Well, stablecoins are just as programmable as CBDCs in every single way.
You're – instead of trusting the government to not restrict the spending conditions,
you're trusting a private company, some of which – many of which aren't even
domiciled in the United States, don't even have constitutional protections of
free speech or whatever have you.
And it's every bit as dangerous as the government having programmability over your money.
It's just a private company.
You're listening to The Corbett Report.
Welcome back, friends. Welcome back to The Corbett Report. This is James Corbett
of CorbettReport.com, and this conversation is coming to you in the midst of Crypto Week,
which, for those who don't know, is the White House-designated super week in
which a bunch of crypto-related legislation is due to be passed,
including the Clarity Act,
the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act, and the Senate's Genius Act,
regulation. Regulating stablecoins.
Get it? Stable. Genius.
Just like Trump. Oh, they're so witty.
Well, what does any of this really mean? Oh, good.
They're fighting against the CBDC threat that I've talked about for many years.
So that's a good thing, right?
Right? Well, maybe and maybe not. The devil, as always, is in the details.
And to talk about those details, I'm going to bring on someone who has a lot
to say about this subject.
His name is Mark Goodwin. And I would imagine my audience perhaps best knows
him as a co-author with Whitney Webb on a series of articles from Unlimited
Hangout, specifically some articles from last year, which I think are relevant
to today's conversation and which I will link up in the show notes,
including Trump embraces the Bitcoin dollar, stable coins to entrench U.S.
Financial hegemony, and the chain of consensus, the cartel behind the blockchain.
He's done some incredibly important reporting on these matters,
so let's bring him on the program. Mark Goodwin, thank you so much for joining us today.
James, thank you so much. Long-time fan. It's a great privilege to be here and
talk with you about something that's going to affect everybody,
whether or not you know what's going on or not.
So, important time and really happy to be here with you today.
Yes, well, I think you are not wrong about that, unfortunately.
This is going to affect everyone, whether they know about it or not.
But before we get into the nuts and bolts of this, since this is your first
time, and since you have an interesting origin story in the alt-media space here,
why don't you tell us about how you got started in this space generally and
how you came over to the alt-media side of things? Yeah, sure.
Well, I was living in the Bay Area for a long time, you know,
in San Francisco for, you know, the better part of 10 years and was there through,
you know, it's been in the news a lot.
There's a lot that's been going on in San Francisco and California in particular.
Just the political divide just got really insane. And I was doing blue-collar
things and working in service and bartending and what have you.
And, you know, I was there during the pandemic, you know, we'll call it that.
And, you know, most of my friends were lefties, maybe some walk-away lefties,
but, you know, really from that side. And then I kind of just watched everybody
turn and, you know, everything get really nasty.
And it wasn't a great time for me personally, but I took that opportunity to
sort of, you know, I had a lot of time on my hands.
The bar industry had collapsed. I wasn't working.
But I had been in Bitcoin for a few years because a guy who took over for Ross
for Silk Road 2.0 was a regular at the bar that I was barbacking at in 2014, 2015.
So he came in and explained Bitcoin to me pretty early on, and I thought it
was kind of interesting and then got really into it as it went on. By 2020, I saw...
OK, you know, the government's going to do what the government does,
and it's going to print a shit ton of money because that's just that's how we solve viruses.
And obviously, I understood a lot more of that later. But I took that time to
kind of start writing and educating about Bitcoin just for friends that were
in the service industry, because I was like, this is really going to hurt you.
You know, you don't have long term savings and living paycheck to paycheck.
Your paycheck was just taken away from you by the government and your right
to earn and travel and all that.
I'm sure your audience is very familiar with all that. And so I started educating
about Bitcoin, and that led to writing about it sort of professionally,
part-time at first with Bitcoin Magazine.
Then it got kind of roped in, and by the end of it was actually running the
editorial there as editor-in-chief.
And then as the Bitcoin space really turned towards the government as sort of
a partner in crime, if you will, I got very disenchanted with the whole movement.
Which is not to say that there are not benefits to it, of course,
as I am enjoying to some degree, but was sort of, hey, I don't want to do this Trump thing.
I know where this is going. I know the group of people that he sort of runs with.
And, you know, I think a lot of those people are figuring that out now.
So long story short, I left the Bitcoin space about a year ago officially and
have been writing at Unlimited Hangout with my friend Whitney Webb,
yeah, for some time now. I'm really focusing on.
You know, the dollarization of crypto and the dollarization of the world because
of crypto and how Bitcoin plays into that.
And I wrote a book called The Bitcoin Dollar based on an article I wrote in
2021 that sort of sets this all up.
