught up in the in the partisan dysfunction of that we're also familiar with and then it becomes something that you know uh one side has to you know jam down the other's throats frankly and we don't want that we want that to be something that everybody kind of works together and and realize this is something you know like the uh like the internet in the 90s or something that we need to try to you know um uh you know promote and make us a friendly jurisdiction for so tyler what would you say

does crypto need to fight for like what are the issues that are at stake that like maybe maybe all of us in the in the crypto world just sit on our hands and we don't become activists what do we what are we leaving on the table what are we losing yeah that's a that's a great question so i think there's there's a few um you know hot button issues obviously and i think you and your your listeners are probably familiar with them there's the you know there's securities laws and how they apply to you know tokens and i think that's something that's gotten a lot of attention in crypto uh that something that's also been addressed in a few bills that haven't really gone anywhere in in in uh in the house and senate um you know that's something that if we don't you know keep pushing uh

might not go anywhere in itself um there's also things that are easy that things that like it's almost unbelievable that haven't been dealt with yet like the like a de minimis tax exemption right where people need to um take you know for to be fully tax compliant technically need to like track you know the smallest uh transactions with bitcoin yeah if you pay gas on ether right technically you have to track the cost basis of that ether that you just spent with like the five cents you spent on gas right that's how silly it is it's very silly and i'm sure also things like transferring from dye to tether to usdc tactically spaced out based off the rate changes

i can i can see the you know the reactions of the people in dc their minds are spinning as you just try to tell them like describe something like that the crazy thing about it is like most people in crypto they're like yeah we like we'll pay our taxes just like tell us don't make us guess it's kind of like the irs you're like filling this stuff out and it's like yeah guess guess what you owe us and you're like okay i'll guess and if you're wrong we'll free you in jail we'll find you like it's not a fun game to play no it is not and that and those are so that it's uh excuse me it is those things that uh you know are at risk for not you know engaging with uh with our policymakers um it's very i think

it's very important for the crypto community broadly to uh you know despite our differences whether you're a bitcoin or an etherean or whatever you call it you know uh these are all things these are things that you know affect us all so um it's good too what's holding those things back is is there some maybe let's talk about some of the the fears right the concerns right so i think i've heard maybe brad sherman's who's a congressman i think maybe in um california somewhere yeah he's a los angeles space i believe okay i've heard him say that uh like his main one of his main concerns uh is us loss of reserve currency status um which i'm like okay well maybe you actually understand like what crypto is

a little bit if you're articulating it in that way um but like that's one concern that i've articulated is that the common concern is it more you know terrorists and uh rogue countries and we can't monitor or like what are the common concerns coming out of congress that prevent just really simple things like this like we just want to something to clarify how we pay taxes on crypto right yeah so so i guess to answer that so i think there's the main thing that's preventing like these types of you know we can call it simple i guess you know i'm not a i'm not a lawyer i'm not a legal scholar it might not be you know that these these things might not actually be simple to change even though i you know there are proposals on the

table and people have been debating the merits of anyway the the thing that um is preventing uh those things from happening is frankly just you know political dysfunction that as as uh representative emmer said uh who's i believe a co-chair of the blockchain caucus uh in the in congress um what he said in in our uh the hotel pack interview with him was uh you know congress is just name and post office these days they're not doing much and i think that so that that uh that's the main obstacle um it's it's really hard to get uh the republic the red and the blue team to work together i think that's the main one um you mentioned specifically brad sherman's

objection about um you know the doll the dollar's reserve currency status i think actually i don't know if i've heard that that uh that um you know point brought up much uh other than other than that that uh hearing that or a couple of hearings that he's brought that up uh i don't know if that's i i think that's in the background and i know that definitely um it definitely uh influenced the libra discussion uh but i don't know if that's like the main motivator for you know somebody being like antagonistic towards crypto uh you know regulatory clarity or whatever you want to call it broadly um there are however some serious concerns i think uh you know another another just

to go back to your previous question like those are we went over some of the easy ones some of the harder ones are some of these things that you know uh concerns about hosted versus unhosted wallets when it comes to money laundering like these these things are these things are huge issues uh and you mentioned fincen uh you know previously this is directly related to that is that uh you know if if uh if we don't engage with policy makers and you know as a community say that you know we want to be using these products and we want a bankless future rather than having you know to work with the banks uh then um you know we could very well see a future where you know unhosted wallets uh anybody's meta mask on their

browser uh is uh you know prohibited uh usage of that is prohibited or severely restricted and um obviously that's an existential type of threat to crypto and we don't want to see that happen either so tyler that seems to me like the issue right the number one issue and because there's a ton of incentives here at play a bankless world where we can all have our own infinite number of metamasks wallets and we don't have to ask permission to you know send money between each other that is cutting out middlemen and that is middlemen that exist in the legacy system that have funding dollars and lobbying efforts and and want to retain the status quo and could perhaps likely push narratives

such as money laundering and criminals in order to say like hey you know crypto's dangerous and we need to babysit our citizens by making wild gardens that protect them right so we can make sure that you know you know when you you have your paypal btc that you only ever send it to another paypal individual what i'm worried about is that when it comes to lobbying which is kind of basically how you get what you want in the political landscape the the status quo and the legacy institutions have all the capital in the world to lobby and the crypto world doesn't seem to be very well organized in order to get this lobbying efforts done to retain some of these core principles that underpin our entire industry how do you think about these

