SotN#26: Defending our Nodes w/ Coin Center's Jerry Brito and Peter Van Valkenburgh

Transcript

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all right bankless nation welcome to state of the nation number 26. we've got an exciting episode for you today we're going to talk about defending our nodes our bitcoin nodes our ethereum nodes we're going to talk about regulation we're going to talk about what is going on with the stable act and we have the experts to do that from coin center we're going to introduce them in just a few moments if this is your first day of the nation the drill is we talk about what is happening every week in the crypto ecosystem related to some of the big picture stuff we address on the newsletter and in the podcast and then we try to drop some insights and action items this comes

live on tuesdays this is a little late on tuesday but we needed to accommodate some guest timing and then it comes as well on the podcast so you can catch it in audio format tomorrow david how are you doing today are you excited about this episode yeah i'm really excited and this is uh something that we often speak about on the bank list podcasts on the bankless youtube is like at this at some point in time in the future we're going to call upon the nation to fight the fight right and it's in the stable act and what's going on in dc seems to be perhaps like a tremor maybe maybe it's the real fight i don't think it's the real fight but it seems to be like an indication of what's to come like there is going to be a fight

in in the world of regulation in the world of dc in the world of nation states that's going to uh be about like what this industry can or cannot do and there seems the the fight seems to be at our doorstep and so we are we're bringing on people from the from the coin center jerry and peter to people that have just top respect upmost respect out of our industry to help us get some clarity as to like what is the significance of the stable act is this the real fight is this like kind of the fight before the fight like what's going on here absolutely it's gonna be good and if you haven't heard of the stable act uh it kind of made waves last week but we will introduce it to you it's some um a bill

in front of congress right now we'll be talking about that in just a minute we should also talk about what's new in the bankless program david so we had a fantastic episode uh come out about like the geopolitics uh how crypto can emerge as a um a potential not a replacement but a decoupling of the nation state with a political philosopher um bruno and that came out on monday what's your take on that episode yeah bruno and this is extreme extremely relevant right because the the whole point of that podcast was to talk about the different domains of the world like we have different countries but that's not really what in my mind is what defines the seams of the world we kind of have the west versus east and

there's a seam there um there there's kind of developed there's undeveloped countries and there's a seam there and bruno as a political philosopher who's traveled the globe has opinions as to like what these different civilizations of the world how what their dispositions are and importantly what their dispositions could be towards crypto uh and so we're seeing that play out in in today's world and and especially in the conversation that we're having today with the guys from coin centers like well america has a specific disposition towards crypto uh and and we talk about the whole world's disposition with bruno on the podcast so that was a ton of fun yeah i like these episodes we've been doing lately with uh some folks that uh are maybe a little more crypto skeptical or if not if not skeptical maybe uh using the term

unconvinced they're they're not entirely sold they're not of the religion i think you've called them secular before we recorded another fantastic episode that's coming out next um next monday next monday with dimitri who has a fantastic episode a fantastic podcast called hidden forces and you've got to fix that mold too do you want to give folks a preview yeah hidden forces is one of my favorite podcasts all about talking about the the hidden forces of the world that control our our finances are the economies of the world the politics of the world the culture of the world just the the movers and shakers the things that are moving and shaking the world those subject matters come on to dimitri's podcast and so he i call him on the crypto periphery right like

he understands crypto he understands our industry he understands the culture but he's not in the middle of it right he's not in the religion right uh and so like that's a very like biased sober perspective to have and so getting that perspective on the bankless podcast is definitely something that we want to do so stay tuned to here at that episode on monday so that is next monday guys we've got some youth content on the horizon as well we're doing a bold case for ethereum with some of the biggest evolves we know we've been talking about that and then we're having uh ether capital i would call ether capital this is a publicly traded company based in canada they're almost like the micro strategy of ether they are buying either putting on their balance sheet and they are a publicly traded company on

the toronto stock exchange super excited to talk about uh to talk with them about the balance sheet so a lot coming at you soon but david let's start with the question i always ask you at the beginning of every state of the nation that's this what is the state of the nation today sir the state of the nation is joining the ranks we are ranking up right and so you know there there we in the in at least in crypto twitter there's a bunch of fighting going on between bitcoin and ethereum but as soon as this rohan guy who's one of the leaders behind the stable act joined the twitter fray it seemed to be like the the bitcoin ethereum's world just like the the division between that world just like melted away and all of a sudden it was you know bitcoin and ethereum versus

the outside world and as somebody who like plays in both camps i really enjoyed that i really enjoyed the melding of the communities to like kind of unite against like this common enemy which is top-down bad regulation and so like we're ranking up we're joining together we're joining forces and that is the state of the nation that is nice it's like it's like a a unifying force i i suppose amidst all the tribalism in rank or in crypto there are a shared set of values that i think every crypto community at least in the decentralized cryptic community shares so it's fantastic when we can come together around this all right with that we should get to our main event i want to introduce two individuals guests from coin center coin center is a non-profit

research and advocacy center focused on public policy issues they're based in washington dc in the heart of the capital fighting the good fight i feel like any time we have a problem with crypto regulation we put the bat signal in the in the air and income jerry in in comes peter incomes coin center to to help us with these regulatory issues jerry britto is the executive director i want to welcome you jerry and peter van volkenberg is a research director at coin center gentlemen it is fantastic to have you how are you doing today very well thank you so much for having us yeah great awesome all right well you know what i want to start with this this kind of question so jimmy lear said this i read he is the ceo of um circle of course

which issues staple coins he said [ __ ] is about to get real guys is [ __ ] about to get real here like did something major happened last week or is that just crypto twitter making much of you about nothing that's a good question um so look i mean uh you're referring specifically to the stable act and you know it's serious because it's kind of a frontal assault on um people's ability to run software essentially okay so in that way it's real we should care about it on the on the flip side um this is a bill is it was introduced with you know like

a couple of weeks like maybe less than two weeks left in for congress um so it's definitely not gonna move this congress although it'll probably be reintroduced next congress and it was introduced by rashida talib who is a member of congress who is part of the very very progressive wing of the democratic party um who um you can say really is not in the mainstream um and not certainly in the leadership of the democratic party so even though democratic party controls the house this is a bill that i you know i would be surprised if it moves a lot it might um chairman waters

who chairs house financial services might decide to get behind it um and maybe might see some movement but i think it would be difficult even if it passed the house it would also have to pass the senate and you know the senate is where house bills go to die senate is the the so um plate of democracy cooling saucer right that's what jefferson said awesome okay um so look i don't think this bill is going to pass anytime soon but this bill is a frontal assault and i think um look i i think a lot of the motivation for this bill is libra