So yeah, I sort of was in the Bitcoin sphere pretty intensely,
saw where it was going, noped out, and then have been kind of lovingly embraced
by the alt media space, which I'm very thankful for.
So that's kind of the origin a little bit that's an interesting story
i i'm interested in that trajectory because it sort of tracks with
what i have seen taking place and i've been talking about
bitcoin since what was it 2012 i can't remember
a long time yeah whenever my first uh
podcast on it was was a long time ago and it was of course sold to at least
the alt media space at the time as this libertarian decentralized disintermediate
the banking system that we're gonna stick it to the man and then i've watched
over the course of a decade as people basically flooded in with dollar signs in their eyes,
thinking about, we're going to comply with the man so that we get this all regulated.
And that is, unfortunately, the trajectory of the crypto space,
generally speaking, for a lot of people.
I think a lot of people in my audience, the Venn diagram overlap of my audience
and crypto bros probably are in Monero or Xano or something at this point.
But still, it's a vanishingly small minority of the space that still actually
cares about freedom and privacy.
Having said all of that, we're here today to talk about stablecoins,
because as I mentioned before, the Genius Act is in the process of being passed
as we're recording this conversation, question mark.
At any rate, it is certainly on the table, and I think a lot of people still
don't even know what a stablecoin is, let alone why it's going to affect their lives.
So why don't we just start at the brass tacks of that? What is a stablecoin?
Totally, yeah. So the idea, the name, it's very clever.
These very important products that come into our lives usually have very clever names.
And I think the stablecoin name is a very clever trick because the idea of the
stablecoin, the stability,
comes from the fact that it is a tokenized representation of a real-world asset
or of something that exists in reality.
And here's a representation of it that's pegged one-to-one. That's the stable.
So there's a token on the blockchain and a bank dollar, and they are pegged
together. So it's a one-to-one representation.
And the idea of a stable coin is that unlike Bitcoin, there's not these rapid
fluctuations in value as you're exchanging the token.
It's stable, right? That's the idea of the name.
But of course, it's a very clever trick because we all know that the purchasing
power of a dollar is anything but stable and has been routinely inflated away
for a very long time now and not –.
Not only that, the general idea of the Fed debasing the dollar alongside the Treasury,
of course, we have the idea of, well, if it's a tokenized representation on
a blockchain and there's supposed to be this dollar in a bank,
what if the bank goes under?
What if the holder of the stablecoin issuer gets subpoenaed?
Or some other nasty fun thing that tends to happen in these – wherever dollars
are. Of course, there's a lot
of risks that come when you have sort of a trusted peg in these systems.
So stablecoins are basically the modern iteration of what we've seen for a really
long time of private capital creation, which is to say that the majority of
dollars are already digital. They've been digital for a long time.
And the way that they're created is the Fed and the Treasury print these reserves,
these securities, and they give them to private banks like a J.P. Morgan.
And then J.P. Morgan actually creates the dollars in your checkings account.
They're not actually made by the government directly. They're selling these
reserves, and the private banks make them. Stablecoins are the same thing.
They obviously have some quirks and some things that we'll get into here.
But the general idea is that it's just a digital asset that is pegged one-to-one
with a real-world asset. The vast majority of these are dollars.
But of course, you can have stablecoins that are based on the price of gold.
You can have stablecoins on the price of oil.
And you can have clever stablecoins that aren't even a one-to-one,
but there's some sort of algorithmic pairings.
Where they're trusting the market forces to, you know, represent the purchasing
power of a dollar through some other basket of currencies.
Notably, we saw that with the Terra Luna explosion in 2022, where there was
this algorithmic stablecoin that was backed by Bitcoin that was then popped and exploded,
as I postulate in this piece, on purpose in order to spurn regulation,
which we are now seeing literally hit the president's desk today, the Genius Act.
Which, of course, sets up the stablecoin industry.
And the main way that it does it is putting rules and regulations into what
can actually back these stablecoins.
So what is going to basically happen here is that the government is going to
tell stablecoin issuers that they have to hold U.S.
Government debt in order to print these dollar tokens.
So instead of doing cool, fun things that one might be able to do with this
technology, which has some fun use cases.
Instead of being able to create dollar instruments that don't touch government debt at all, the U.S.
Government is coming out and saying, if you want to call your thing a stablecoin,
you want to put that dollar sign there, you better buy our debt first, buy our bags.
So the Genius Act is quite genius in a way, in that it's forcing technologists
to bite the bullet and buy the debt of the U.S.
Government at a very crucial time in which the U.S.
Government desperately needs more buyers of debt.