things yeah that's a great point so a couple couple of things come to mind uh you know first shout out to organizations like coin center uh in in blockchain association and in the chamber of digital commerce as well that have been fighting this fight in dcc uh it's been you know it's great uh to have representatives like them uh you know um trying to you know maybe counteract the uh the the dollars of the of the you know the bank lobby or the other you know um other lobbyists in in dc um you know i i think in in why we started hold pack in a way was to try to be a you know an alternative to that uh complex i think

you know obviously there are companies within uh crypto that you know uh are getting more active in terms of you know trying to put money to work in dc um and it's in their interest to do so uh but i think what what's really powerful is is like a is a basically a grassroots political organization uh like hotel pack aspires to be where the people the you know the listeners of your uh of your podcast and in in content and uh the members of bankless nation uh you know can uh can you know can um make their voices heard and you know maybe not donate a ton of money but you know put some skin in the game and and then uh you know you can see that we have a

grassroots organization of real people using these products and wanting to see you know the you know this future come to come to fruition um so that that's why we started holopack and uh i think you're right uh it's a we're up against big al uh big big uh enemies in that sense but in some ways actually the one way to think about it is you know uh the paypals of the world uh maybe they're not they're not necessarily you know aligned with the banks 100 right so it's almost i like to think of it and i don't know if i've fully fleshed out this thought yet is that when in this battle versus like fintechs versus banks right and this is this is very relevant to the oh what's been happening in the occ in the last few

months is that uh in this battle versus with fintechs versus banks um the this idea of like what is a bank might kind of get lost in the in the you know it just it might become irrelevant and in that in that uh you know scrum if you will there might be a path open for you know uh public blockchains and crypto networks to find a way to you know exist within that um within that world where you know we kind of are in a bankless world because you know banks don't really mean anything they're largely a regulatory invention in a lot of ways um and you know uh if uh if crypto is all it's cracked up to be and all that we think uh it is then uh you know that will rise to the

top and be chosen by uh by the market so that's kind of that's kind of the like a little bit of the protocol sync thesis right it's like when you have all of these parties that can't agree right paypal's not going to want to settle on jp morgan's whole transaction network or private uh blockchain and vice versa right jp morgan's not going to look fondly on libra or whatever big tech silicon valley comes out with so what do they do they throw up their hands and say well let's all pick this one this credibly neutral settlement layer that none of us control because that's the only fair way to do it um and hopefully that's that's some of the the glimmer of hope for something like an ethereum for instance that is the settlement layer that no one controls

um david i think you're you're you like i i guess one thing before we get to a next point actually is another glimmer of hope it seems to me tyler is that um we did this in the u.s in the early 90s right with the internet and somehow we got to an internet that wasn't perfect but was reasonable like it worked like all kind of 90s and 2000s tech was built on this thing it was reasonably permissionless it was reasonably credibly neutral oh my god we even we even somehow got away with cryptographically secure um transactions using https and and tls

like um and that used to be that sort of cryptography used to be like military grade tech you know if you if you went back in the 1940s or something you said hey we've got this new protocol thing and it's going to allow citizen a to send something to citizen b and by the way government you can't open the mail and read any of the the transactions big brother government would have been like uh i don't know but somehow we got it through in the 90s which gives me some hope is there some like path there that we can take to start applying it to crypto and and like this is the new internet this is the internet of money paint that picture for legislators yeah i i i hope so i hope there is uh i i think there's you know uh

they're uh i don't know if you you guys might have crossed your radar back when it when it came out but uh you know hester purse at the sec has come out with like a safe harbor proposal that i think is uh kind of speaks to that uh that at least that motivation that you're describing right which is to kind of create a light touch kind of regulatory environment where where uh you know things can be experimented with without fear of of uh you know um getting caught up in in in in in the in yeah these laws have have jail times in many ways uh associated with them which is not something that you know we want to subject any uh entrepreneurial crypto developer uh to right um so i think there are some uh

there's hope there i think you know maybe uh the problem is is uh i i it really gets back to um you know there needs to be the political will to try to uh tried to uh you know uh create to to do something similar to like to the 90s as you were describing with the internet and uh who knows whether that will ever be there i certainly hope so and i certainly hope i know that you know the organizations that i i i i listed off like coin center and and blockchain association um and hotel pack will be working to try to get that get people there uh but i guess there's only we'll we'll see right it's up to us to try to engage and uh get get our

representatives one by one to that point so tyler we asked about like what do we have to lose uh and that kind of illustrates a a game of verses rather than a game of collaborate collaboration right so what happens when the world of crypto our our industry uh thinks about collaborating with the nation state and we actually work together right what do we have when and then we also win our political battles like what do we have to gain that makes the world of crypto a more fun place to live in like it's it's the just it's less costly to it's not less a separated world right we have the bankless nation and we have the legacy nation state and

what happens when these things come to meld because we want a lot of the political battles uh what can you kind of illustrate uh that kind of world yeah that's a great question you know i'm not thinking about this i'm not sure there's necessarily like a silver bullet that like is gonna you know create the utopia that we're like hope that we were hoping for but i do think uh i mean maybe this is not really what you had in mind but i'd like to take the question in this direction uh and you can uh feel free to shoot me down if not but i think there are a lot of things that the crypto um industry community whatever you want to call it you know can teach and help uh you know government with uh for example like the the biggest thing that comes to mind is