and if we were to see another thing like libra you can imagine this bill like you know um uh getting a lot of um uh uh you know juice behind it um so yeah that's kind of what i think that said stable act is not the only thing that's happening in dc um and there are tons of other little things that could become big um that could necessitate a fight they're also good things that are happening so let's actually start there because i i don't like i alluded to i don't think the stable act is going to be like the big thing that we all focus on but it does indicate

why this is important right and what could be right but let's start at the very beginning like bitcoin ethereum these are like internet scale organizations they don't exist inside of a nation state they're censorship resistant they're permissionless they're non-sovereign so like why do we even need you guys like why do we need people to defend this in in in regulatory institutions like washington dc like i thought this was a non-sovereign system like why why are we talking to regulators in the first place yeah that's a good question um so i i think that looks i think you're absolutely right that something like ethereum or bitcoin are unstoppable machines

right and so they're going to be running the question is are they going to be useful machines right are are you going to be able to connect to it and use it um in your country and more importantly is it going to be something that a wide number of people are going to be able to use it um and so there you know that's something that nation states for better or worse have um uh you know can definitely uh affect um and so and look i mean i think that networks like ethereum and bitcoin are incredibly compatible with the values of

liberal democratic western nations like the united states and so nation states and governments and regulation shouldn't be an impediment to the use of these networks and so um if that's true you need somebody to talk to government um if nothing else just explain to them hey this is how it works this is this is how this is what it is how it works technically um here is where maybe there are gaps created between the technology and the law if you're going to fill those gaps here are ways that you can do it that's not

going to destroy the potential of this thing and so that that's what coin center does um and you know we're kind of like you know we a big role model for us is like the electronic frontier foundation right so the internet is as you say a sovereign um you know internet scale network right this is the internet um why do you know why does it need uh representatives well for the same reason these are unknown public goods nobody owns bitcoin nobody owns ethereum nobody owns the internet um and while companies that run on top of these networks can hire their own lawyers their own lobbyists to represent their interests you need somebody to represent the

interest of the public good this unknown network and to represent the interests of people um to have the freedom to use these networks and so like the eff you know we at coin center are kind of self-appointed champions for um open cryptocurrency networks yeah so jerry worth noting that we don't represent any companies we don't represent any specific entities in the space we have a mission and we're there to defend the mission and the mission is to defend people's freedom to use permissionless blockchain networks guys how did we get the so you mentioned the eff i believe jerry i'm actually not super familiar with the eff um i am a

bit more familiar with like the fact that actually um the internet went fairly well from a regulation perspective in the 90s right like there were definitely some bumps along the way but we got it done america accepted the internet and this was pretty novel at the time there's some cryptography involved there was a permissionless communication network some scary things around copyright all sorts of things how did we do that and like can that success be repeated for crypto because crypto i guess is one it's in a different timeline right so like the um the us as a nation in the 90s appears to me to be a bit more moderate and less

polarized than it is now so we've got that issue we're dealing with the second issue is crypto of course um hits on a few things the nation state might be a little bit um i guess scared to relinquish control of around financial transactions and the essence of of money but like are you guys optimistic that we can actually repeat the success of internet adoption uh with crypto and and kind of like forge our way through this path make make this happen yeah i mean i i you know wouldn't be doing this full-time if i wasn't optimistic that we could do it um i i do think we can replicate the success of the 90s but that didn't just

happen uh you know as you were saying we didn't just do it because we're america it took a lot of work from people like the eff the electronic frontier foundation right so as exactly as you pointed out um there were big concerns related to things that nation states are sensitive about like cryptography right cryptography was something that until very recently quite frankly until the 90s was the exclusive domain of nation states encryption was right and the eff was instrumental in fighting that fight um so that encryption could be widely used by the public it wasn't like you know we weren't um again it's the kind of thing where it's just math so that

you can't stop it right but the government can severely restrict mass adoption of it right and thanks to people like the eff um uh we were able to win those fights right so you know it took a lot of um lobbying and a lot of litigation um to win those battles and save for copyright you know and i'd say that i'd say that you know there's collateral damage in the process of this you know determining how government will or will not accept these new technologies so people can be put in jail uh you know i think ultimately these technologies are somewhat unstoppable that in the long run we'll have shared networks we'll have the

internet as we already have but in that process a lot of lives can be ruined um so you look at the the first the first wave of crypto wars which was over encryption technology things like pgp and thank god we had organizations like the electronic frontier foundation to stand up for actual scientists cryptographers who wanted to publish their cryptography standards but the government had labeled those cryptography standards as weapons as munitions that you're not allowed to export out of the country because you're literally sharing weapons with our enemies and the eff said look these cryptographers just want to publish these these mathematical equations effectively as you'd publish a book and

it's their right in america in a liberal democracy to do that without your prior restraint and the eff broadly speaking won those cases uh and the defendants won those cases and that's why we have things like ssl today we you know we might have had it anyway but lives would have been destroyed in the process uh and and maybe america wouldn't be the leader in the internet um maybe it would be some other country or maybe it would even be slowed down to the point where we were just now starting to enjoy you know websites instead of what's next which might be you know cryptocurrencies and things like that so that's optimistic that makes me optimistic but also what makes me a little bit skeptical is is that was 20

30 years ago that was a generation ago like things change perspectives and cultures and values change and especially in a world where there seems to be so much polarization and there seems to be just like a lot of desire to make finally make change happen it seems to be that like the uh ascribing's like hey we did it back you know if we fight the fight like we fought it back 30 years ago we'll get the same outcomes well it's a different world nowadays so like maybe what what do you think is is different about this world that might not be the same might not make this the fight the same fight um oh yeah you know i'm not

so yeah you're right that it's a different world and so as a result people who you know you can't necessarily apply the same kinds of tactics that you might when when it comes to lobbying or whatever you know like like you know we now have twitter right so i'm not going to fax out a press release i'm going to use um but i think those are all tactics i think ultimately at the end of the day the spite um all the pull overs in and what have you um america still has the same values as always and i think the internet was successful because it was able to appeal to those values right if you think about it the internet is completely open and permissionless it's the west right it's it's a wild