So I'll wrap it up there. But that basically catches you up very quickly on what stablecoins are.
And you'll hear them a lot. For the most part, whenever you hear the word stablecoin,
you can just think a digital dollar that's represented on a blockchain.
Excellent. Well, that is a
good crash course for people who need to understand why this is important.
They'll need to look into the history of, say, Bretton Woods,
the agreement at the end of World War II that was going to peg the entire world
monetary system to the U.S. dollar, which itself was pegged to gold.
Famously, of course, Nixon closed the gold window in 1971.
What is really backing up the entire global monetary order? I don't know. How about oil?
And so, of course, we saw the engineering of the petrodollar system,
which functioned very well for half a century in propping up the U.S.
Dollar, because everyone who wants to industrialize or perform industrial activities
is going to need oil, so they're going to buy it. Then it's denominated in U.S.
Dollars, and the Saudis had a deal to basically launder all their money back through U.S.
Banks, so keeping it in the U.S. system. This is how the U.S.
Dollar has been propped up and propagated for the past half century.
But that system is coming to an end, and there was some fake news last year.
The petrodollar agreement expired.
Well, there was no particular agreement. It was a system, but it is expiring.
And it is certainly under pressure from a lot of different threats like the
petroyuan and other such ideas.
So the question then becomes, how do you not only continue, not only service
this $35 trillion debt or whatever it is at the moment, but how do you continue
blowing that bubble so that the big, beautiful bill and everything else can
continue to be financed.
There's got to be a reason why people are buying dollars. Oh, I know.
Let's make stable coins a regulatory mandate for them to be tethered to U.S.
Debt, U.S. treasuries, so that people will still be buying into the U.S.
Debt system. And they can continue inflating the bubble. That is sort of the
underlying aspect of all of this.
Correct me if I'm wrong on any part of that assessment. No, I think that was perfect.
A very It's a very succinct explanation of the petrodollar, and the general
idea is, well, okay, if you want to print more money, you've got to have more
users. You've got to have more people interested in the system.
There's a few ways you can do it, but the best way to do it is to get more people
playing in the sandbox, right? Get more people using dollars as their medium of exchange.
If you go from the total addressable market of dollar users from maybe a billion
players, the 350-whatever Americans, and then all the people using dollars as
a store of value across the world,
with stable coins, really all you need is a smartphone or an internet access.
And you have access to U.S. dollars, which is something that hasn't necessarily
been available to the 7, 8 billion people in the world,
there's been limitations to who can play in the regulatory regime of the dollar kind of by design.
You had to get pallets of cash sent to the Middle East or whatever to be able to play in that system.
Now you simply download a wallet on a smartphone and you have access to dollars.
This, of course, is sold as this very altruistic thing.
You know, we are banking the unbanked, James. It's amazing. It's like,
no, you're charging someone basically a fee to use your bank account,
and you're letting them buy little IOUs, basically, for the dollars that you hold in your account.
So we're seeing this push of, you know, how do we extend dollar hedgemen?
You know, we find more users. And so now we're pushing stablecoins on the global
south, on South America, on Asia, on Africa, and we're seeing serious headwinds of adoption.
And we're seeing the dollarization of crypto and blockchains in general.
I think there was a stat a year ago that 80% of all value settled in the extended
cryptocurrency space was using stablecoins.
I mean, it is the killer app of blockchain is dollars.
I mean, it's very strange. It seems very backwards of, again,
as you started at the beginning, you know, what was the idea,
the ethos of this movement to now revert back to, oh, it's dollar tokens is
the killer app is is sort of sad. But this is this is.
These systems are not designed willy-nilly. This is not an accident that as
we are really seeing runaway debt service happening after 08,
which was a controlled implosion, to 2020, which was a controlled implosion,
very specifically a controlled implosion that crushed demand and velocity of
dollars by shutting everybody in their house.
And then you print trillions and trillions of dollars. As that was happening,
Trump is setting up the entirety of the Bitcoin dollar stablecoin play that
we're now seeing the fruits of.
On his last days in office, he's passing these bulletins and letting banks hold stablecoins.
Those were things that happened in his final days in office.
And now we're seeing the Genius Act sort of formalize that.
So in 2020, there was like 10 billion stablecoins.
It was a very, very small industry. Now we're $200 billion or something like that,
and it's going to go to – Scott Besson is – running Treasury is estimating $3.7
trillion of stablecoin demand will be enabled basically overnight from the Genius Act passing.
That's tonight, depending where you are in the world. That's this afternoon.