this you know emerging debate around like the digital dollar right like uh people in dc have been talking about this forever or not forever but for this year a lot uh and and you know frankly there's there's not a lot of uh depending on who you talk to you get different definitions of a digital dollar one you know uh is you know something like a fed account right and everybody has accounts at the fed and i don't think that's a lot like i don't think that really appeals to crypto uh people very much um but you know the other thing is uh you know uh along the sovereign individual thesis along the bankless nation thesis uh is er you know our token-based digital dollars that

um you know people uh that that that give people financial privacy and in in and uh you know don't subject them to the type of surveillance that the banking system does now especially with the and pay attention to the travel rule uh stuff that's come out from fincen recently that's going to lower the threshold for uh information gathering on on transactions uh follow jake travinsky and jason stoneman sato on those issues they're very good uh a quick plug for my friends um but the uh but you know the question a lot in dc i guess the the best discussions about digital about the digital dollar come back to like how do we enshrine you know what are supposedly american values in this new form of money that like might exist right and

um you know i think the crypto community has a lot to teach uh in dc frankly about that about you know what what they care about and i think what crypto cares about or the things that i just mentioned and that i think appeals to a larger audience um especially when you kind of uh juxtapose it with uh with with the chinese you know digital currency uh initiatives and how that's kind of basically the opposite of what we're talking about so um you know i don't know if that was quite your answer uh or question david but that's that's kind of uh in my mind in the in the in the uh optimistic world where government and the crypto community are working uh well together like that's that's what comes out of it

tyler we tyler we have so many more conversations that that we want to get to i'm particularly interested in huddle pack because i hear that you guys use quadratic voting to figure out how to allocate funds we want to get into conversations like that but we're going to have to take a break and talk about some of our sponsors that make this show possible great if you want to live a bankless life you need to get a hardware wallet there is no alternative for storing your crypto in a self-sovereign fashion that's why i have four ledgers that i use to manage my different crypto assets using the ledger live account as well ledger live is like your home base for managing your ethereum defy and crypto accounts it

does a really good job of aggregating all of your different ethereum wallets if you are the type of person that uses more than one but you can also add other cryptocurrencies like bitcoin or cosmos or whatever your preferred blockchain is and then it will display an aggregate portfolio of all your accounts at the main page one thing that ledger is doing a really good job of is enabling all the money verbs that me and ryan talk about with the bankless skill cube enabled in the ledger live app so right now in the ledger live app you can buy sell lend swap and stake your crypto assets which is doing a really good job of fulfilling all of the money verbs in the bankless skill cube something that's new to ledger live is ledger swap where you can swap assets one for another directly inside the ledger live application

ensuring trustlessness in your financial activity on ethereum and on bitcoin if you want to learn more about what you can do with a ledger go to the blog post the power of ledger live on the ledger website where they share some of the more advanced things that you can do with your ledger that you might not have known about there's a link in the show notes that will take you to the ledger shop where you can get your preferred ledger hardware wallet i personally like the ledger nano x but i also have both they're both great options when you own a ledger you own your own assets in the way that they have been designed to be held by the user and the user alone so go get your ledger today to make sure that you are as self sovereign as possible

the bankless state in the nations are brought to you by wiring wiring is defy's first self-building community run project which i just get really really excited about iron is a system that seeks out yield in d5 and it does that in a number of different ways a very aggressive way is with the vaults where you can deposit your preferred asset of choice and different defy experts will come in and generate a strategy for what to do with your deposited token right and so it'll go find ways to get yield in that deposited token in d5 for those who want to just earn yield on their stable coins the earn system is for you where you can deposit your preferred stable coin and wiring will go and figure out which

money market on d5 and d5 is producing the best interest rate whether it's dydx it's compound or ave it looks around d5 to see where the yield is coming from and it directs stable coins automatically so you don't have to check them out at why earn dot finance to get started and also check out the stats page to see what other people are doing as well all right bankless nation we are back with tyler werty and we're talking all things politics uh particularly on this day the biden versus trump election we've covered a lot so far tyler uh when we left off we were just talking about central bank digital currencies and i think you indicated that that sort of could be a catalyst for some movement if it feels like congress has is in sort of

a stalemate isn't doing a lot of things sometimes it takes this shot across the bow this catalyst to get them moving uh china is moving full steam ahead on their special bank digital currency at what point does a u.s fed coin some sort of a central bank digital currency just break through the um the impasse and sort of the status quo and become top of mind are we getting close to that do you think is there are there mumblings is are there rumors in dc that uh you know the us needs a strategy for central bank digital currency yeah so like i said like when you say digital dollar in dc it depends on who you're talking to and uh as to where they take it right so

um i think there is a if you're to do like the google trends of dc conversations right like the digital dollar would have had a spike in 2020 uh like people are talking about it more um where that goes is a is a great question and uh yeah you know there are better experts than than i to to kind of hash out all the different directions uh but uh you know i think i think there is an increasing chatter about it there's increasing chatter about um you know things like libra and like how that's gonna play in uh you know libra famously or you know uh i guess famously uh you know change from a basket of currencies to a dollar based one i think to appease

regulators and and and policymakers on the hill especially with that that kind of um uh you know because because that was a chief that was a big concern to them was was dollar supremacy and you know uh the role of the dollar in the in the global economy uh you know uh in in threats to that um but i i do think there is potential for it i think unfortunately you know again it it depends on like what happens today uh the you know with the democrat i think the democrats are uh more okay more um uh on board with something like a fed account based digital dollar at least if you're gonna take some of the the bills that have been introduced in the last few months uh coveted relief related bills