frontier where you can go and uh it's you know it's an electronic frontier if you will right we can go and settle this is this is the most american thing in the world while we were building you know why we in america were building the internet um our friends and friends were building minitel right which is gonna win out so um you know i think if we can just remind policy makers of that that hasn't changed right policymakers for both left and right still see that and so you know we can the story to tell is look while um china is building uh dsep we can build completely open permissionless networks and which do you think is going to win out right if you

have any self-confidence in your values you know it's going to be open and permissionless networks so so you know i think an important thing is to make sure that um something like crypto does not become a partisan issue right if it does then it becomes much harder right and to date we've been very lucky that it's not um we have um strong champions on both the left and right and the republicans and the democrats and we have critics and detractors on both the left and the right um so i think that's very good speaking of uh strong champions i i want to bring up your recent git coin grant because um you know folks that are tuned in to

bank lists of course they they know what bitcoin is it's it's a quadratic funding mechanism with a matching mechanism which essentially allows people in the crypto community to sort of vote with their dollars and have that vote amplified for the projects they support and maybe in a way it was kind of good timing for this stable act news to come out because i just want to share the git coin page because it's it's super exciting what the crypto community community can do once it is uh incentivized to act this is i think less than a week old maybe just over a week old but you guys just put out your grant i think at the end of end of last week so it's probably only a few days that this grant has been active and you've already raised close to when

you consider matching 158 that's die a thousand die which is of course us dollars um have you been like really excited to see how the crypto community has rallied around coin center in the wake of some of this regulatory news and uncertainty has it been surprising to you has it been exciting uh no i mean it's it's been amazing um we were just completely floored um by the response uh from the crypto community um especially the ethereum community you know using git coin um and we're like incredibly uh um you know what can i say um it's the kind

of thing where um look we weren't planning any of this um you know niraj yeah naranja agrawal who runs our communications um he's like you know we should start a you know a git coin account we think i think it's a good way to do it i'm like yeah let's do it um and it just sort of coincided that at the same time that we started this bitcoin um you know grant proposal and put it out there the stable act made clear what's at stake right there are frontal assaults that come and i think that um really drove people to contribute which you know we're incredibly um uh grateful for because you know a lot of the work that we do isn't

so clear right a lot of the work we do we can't ever talk about because it's sort of like avoiding things that you never find out would have happened right and we can't talk about it um you know uh but like you know something that the ethereum community i think isn't aware of is um you know coin center was um you know if not instrumental i think pretty influential in making sure that the sec understood that ethereum is not a security ethereum as a running network is not a security right and we spent a lot of time with the sec making that case starting in what one peter when 2015. so so we were

in in meetings in their interdivisional working group that was focused on cryptocurrencies back when ethereum was brand new long before the dow crowdfund and then the dao report from the sec just giving them the information that is quite honest information that you know look bitcoin is open source protocol people are going to take that code rewrite that code build brand new networks and if they're actually running like bitcoin they're not securities if on the other hand somebody is at the center of that network and everyone relies on that person that's not sufficiently decentralized as director hinden later put it um or if they're making promises about that network like i guarantee you it'll be

10x in in two years then it is a security and it makes sense that the sec can carve a delicate path to go after the scams and leave the true innovation out of securities regulation but it was not a foregone conclusion in 2015. you know i think just to emphasize um for like the ethereum community how important that that was right back to what peter was saying earlier it's not that the sec might not at some point in the future change its mind on ethereum but this allowed them to provide clarity far sooner and accelerated the development of um such things as like if ether is listed as a commodity it can be listed

by the cftc um it it's it's it also puts a a lens in the path for tokens to to move towards decentralization so it really just accelerates the industry in the us and accelerates the adoption of what we all want to see which is a more open financial world so maybe the outcome would have been inevitably in 10 or 15 years that like this regulation would you know happen but what you guys are doing is really accelerating adoption and it's a bunch of quiet work that um i think folks don't know goes on behind the scenes with these types of issues

yeah thank you and you know i'm not sure if we're accelerating but what i like to think about what we're doing for all networks is making sure that the space exists so that you can just do your innovation and make it available so that people can use it you know and and yeah because the alternative is there gonna be a lot of roadblocks that might just lead people to say meh i'm not going to work on this i can work on something else arguing that ether is a triple point asset would have been way harder if ether was also a security and so that that is definitely valuable and and the the link between coin center and get coin i think is a really elegant one because you guys are protecting public goods without actually

representing a company right uh so there's you guys don't represent anyone there's no stakeholders behind you you guys just represent the industry and i can imagine that like getting funding for that is actually kind of hard because of your specifically your neutrality and the whole thing like if you guys were sponsored by a company coin center would be a different entity it wouldn't be coin center it would be something else and so that's specifically where git coin comes into play because git coin that bitcoin is meant to fund that gap of companies that have extremely perhaps the most significant roles to play but don't actually have a way to get funded uh and so the alignment between coin center and git coin i think is is one that's going to play out in a very long relationship that i'm excited

to see unfold yeah i'll say i'll say historically we've we've generally gotten about half our donations from individuals usually very generous individuals who understand our mission and want to make sure we succeed but this git coin situation will significantly increase the number of donations more smaller donations and that's exactly what we want we want to be representatives of a sort of grassroots movement to say look this is the technology of the future it's important it's important for america it's important for all of us let's build it yeah and i i should hasten to say that yes coin center is a public good in itself we do and our work is supported as peter says about half of our support comes from individuals um the other half does come

from companies and investors in the space um but it's strings free right like um you know this is the work that we do if you want to support us great if you want to support us you know we'll tell you at the end of the year this is what we've done if you want to support us great if you don't you know that's okay jerry sometimes got kind of like a scarface mentality with one he's like you know we don't have to be here our independence um is very important because it's what uh makes it possible for folks at the sec for example to trust us right we're not we're not selling our own book we really want to explain to you exactly what it what this is how it works and

give you honest advice about you know what are the risks and how you could address those risks well guys um we want to get you to uh a quarter of a million on git coin at least so any any bankless listeners watching this support this excellent work all it takes is a die one die and that could be amplified a whole lot with bitcoin matching i just put the link in the youtube chat box you can go awesome thanks david we should talk about the stable act because that has been um sort of a catalyst for a lot of these things and as you mentioned at the outset sort of shows what's at stake in crypto and this this regulatory conversation um can you maybe uh explain what the stable act