That's a serious amount of money. You look at the bailouts in 08,
it was hundreds of billions, and it was enough to get us all in the streets
yelling, why are we bailing out the banks with these hundreds of billions of dollars?
Now it's, oh, we can print $3.7 trillion to stablecoin issuers,
and this is seen as this sort of technological advancement, this altruistic bankingly unbanked.
In reality, it's a very clever trick by the government to create debt demand
and create more dollar users at the most critical time possible as this debt
service is now outpacing our military budget, which upheld the petrodollar,
and really becoming a national priority.
That is why these bills are all happening. That's why this crypto week is being presented.
It's because the U.S. government needs these stable coins to be able to kick the can down the road.
And there's a whole other element to this of this debt sink idea that is the
other pair to this, which is using Bitcoin as this deflationary scarce asset
that they can inflate the dollars into.
And rather than inflating into gold or into land or into other assets that are
held by other countries, right?
Like we could pay off the debt tomorrow if we wanted to and we said an ounce
of gold is $30,000. Come, come, come, you know, give us your,
you know, they could pay off the debt tomorrow.
But what would that do? That would make everybody in the world that holds gold
extremely, extremely rich.
They don't want to do that. They want to keep this wealth transfer into the
tightest circle possible.
So very conveniently, this decentralized, scarce asset comes out of nowhere
at the onset of the – or rather at the offset of the 2007-08-09 crisis.
Bitcoin comes out, released anonymously, and it's obviously sold as this decentralized
idea, and in many ways it is.
But it's really more distributed than decentralized. It's an imperfect distribution of power.
And when you look at where that power goes, really the only way you can really
measure it is hash rate, which is the computers upholding the system,
and then who holds the Bitcoin.
And when you look at it across the board, it's the United States of America,
whether it's the private interests of the US or even just the government itself,
private companies, public companies.
And so the wealth bubble that was – the debt bubble that was exploded over our
lives is now about to be vacuumed into the next financial system.
And we are quite literally on the onset of that on-off switch on the vacuum
is being turned probably right now. In fact, by the time people are watching
this conversation, it will probably already have passed.
So the on-twitch is going as we're speaking. But so the people who are positioned
on the the bottom level of this elevator that's about to shoot up here. Sure.
Would they be would there be any names that people would recognize that are
involved in this stable coin industry? Like, I don't know, like like Trump, for example.
Sure. Yeah. I mean, Trump himself and his family, you know, they did one of
the large it should be one of the biggest political scandals,
frankly, ever is on inauguration night.
You know, the Trump family releases their own private currency.
You know, if you remove the crypto aspect of a Solana meme coin and you just
say it, what it is without the technical jargon, he started his own private currency, you know,
24 hours before he's re-sworn back in to be the president of the United States. That's insane.
Very crazy. Now, I'm not saying I enjoy the monopoly of the public sector on
money printing, but it is a wild thing to have a president, an incoming president,
create their own currency.
And then you look at, well, what are the conflicts of interest here?
It's like, well, hey, anybody in the international game can directly pay into
the coffers of the president,
totally circumnavigating all of the rules and regulations that should be in
place for restricting conflicts of interest.
You want to lobby and donate to a president. There are a lot of rules of what
you can do by printing your own currency and letting anybody in the world with
internet access access it.
Um, suddenly you have billions of dollars sloshing around going into the president's
pockets right before he takes power, right before he signs bills like we are seeing today.
Right. So, you know, what is the whole point of the public sector in general?
It's a regulatory enabling environment for the private sector interests,
the donor class of the, uh, you know, the representatives that they buy.
So Trump has started his own stable coin. He has started his own currency.
How successful they'll be, we'll see, but there's an extreme conflict of interest immediately.
Ironically, that is something being picked up by the Elizabeth Warren sort of
anti-crypto group is, look, this is ridiculous, this crypto con.
And in many ways, they're actually right. I don't very often find myself agreeing
with her, but I think in this case, she's sort of correct.
Broken clock is right twice a day, I suppose.
But in my opinion, I think more importantly, I think Trump is a figurehead personally.
And I think the interests behind him have been in the crypto space for an extremely
long time, very possibly even created the crypto space, depending on how deep you want to go.
And in particular, I'm looking at Peter Thiel and the extended PayPal mafia,
including Elon, including Reid Hoffman.
And a lot of other players associated, especially with Peter Thiel.
And if you actually look at the original founding motto of PayPal,
the idea of it was like their original logo was a new world currency.
And they had come together with this idea. David Sachs is this former McKinsey
consultant who comes in to join Thiel, who is a currency trader.
And Max Levgen, who's a cryptographer who spent all this time working on distributed
systems. They were the two guys that formed PayPal.