um to uh you know if you're going to take take that as their position then then you know the the thing that's getting the most attention is is the digital that type of digital dollar and what's their intent with that type of digital dollar is is part of the appeal for on the democrat side um hey this is a way to distribute maybe some sort of ubi you know another 1200 check to the people directly to the people to their account um that that seems to be popular in some aspect of the democratic party is that part of the carrot there well i think a lot of it it's you know it's it's motivated by uh you know financial inclusion uh goals right so so it'd be hard to get bank accounts when

you know in certain uh you know underprivileged uh communities uh in rural communities it's hard to get access bank accounts so a lot of this digital dollar stuff uh with the fed has been introduced alongside of like postal banking legislature to make post offices offer banking services uh you know it's been um in indefinitely motivated by covet relief related economic relief related effort uh which could technically you know you said ubi set the you know set the infrastructure for a ubi in the future that that is that is uh that would i would presume that to be you know compatible um there is also you know groups in dc

that are talking about digital dollar like the digital dollar project which is headed by uh former cftc officials chris john carlo and daniel gorfin those are big names big names yes absolutely and so then they have you know weight political weight in dc as well they in their they've been um you know advocating for something different uh something like a more of a token-based digital dollar with roles for you know private industry uh you know having some type of role in that uh in that um uh you know uh arrangement uh if you will um so so yeah it's it's i guess the to sum it up like it's very to be determined uh

the a lot of the air has been sucked out of the room uh with with uh you know first coveted relief and and just trying to figure that out of course this is somewhat related uh and then the election uh this year so you know real discussion hasn't necessa maybe hasn't necessarily taken place i don't think we've had a full-throated like civic discussion about the digital dollar um but what's good i guess and from my perspective is that you know private innovation continues to trudge on right you see uh stable coin growth this year has been tremendous uh digital dollars that that in itself is in very much you know a digital dollar and and i think

it's very important that within this broader you know uh discussion as it relates to government involvement in the digital dollar that private innovations and you know uh all the all the things that are caught up in that uh are you know are allowed to to you know um take place and thrive here as well because i think choice is good for the consumer at the end of the day absolutely tyler i want to turn the conversation to huddlepack because there are some interesting things going behind the scenes there at huddlepack based on some pretty interesting cryptoeconomic primitives maybe you could intro us into what huddlepack is absolutely yeah so so as we've discussed no the the idea there was you know to

create like a grassroots political organization uh to engage the crypto community in dc and to add a fundraising element um pacs our political action committees which are basically you know uh uh you know non-profits dedicated towards donating uh and supporting um candidates for public office so hotel pack is uh in hotel pack huddle pack you know tomatoes tomatoes here we go i think i've said that on every every podcast i've been on everybody pronounces it differently but i'm not gonna change at this point but uh the uh um you know what i think what was missing from from the you know the the crypto policy advocacy space was something like

this so we wanted to fill that gap and uh in in and yeah so the way it works uh you mentioned you know um quadratic voting so the we you know i was thinking about how to create you know one of these things for the for the crypto community and of course i want to make a crypto native and i want to make it you know so thusly you know make a community governed and um obviously there's there's you know laws fec rules around around pacs and how how to do things so we can't go full full board in the crypto native direction quite yet but one of the things that we experimented this year was uh you know anybody who donated or signed up for our email uh list in in our in our sub stack

newsletter uh received total vote tokens uh in in exchange so uh we these were tokens on the rinkeby test net to avoid gas fees and all those and all that stuff uh i was sending out you know rink of the eth to people so they could vote in our uh vote in our in our community ballot but we held one community ballot where um uh you know uh there was a list of 10 candidates to choose from um those were provided by you know myself in the in the hotel pack board uh but eventually we want to like have the community curate those as well um so basically the way it worked is there was 10 10 uh 10 10

candidates to choose from the people who had hotel votes were able to you know connect their meta mask to uh to the community ballot page and then uh we used quadratic voting for how to buy the votes for those candidates so uh you know if you had whatever however many total votes uh in the way quadratic voting works is the first vote cost one the second cost four third cost nine so we thought that was a good way to kind of level the playing field between you know the whales that were donating a lot and those in the people who you know frankly we want to engage people just giving you know 20 bucks here and there um uh quadratic voting helps to level the playing field between those two groups

uh and then it also you know just uh exposes more people to some of the cool stuff that crypto that's going on in crypto so uh yeah we that was uh that was a lot of fun it was really cool to see people you know um you know got some dc people on metamask got people using tokens and stuff and it was it was it was a lot of fun so you know that this is just the first iteration we want to we want to keep building it out and we want to engage the you know community to help us do so uh another quick plug sorry is uh we used we another like or another crypto native thing that we did was was to uh have a token permission discord uh by our friends at abridged and collab land uh shout out those guys

and uh and yeah so so um like i said you know we're just trying to create like a crypto native political organization trying to experiment with what that looks like and uh and that was that was the first iteration this year this is something that i get really really excited about and so for our listeners i want you to take molok dao and get coin and kind of put them into one right and so what what i think you guys are doing at huddle dow is you are figuring out a way to build a more scalable organization using cryptocurrency infrastructure and cryptographic primitives right quad the whole concept of quadratic voting is generating a system that is more inclusive that allows people to have more say and when that if that is