actually says and what it does and peter you put put together a fantastic post on it but for for those that weren't part of the conversation haven't read it what's the summary here yeah so it it amends federal banking laws say that stable coins and it defines that term term has obviously never been defined before in law stable coins can only be issued by uh federal banks that have fdic insurance effectively so there's this strong push to say look if it's dollar backed uh and that's that's interpreted broadly as even if somebody is is saying this is dollar backed but it's some algorithmic thing or if someone's saying this is um this is pegged to a

dollar or it will reflect the dollar even using the term dollar in marketing will fit you into the definition of stable coin and then this law if it was to become law it's just a bill of course would say you can't do that unless you're a chartered federal bank which i don't need to explain it probably sounds like it is is very difficult to become an ordinary person would never become a chartered federal bank and get fdic insurance and so this is um you know make no mistake this is quite radical uh because not only does this necessarily cover um you know like an asset-backed stable coin that's that's centralized like a usdc or a tether uh this could cover things that are like maker uh like die where you have just a

lot of language that says it's it it's pegged to or it tries to equilibrate towards a dollar this kind of covers it because it got such a broad definition and it would also interestingly cover things like like dollar dollar digital dollars you keep with paypal or with venmo just like pre-crypto money transmission stuff which for decades has been regulated by state licensing and never as a federal banking activity so this is sweeping and you know to put it briefly and the reason why this is a real threat to permissionless networks because there are decent arguments to be made that if you're claiming that you're backing something you should be regulated in some way so you're not scamming people you know not actually

holding dollars but this goes far beyond just that common sense regulation this says that even if you're um basically facilitating somebody who's not a bank issuing or passing or uttering a stable coin uh from person to person you as someone facilitating the activity could be um performing an illegal act in this law and what is facilitating a die transaction maybe look like it could very easily just look like i'm an ethereum miner or staker and i staked or mined for a block that ended up having a die transaction in it so you may not have any idea that you facilitated that activity and quite

frankly you wouldn't if you were mining a purpose-agnostic blockchain network because there's tons of transactions in there some of them might be stablecoin some of them than not and if that mere act of running that server on the internet that performs that function makes you liable of breaking federal banking laws you know i don't think it would destroy ethereum but it would certainly destroy people's ability to you know honestly and legally run ethereum nodes in the us and that's extremely bad for innovation so there seems to be a number of different uh stakeholders that seem to be primarily affected here we have the centralized issuers of stable coins that's like usdc tether would fall into this camp uh libra

also now known as dm is is also very very much in this camp there's also the decentralized issuers which is dye or anything algorithmic right so like maybe even something as niche as empty set dollar would be a protocolized version of a stable coin that ben pegs to a dollar and so that's now falls under the purview and then there's even node operators and so like it gets even more and more expansive as we go out and we want to touch on all three of those cohorts of people but i kind of want to be a little nitpicky here and get your guys's perspective here because like what is a stablecoin and it seems to only it seems to be too easy to route around the wording that this uh bill has used because like what about a token that is backed by gold like that's

pretty stable that's just you could call that a stable coin what about it what about a token that represents an aussie dollar or a euro or what about something that is stable to its own basket of of of you know it's its own you know index and so like what kind of one of the questions is like how much have these people really thought about like the loopholes that they're creating because like you could just like okay we're just going to make something that is stable to uh you know one and a half dollars or or so something that's stable to gold or just like just route around the problem like it seems to be really really really arbitrary is is that your guys take as well because that seems to be my perspective it seems to be like there's a number

there's also like stable-ish coins like with things that definitely don't peg to one certain thing but they still are much more stable than their asset that's the the ryze system it seems to be that there wasn't much thought put into like parameterizing this thing jerry well i mean so um peter you you've read the law more carefully than me um but it would cover basically dollar pegged um stable coins and the reason for that is because what the law is you know what the authors and sponsors of the bill are concerned with it seems to be is systemic risk to the us dollar banking system right that's what they're

addressing so something like a gold-backed um token um would not i don't think i'll defer to peter since he read it more closely i don't think would fall here right um i don't think a um aussie dollar backed uh would fall either really what they're the reason they're doing this is they're targeting what they perceive to be systemic risk presented by what they would call shadow banking in the form of paypal or yeah so to give the supporters of the bill some credit they are very passionate um when you look at say rohan grey on twitter that dollars are a sort of public function of the united states government and

and things like systemic risk are not just about counterparty risk they're not about simply situations where the company that's holding the dollars and people have the tokens that that represent the claims on the dollars they don't have enough dollars to make good to their customers that would be counterparty risk and we do have fdic insurance for that reason but you know i i've seen rohan talk also about how the risk i'm concerned about he would say is also the risk of not having full control over the monetary supply in the way that he thinks um the federal government should have greater control over the monetary supply that like the supply of dollars in circulation matters and he wants only banks to be in the business of

increasing or decreasing that supply effectively that's a very uh modern monetary he he is a very scholar he's a charterless so his his notion of what money is and you know money is a crazy thing it's easy to have lots of different notions about yes is very state-oriented so the fact that this is dollar-focused is partially deliberate i still don't agree with it but it's it's deliberate and i will add just as far as the legislative language it's worth noting that it also applies to the uh to a peg to any other state or national currency so it would it would apply to like a europe thing and there's there's again this is drafted incredibly broadly because they really want to go after everyone with this potentially there's a paragraph

towards the end of the definition of stable coin that says it's pegged in such a manner that regardless of intent has the effect of creating a reasonable expectation or belief among the general public that the instrument will retain a nominal redemption value that is so stable as to render the nominal redemption value effectively fixed so if you had like a big mac dollar or a big mac coin that was going to always retain about big mac purchasing power this is covering it wow was that their intent peter like you know was it their intent to be this broad i mean it's affecting a lot of parties in the u.s or this potentially would affect love so centralized issuers right you really put a handcuff on like usdc and the things that coinbase is doing and

then also you definitely put some handcuffs on decentralized protocols like diet and perhaps most precariously if an individual out of their home is running an ethereum node that runs a transaction that is prohibited by this sort of a law then they might have some culpability here in the process too this seems incredibly broad i think part of me wonders whether that broadness was the intent or whether back to to david's question if it was just well there's some education required they didn't realize it would be they were trying to maybe target you know facebook and libra and they didn't realize all of these downstream effects just because they're not fully enmeshed

in the crypto ecosystem what's your take so we've had lots of situations like that in the past where we go to congress and someone's written a bill and they maybe don't fully understand the consequences because they don't fully understand the technology that it might regulate this is not one of those examples so wow this is intentionally broad because of this deeply held belief and a genuine belief that i disagree with that if it's dollar related or if it has to do with the money supply of the nation it should be heavily regulated so so this is intentional and it's what's interesting about it is it's broader than you think even when you read the already broad seeming language so when we wrote a blog post about this