He comes in and he sort of takes them from, hey, stop playing with your palm
pilots. Let's go to the internet. Let's use email.
He's now, of course, the crypto AI czar for Trump. He's one of the main advisors on these bills.
But when they all got together, those three, they were really the biggest ones
at the beginning of PayPal. And their idea was, let's create a new world currency.
And there's this book, The PayPal Wars,
where Peter Thiel is described by this early marketing executive at PayPal as
doing this early meeting at PayPal where he describes there's a really lack
of dollars being accessed across the world.
And central banks across the world are really taking advantage of their citizens.
And if we can create dollars and put them natively on the internet,
we can allow these slaves to their central banks, which is true.
But we can give freedom to these citizens that are stuck in their shitty fiat
currency being printed by their local governments, and they can get beautiful, beautiful dollars.
And we can onboard them and really save the world, basically,
from central bank control.
And of course, now here we are 20 years later, that exact same pitch is being
made by these stablecoin providers.
Thiel really saw this very early on that there was a way to use technology to
dollarize the world rather than military force or political force.
And that actually technology is sort of a dissolving agent that can break down
a lot of these controls that local governments have over their citizens,
specifically as it relates to capital flight.
So the PayPal guys were hip to this a very long time ago. Of course,
they're incredibly connected to intelligence.
Palantir, you know, the great Palantir that everyone's now suddenly being awakened
to started as the anti-fraud algorithm at PayPal.
I mean, it really came out of this group. Obviously, there's the TIA aspect,
Poindexter, and all that, but the original algorithm that became Palantir was called Igor.
It was named after a Russian scammer that was scamming everybody with PayPal.
So the PayPal mafia understood that technology could do something that politics
and military really couldn't.
And this group of people really had the brains and the intelligence connections
to be able to set up something like this.
And of course PayPal Mafia gets all of the credit these days,
but it was really PayPal that dollarized the internet, that made the native
currency of the internet the dollar with their eBay counterparts,
all of which have immense intelligence connections.
And now we're seeing the next iteration of that, where it's not just PayPal dollars.
Now we're seeing these stablecoins proliferate and actually really neutering
the ability of local governments to retain value within their country,
within their closed system of, why would you hold Argentine pesos if you can
get access to dollars with the internet?
Maybe they wanted pesos 20 years ago, but they couldn't quite do it.
There was closed-circuit regulatory things at play that were stopping people
from being able to just sell dollar access to Argentina.
Now we have a way to circumnavigate the enabling environment of the public sector via technology.
And so Teal is super connected all over the stablecoin space and the PayPal mafia in general.
Elon Musk wants to turn X into half the financial system and all of these things
that these AI companies are saying.
And in reality, I think they might do it, which is very scary.
And what's the outcome of this? Why are stablecoins worse than dollars?
We really have to just sort of look at the dialectic and sort of the warnings.
Folks like you have been saying about CBDCs for almost a decade now, if not for longer.
And when you look at the dichotomy of CBDCs and stablecoins,
you start to see some like chilling similarities.
And in many ways, you might even argue they're worse due to constitutional protection.
So maybe I'll stop ranting there for a second and let you pick up there.
You know, you're reading my mind, actually, because that's exactly what I wanted
to get into. Because obviously the great irony is that during this crypto week,
we have the Anti-CBDC Surveillance Act being passed at the same time as the
Genius Act to wire in the stablecoins into the global economy.
And I think that is no coincidence because, thankfully, a lot of people have
woken up to the very real threat that central bank digital currencies pose.
And the politicians love to get in front of the parade. Yeah,
don't worry, guys. We're going to protect you from that horrible threat.
And here's this stablecoin thing that you guys can use.
What is the difference? Why is it worse? Why would it be worse?
Don't we want a private version of this instead of a central bank run version?
Right. I mean, that's sort of the funny dialectic that we're dealing with right now.
You know, this idea of, you know, the Javier Malaise, the free market champions
are going to come in and deliver the enslaved masses from the government failure
that was, you know, the global lockdowns of COVID, right?
I mean, we've seen a controlled demolition of the trusted institutions,
whether it's media, whether it's whatever, whether it's banking.
But where does that lead the people to go to?
It's whenever there's a controlled demolition, there's a there's a new path
paved that looks very nice that goes right into another pen.
And we've seen that with journalism. I mean, it's absolutely insane.
The podcast community is now
the new mainstream media. They are the state media. They have Trump on.
They have Vance on. They're giving them softball questions, laughing,
doing that. it's the same dialectic that we're seeing with capital creation.