achieved then in theory huddle dial can incentivize more donations right and so is using cryptographic infrastructure to create a bigger tent for allowing more people to express their political opinions pax political action committees are super powerful because it's a way to uh focus and converge people's attentions and values and energies by just delegating into a few people and you you are using uh quadratic voting you're using uh the ethereum blockchain or test net uh and you're using a dow like system like kind of like moloch to really try and see how many people can we get involved to direct funds and also use the principle of quadratic voting which

is market-based incentives to allocate funds to people that we deem the most appropriate to receive those things and i think when we compare legacy systems versus crypto systems to me this is just one of the things that is why crypto is always going to win you know cross my fingers that's just a theory um but it's because we are able to do the same things but in a better form a more inclusive form a lot a bigger tent and if you guys have been following what we've been talking on the bank list program bigger tents win bigger tents always win and i is it is that that's my take does that resonate with you i mean hey you're hired let's go let's yeah let's do it the the that was that was perfect that's exactly right

and and i think uh you know part of the i said uh i mentioned this before but i'll just reiterate is like you know yes we were trying to fill a gap in the crypto policy advocacy space um to get you know grassroots and fundraising operation off the off the ground but also wanted to you know we want hotel pack to be an example for dc to learn from the power of these things these community owned and run uh you know uh digital first uh uh organizations like i want i want dc's brains to start you know to start uh turning and um thinking about the the potential of these things i think both you know so so yes couldn't have said it better david thank you it's kind of cool because um

you know what is a pac if not a capital pool right that influences policy and um what's that ethereum in crypto yeah what's a dow i mean we happen to be pretty good in d5 and ethereum at capital pools so global capital pools so there's one thing we know how to do like we do know how to do that so it does seem like a perfect marriage i guess as long as you can get sort of the um the pack regulation sort of straight side of things because it does have to have a foot i guess in the in the legal meet space world to make sure that people aren't giving too much or they're identified or whatever the pack rules are i don't quite know them but super interesting stuff tyler hey um one

last question for you before we let you go so thinking about all this stuff that we've heard today what can the bankless nation do today to help you know david talked about the the state of the nation's political and he used the term activist what's our role what can we do right now yeah well thanks for asking uh i i'm happy to plug huddle pack again uh so you know i think uh first of all let me say that uh as i am you know uh as i kind of thought through hotel pack and what i wanted it to be and what i wanted it to you know kind of represent and stuff the the ideas of bank was nation um you know were top of mind so you guys you know have already had

influence over a hotel pack in that way but but uh you know to to uh to think about you know how how bankless nation can get involved you know i there's there's two there's two main ways right now uh uh i guess three the first is you know just sign up uh on our website and subscribe to our newsletter that'll earn you hotel votes and we'll send you those and boo and you'll be a part you'll be a huddle pack member uh at that from that point on the second um is uh you know if you are able please donate uh you know we are again pacs are just uh pools of capital and so we need capital to be able to uh do our job uh well um and then uh you know the third is uh you know i know there's a lot of uh

developers and tech minded people here product people uh you know listening um we uh you know i am uh my dms are open uh on hotel packs uh page on twitter as well as my personal page if you wanna get involved and to help us build the next gen of of hotel pack for for 2022 and beyond uh you know please uh please send me uh send me a message or or reach out at hello hotelpack.org that's awesome any of that will work and on that donation piece if someone is interested in donate they want to donate they can't do it in crypto today as i understand but i'm sure that's coming soon but um what does what do the funds go to are you pushing the agenda of crypto

everything we talked about today in dc so um so uh it'll go so the donations go to uh well they go to hotel pack and then they are disbursed to uh candidates based on the uh you know the decisions of the community there's some portion of the funds that will go that go to just kind of running hotel pack we're basically over that over that hill though i think that a lot of our founding donors uh kind of set us up well for that uh so some portion will go to like things like compliance like monthly you know compliance costs but we really we're striving to get as much as you know as as high a percentage of every dollar that's donated to hold a pack back into donations to candidates to try to build a you know coalition in

congress to uh to do all the things that we've been talking about today okay very cool interesting i uh don't know all the subtleties of how that sort of works donations to candidates but i'm sure uh money i do know that money makes politics go round and if crypto wants a place in the political sphere and meat space we need to be at the table tyler it has been fantastic to have you on bankless state of the nation thanks so much for joining us sir thanks so much for having me on and uh keep going with uh with banquo's nation uh you know i hope hopefully we can get as many of the ideas that you guys talk about uh translated into you know dc and um they can catch on there as well so thanks guys awesome tyler thank you for being the vehicle to which so that we

can actually get that done great all right bye guys take care david wow that's that's pretty eye opening man like um lobbyist stuff is very very interesting i think i um i i do wonder about the future of this i we we definitely need to be involved in some way in these conversations in dc and it seems like you know pax and having representatives in dc is a way to do that uh what are some of your takeaways from that yeah i think my biggest takeaway is is like and i think i learned this lesson in 2016 where like you don't really get to opt out of politics right like you don't get to just sit on your hands and say you know you know politics isn't for me