the other day one of the first things i pointed out is why is this regulating stable coins which are dollar liabilities but not regulating all the other non-bank dollar liabilities out there like all the money that paypal and venmo and square cash hold for people um those aren't stable coins as we tend to understand them and they're they're huge liabilities right so shouldn't those also be regulated by you know putting them under the purview of federal banks rather than keeping them in the state money transmission licensing framework where they exist today and rohan um to his credit uh came out immediately after we published the blog post and said no it's meant to cover all of those companies wow oh my god wow we defined stable coins so broadly that it

would that a paypal digital balance on paypal a digital balance in your apple pay wallet would be a stable coin and then they'd have to do it through federal banking laws is that's kind of trojan horse yeah how about that down there in the post actually and then i said it again on twitter this is this has got balls um not to be crude but you know this is this is strong legislation with a very deliberate intent to sweep widely it's also why i think it has much less of a chance of passing because it's it's really out there right so so peter i've got some starbucks gift cards right and uh they have a lot of stable coins i think like does would starbucks be required to open a bank charter in order

to issue starbucks cards in this sort of wide sweeping bill you know i hadn't actually thought of gift cards i have to reread the language with respect to gift cards because normally those get out of money transmission licensing requirements because they're only accepted at a number of authorized um you know acceptors or or there we go we found our loophole but this doesn't this doesn't have a so-called closed-loop exemption like the money transmission statutes do so maybe starbucks cards are covered as well actually in this wow so i want to ask about um there seems to be a lot of intent which my mind after seeing seeing a lot of intent goes to the motivations to me my my there's a

there's a decent amount of me that's a conspiracy theorist and so i'm like the banks are behind this right in the crypto space it's weird so unheard of in my mind this is just like a huge extension of banking infrastructure and you know banks kind of are the big arm of the government to exert power right like we exert power over things like north korea and iran by cutting them out from banking services um payment services and so like it seems to be that like requiring everyone to be a bank uh is in some way maybe that's good for the banking industry but it's definitely good for the power of the central government right because it's bringing everyone under their fold

under their control right well so like and and this rohan grey character is definitely interesting because like we said his deal generally seems to be like pro-government just pro-state he's a statist he likes the state to have the the power and control that it should have like what what are the motivations behind pushing this thing because like there's also the conversation of like uh uh rashida taleb i think i pronounced her name like she had her own like verbalized intent which is to you know protect the little guy protect minorities rohan gray seems to have his intent like what's the motivation really pushing forward this stable act you know i mean um that's the kind of thing that maybe you

should have rohan on and and asked him and i think he'd be probably very game to to come on um but i mean just looking at his stated position again it's to address what he perceives to be um a systemic risk um and yeah i i you know as peter was just saying you know it's the view of not just him but i i think it you know as you're saying money money modern monetary theorists um of all stripes that um you know what is that money is a public good that should be controlled by the state and at the you know money supply um uh you know something that only the state should be able to control and the

way you control that is by controlling the banks and so it's kind of funny so i can tell you kind of categorically that this is not a plot of the big banks because again you know rohan had a hand in crafting this talib introduced it and i can think of you know no greater enemy of the banks than rohan and representative talib that said it's kind of funny that what they want is to create a ton more banks potentially um so that you know that's funny it sounds ironic but no it's not if you consider that you know they think that banks should be heavily regulated so that they are you know essentially arms of the state um carrying out a

public good that's review and to rohan's credit um you know rohan actually was on our podcast peter interviewed him and we had him on because um representative talib um a few months before so this was i don't know peter wasn't in this months ago four months ago representative talib um floated a draft bill it was never introduced and this was you remember at the time when um you know there were problems getting covered relief out to people um uh by the federal government um and uh she she floated a bill that would have created a digital dollar

it wouldn't be the central bank doing it it would have been the treasury and the neat thing about this digital dollar that she proposed and i'm sure rohan had a hand in uh in crafting that bill as well it would have been a token-based bearer instrument it was a digital dollar and that would be or at least had the intent to be i i sort of will quibble a little bit about the the um sort of uh function to get it to be that way but it had the intention to be fully anonymous right so they wanted to create digital cash which is awesome right so rohan is all in favor of building bare you know token based bearer

completely anonymous digital cash as long as the state does it but only the government should should be the one doing it that's just that's their that's her view and that you know that's a legitimate point of view i guess um it's interesting so and to go back to the modern monetary theory piece that bill the the creating the digital money was one piece the other piece of the bill was minting a trillion dollar coin i remember this right so you would create a trillion dollars and then distribute that trillion dollars through this digital dollar scheme so anyhow we you know we agree so you know it's interesting so he um

i would sort of temper the you know i mean clearly rohan is a quote unquote status that some people might label him but you know it's a status that wants to build completely anonymous bare digital cash yeah his stated reasons for that his stated reasons for that in in the podcast where we when we had him on were fear of totalitarianism that if if you don't have the ability to have anonymous financial transactions as we do through physical cash and as he thinks we should have with digital cash which i agree then you'll have a centralized database of everything that everyone ever buys every service everyone uses every embarrassing thing they do or political contribution that they make and democracy can't function like that so

i you know there may be you could think of this as cognitive dissonance but you could also think of this as someone who just thinks that money is this public good that the state should have monopoly control over but that ultimately the money should be extremely user sovereign and private um i mean what i would point out to rohan and i want peter you probably did on the podcast is um you know we agree on that we should have that user sovereign private money in order to prevent totalitarianism but to me the way to do that is not as the bill would have to create a board a privacy board of political appointees to oversee and ensure that the way to do that is with trustless you know

mechanisms like ethereum and bitcoin fundamentally where i think this comes down to which might be interesting to your listeners who have more philosophical or economic bent is can people band together to provide public goods right or must we trust the government to provide public goods and can those two solutions coexist or would one chisel away at the other and therefore need to be outlawed obviously coin center believes very strongly that individuals acting in their own volition and freedom and with innovation and passion can make their own public goods and we don't need to have government monopoly over things like monetary systems i think they can coexist uh as do we as does the bankless nation and we want to get into that a little bit more because there is some some overlap i

think with what uh television and some of the folks behind this bill want to do and what crypto wants to do but before we get to that we'll talk about dye we'll talk about some other things we've got to jump to our sponsors who have made this show possible so we'll be back in two minutes 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 stablecoin and wiring will go and figure out which money market on d5 and device producing the best interest rate whether it's dydx