So we obviously all lost a lot of trust.
Many of us didn't have that trust there, but I think in a mass scale,
a lot of trust has been lost on the government and the public sector.
And so at the same time, the fears of a CBDC.
Of a government controlling a digital currency, sort of started bubbling up
around the time that the government started printing a bunch of money and directly
depositing money into people's bank accounts.
And when people started pushing back against the government,
like say the trucker protest,
we saw the government and local law enforcement put pressure on the financial
institutions that were spreading that money around and GoFundMe sees the funds.
And we saw some direct examples of this when there were dissonant voices pushing
against public sector power,
public sector was able to sort of use, you know, the lawfare and economic,
you know, tomfoolery to prevent, you know, dissonant action.
And so the CBDC, you know, fear was, was very rightly, you know,
sown in these, in these years, because we of course don't want,
they already can push and leverage private companies. We don't want them to have control.
I don't want the government to be able to go into my wallet and take my money
because I don't want to get a shot or because I think so-and-so about so-and-so in the government.
So these fears were like very natural and I think in many ways obviously completely correct.
But this is kind of how the government works. They create a fear. They let the fear build.
And then they create this dialectic solution to the problem.
You lost your trust in government.
You're fearful of us printing a bunch of money. You're fearful of us doing all
this, you know, crap to dissident voices.
Well, hey, we're going to ban CBDCs. Don't you worry. We got you covered.
But come over here and check out this stablecoin thing. It's a private bank. It's free market.
You know, the free market is always right. Nothing bad can ever happen in the
free market. There's no cartels there.
There's no plunder capitalism. It's just all good stuff.
So what you're afraid of with CBDCs, the stable coin will come in and it will
totally take care of all of those concerns.
And we saw that Trump, I mean, literally his first, one of the first executive
orders he signed in office was, I'm going to ban the development and research of CBDCs.
And in the same EO, three paragraphs later, he's like, but we're going to use
beautiful stable coins and it's going to be so beautiful.
I mean, they really telegraphed it if you were paying attention,
you know, this dialectic shift.
So what are we afraid of CBDs, right? We're afraid of them being programmable.
We're afraid of them being seizeable and surveillable. Those are kind of the
three main things I would say we're sort of afraid of.
From a programmability standpoint, I don't want the government saying I can't
buy a tank of gas because I bought a steak yesterday and the steak has this
much carbon off-put and I can't buy a plane ticket because I like running big computers.
Whatever the aspect is, the programmability of the spending conditions of your
money, you don't want the government to have control over that.
I don't want them to be able to program and say, if I don't spend this money
overnight, it's going to disappear from my wallet, or I can't send it and I
can't donate to a cause that's anti-government.
Whatever the thing is, I don't want the government to be able to programmably
restrict where I can spend my money.
And that's part of the big transfer of the digitization of money is that now
the restrictions on your spending conditions aren't physical.
It's not, oh, I need a boat to send a billion dollars of gold across the ocean.
It's now just what can the program actualize?
And so when you allow a central controller over the program to say you can't
spend money here or this or here are the conditions, the programmability becomes a really big issue.
Well, stablecoins are just as programmable as CBDCs in every single way.
You're – instead of trusting the government to not restrict the spending conditions,
you're trusting a private company, some of which – many of which aren't even
domiciled in the United States, don't even have constitutional protections of
free speech or whatever have you.
And it's every bit as dangerous as the government having programmability over your money.
It's just a private company. maybe there are some good private companies out
there I'm sure they do exist but it's not really an upgrade and that concern
still is there and on the same level if you can access.
The code as a centralized issuer to say I'm restricting where you can spend
it well then you can also just seize it and so the seizeability is the same
thing it's still programmability when the token is digital so they can program it, they can seize it,
And I think the third pillar, the surveillability, and we can get a little bit nitty-gritty here.
I'll try to keep it brief and not bore anybody and put them to sleep talking about blockchains.
But the surveillability of a private stablecoin on a public blockchain,
which I'll explain, versus a CBDC, is a little bit more nuanced.
But I think it's really important, and I really like – if you take one thing
from this viewer, I hope it's this.
And a CBDC, just like when you use a wire or some sort of traditional banking
instrument to send money,
you are very knowingly unveiling your transactional history to a party.
When you use a bank, when you use a – if you're using Bank of America and you
have a bank app and you're sending money to someone, you're revealing to your
bank who you're spending money to and then to your receiver's bank.
And there's a group of people, a closed group of people, but there's a group
of people you are 100% exposing your transactional history to.
It's just a necessity for updating a ledger, right, that expresses the volatility
between these two parties.