i'm not really interested in it because like i said at the beginning it doesn't matter if you're not interested in politics because politics is interested in you right and so if you're a listener to the bankless youtube to the bankless nation bankless newsletter banknotes podcast that means you're interested in crypto and that means you're interested in crypto growing into its maximum potential and if you're interested in that therefore you're interested in protecting crypto from you know people that might not have the same incentives as you are and again like that's why pax exists in the first place maybe it's not maybe crypto's not your deal maybe it's maybe it's uh i don't know and insert your political interest here there's a pack for that right and the reason for that is because it's more efficient and more scalable to just send money to a

pack and make them do the labor for you right that's what a pac is is it coordinates and and centralizes labor and focuses it right it's like a lens of of of influence and crypto's gonna have its packs too and so you know huddle pack i think is a great mechanism to figure out how can we make crypto uh aligned with the rest of the world and not against the rest of the world right yeah yeah i agree you know there's a part of me that's a little divided on this because uh money and politics i would our i would argue is is uh certainly not ideal but this is also the world that we live in right so we are post citizens united cases this is how things happen in dc so we have to be

pragmatic about it as well and speaking of being pragmatic david you wrote this uh great piece on monday talking about the election outcome and i i do think it's worth uh talking about really briefly but you basically made the argument that um hey like the question of on everyone's mind in crypto is um is is biden or trump going to be a good thing or bad thing for crypto and you kind of changed the dichotomy a little bit and you said well it's it's less about who wins and more about certainty versus uh uncertainty right and they you know it's it's almost the way in which the candidate wins or loses could lead to more uncertainty and i think

part of what you're saying is sort of uncertainty bad like generally bad for markets but also you're you're kind of making the the claim to you that um there's an element of crypto does thrive on a little bit of global uncertainty uh it can thrive in in the chaos but i think the larger point of the article um and maybe that's where the title came from is that while this chaos is going on um the eye of sauron like that being sort of the government in this case is not pointed on crypto and that's probably a good thing for now because crypto is just a baby it's you know it's a it's a small little hobbit for using our lord of the rings and it's got to grow up into a big strong hobbit before it can like take on you know sauron and his tower here uh

yeah you wanna you wanna talk about some of the themes from this article yeah absolutely and yeah just to reiterate like again i don't think biden or trump is really the the focal point here and i don't even think it's really a focal point of the election when you vote biden and you or you vote trump you're voting for the team not the person right and that's kind of what we were getting into uh with tyler just now but like you said like the crypto thrives in volatility crypto thrives in chaos and i think one of the the reasons one like the the btc price is extremely volatile but bitcoin is is like the bane of the dark knight of batman like it was born in chaos it was born in volatility it knew it knows how

to live in a volatile world right and the legacy system doesn't know how to do that the legacy financial markets look towards the election and hopes for stability and hopes for certainty but in crypto we don't give a about about certainty we don't care about about uh you know stability because our our whole entire industry goes and boom and bust cycles every three to four years there's no there's no foundational substrate to our industry so it doesn't matter for us like it's like chaos is actually one of our best friends because the longer and more that ethereum and bitcoin can can develop and mature before the nation state tries to top down control it the

better yeah i have a friend who's a um a financial planner right and he's like you know sometimes i'll talk to him he's like oh brutal day you know mark was down four percent i'm like oh four percent four percent do tell me more i mean there's an element of like wow crypto four percent i mean that can happen in a few seconds right and uh we are very used to this this chaotic world but i think one of one of your main points too is that whatever outcome happens today it's basically this is not really like there's no clear candidate that supports crypto or doesn't support crypto right both candidates probably support modern

monetary policy and money printing so i guess that's a boom to crypto either way you could argue one more than the other um we'll see but tomorrow or today now it's it's not really kryptos battle like it's not our fight yet but our fight will come at some point right when the eye of sauron starts to turn its eye onto onto the crypto industry and maybe we got a flavor of what that could look like with tyler maybe we need to start preparing now yeah and and here's how i think this election is relevant to crypto because you know everything is connected right uh in my in my um opinion uh the the the radical left the very

loud left kind of has the the democrats um they've kind of controlled the democrats right and the radical left wants wants stimulus right the left is running on being the pro stimulus party but we even saw donald trump like flash an anti-stimulus tweet like two weeks before the election and then immediately backtracked and was like no we're definitely doing stimulus just kidding i wasn't that that tweet was a mistake we're definitely a pro stimulus party as well and so i think the populace of the american or the the government the parties the political parties are held hostage by the people who want stimulus because we gave them a little bit like they got a

taste of stimulus and they're like well why can't we have more of that and the parties are like don't have an answer to that question right and that is how we think that we are converging on an mmt uh a pro mmt environment no matter what the mmt is coming right and this means bullishness for bitcoin and it doesn't matter i've been having this conversation with a couple of ethereum people who are very not not very but like don't don't see the value in bitcoin that bitcoiners do or i necessarily do bitcoin doesn't need to do anything other than be alive because mmt makes it really difficult to allocate capital right the equity markets are really highly highly priced like amazon

shares three thousand dollars that's insanely high priced and so people are looking like with all this mmt going on where do i park my capital and that's what bitcoin offers a vehicle for you don't have to be bullish on bitcoin the technology you just have to be bullish on bitcoin the 21 million meme right and if people are taking their stimulus and they're buying bitcoin that is going to make the nation stay jealous and that's what i finish up with in this article right the nation state if you are taking the money that you uh don't want to hold which is the dollar because it's being printed and you are buying bitcoin with it the united states nation is going to have to print more money to achieve the same ends previously right we talked about this in the second episode of bankless ever where we talked about like how