it's compound or ave it looks around defy to see where the yield is coming from and it directs stable coins automatically so you don't have to check them out at yearn.finance to get started and also check out the stats page to see what other people are doing as well right we're back with jerry and peter from coin center guys where we left off we were talking about modern monetary theory and sort of the i guess the political agenda this this kind of might be coming from and there are also some i think areas of common ground between that maybe call it wing of politics in america and what we are trying to do in the crypto community particularly in the bankless

community um one of the purported purposes of this bill is to help essentially the the unbanked right and isn't that what crypto does i mean the title of the show and the movement that david and i are part of is banklust using systems like bitcoin and ethereum to essentially bank without a bank in a permissionless way that means open access to everyone in america credibly neutral independent of you know race independent of socioeconomic class a credibly neutral banking system for the world that seems to be very much a part of the spirit of folks in congress like uh to lead

is there common ground there or are they not recognizing that side of the equation maybe we'll start with you jerry yeah you know i i think there is common ground at a high level right and so i i think that's you know you can um we have we have shared concerns right so um i think where we depart is and again i encourage you to have somebody like rohan on to have him speak for himself because i don't want to do that um but you know i'll try to steal in what i think somebody like him would say and that's number one you know i think he'd be or somebody like him would be perfectly happy to have to you know let people experiment with

um building um monetary experiments like ethereum or bitcoin um i think the problem he sees is when people start issuing things that they call dollars right because again dollars this is public good that can only be provided by the state um and in doing that um perhaps creating systemic risk and so what does he mean by that well what i take it to mean is um you have a stable coin issuer that says give me a dollar and i'll issue you this token and whenever you want something you can come back with

the token i'll give you back a dollar um but what if that what if they issue more tokens than they keep dollars right and then what if there's a run on the bank the quote unquote bank there's a run on the bank and then it collapses and then that means that that has a ripple effect because then loans that need to be paid can't be paid and that ripples and ripples and you get a financial crisis right that's your concern and so the way that they would address that is by regulating what they would call depository institutions right as banks now what i would point out there is to the extent you have a stable coin issuer

that is doing stable coin business i'm talking here about centralized one so you said you have a centralized stable coin issuer that isn't regulated by any body in the u.s and they're doing business with us people well they're not you know they're violating some law it could be a banking law could be a money transmission law they're violating some law so you know there's a way to address that and if you look at um other stable coin issues like for example gemini they are new york a new york trust right and they have to keep a dollar in reserve for every outstanding gemini dollar that they have and they are regularly audited and regulated by

new york department of financial services um same thing goes for usdc um maybe you know so they're regulated issuers of usdc are regulated as money transmitters um but again they're supervised by banking one-to-one reserve requirement they always have yeah so it's not like they're not regulated they are then you have things like die and in my view there you're you are regulated you're regulated by the smart contract you can you see it and you and you know the um uh the deposits that you make um

uh are locked up right so so anyhow i mean um [Music] i don't see the systemic risk that's posed by any of these things except the ones that are simply not complying with u.s law in any way so so like we would obviously agree with those arguments of course but this is a crypto podcast but my my my question here is it i can't help but feeling like crypto's being picked on because we we have this time right now this tiny cottage industry and stable coins are used by what like a lot of crypto geeks at this point in time there are other larger capital pools but 20 billion or so i mean if we're talking about like shadow banking

and shadow dollars like what about the euro dollar right outside of largely u.s jurisdiction this is what i can't kind of wrap my head around is why is it because of is it because of facebook is it because of libra maybe that this small cottage industry has suddenly risen to like the floor of congress to take some action against it just seems so early in the process what's what are your thoughts so i i definitely think that libra is what spurred um the u.s congress as well as regulators and legislators around the world to

sort of you know focus in on the concept of stable coins for sure and not just from a credential or systemic uh perspective but also from a money laundering and terrorist financing perspective right libra definitely um uh draws that um peter i mean do you have other thoughts peter on why stable coins are being single no i mean like i said earlier um in the interview i do think that you know there's a little bit of a mark a tricky sneaky marketing thing going on in the way the legislative language is drafted because stablecoin is drafted such that

it could cover all kinds of things like paypal balances and starbucks gift cards as stable coins and so in some ways this is this is well let's use a somewhat easy to villainize term because it's from a weird cottage crypto industry in order to sneak in regulation of all kinds of non-bank dollar liabilities into a federal regime which i don't think is a wise way to draft legislation quite frankly because and actually realize that the words on the page mean something more than what they seem to obviously mean they'll have to recalibrate and that's not what you laws should be written to be clear and intuitive they shouldn't be written such that you need to be a a jd or a jsd in order to figure them out

yeah and i should say that while um we're very happy that cryptocurrency has remained a bipartisan or non-partisan issue libra was not that libra the parties were unified in their contempt for libra broadly speaking right there there are people um who maybe championed it a little bit here and there but broadly speaking both parties and um and i don't think we can underscore it enough because we will not have enough time to get into a lot of anti-money laundering law on this call but libra was a severe disrupter of otherwise very good policy settlements

within the anti-money laundering context for you know from fincen from the international financial uh crimes regulators the fatif the financial action task force we had a really good situation where on-ramps to these protocols would be regulated for aml but you know individual users of these protocols would not be regulated for anti-money laundering purposes and when facebook announces that this libra thing is going to be p2p and tons of dollar transactions for anyone with a whatsapp account are going to be p2p it definitely made aml regulators suddenly say wait a minute you can do p2p transactions with libra and then also say oh wait a minute you can do p2p transactions with ether and with bitcoin

and all that's happening outside of these regulated on-ramps what should we do and that's that's not good either so i want to turn the conversation to uh where into my mind and for some and it gets crazy and for some reason rohan doesn't think this is crazy and so i kind of i want to read some quotes from rohan that came out through either on twitter or through other media he says i think it's going to be quite easy to find concentrated power even in those networks on which regulatory pressure can be placed but and this is why they're there uh crypto twitter their head exploded i'm not going to take their propaganda as gospel that every node operator should be considered prima facie i'm i'm going to