Blockchain is a very confusing, you know, a lot of people don't really grok
the nuances of it, which is very understandable. It's kind of confusing on purpose.
But you can really think of a blockchain as just a public distributed ledger.
So rather than that ledger expressing the volatility between the two transacting
parties being a closed circuit in a black box in Bank of America's server room
or Wells Fargo server room, It's now native to the internet,
downloadable by anybody, and anybody that has access to the blockchain,
which means anybody that has access to the internet, can now download the blockchain,
which is just a string of ledgers strung together very cleverly, cryptographically.
But it means that every transaction that you make on a blockchain is viewable
by anybody that has access to the internet.
But it's pseudonymous. Don't worry. Well,
you know, there is some truth to that, but there's also a whole bunch of horseshit
to that, which is to say that the heuristic analysis that can take place when
you're using a public blockchain, you know, it's very hard to do anything private on the Internet.
It's very hard to do anything private at all these days. But specifically trying
to do some sort of communication where there's a handshake online is really
hard because so many pieces of the infrastructure that we think of the Internet
as being this distributed, beautiful, open thing, but it's really not.
It's a whole bunch of closed people that have, oh, I'm your ISP here,
that I can see everything, every bit going in and out of your system.
Here's the ISP on the other side. They can see. We know damn well via the Snowden
leaks and some other things that they are literally just taking data directly
from the fiber optic cables,
and they're reading everything coming in and out As now we're getting the Starlink
era and satellite internet, they're reading everything.
And so a blockchain is really this kind of really clever
way to create an opportunity for the world and really intelligence agencies
to be able to get warrantless surveillance on everybody using stable coins on
public blockchains because every transaction you make is published openly.
It doesn't say Mark Goodwin sends James Corbett.
It's a string of numbers, a couple dollars in a string of numbers.
But if you are an intelligence-level-sized entity, which nowadays are increasingly
more and more private and in many ways have always been private,
the intelligence community really was the information sector of the banking industry.
But now we're seeing, you know, with heuristic analysis, combining these data
caches of IP addresses, of social network, you know, oh, I posted that I bought
Bitcoin today on Twitter.
Well, Palantir now has a database that says you bought Bitcoin that day and at this price.
And you can really, at this very high level of computational analysis,
really break down a lot of stuff that happens on these blockchains just through
pretty basic human behavior.
So in reality, it's created an asymmetric
advantage for intelligence-level communities and industries to be able to analyze
the blockchain without any need of getting a warrant and going to that Wells
Fargo server room or that Bank
of America server room that they would have needed to do 10 years ago.
Now they can go right to the blockchain and they can find exactly the transaction
and use heuristic analysis and find your wallet.
It's really worse than CBDCs in this way because rather than it just being the
government, which is very bad, I'm not saying CBDCs are good.
Publishing it in a closed box where you are willingly, knowingly giving your
information to, you know, 10 to 13 branches of government and law enforcement
and respective people that would be in charge of a CBDC.
Instead, you're actually publishing
all of your transactional data to everybody in the world, right?
So I would argue in many ways they are worse.
They don't give you constitutional protections that might exist from a government-issued
currency. and they are published in a way that can be analyzed by very powerful computational groups.
And there's no shortage of those these days. And let's be honest,
these people that kind of built this industry,
like a Peter Thiel, happens to run one of the biggest data bases in the entire
world that's only growing and getting more powerful every day as it gets more and more data.
Blockchains are really ripe for data because they are just literally an open ledger.
So that's sort of that dialectic of, yes, CBDCs are bad, but stablecoins are
kind of the worst of both worlds. They're...
They're private in name only. They are backed by government debt,
so it's still extending dollar hedgemen, dollar empire, buying Uncle Sam's bags.
They are still beholden to the public sector because if you want to hold $150
billion of treasuries, you damn well better do whatever the government wants you to do.
You can't just hold that and say, I'm not giving you my customer information.
No, they'll seize your treasuries, and then there goes by $150 billion.
So let's look at this. A good example, Tether is the biggest stablecoin provider in the world.
They have over $160 billion of treasuries.
They have been forced to onboard the FBI, the Secret Service,
Chain Analysis, which is an In-Q-Tel-funded private blockchain analysis company.
All of these law enforcement arms, private or public, are on their system.
They've seized and blacklisted billions of dollars of tethers at the behest of the public sector,
and that is sort of the – it's the new iteration of the private-public relationship
that has been capital creation.
And in many ways, it's being sold to us as this convenient, wonderful thing,
cheap fees, dollar access for everybody.
But we're creating an environment and a petri dish right now for global mass
surveillance for all of our financial transactions and still the seesability
and programmability at the behest of the public sector.
So what's really the benefit here? What is so genius about this for the people?
Oh, no, it's actually a really good way to build the Panopticon and buy Uncle
Sam's bags and enrich all of the donor class that we have seen support Donald
Trump's current administration.
And to do it through a cutout so that gives the plausible deniability to the
government itself in the exact same way Operation Chokepoint worked.
Don't worry. It's not the government that's debanking people.
It's the government that's leaning on the DOJ to lean on the FDIC to lean on
the private banks to debank you.
And the private banks are doing it. So, you know, it's them.
It's not us in the exact same way. It's not it's not the government that's going
to be programming and controlling and surveilling your your digital currency.
It's going to be the government leaning on the treasury to lean on these stablecoin
issuers to do all of that.
So yes, as you say, the worst of all possible worlds, in a sense.
And as I say, this genius act is in the process of being passed as we're talking.
So by the time people see this conversation, it may already be a fait accompli.
So there is no doubt much more that we could, should, and hopefully will have
to say on this topic in the future. I know you'll be keeping your eye on this
topic, and I will too, and so hopefully we can update people as this continues to develop.
But I'm glad we set the groundwork today and let people know what is happening
as it's happening, because I don't see a lot of people talking about this,
and I'm glad you're out there doing that.
On that note, of course, I'll be linking up your articles with Whitney Webb
on Unlimited Hangout about this topic that I think are great explainers that
get people on board and explain all of this to them in pretty simple English,
so I'm glad that resource exists today.
Where else should people be going? How can they follow your work if they're
interested in the subject?
Yeah, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Yeah, I do think it's very
important just to add one little salt at the end of this.
It's I think this thing is coming. I think it's inevitable.
And whether or not you choose, you know, financial stuff is always very personal.
So I'm not saying you should do anything at all, but just learn about what's happening.
Learn about the technology and the players here and make a decision for yourself
how you want to best situate.
But just know that no matter what, you can try to cover your ears and block
your eyes, but this tsunami is coming of stablecoins and money printing and
all the things that we know.
So just inform yourself and decide what you want to do with it.
And that is hopefully the point of our work and my work is to just inform.
Financial literacy is a really hard thing to find.
It's very complicated, and it's very complicated on purpose.
Finances, you know, the financial system on purpose is designed that way.
When you add blockchain jargon, it gets even crazier.
And that's kind of the whole point is to hide and mask behind these things and
then create this new system.
And all of a sudden, there's a new class of people that can only access these digital dollars.
So prevent yourself from going there by reading, you know, a whole bunch of
there are now quite awareness to what's going on.
So there are some others really holding this torch.
But I got to tip my hat to Whitney Webb at a limited Hangout,
where you can find my work for noticing that this was something that was important.
And working on me with a series called The Chain, which we will be turning into
a book by the end of the year.
And you can find it on thelimitedhangout.com, but I also created just a little URL.
That's thechain.wiki, so you can just see all the articles there.
It's almost 100,000 words. It's a book itself already online.
We added a whole bunch of backstory to it. So,
Just check it out there on Unlimited Hangout. And then very excited to announce,
too, that we're going to be, you know, moving in that direction,
doing more long form stuff and physical things.
So we're going to be starting a print magazine.
We're going to be publishing this book, starting a publishing house,
which is what I was doing at Bitcoin Magazine when I started running the print magazine.
I'm super excited about that because that's where we need to go.
So, and, you know, they want us in this spin cycle of confusion by just hyper
normal, just flashing us with stuff.
We got to slow down. We got to breathe because the decisions we make are going
to reverberate for a really long time as we're going into this new financial system.
So our idea was let's make some slow content for fast times.
And that's kind of the idea of the publishing house. So more to be said there
for sure, but follow us on Unlimited Hangout and you'll get the skinny there.
I'm incredibly excited to see this. And it does, again, it seems interesting
to me that you've fallen so far through the Bitcoin rabbit hole that you're
out on the other side back into the real world, an actual physical print.
Yeah, it's good. I think that is the best possible progression to make is to
reconnect with the actual real world as we realize that the digital world was
just supposed to be an adjunct, just something that we use.
But no, no, no, no, no. It's starting to use us.
And we have to start reconnecting with the real world physical print magazines and books.
Yes, I'm all on board. So I'm very excited to hear about that.
I hope we get the chance to talk about that more in the future.
Mark, good to make this connection. Let's keep talking and keep ringing the
alarm bell about these issues. Thank you for your time.
You got it, James. Thanks so much for having me. A real honor.
Music.
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