people spend bad money and hoard good money and bad money is money that's being printed and if the if the people of the united states nation are taking their stimulus checks are taking their quantitative easing and they're buying bitcoin and putting bitcoin on their balance sheets that's going to make the nation state really jealous and that's what that's a lot of what we were talking about with tyler just now about wild gardens around crypto as being one of the biggest things in our political fight ahead of us yeah absolutely and i know you keep saying bitcoin because i think you you've you you're bullish bitcoin right so um like i would definitely broaden that to say non-sovereign assets right and um i'm personally more bullish uh ether in these in these dark times of mmt um but yes both both can serve as a

non-sovereign unaffected by mmt policy kind of shelling point asset um and definitely i mean bitcoin is the first that people the the dude on the street hears right um can we talk about something else hang on so so since you brought up ether yeah here so ether plus eip1559 think about this when you get inflation and issuance of money wait are you are you trying to redeem yourself with the ethics yeah i'm telling you that you were talking about okay okay carry on sir so inflation and money printing makes the velocity of money go up you know and we all know the stories of people in argentina or venezuela who got their paycheck and they got their paycheck in

like plastic bags full of cash and then they immediately went to the store and they bought all the groceries that they could regardless if they needed them or not that's the velocity of money the money is moving around the nation really really fast and that's what happens when you print a bunch of money and so think about the combination of eip1559 on ethereum which burns ether as a function of the amount of transactional volume on ethereum and an increasing velocity of u.s dollars which there are a ton of on ethereum and so i think people the reason why i speak about bitcoin as the anti-mmt asset is because that's the shelling point but when people get okay with bitcoin they're going to look elsewhere in the

crypto world and they're going to see ether the asset which uh grows commensurately scarce as the growth of the ethereum economy grows but it also is getting deleted by the velocity of us dollar stable coins going around the ethereum network and they're going to see bitcoin as a disinflationary asset but they're going to see ether as an actively deflating asset that is actually becoming more scarce based on a as a function of the money printing of of dollars that's my thesis gateway drug to understanding ether right now good or bad is definitely bitcoin bitcoin has had a 10-year history to show the world what digital scarcity looks like ether's had a five-year history and eip

fifteen five nine and sticky hasn't even kicked in yet so uh agree with you there long term horizon did i redeem myself am i i don't know man i'm canceled you tell us in the comments [Laughter] i'm okay with your takes david as always all right hey let's talk about something else i've been thinking about um i know we're going a little long here but this i was thinking about this poster raul paul episode um and raul's raul paul like his perspective i don't want to put any spoilers here but part of his perspective that's probably different from our own was was basically this if i could distill it down like we were talking a little bankless right and um

he i think he understands he he values the permissionless open layer of all this innovation all of these free markets right but i don't think he quite understood the um self-sovereign kind of aspect of going bankless right i think raul paul his answer to uh why use compound like versus um a uh like a coin base or a a bit mex or something was like well i'll just use whatever gives me the best rate i don't really care and whatever is the most like i don't care about the thesis of of self-sovereign bankless bankless money because i think his take was

basically guys we've already lost the battle for privacy and freedom right he said at one point during a conversation with them david this stuck with me it's like look they're already tracking everything you do on google like they already you have an amazon alexa device like in your home it's it's listening to your conversation you think there's anything you can hide from big brother you're certainly not going to hide your like banking activities unless they give you the ability to to use a d5 protocol they can simply you know strip that ability away from you we've already lost the battle for privacy and freedom is what raul paul says and therefore he thinks about the space with a little bit of a different lens than you or i might i'm sorry i tweeted this out like

just a poll have we already lost the battle for privacy and freedom in the in the digital age um forty percent of people said yes we lost it's just twitter informal poll sixty percent said no there's hope what do you think i i think that i'm surprised that the yes we lost is so high 40 think that we've already lost that's pretty high um i i do think that you know we just have more information about the intricacies of ethereum and d5 than i think raul does uh and i think raul's counterpoint however was that you know we are perhaps a little bit more like revolutionary than the typical individual right like we're we are on the bleeding edge of d fire like we we try all the defy apps we

drink the defy kool-aid we drink the the bankless nation kool-aid of being completely self-sovereign in in the most you know to the nth degree and that that and i i did appreciate his take where he said you know he kind of alluded to like not everyone is going to be that far on the spectrum of being a revolutionary right and so i appreciate that however uh i think also raul perhaps underestimates or maybe doesn't even think about the mark the creeping authoritarianism of the nation state right um and you know america land of free home of the brave you know based on you know freedom values of freedom i think people don't think that that's

possible in america um but like i said at the end of that market monday piece like when there's a bunch of mmt going on and people are using that freedom to sell their dollars and buy bitcoin that's going to make the nation state pretty upset uh and so i i think the jury's out on how much america can really retain its you know freedom meme freedom freedom brand because it's already been like you've said it's already been lost right so if we only i think the trend has to actually stay the same for the bankless thesis to play out so i i i agree with you of course all of that and like i skew revolutionary and that's why we're hosts that's why that's why we're wearing the shirt man that's right that's why this works

um but like you know raul raul puts his hat on it's like i'm the pragmatic traitor perspective and and he has a different take but i want to ask you this right for for all let's say i agree with you right you