butcher that word prima facie immune from liability for any activity that takes place on the network those nodes maintain and then another quote this is a completely decentralized network you can't hold anyone accountable unless they unless you hold the whole thing accountable is this is what rohan is saying about people that talk about ethereum and bitcoin on crypto twitter this is just saying that you think it should be possible for a large group of actors to collectively engage in behavior that is unlawful for any one individual within that group to engage in which i think is a non-starter from a financial regulatory perspective so this bitcoin and ethereum there's activity going on uh in the in

these networks economic activity sometimes we're buying like bitcoin is buying drugs like sometimes bitcoin and ether and stable coins are used to do bad things uh and the crypto industry puts up this what rohan's calling this this veil of decentralization saying well yeah you know you use the software to do things but the nodes that run the ecosystem aren't responsible for the economic activity that happens on them and rohan is saying that no they are actually responsible and it's actually not crazy to say that they're responsible no matter how many number of nodes there are what's your guys's take on on that perspective because rohan is trying to just be like you know the party's over like no nodes are responsible like don't give me any of that bs like if you're if you're running

a computer that processes a bad transaction like you are responsible is that is that a reasonable take to have or is that just completely hair brained so let me let peter kind of address that veil of decentralization thing but before that point out that what you started with that rohan said and by the way again you should have them on because i feel bad right addressing him without having him here to to defend himself um but notice what he's saying um what he's saying is look the stable act um technically would allow the the government to go after individual node operators who had some interaction with a die

transaction for example but he's saying it's not going to come to that right there are bigger fish right there you know they're going to be the i'm not sure what it is he thinks it is in in the case of dye but in the case of a of a centralized stable coin um this you know the government will be able to go after that issuer before it goes after the notes so he's so in one sort of um breath he's saying look you guys don't really have to worry about this because even though even though the law allows the state to go after you they're not you know um in my mind you shouldn't write laws

if that's not your intent then don't write laws that allow that kind of a abroad um but i think he's right um but you know again i i think we already have number one i think we have already um good regulation in place would address his systemic concerns he would clearly disagree you know whatever um but that that's one thing that's but then what you do is you write laws that cover decentralize you know sorry centralized stable coin issuers and you recognize them how you want to regulate them um when it comes to dye i'm not sure who he thinks i'm saying is genuinely i don't know who he thinks um

is left to regulate but the nodes and the users i don't think he means the developers of the software because you know if he does and that's you know he wants to regulate speech um so i don't know peter what do you want to talk about and let's be clear we'll get to peter but like let's be clear on when we say the nodes right that could be individuals running ether staking notes out of their house individual americans in their homes without running his point that's part of his point when he talked about ability centralization his point is um it's not as if there's nobody to hold accountable there are real people who make up this network

wow wow peter and and and the disconnect there so i don't think it's hair brand i just think it is it it i don't mean to be um dramatic because like again i think rohan has some genuine beliefs that lead him to these conclusions but i don't think it's hairbrand i think it's totalitarian it says it says look there are bad things in the world and we need people in government to have the unfettered discretion to go after whoever they need to go after to stop those bad things and it the corollary to that is as jerry said we believe that people in government

will use that unfettered power wisely to only go after the lumpy bigger actors in the space and not go after you know your uncle who's running an east staking node in their basement who's a nice man you know but i don't want to trust right i don't know who it would be at the end of the day the fbi or the federal reserve or the fdic to to always use that power without using it in an arbitrary way and without using it in an effectively a totalitarian way and and what's missing here is that laws so in in other in other tweets where he talks about things like nodes he talks he makes a comparison to counterfeiting and says well

counterfeiting is always illegal whether it's a person passing a single twenty dollar note that they know is counterfeit or whether it's somebody printing thousands of hundred dollar notes and we usually only go after the really bad counterfeiters a that's not true lots of disenfranchised poor individuals actually get arrested for passing a counterfeit note that they may or may not have known as counterfeit actually that that that happened relevant earlier this year yes extremely relevant earlier this year and b um i would say counterfeiting laws are very carefully drafted so that you have to prove that there is a knowing intent to defraud the person you are trying to

pass the note to intent matters intent matters and if you are participating in in the ethereum network as a staker or as a minor or if you're a bitcoin miner you have no intent to further counterfeiting you have an intent to validate a public good a blockchain that has a has a ledger of hundreds or thousands of transactions that are hopefully improving people's lives with respect to things like identity systems monetary systems payment systems and most of them are completely legal we can't just crash down every legal barrier we have to allow people in government and allow people to allow the police to stop every every harmful act even if it means stopping tons of

unharmful or or good acts we we can't live in that world i don't want to live in that world and you know i should say that it's there's a parallel here to that previous bill we talked about right so in both cases um there is this faith that the state will be able to do the right thing in all cases right so in one you know in the stable act it's that we're going to give this the state this really broad power but we trust that they're not going to abuse that they're only going to go after the big fish and the other one we're going to have private digital cash but we're going to trust this privacy board to ensure that um

you know and i think that's just where we depart um uh you know if men uh were angels et cetera et cetera the second time jefferson's quoted in in this podcast yeah this is a a jeffersonian friendly podcast i suppose um you know one other i guess practical question based on what you're saying uh jerry and peter is like let's say that um you know rohan was with is sort of right or like he's he's successful and basically the eth nodes in the us drop right maybe they drop to zero well outside of the us there's still eight thousand eth nodes that continue to run

and process die transactions important and process dye transactions and process other us dollar denominated whether it's black market gray market or whether other regulatory nation state regimes just simply allow it right so from a practical perspective even if it were possible to completely ban or make a legal this sort of activity in the u.s you can't do it across a like multilateral world with different regulatory regimes and therefore all you succeed in doing is kind of put the us behind on some sort of adoption track to something that that could be um

essentially the internet of money or like kind of a next wave of innovation i mean does he do they see that argument in play yeah so i agree with you what you're saying um i think what rohan would say and again you know this is you know again you're doing great jerry still man um i think what he would say and i think he's right is that yes that's the point what we're trying to do is marginalize these activities so that yeah maybe in the shadows they're done by a few people but this does not become a um

major mainstream thing unless it's being done by a regulated bank right um that is the point and i think he's right um i think as i was saying before while ethereum bitcoin are unstoppable you can marginalize it right think of bittorrent bittorrent um hasn't been stopped it's still there you can go use it but who you know bittorrent has been marginalized right bittorrent should have been um really backbone infrastructure for how we move around data on the internet and it's like this thing that is in the public mind is associated with piracy and it really as a result um uh in the technology the technology in the

