May 12, 2024 - Info Warrior - Jason Bermas
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| It's time to switch off. | |
| Today's News Talk Radio. | |
| Very entertaining. TNT. We are now joined by the man behind the Conscious Resistance, also does great work over at TheLastAmericanVagabond.com, Derek Brose. | |
| Derek, thank you so much for joining us, brother. | |
| Let's talk crypto because I've often talked about this selective enforcement regarding cryptocurrency. | |
| We're kind of starting to see that. | |
| I know that an individual that you know has now been arrested for tax fraud. | |
| Saying that he owes the government millions. | |
| When we're talking Bitcoin, one of the biggest sells around Bitcoin was that it was money that did not adhere to the bank rules and therefore taxation rules surrounding your state, your country. | |
| It was something that you could use peer to peer, etc. | |
| And obviously, it has been sculpted into something very, very different. | |
| It is now part of ETFs on Wall Street. | |
| It has heavy investment with Vanguard and BlackRock. | |
| And even with the recent halving and the boost in Bitcoin beyond anywhere we've seen it above the 70k mark, traditionally, you've seen a real boost in the altcoin market at the same time that Bitcoin makes these runs. | |
| Hasn't happened this time around. | |
| So there's a lot going on with that coin, crypto in general, and then government regulations surrounding it. | |
| So I guess let's start with your friend and his situation. | |
| Let's explain that to folks. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. And I think you kind of painted a good picture there, Jason, that people need to understand that Bitcoin and the crypto space in general is not what it was a decade ago. | |
| Just for a little bit of background, I started reporting on crypto and Bitcoin specifically in 2012. | |
| I went to the Texas Bitcoin Conference and interviewed a lot of the early players. | |
| I got my first Bitcoin transaction in 2013 And I have used it as well as Monero and other cryptos to not use banks and to avoid governments. | |
| And I'm one of those people who think it could be a tool like that. | |
| But unfortunately, as you mentioned, it has been co-opted and now most people know it as an investment. | |
| People connected to the Bilderberg Group through the company Blockstream, as well as some of the folks at MIT Media Labs with connections to Epstein, have gained control over it in the last eight years or more. | |
| And one of the people calling that out was a man named Roger Ver, He had a nickname of Bitcoin Jesus, which is sort of a jokey nickname given to him in the early 2010s because he was one of the earliest wealthy investors. | |
| He was already, I think, wealthy prior to Bitcoin, but he got in Bitcoin early and was really an advocate for it and specifically saying, this could help us get around the Federal Reserve. | |
| If we use this, if we promote it, we actually adopt it. | |
| This could get us past the central bank fiat level. | |
| Federal Reserve System and maybe towards something better, maybe towards a real anonymous peer-to-peer money, in addition to cash, but something that you could send anywhere around the world without governments, without banks. | |
| And his name is Roger Ver, and I've worked with him in the past. | |
| He's funded some of my speaking tours across the U.S. back in 2017, 2018. | |
| And he recently actually released a book called Hijacking Bitcoin that's all about what I just mentioned, Bilderberg and Blockstream and a lot of these connections. | |
| And I was actually set to interview him this coming week to discuss that. | |
| And then just a couple of days ago, we see – about a week ago, actually, we see this press release from the Department of Justice announcing that he'd been arrested in Spain, and they're claiming he owes them $48 million in taxes. | |
| And for me personally, I mean, I think most people probably have issues with taxes, but when you really read the language of the U.S. government and specifically the IRS here – Just the, I don't know, the hubris with them. | |
| It says, quote, Vare is alleged to have caused a loss to the IRS of at least $48 million. | |
| What he's accused of doing is basically not telling them that he had Bitcoin. | |
| And since the last few years, the IRS has now started to create rules where they expect, you know, if you have a Bitcoin or even half a Bitcoin or whatever you got at the end of the year when it's time to pay taxes, you're supposed to estimate the capital gains, you know, what it was worth when you got it, what it's worth now, and what the difference, and you owe them a percentage or something to that effect. | |
| Most people ignore it, but they're getting increasingly aggressive with these policies and they're going after big players like Roger here. | |
| Roger also very publicly Expatriated and, you know, said he was severing his U.S. citizenship and he got citizenship in St. | |
| Kitts and Neva, a small island, and did this very publicly. | |
| It made the news, you know, crypto millionaire, Bitcoin Jesus gives up U.S. citizenship. | |
| And so he did have a target on his back, and they've been watching him very closely, and they're alleging that back in 2017, when he was going through this process, he didn't tell them, didn't tell the government how much Bitcoins he had. | |
| And so now those Bitcoins are worth a lot of money. | |
| I guess they're estimating about $48 million. | |
| And they're claiming he owes them that, and they've now arrested him. | |
| And the bigger picture, I think, is just that this is really one in a long line of, at least in the last year, we could go all the way back to 2013, talk about Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road, but really in the last year, last summer, Two of the founders of another organization called Tornado Cash, which helps people mix between Bitcoin and other currencies. | |
| And it does allow for more privacy than the government wants, so they consider it money laundering. | |
| They were arrested before Roger was arrested. | |
| The founders of this Samurai Wallet, which did a similar thing, let people do these swaps and these mixing, they were arrested just two weeks ago. | |
| And because of that, after the Samurai Wallet guys were arrested, you have these other privacy-based operations starting to voluntarily shut down in the U.S. Phoenix, Wasabi, today, Local Monero, which is another peer-to-peer network that I use here in Mexico that allows you to transact anonymously, announce that they're shutting down in a week. | |
| All of this because people are afraid of the U.S. government starting to come after them, or at least they're ceasing operations in the U.S. And so Roger's arrest is simply just the latest in a... | |
| An incoming attack on those of us who are trying to use crypto in a private way because they want people to only have the track and trace CBDC. That's what this is really about, is trying to eliminate any competition. | |
| I totally and completely agree. | |
| And one of the other things that was done globally that no one's really talking about Are the two people that were arrested in Germany with 2,000 Bitcoin worth $50 billion. | |
| And when the government took that away from them, nobody knows how. | |
| Everybody acts like, oh, they had the keys. | |
| You get in that room. Well, they'll get those keys from you. | |
| They took them. And again, People were saying it has Satoshi shown his hand. | |
| No, the government stepped in and took a couple guys accused of a crime without any due process. | |
| They took $50 billion in a crypto asset they really had no dominion over. | |
| And it's not just Germany. | |
| It's the United States going into other countries. | |
| I want to focus in on that and beyond. | |
| We're with Derek Brose. We've got to take a break for the headlines. | |
| More TNT after this. | |
| For TNT, this is James O'Neill. | |
| Former President Donald Trump expressed his willingness to go to jail over violations of a gag order related to his ongoing hush money trial. | |
| William Gallagher and his two sons James and Thomas were arrested and charged with their involvement in the U.S. Capitol breach on January 6, 2021. | |
| William faces a felony charge of obstructing law enforcement during civil disorder and several misdemeanors | |
| With a potential maximum sentence of eight years if convicted | |
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| Now you know that I have been just like you kind of on the peripherals of this crypto space | |
| Since it was really just Bitcoin as the player right Bitcoin | |
| Bitcoin, Litecoin, pre-Ethereum days, all these things. | |
| And when we were talking about those coins, they could be mined. | |
| There was proof of work. | |
| So you knew a certain amount of energy went into them and the brilliance of Bitcoin was what? | |
| It was finite. Gradually, over time, it would become more and more difficult to mine. | |
| It has now reached really that point where is it profitable to mine? | |
| Probably not right now unless you're looking into some crazy future investment where it explodes. | |
| Who knows? A very real possibility. | |
| A literal plethora of other coins have hit the scene. | |
| And even something like Ethereum that started with proof of work and mining has now moved to proof of stake and is something very, very different, but it's kept that blockchain aspect. | |
| And that is the one aspect that they would like to keep with their CBDCs or any type of controlled coin. | |
| That takes away all of the anonymity and instead really inverts it and it makes it not only have the ability to be taxed at its maximum, but also programmable in the sense of geographically where you can use it. | |
| Or specifically what you may be able to use it on. | |
| That's the harsh reality of how dangerous this programmable currency is. | |
| And then, you know, put on top of that the fact that our government is willing to go into other countries To prosecute people as though they are cartel members selling drugs is even more frightening because that is going to quickly regulate the market in kind of this globalist perspective, aka the people at Bilderberg. | |
| Like you were talking about, whatever they're saying about it at Davos and whatever the UN is projecting. | |
| I know I said a mouthful there, but that's the road not that we're on, but that has to be stopped because it's moving forward very quickly. | |
| Absolutely. And as we were talking about last week, Jason, with things like the Summit of the Future, the World Health Organization pandemic treaty, I mentioned that several times in recent documents and recent conferences, the WEF and the UN have been calling for the new Bretton Woods moment, calling for the financing pact of the future, time to remake the economic system. | |
| And this is all about pushing us towards CBDCs and, as you mentioned, programmable money. | |
| And I want to just reemphasize why the government is going after these people. | |
| For folks who maybe are totally just kind of crypto oblivious and never even dipped your toes in this, these folks who have been arrested were the ones who founded wallets, which is where you hold your crypto in, and websites, decentralized exchanges that were allowing people to mix their money. | |
| So maybe I have Bitcoin, but since Bitcoin is a Is a blockchain that can be tracked now with chain analysis companies? | |
| Maybe I want to go to something more private, so I want to turn it into Monero. | |
| You have swaps that can do that, but you also have mixers and tumblers, which will sort of send around your money into multiple transactions or mix it up with a bunch of other crypto money together, and then a transaction comes out on the other side. | |
| And the idea being that it makes it harder for anybody who is potentially tracking these transactions to follow them all the way and to get to you, allowing you some privacy. | |
| An even more concrete example, here in Mexico, using Local Monero, which just announced that they're shutting down in a week, I can go to the ATM in Mexico. | |
| I can initiate an exchange on Local Monero, do a decentralized exchange, and say, hey, I'd like to sell you one Monero for some pesos, for some cash to go pay my rent or whatever. | |
| I initiate the exchange. | |
| Somebody sends me a 16-digit code, and here in Mexico, I can go to the ATM. I can put in that code without a bank account, without ID. Put in that code and get my pesos cash right out of there. | |
| Go back on the app or the computer, hit finalize. | |
| They get the Monero. Done. | |
| No banks, no governments. It's beautiful. | |
| That is about to come to an end in a week. | |
| Those sorts of things are why the government are afraid, because they don't want people to be able to transact without them knowing about it and without them being able to collect their tax dollars. | |
| And as far as I'm concerned, it's extortion, whether we're talking about crypto or good old cash. | |
| So what does this mean for countries like El Salvador, right? | |
| Because that's the new Max Keiser, Bitcoin maximalist society. | |
| And, you know, look, the guy has turned it around there, at least crime wise. | |
| But at the same time, he is very right wing. | |
| That doesn't necessarily mean what he's done is bad, but he's put Bitcoin into place with that nation state. | |
| Do you think that because of nation states like that, because of the BlackRock and Vanguard investments, the ETFs, that Bitcoin is at least going to be the first attempt at a government-regulated cryptocurrency and then move it into something different for their CBDC or ultimately just adopt it? | |
| I think it's probably going to be the former, which is, you know, right now Bitcoin has obviously been chosen. | |
| They're starting to regulate it. Most of the people who were in the space 10 years ago plus, whenever I was going there, and there was a lot of people like, yeah, let's, you know, keep it out of the government's hand, keep it free. | |
| And there was a few people calling for regulation. | |
| Those people won. They have taken over and they want regulation, they want legitimacy, etc. | |
| So I think Bitcoin is going to be regulated, KYC, no way to buy it without it, you know, without showing ID or facial recognition or something. | |
| And eventually there will be another government token. | |
| But they could choose to use Bitcoin as the first sort of model since so many people have adopted it. | |
| Personally, I don't think that was the plan from the beginning. | |
| I think it has been co-opted. | |
| Just like with anything, people had this really beautiful idea of peer-to-peer digital cash without government involvement. | |
| I think that still exists with Monero and Bitcoin Cash and even Litecoin and other projects. | |
| Maybe places like El Salvador and some other countries will become havens for crypto use, and others like the U.S. are going to be very, very restrictive. | |
| But I think we all know that most of the countries of the world are pushing towards the CBDC, and ultimately if they see crypto as a threat, they'll probably start to try to ban it. | |
| You know, one of the things you mentioned there, though, was in order to transact in crypto, that you'd have to scan your face or basically give up your biometrics. | |
| Where does that leave a coin like WorldCoin by Sam Altman in his universal basic income project? | |
| That is not only giving you the incentive to give up your biometrics so that you can be verified as human as you utilize this token, but then the person that scans those biometrics is also making WorldCoin. | |
| So do you see that kind of as a side project that gains momentum globally and they see what goes with it? | |
| I think WorldCoin is definitely in the running to be one of these New World Order tokens. | |
| You know, it's from good old Sam Altman, Bilderberg attendee. | |
| You know, he's definitely part of this cabal, I would say. | |
| And I don't have good feelings about that. | |
| I do not recommend people go in there to scan it. | |
| And the most messed up thing about it, when you look at the WorldCoin locations, last time I checked, they were focused on India. | |
| There was one point they were here in Mexico. | |
| Other, you know, developing countries, places that do have some poverty, and those are the places they're targeting people who maybe really could use some assistance And getting them to just scan their faces, mostly people probably have very little understanding of privacy in terms of biometrics and your face print. | |
| It's a scary world that we're in, but we've mentioned Bilderberg a couple times. | |
| We've only got a minute left in the broadcast. | |
| It's May. I started looking yesterday. | |
| I just thought to myself, hey, is it out there? | |
| Do you have any beat on where Bilderberg will be this year? | |
| Because they really slipped it under the radar last year. | |
| Where was it? It was in the middle of New York City, wasn't it? | |
| I think so. Yeah, I haven't heard anything specifically about this year, but I will be keeping an eye on it because, I mean, I'm doing research right now, unrelated to the Bilderberg Group, and their name keeps popping up with different attendees. | |
| So you find their influence everywhere. | |
| Yeah, and again, we're in that time period where it could be a couple weeks from now, it could be the middle or the end of June, but they kept it under wraps literally until about 48 to 24 hours before the event last year and made it impossible. | |
| For a guy like me to go cover it. | |
| And I think Max Blumenthal and Frank's analysis were really the only people on the scene to give it the coverage it deserved. | |
| Derek, thank you so much for joining us. |
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