hey there okay technically we're still streaming by the way wow well welcome back all right the interference i don't know what just happened that's that's never happened before there's gonna be a little bit of a two-minute break in the uh in the youtube we still got 20 people watching though wow all right they're they're they're wondering what happens and where we went yeah we got we got cancelled we'll just uh stitch this together yeah anyway will you turn on your uh video ryan yeah let me do that um there we go and we're back and we're back hey like nothing happened shot across the bow maybe we said the words nation state a little too many times well anyway what i i was i was kind of

con concluding with the question of um but like raul's point is like we're already too far gone right like there's even if we want to even if there are enough revolutionaries we just they're the the incumbents have an asymmetrical advantage right they own big tech they own you know like the nation like the battle's lost and we just don't know it yet we're still here fighting the revolution the battle's already lost what do you think about that it's a little despondent i guess yes yeah actually i i think i have a pretty salient uh uh opinion on this um brandon quiddum who's a bitcoiner he's the bitcoin mushroom guy uh wrote about how bitcoin is mycelium uh which fantastic article uh

recently wrote an article uh connecting like the what uh the book called the fourth turning which talks about like the generations of history and how each generation has a relationship with the past generation right the way that your parents raised you was impacted by the way that their parents raised them and we impact the generations going forward and part of the thesis of of his article in that book is that currently we are in a time of high chaos and low order and and we are looking for more order right we are looking for uh bigger institutions to put our trust into and our current institutions are failing us right like and this is where maybe what we were alluding to with like uh big

tech and big banks and you know the government these are institutions that aren't providing us with the order that we're looking for there's everyone talks about how there's no trust in institutions anymore and and i think that's what raul is kind of illustrating is like yeah we've already lost because the institutions we don't trust them and they've already captured all of our data all of our privacy we don't there's nothing we could do about it nothing we can do about it what raul i think is is discounting or not including in his thesis is our ability to make new institutions that we can trust that we can leverage and i think you're also pointing to like a gener a generational shift generation to those new institutions right it's like the the existing incumbents who run the institutions of today won't always

be in power right that's exactly right and the way that we the way that our generation and the people of our world look to discover order by relying on institutions is going to be different than raul's generation right like i don't think raul knows about tornado cash or aztec or other privacy implementations on ethereum i don't think he understands how close privacy is to anyone with a metamask account on ethereum because this privacy is just one transaction away and it's only getting better i'm not sure raul under has gotten to that point about ethereum and defi yet absolutely well that's reason to be optimistic david that that's cool stuff i um i i like that take and it's a good counter uh but folks definitely tune in to that podcast on monday and you'll

hear sort of his take and a little back and forth on that hey david last thing because we should wrap it up before the before the government shuts us down again um bap sales okay so what's happened like it was last last week around this time we reintroduced bap sales on balancer i think it was wednesday maybe not tuesday and this was an auction on balancer what's the price as of today i guess uh well well you're well you're talking about this i could go look it up huh yeah so actually i think we should start about what the price was last week and so last week yeah well i started this thing off we start we started the bap price at the highest price that it was sold at uniswap before the price got too high and that was twelve hundred dollars uh

and uh and that's what we started the balancer pool at uh this time around and for those that are just tuning in the way that this is different with with uniswap the price starts at a threshold and then it moves up as people buy more that's how uniswap works with balancer the price starts high and actually moves low but it still has that uniswap element where if there's more buyers then the price will go up but over time the price ticks downwards so it's a little bit of a game we started the price at 1200 die and it's currently 649 die that's cool like so yesterday um somebody poked it yesterday it was like in the 500s or something right yeah it was 5 38. and so now that it's at 6.50 it looks like somebody went and bought one

so somebody bought it goes up and if you wait enough time it slips down right just on that pricing curve for 30 days what's the last day of this again the thanksgiving is the last day of the sale it's on thanksgiving right and so there's a little bit of a game right so like the theory is the price according to the smart contract will trend towards zero but the game theory behind this is like at some point before it reaches zero it's gonna people are gonna buy them all because these shirts are awesome and they're definitely worth more than zero dollars and so some point between twelve hundred dollars and zero dollars all the bap tokens sell out right but there's also a little bit of gain like say that say the bat price goes down to 400 and then someone buys one and it goes

back up to 480. but then someone buys another one and goes up to 550. so while it trends downwards it can still go up because of the way you know amms work it's a combination of amm and dutch auction it's super cool it's going to be cool to see other tokens released in this fashion we're just kind of like using it very early paving the way but this is a really cool shirt uh there's a price point david where uh i want to pick up number two i'm not gonna tell you what that is because like you're my uh you know if you're out of front run you adversary and you're gonna front run me but there is a price point where i'm swooping in and i'm gonna grab another uh eatscape shirt i'll tell you i'll i'll go ahead and leak this alpha because uh as soon as it

hits roughly the cost of shipping i'm buying all of them so i don't have to go [Laughter] there you go so there's our guessing game somewhere between zero and that price and where i swoop in and buy my second is where you should be buying if you're listening to this all right david we've gone on long enough this has been state of the nation guys we we've talked um all about you know kind of politics and being an activist in the political systems and it's been fantastic to talk to tyler thank you so much for joining us on this special election day edition of state of the nation as always risks and disclaimers ether bitcoin the assets we talk about are risky you could lose what

you put in if you are playing with defy be careful but thanks for joining us on the journey it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us and going bank list together thanks a lot