corporate world it's never really considered as a potential solution to certain problems because it never yeah it's just been marginalized and the same thing could happen to crypto another another example is tor yeah tor is actually kind of an interesting example because it's a product of us government research and there was a deliberate desire to get the private sector and individuals using tor because if the only people using tor are us agents in the field you can identify that network traffic if those us agents in the field are amongst a bunch of other randos in iran or wherever else who are interested in internet privacy then the us agents in the field have privacy so tor is another interesting example i mean you know i think this came up on twitter a

couple times should users of tor should tor relay nodes or exit nodes be held liable if people are accessing stablecoin networks through tor i suppose under this bill they would be and i don't know how i don't know how the bill's supporters feel about tor you know if they value privacy they might like tor but this could outlaw tour but the the the the lesson from tor is if you are a state a powerful state in the world like the us government you do not want to to ghettoize these new technologies because you will lose control over them completely they will go to the corners and you will lose visibility into those networks and you will lose power over

those networks altogether much better to play nice with these networks understand them utilize them for your own uses as as a state and um and maintain you know points of regulation like the exchanges like the like the centrally backed uh stable coins regulate them for consumer protection and maintain uh power and visibility into these systems don't send them away yeah and foster um development of industry on top of these networks that is american right if if that's what you care about um that's how we one with the internet is that we fostered

um you know development on the internet that was american should do the same thing here absolutely guys yeah 100 on your team with respect to all of these things i i guess maybe just two things to quickly uh address some maybe some misconceptions and then we can wrap this whole thing up about like kind of where david started which is the fight to come and how how folks can join the cause of coin center you know the first is the chances that this actually happens guys pretty slim like this bill does it i mean we we've been talking about it because i think it's a very interesting angle uh obviously but this is really anecdotal at the very least yes yeah this particular bill i would put you know

the probability that it becomes law at low right i think there's a lot of things that would have to happen for this build-up to make it all the way through so so i would say it's it's pretty low but um similar stuff um could happen and the threats to nodes could come not just from financial regulation they can come from other quarters right it could come from anti-money laundering regulation so we always got to be you know on the lookout the second misconception maybe i want to address is what we're not saying in this i think conversation is that um there can't be some sensible regulation around say stable coins right it's not this

clearly but uh i'm sure you guys would agree that the us could do things from a regulatory regime with stable coins any any comments on that well i think we know one thing we've advocated for for the last three years which um representative talib might find interesting i don't know is that the state money transmission licensing system which is how a lot of these central asset-backed stable coins are regulated like usdc is a strange archaic system that you'd have to get a license in every state in the u.s where you have customers so you have to accumulate like pokemon all 53 state and territory territorial licenses and you get examined by each of those

mostly independently some states coordinate but you get like different people checking your books from different states all the time you have to pass multiple criminal background checks it's not sensible regulation it's not good for the companies because the companies have to suffer these costs of regulation it's not good for the users of money transmission services because some states like i always pick on alabama have effectively very little uh in the way of consumer protections you you can get a money transmission license there by merely posting a five thousand dollar bond generally speaking irrespective of the amount of money you're moving so they're woefully underprotected so why not get rid of this state-by-state approach which is bad for consumers and bad for

businesses and replace it with a single federal money transmission license or an alternative license so if people want to get out of the state licensing conundrum they can get this better federal license that would have better controls and you know more sensible regulations for for the parties being regulated i i think that's a good approach and and we've advocated that for the last four years at coin center so peter jerry we want to thank you for for coming on the show and we want to wrap up with this kind of just uh bird's-eye view of the this whole conversation um recently uh friend of the pod jake travinsky tweeted out something along the lines of like uh the time to get your assets off centralized exchanges was the day you

bought them then the second best time to do that is right now seriously do it now and that tweet actually kind of reverberated around like almost every single discord channel that i'm in and all the chat groups because that jake is is not somebody to just like ring ring a random bell uh and then this came at the same time after um brian armstrong talked to remain a tweet thread about um uh you know how having to kyc external accounts in relationship with uh crypto exchanges and so like there seems to be something like boiling under the water with people that are very in tune to these conversations and kind of like what we said at the beginning this stable act fight doesn't really feel like the main fight what is the main fight like what are people worried about

because there are definitely people that are worried specifically right now like what's going on like what do we need to be prepared for like what should we be paying attention to so um the so here's one thing that occurs to me is that um if you one of the reasons we're able to be successful at coin center is that we're independent or taken seriously by folks in government the other reason is that we're able to be discrete all right so um if people in government whether it's regulators [ __ ] folks in congress are thinking of doing something um

we can go and provide them advice about that's a good idea that's a bad idea this is how you could improve it you shouldn't do it at all we're able to go in and give advice because they know that they're going to get that advice in private and um if we start tweeting we're not going to get invited back or are you mentioning something on a live stream perhaps uh so that's one thing i would say but you know what i would also say is look the secretary of the treasury has been very um has publicly said in the past that he's concerned that unhosted wallets um could be he he said new numbered swiss bank

accounts right so he's concerned about that and fatis um has sort of echoed that in their 12-month review in may so um that's definitely in the water and look to be you know perfectly honest yeah unhosted wallets can be used by bad actors to do illicit bad things just like email can right and so it presents a risk and there are sensible ways to address that risk and really bad ways to address the risk um so that's you know that's an area that i think you know concerns us and you know

we've been doing some writing about that in defense of jake it's probably always a good time to get your money under your own yeah that's true yeah yeah crypto not your keys not your coins yeah it's definitely an evergreen thought for sure well absolutely guys we really appreciate you sharing our insight your insight today this is a um a fight that i think that the bankless nation can definitely support you on uh some tangible ways to do that guys are go to the coin center get coin grant a dollar goes a long way at least one dollar because it gets amplified by like 60 70 80 more dollars after the fact yeah so if you don't know how this works right so you're wondering excuse me oh my god so your one dollar

gift like one die one usdc it doesn't doesn't really matter it can be a stable coin it could it cannot be a starbucks dollar i don't think we're not there yet but if you give that that gets amplified by 120x right now and this is a a a fight i think worth having we need voices like coin center in dc just educating just talking talking to folks in in congress about these issues so make sure you do that we'll also include some resources for you including um peter's fantastic article about the un unintended consequences of the stable act some other resources for you as well but peter and jerry it's been a pleasure to have you thank you so much for joining us for state of the nation thank you for having me thanks guys

cheers thanks take care all right uh bakela station this has been a long one but um it has been fantastic as always none of this was financial advice ethan's risky die is risky so is bitcoin but this is the frontier we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot