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April 3, 2024 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

01:35:57

DCTV - Mark Jeftovic (aka The Bitcoin Capitalist) on freedom, crypto...

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	Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Welcome to today's episode of Decentralized TV, hosted here on Brighteon.com, the free speech network.
	I'm Mike Adams, and today we have a great guest from BombThrower.com.
	No, it's not about arson or violence.
	It's about crypto.
	And it's Mark Jephtovic, who's going to be joining us here in a second.
	But first, my co-host Todd Pitner joins us.
	Welcome, Todd.
	Hello, Mike.
	How are you?
	I am doing great, Todd.
	It's always fun to do an interview with you.
	We have a great time and we have great guests, including today.
	Yes, we do.
	I'm really looking forward to interviewing the Bitcoin Capitalist.
	Oh, is that his moniker?
	Bitcoin Capitalist?
	On Twitter, yeah.
	He is the Bitcoin Capitalist.
	He's awesome.
	All right.
	Well, he's a man of many talents and skills, has a lot of experience.
	Let's just bring him right on in.
	Welcome, Mark, to the show today.
	It's great to have you on.
	Hi, guys.
	Thanks for having me.
	Absolutely.
	Well, we're honored to have you, and people can see your URL right there, bombthrower.com.
	Let's get that out of the way that it's not about bombs.
	What's bombthrower.com all about?
	You know, it's evolved over the years.
	It started as my personal blog under various different names over the years.
	I rebranded a bunch of times, always contrarian-themed, always sort of against the grain.
	Finally, I was looking for a new domain name for a band, and I came across bombthrower.com and said, this is the perfect name for the blog.
	And so we talk about Bitcoin, we talk about cryptos, we talk about CBDCs.
	And a few more, you know, cancel culture, transhumanism, that sort of thing.
	They all tend to sort of be adjacent to each other.
	I just call it, you know, rapid coverage of a world gone totally cyberpunk.
	Yeah, well, that's interesting that you bring that up, because the whole philosophy of, well, you know, cypherpunk, I would say, is now making a real comeback among mainstream people who don't consider themselves to be punks, like people like Todd and I here.
	We love the cypherpunk philosophy that money should be free and decentralized.
	Yeah, exactly, and it's...
	I always still called it cyberpunk because I remember when I came across this whole idea that computers, this is going way back to college, that computers can actually be...
	I was destined on a track where I was going to work for an insurance company doing COBOL maintenance code on mainframes.
	And then one day...
	You know, my life changed in an instant.
	I was on my way to class, and I stopped in, like, the local occult bookshop just for kicks and picked up this magazine that was Mondo 2000, which was sort of wired before Wired existed and before they got blocked by Conda Nast when it was still cool.
	Yeah, right.
	And there were guys in there that looked like me.
	They were wearing black leather jackets.
	They had hair down to their ass.
	They were, like, wearing earrings and chains, and they were into computers, and there was this thing coming called the Internet, and...
	Everything changed.
	And when I told one of my roommates about it, she said, yeah, that's cyberpunk.
	And I'm like, I want to be a cyberpunk.
	That's changing my trajectory right here and now.
	Wow.
	Wow.
	Very cool.
	Well, Todd, I know you've been digging into some of the videos that Mark has put out there, some of his material.
	What's your first question for Mark today?
	Well, actually, mine was, you know, it's bombthrower.com, blowing up Clown World.
	Yeah, I like that.
	Yeah, you had me at Clown World.
	So my first question is, what is Clown World to you and how are you going about blowing it up, Mark?
	For me, clown world is the most ingenious coping mechanism for this world we live in of perverse incentives, complete backwardations of everything, like morals are backwards, left versus right is inverted, conservative versus liberal is like what they used to stand for seems to be completely inverted now.
	It's upside down.
	Sorry?
	Oh, I said non-violent agreement.
	And then so what happens is, and I succumbed to this for a while, you can become overwhelmed with negativity in a world like this, where the zeitgeist is just completely saturated with this, like, insanity.
	So instead of turning to the negativity and being, like, overwhelmed and bummed out by this, I think clown world was such a compelling Look, it's not depressing, it's comical, right?
	And as long as you understand that it's comical, you can just have fun with it.
	And that's the other thing I like about Bitcoin, not to sort of pivot there so fast, but what I like about Bitcoin is like, I call it a short on clown world.
	So you got this entire clown world, it permeates the entire zeitgeist, everything is stupid, everything is crazy, the incentives are completely backwards.
	How do you short that?
	You buy Bitcoin.
	That's it.
	You're done.
	Interesting.
	Let's talk about...
	Oh, I'm sorry, Todd.
	Just one follow-up on Clown World, because I was thinking about this.
	And, you know, you are the Bitcoin capitalist on Twitter.
	Everybody should go give you a follow.
	And I submit Elon Musk made the idiotic decision to rebrand Twitter as the letter X.
	So now everyone is forced to reference this social media platform as, for example, I'm the Bitcoin capitalist on Twitter.
	I mean X.
	So I guess the platform was actually rebranded Twitter.
	I mean X.
	Is this an example of clown world, Mark?
	It's one of them.
	I mean, actually, Elon gives much better exhibitions of clown worlds, like going back to when he first piled into Bitcoin.
	And then a few weeks later, he was like, oh, wait a minute.
	Bitcoin uses energy?
	Oh, now I'm off of Bitcoin.
	And then he pivoted to Doge, right?
	And then it's like he's back to Bitcoin, and it's just you can't take the guy seriously.
	I never call Twitter X, by the way.
	I just don't.
	I don't call Facebook meta.
	Thank you.
	It's just...
	How did you end up the Bitcoin capitalist?
	Last question there, Mike.
	I won't be too drawn out about it.
	I started as the crypto capitalist because I didn't, you know, I hadn't This last bear cycle sort of separated Bitcoin from crypto in a lot of ways.
	FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, fraud, whatever.
	But I loved the play on words of the crypto capitalist because we live in a world where it's sort of unfashionable to be a capitalist.
	You used to hear a slag would be like, oh, he's a crypto fascist.
	He's a crypto whatever.
	And I thought crypto capitalist is great because you almost have to be secretive about it.
	And then crypto took its own sort of bad connotations over the last cycle.
	So I rebranded as the Bitcoin capitalist because no matter what, I like some of the other projects, but I regard them as projects and maybe like startups.
	But Bitcoin is the base layer of this new decentralized economy we're going into.
	It's the cornerstone.
	It's a category of one.
	That's why I just said, you know what, I'm just going to rebrand as the Bitcoin capitalist.
	Yeah, I think that's inarguable, uh, Bitcoin changed the world.
	It is the base layer, as you said.
	It's not the only coin that's useful.
	However, let me just mention great news.
	Last night, I was talking to...
	Well, we're building a large language model, an AI project, and I have a quality control person in Australia that's just doing some consulting work to help with quality control.
	And...
	She had invoiced us for just a small amount.
	And it's like, this is too small to send a wire and deal with the banking system.
	And then I have to talk to accounting and blah, blah, blah.
	I'm like, by chance, do you accept Monero?
	And she's like, oh yeah, here's my receive address.
	I'm like, Done!
	Got her paid instantly.
	Otherwise, you know, it would have taken forever.
	And of course, we could have done the same with Bitcoin as well.
	But here's the utility of crypto.
	And the reason I mention Monero is because, of course, we're pro-privacy here.
	I don't like everybody snooping into my blockchains, but...
	Crypto is useful in a way that fiat is not.
	And that doesn't even cover the other things.
	But I'd like to know, Mark, about your thoughts on what I just described.
	Here's a real world case.
	It's not just buy and hold and it's going to go higher.
	It's like, hey, we're using this to engage in commerce and it works and it's faster and it has greater utility.
	What are your thoughts?
	Oh, absolutely.
	I mean, I built almost my entire stack of Bitcoin by just taking it as a payment method at my main business.
	We talked a bit before we started rolling.
	I run a web services domain company called EasyDNS.
	We were the first domain registrar to accept Bitcoin back in 2013.
	Is that right?
	Yeah.
	Wow.
	You know, we just stacked it.
	And so every time, like when Paul Krugman says there's no use case for Bitcoin or Nassim Taleb says, oh, you can't use it in everyday commerce.
	I'm like, well, tell me that because we've been doing that since 2013.
	It's never slowed down.
	It's never, you know, it's been steady the entire time, just increasing in transaction velocity ever since.
	Yeah.
	To your point, I mean, I've got a kid I just hired for one of my projects.
	He's a programmer in Nigeria.
	And when we're doing the first meetup phase on Zoom, I'm like, you know, I have a hard time paying people overseas sometimes.
	And I'm like, how do you want to get paid?
	Do you take crypto?
	And his eyes just lit up.
	Yeah.
	He sent me his first invoice, and he said, can you pay me in stablecoin, either Tether or Circle?
	And he sent me an invoice.
	He said, yeah, it's on Polygon.
	I mean, this is how...
	And he just talks about it as if it was PayPal.
	And we see this countries outside of North America, like people are surprised to see that if you look at the top 10 countries of Bitcoin and crypto adaptation, like Canada is not even in the top 10.
	And I'm Canadian.
	U.S. is, I think.
	I can't remember what place.
	But the top countries are like Vietnam, Nigeria, like countries like Turkey.
	You know, that's where the population really gets it, because for one, they're in this slow motion hyperinflation for 20 years in the case of like Turkey or Argentina.
	That's right.
	And people just have already started to make it part of their everyday lives.
	So it's nothing exotic.
	It's just, you know, they kind of look at us North Americans saying, oh, it's weird.
	It has no use case.
	How do you even use this stuff?
	And they kind of think we're behind the curve, I think.
	Well, I've said to my own audience, I've said, if you think Bitcoin is high now, wait till the dollar starts having accelerated hyperinflation and people are looking for a safe haven.
	And, you know, look, I don't make price predictions of where crypto could go.
	I don't encourage price speculation.
	But the intrinsic value, one of the things I want to talk with you about, and Todd, I wanted you to chime in as well, is that, you know, currencies rise and fall.
	And they have throughout civilization, every fiat currency has either already failed or is on a track to failure because no government can escape the seduction of printing free money.
	No government can escape that.
	They all do it, and they will all do it to oblivion.
	Bitcoin, you can't do that.
	Bitcoin is non-counterfeitable, if that's the right term.
	And also, it's mostly non-confiscatable if you have good practices with your wallets and so on.
	But I'm thinking, maybe for the first time in history, Mark, that as the current currencies fail, like the euro is going to fail, the yen is going to fail, the dollar is going to fail.
	For the first time, we have a viable alternative instead of just, oh, let's just have another new government currency that's going to go broke in another couple generations.
	Isn't that an amazing pivot point for history?
	It's absolutely amazing.
	When you look at monetary history, fiat currency is kind of the aberration, not the norm.
	Well, just for a minute, let's talk gold, right?
	So gold, when it became sort of like the de facto monetary backing for currencies worldwide, that wasn't done by a bunch of government experts and convening a panel of bureaucrats to say, let's decide on gold as the backing for the that wasn't done by a bunch of government experts and convening That kind of happened by market forces.
	It just sort of selected itself by market participants.
	And the best book that describes that process is a book called Gold Wars by Ferdinand Lipps.
	He passed away many years ago, but it's a classic and a lot of Bitcoiners have read it.
	So let's fast forward a bit.
	There was this period in the early aughts where people tried to digitize gold.
	With eGold and eBullion and Pecunix and things like that.
	And I was involved in that in the early days because I thought it showed potential.
	It didn't.
	It was too centralized.
	It failed.
	So you fast forward to today.
	Now you've got this Bitcoin, digital gold, truly decentralized.
	And at the same time, we have all of the fiat currencies in the world devaluing themselves.
	Right.
	What happens during every hyperinflation?
	So there is a big turning point in my mind in the way I looked at Bitcoin.
	I knew it was going to be important.
	I knew it was going to change the world from the moment I looked at it, just like when I saw the Internet for the first time.
	Every hyperinflation has what's called a notegelt.
	It's a German phrase.
	It came into being during the Weimar hyperinflation, and it loosely translates into emergency money.
	So every hyperinflation has an emergency money.
	In Weimar, Germany, individual towns started printing their own script.
	In the Zimbabwe hyperinflation, it was prepaid phone cards and gas cards from adjacent countries.
	And I thought Bitcoin was going to be this global Notgeld worldwide as each of these fiat currencies are devaluing themselves into nothingness that Bitcoin was this global emergency money that people were going to run to.
	And that is the case and that's happening.
	But I originally, up until two years ago, thought that's as far as Bitcoin was ever going to go.
	I thought there's never going to be a Bitcoin standard.
	It's not going to be like hyper Bitcoinization is not going to happen.
	It's certainly not going to be a world reserve currency.
	Like I thought none of that is on the table.
	And all that changed in 2022 when, you know, here in Canada, the government declared martial law and started seizing bank accounts.
	Yep.
	Justin Trudeau has become a Bitcoin proponent because of that.
	And the same year, the United States froze the foreign treasury holdings of two other sovereign countries.
	It doesn't matter that those countries are run by thugs.
	The point is, the first event changed the calculus of the individual, how they think about possession of their own wealth.
	And the second event changed the calculus of sovereign nations, how they think about how they hold their foreign exchange assets.
	That's right.
	So that, to me, sort of flicked the switch in my head, and I thought, Hyper-Bitcoinization is now inevitable.
	This is baked in now because you need a money of enemies, so to speak.
	You need a counterparty-free bearer asset that nobody can confiscate from each other because enemies still have to trade with each other.
	in this day and age, in this interconnected world, we still, you know, Europe is still buying gas from Russia, right, and you know, all of this is still happening and countries can't trust each other with seizable foreign assets, so. - Yep, Mark, I love what you said, I'm all of this is still happening and countries can't trust each other with seizable foreign assets, so. - Yep, Mark, I love what you said, I'm gonna turn it over to Todd You said it's a counter party free bearer asset.
	That is absolutely critical.
	If people really understand what you just said, every other form of money, including dollars, has the counterparty risk, bank risk, treasury risk, currency devaluation risk, but also it's a bearer asset.
	You hold it.
	I mean, you better hold it.
	You better not leave it on exchange.
	You hold it.
	You control it.
	You present it.
	Boom.
	You're in control.
	And it's not somebody else's liability.
	Like, your deposits in the bank are a bank liability.
	That's right.
	All right, Todd.
	You're up.
	All right.
	I love this discussion, though.
	I do, too.
	You're not going to be able to shut me up.
	Okay.
	Well, you might say the same about me with this question because I need to set the table a little bit.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	Did a little research.
	And so forgive me in advance, Mark.
	In October of 2021, you wrote an article called, If the Beast is CCP-style social credit, then the answer is Bitcoin.
	And in this article, you asserted that Bitcoin is resistance to financial tyranny, which is great.
	Enter the company Chainalysis, which generates close to $25 million a year in revenues by offering blockchain analysis services to various clients.
	Wait, only $25 million?
	It may be more than that.
	Oh, okay.
	Maybe I have it way under.
	But it's a ton of money.
	Okay.
	Quick research said $25 million.
	But their clients include law enforcement agencies, government institutions such as the IRS, financial institutions, and cryptocurrency exchanges.
	So Bitcoin is a public ledger and transactions are transparent to chain analysis.
	As a matter of fact, the lion's share of their revenues come from analyzing Bitcoin.
	So, you know, they make their living analyzing Bitcoin and selling the information to third parties such as China.
	So since we can't move value privately with Bitcoin, how is it the answer to CCP style social credit, Mark?
	Yeah, I mean, to me, I call...
	I'll set the table a little bit as well, okay?
	Okay, sure.
	We talked about how fiat currencies are all sort of devaluing themselves to zero, and that's sort of...
	Inevitable whenever they've been tried throughout history.
	Where I think this is headed is that CBDCs are going to be seen by governments and central banks as the Hail Mary play to sort of extend the runway on these fiat currencies for a few more decades.
	So there's this natural impetus towards CBDCs that make them somewhat inevitable.
	Practically every central bank is working on them.
	The BIS did a survey, and I think they came up with 120 out of 140 central banks in the world already have projects on the go, if only research stage at this point.
	And it's not conspiracy.
	Like, I'm actually working on a book on CBDCs right now, should be out this year, and I kind of write in it, like, everything that's going to happen under CBDCs, this isn't conspiracy.
	Like, this isn't This comes right out of central bank white papers and Bank of International Settlement papers and all of this stuff.
	They just say it in plain English what's going to happen, expiry dates on cash and programmability and negative interest rates, at least the capabilities for us.
	You don't need a shadowy cabal of people who rule the world to declare that CBDCs are coming in order for them to be inevitable because the dynamics of what's happening to fiat currencies make them inevitable.
	They have to do something, and governments aren't going to just lie down and say, okay, we need to go to a gold standard or a Bitcoin standard.
	It's just simply that will happen when they are forced to do it.
	Right.
	So in the meantime, we have these CBDCs, all right?
	And that's going to come in.
	And what I always say about them is they're either going to launch as or morph into, like just inexorably over time, social credit programs.
	And there's a whole, I mean, we'll probably talk about that and we probably will about, you know, net zero and degrowth and all of that stuff and how CBDCs are going to be the perfect way to sort of manage that.
	But now we get to Bitcoin, right?
	What's the antidote to this?
	CBDCs will not even be money in even the loosest definition of the word because we talked about how Bitcoin has no counterparty in CBDCs.
	It's not even a thing.
	It's not even a currency.
	It's more like a score, right?
	It's more like just a number that'll be on your phone that goes down every time you do anything.
	Treasury credits.
	You have digital treasury credits.
	Yeah, and you're not going to be able to have custody over your private keys.
	There won't even be private keys.
	So you won't have self-custody.
	You won't have capital mobility.
	You won't have the ability to spend it on whatever you want whenever you want.
	Where as Bitcoin and Monero and pretty well a lot of the other cryptos have all of that baked in, nothing to the extent that Bitcoin does.
	And can I interject, Mark?
	I apologize.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	The way the West has used economic sanctions...
	Through the SWIFT system internationally, they will do the same thing at a micro level with CBDCs domestically.
	You can be individually sanctioned so that you will not be able to buy anything from a sporting goods store because you might buy 9mm rounds.
	Individual sanctions are coming.
	Yeah, individual carbon footprints, individual carbon quotas, individual, you know, nudge units that are just sort of like nudging, oh, we want you to eat less meat, so we're going to just sort of like nudge you in this direction.
	And the way to avoid all that The way you get captured by all that, the way you get ensnared by it is to be economically dependent on the state.
	If you have no independent means of wealth or income, if you work for somebody else and that's all you do, or you're on a government entitlement program, especially the latter, if you're on any kind of government entitlement program and you need that to make ends meet, You're out of luck when all this comes in.
	You'll be controlled or cut off.
	Exactly.
	And what I tell people is, without trying to sound too glib about it, is don't be dependent on the state.
	If you have a job, start a business on the side.
	Even if it's a kitchen table business or you learn affiliate marketing or something, just start something on the side that you have at least a pathway that you can ramp it If you're already a business owner, invest or buy or start another business and just get as many multiple streams of income coming in, have asset diversity.
	I'm getting a second passport for my daughter and I. You have to really think about plan B's and what I always say the precious commodity is in this era we're going into is optionality.
	Bitcoin gives you options.
	It gives you a pathway to options and optionality and the people who will have their lives completely gamified in their phones and controlled by it will be those who have no options.
	And so...
	That's how I call it.
	Monetary apartheid is where we're headed.
	But to Todd's point, the surveillance capabilities over the Bitcoin blockchain, that does provide government opportunities to surveil people's blockchain activity if they're not careful about how they use it, right?
	Yeah, I didn't speak to that one.
	Sorry.
	So, as we all know, it's a double-edged sword, Bitcoin completely transparent network, and that's not a bad thing, I think, net-net.
	I'll come back to the main point, but when hysterical shrews like Liz Warren come out with their anti-crypto army saying crypto is being used by money launderers and Hamas and things like that, Chainalysis was actually one of the voices that said, you know what, when you look at the blockchain, that's really not the case.
	When you look at the blockchain, the actual usage of the US dollar is still 97% of all illicit activity, very low level on Bitcoin.
	So in that sense, it actually...
	I mean, I'm not in Bitcoin so that I can break moral laws with impunity to steal or whatever.
	I'm in Bitcoin because I want self-sovereignty.
	So what I tell a lot of people about it is like, yeah...
	Everything's on the blockchain.
	Everything is transparent.
	You can trace things through.
	But there's nothing anybody can do about it.
	So the government may know that I said...
	Yeah, but they can.
	They can.
	I mean, the truckers out there who were donating, they had consequences.
	And I'll tell you...
	Let's talk about it.
	Finish your point.
	We'll get back to it.
	I'll just say the thing that drives me a bit mad about Bitcoin...
	Is not Bitcoin.
	I think Bitcoin is beautiful.
	I mean, it's a limited supply of 21 million.
	It's decentralized.
	It has, what, clear monetary policy.
	It's open.
	It's permissionless.
	It's unconfiscatable.
	It's fungible.
	Everything that we love.
	That, by the way, CBDCs are the exact opposite, everybody who's watching and paying attention.
	You know, you need to think about unlimited supply, centralized supply.
	Opaque monetary policy.
	It's closed and permissioned.
	There's always risk of seizure, and it's privacy invasive.
	So, you know, but what happens is I find that Bitcoin, there's a certain segment of what I will call the maximalists, that if it's not Bitcoin, it's a shitcoin.
	And they literally just wield all kinds of ad-hom attacks at anything that is not a Bitcoin.
	And I know back in that 2021 article, Mark, you also wrote, honest money enables the exchange of value.
	And without honest money, we are left with force and coercion.
	And I agree with that 100%.
	But to have honest money absent force and coercion, don't we also have to be able to exchange value privately, Mark?
	Let me add, before you answer that, Mark.
	I think you'll find this valuable, Todd.
	What concerns me, and I think Todd as well, is how governments can pressure the centralized exchanges.
	And that's what happened in Canada.
	So they blocked certain Bitcoin wallet addresses in Canada.
	Now, of course, you can go outside of Canada.
	You can use VPNs.
	There's all kinds of ways to get around that.
	But because these centralized exchanges, they're now getting all kinds of pressure to drop Monero, for example, like Binance just did.
	The exchanges, it goes against the whole cyberpunk attitude of decentralization.
	And the exchanges can be leaned on by nefarious governments.
	And because of that, because most Bitcoin people, well, I don't know if it's most, but a lot, they don't take self-ownership.
	They leave it on the exchange, and they rely on the exchanges, and those exchanges can be heavily censored and controlled by governments.
	But I want to interject that before you respond, Mark.
	Don't let me forget that, okay?
	Okay.
	We're going to have a stack.
	Yeah.
	I want to circle back to the Freedom Convoy, okay?
	Yeah.
	And maybe you should get Ben Dichter on the show sometime because he was, of course, neck deep in it.
	He was one of the leaders of it, and he was intimately involved in the Bitcoin aspect of it.
	So in the Freedom Convoy...
	The government seized bank accounts, and the government seized the GoFundMes and the GiveSendGo's, and then they also doxed everyone who donated via GiveSendGo because they obtained the spreadsheet through a hacker, and then they doxed everyone with it.
	The Bitcoin, of all the funds raised, only the Bitcoin got through to the truckers.
	That was it.
	None of the other money got through.
	Again, Ben can tell you a lot more about what happened with all the rest of the money.
	It's a story not a lot of people have heard.
	Yeah, the government came out and they froze a bunch of addresses, but what did that mean?
	None of that Bitcoin was seized.
	None of those addresses were seized because they can't seize it.
	None of the Bitcoin was inside a centralized exchange and nobody needs any centralized exchange to move Bitcoin around the network.
	That was really kind of more performative than anything else.
	And, you know, with the complicity of the Canadian media, which are, like, it's more agit-prop than anything else, they sort of bombarded the public with this message of, like, oh, the government froze these Bitcoin wallets.
	Nothing like that happened.
	But didn't they identify the woman that sent it and they froze her actual bank account?
	So she was considered a terrorist?
	And that's...
	I don't know about a specific case of someone sending Bitcoin and having their...
	$50.
	$50 of Bitcoin.
	Yeah, $50 of Bitcoin.
	You're saying they tracked her identity from the Bitcoin wallet back to the exchange where she did KYC and then they froze her fiat bank accounts?
	Yes.
	Is that what you're saying, Todd?
	Yeah.
	I had not heard that before.
	I considered her a terrorist.
	Yeah, I haven't heard that one.
	I've heard of people who sent $50 through the banking system or GiveSendGo who had their bank accounts seized.
	I sent a lot more than $50 from my own name in Bitcoin, and I never heard anything about it, and my bank accounts are fine.
	Yeah.
	So I don't know about that case.
	I'm not disputing it.
	I'm just saying I don't know about that one.
	And Mark, don't get me wrong.
	I'm not hammering Bitcoin.
	My message is I believe that we...
	It is our human right.
	The name of this show is Decentralized TV. We're building the infrastructure of human freedom.
	I believe we should be able to exchange value privately.
	So, when I hear the BT maximalists say, if it's not Bitcoin, it's a shitcoin, well, you can't move Bitcoin privately.
	So, that kind of goes against this very deep...
	Feeling I have a freedom.
	And so my message is Monero, Fero, Epic Cash, and other privacy coins, they enable us to actually move value privately.
	And isn't it time that we give privacy coins a day in the sun if we're serious about fighting against the quote-unquote beast?
	I self-describe myself as a maximalist a lot of the time.
	However, I guess it's not a good label because I agree with you that there are points to a lot of other projects.
	And actually, I have Monero myself, right?
	Like, I hold Monero.
	There's some other projects like Zero Knowledge Networks that runs on Ethereum, which is a privacy project.
	And there's actually a few of them.
	There's a zero X zero and like they're just exploding because it's a market need right now and they're becoming larger and larger market caps, these projects.
	And so whether Bitcoin maxis say, you know, everything else that exists is a shit coin or not is kind of irrelevant because, you know, again, there is this need there.
	There is this desire for market participants at least some of the time to exchange value privately and completely anonymously, so that's never going to stop.
	The exchanges, right?
	So maybe the exchanges are going to stop I just thought of another thing I wanted to say before I got to this, but one at a time, I suppose.
	I tell my readers a lot of times that going forward...
	We expect the exchanges to become kind of, I call them checkpoint Charlie, right?
	Exchanges, the centralized exchanges are where taxation and control are the ingress and egress points into and out of fiat world to the crypto world is going to happen in the centralized exchanges.
	That's just going to be a reality.
	That's just the way it is.
	And you adjust accordingly.
	One, I think my theory for years, which I believe is being borne out, is that much of the crypto going exiting fiat world and going into crypto world is on a one way street.
	OK, I agree with you.
	I agree with you.
	It's never coming back out.
	Yep.
	So you have to get through Checkpoint, Charlie, and for God's sakes, don't leave it on the exchange, right?
	There you go.
	And you move through, you move past that point, and you're home free, right?
	Well, Mark, I'm a perfect example of that.
	I have only bought crypto with fiat, and I've swapped crypto for crypto, and I've used crypto, and I've received Ascent crypto.
	I've never sold crypto for fiat, not once, and I never will.
	I mean, my hope is to use it in the new economic system of the crypto world.
	I'm holding crypto as a store of value for future products and services that I can acquire with crypto.
	I'm never going back into the dollar with those assets.
	And so the exchanges only matter to me one time, which is exactly what you were saying.
	It's just one time, okay, I went through KYC. Yes, the government knows that I spent X number of dollars into some kind of crypto.
	And then from that point on, they have no freaking clue what happened.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I just said Mike had a boat wreck.
	Lost my passphrase or seed phrase.
	Boat accident.
	And then the other way is you earn crypto.
	You earn it in your services.
	You build up multiple streams of crypto income.
	If you own a business, you accept it as a payment method.
	Now, I accept, you know, EasyDNS has been accepting it as a payment method for, you know, since 2013.
	We don't use it as a tax evasion device.
	I mean, it's like right there on our balance sheet.
	We like, you know, our accountants know about it.
	And it's like, here it is.
	Here's the value that was, you know, and they account for it.
	It's tracked the capital gains and all that stuff.
	We don't convert it into fiat.
	We did once.
	And we paid our taxes on it at the time.
	So, you know, we just do it all above board the few times you're going to convert the other way.
	But for the most part, you just earn it and stack it.
	Yeah, exactly right.
	But I would think that over time, because the centralized exchanges have been under, of course, increasing pressure by governments, as governments are increasingly waging war against crypto to try to suppress the competition of what they're coming out with, which is the CBDCs.
	So...
	The business model of the Binances of the world seems ultimately really either they're going to have to become puppets of the governments We're good to
	go.
	Who knows what new requirements governments might, way beyond KYC, like limits of how much you can send and receive.
	That already exists.
	Well, that's true.
	Yeah, you're right.
	But I believe...
	Pretty strongly still to this day in the sovereign individual thesis where there will become a more competitive marketplace among sovereigns or perhaps even micro-sovereigns that sort of see the light and say, okay, you know what?
	Running a system this oppressively is self-defeating and ultimately forces the most productive people outside of our jurisdiction.
	And those productive people get attracted to jurisdictions where that is less the case.
	To your point, I've been asking how soon can I buy BRICS crypto from the BRICS nations?
	Because they're saying they're going to roll out a blockchain-based international settlement system.
	But they're probably not going to be like libertarian paradises either, right?
	I'm thinking more places like El Salvador's or Argentina's or wherever.
	But getting back to the centralized exchanges like in the US or Canada, you know, I think Coinbase will eventually be the only legal crypto exchange in America.
	They have this, they do a respectable job Yeah.
	Right.
	And I own shares in Coinbase and I tell, you know, it's almost sort of like this is part of this part of the plumbing.
	Crypto is not going away.
	Coinbase is going to be part of the plumbing.
	You might as well own a piece of it.
	But I would argue that Coinbase, I mean, I agree with your assessment, but Coinbase ultimately just functions as a surveillance front for the tax authorities, right?
	So Coinbase reports everything to the government.
	Otherwise, they would not be allowed to exist in the same way that Google does or Facebook or YouTube.
	So it's just a surveillance net.
	By the way, even Elon Musk on Twitter, part of his business model is selling every data, everything that you tweet, selling it to companies that market to the NSA and the CIA and who knows who, right?
	So these corporations are only allowed to exist because they spy on their users.
	Yeah.
	And those corporations exist on, like I said, the border between the fiat and the crypto systems.
	And in a world that's becoming far more decentralized, we're going to see more of these decentralized, like DEXs, decentralized exchanges.
	And you probably see less fiat rails in those decentralized worlds.
	And that's why I tell people, it's like, you know, there's a bit of a window of opportunity here that you still have convertibility Right.
	There may come a time, I don't know, when everything you have in crypto is all you're ever going to have in crypto and everything else is in fiat forever.
	Yeah, true.
	That could happen.
	The great chasm.
	I like how you said that anybody out there can just advertise that they're accepting crypto for their own goods and services and they can Slowly gain a trickle of crypto.
	You know, we interviewed some people early on in the show here, Todd.
	Remember how difficult it was to get Bitcoin or Monero without going through KYC? Oh, yeah.
	Remember that?
	Like, mail people cash.
	And then when they get the cash, they'll deposit the Bitcoin.
	And I'm like, really?
	I'm not sure I want to mail cash.
	I know.
	But go ahead, Todd.
	I think that the cypherpunks of today are the ones who are focused on mastering the art of decentralized exchanges.
	And I'm not there yet, but I am determined to get there.
	And because, you know...
	I just think that it's going to be impossible at some point in time to be able to onboard fiat to get into crypto.
	And if you're already into crypto, good luck being able to...
	Keep it private.
	But these decentralized exchanges, I believe that there's hope.
	And these swap services, and, you know, Mike, we interviewed Dr.
	Kapp with Basic Swap Dex, and that's pretty exciting.
	Yeah.
	But what do you think about centralized versus decentralized exchanges, Mark?
	Well, yeah, I think, actually, Never mind exchanges.
	Centralized versus decentralized is the defining tension of the age that we're heading into.
	It's everything.
	I think this transcends left versus right politics.
	It's either you want the government to tell everyone what to do, you want more centralization, or you want to be left alone to do your own thing.
	That's decentralization.
	That's sort of like the polls or the spectrum today.
	There was one thing I remembered what that one point was earlier on that I wanted to mention is that these anonymity tools and these privacy protocols, they're also happening on Bitcoin as well.
	I mean, there's Monero and there's, like I said, some of those other projects that I mentioned, but there's coin joins on Bitcoin.
	There's things like Fediment and Taproot that are enabling tokenization and swapping and things like that.
	And everyone is starting to build.
	Things that you normally used to see on Ethereum or other protocols, and they're starting to say, how do we build this onto Bitcoin?
	Because it is a category of one.
	Every reason to believe that these kinds of tools and protocols are going to continue to develop and be refined and become more sophisticated on Bitcoin as well and everywhere else.
	That's great news, and I've taken a deep dive into that as well.
	I've used Sparrow and Whirlpool and CoinJoin and tried all these different things as well.
	And it kind of leads me to my bigger question, which is how do we make...
	How does the community of Bitcoin or Monero...
	How does it make it easier for non-techie people?
	And I actually have the same question about CBDCs.
	Every time I hear government officials talking about, oh, we're going to roll out CBDCs, I'm thinking, well, how would my grandma ever use that?
	It's impossible.
	Or the other day, all credit cards failed in the Northeast, and grocery stores were cash-only, and gas stations were cash-only because the whole system went down.
	But there's a lot of people in society that don't even have mobile phones.
	They're not technical.
	They don't know what a password is.
	They're not going to be able to use it, Mark.
	How does this chasm get crossed even just for Bitcoin?
	So on the Bitcoin side, I've been saying for a long time, it's got a long way to go on the UX side of things.
	I mean, even, like, I've been in this for a long time, and, you know, the other few weeks ago, I actually moved custody on some of my Bitcoin, and I was, like, terrified through the whole process.
	Right?
	You know, and you do all the safety procedures and stuff, and you're still white-knuckling it I mean, sending a Lightning payment now, it's easy peasy.
	It's just like it's easier than using Apple Pay.
	So that's already kind of happening on the Bitcoin side.
	But I tell people, look...
	At the end of the day, people want PayPal.
	They want it that simple.
	So how do you do that in Bitcoin?
	And it's not as simple to do it in Bitcoin because you really want to ingrain those principles.
	You don't want to leave your crypto on a centralized exchange.
	You want to have personal control over your seed phrase and stuff.
	And some of that is hard to dumb down.
	So this is a challenge.
	On the CBDC side, I really think that Governments are basically going to go with the fishing net model.
	Like, okay, we're going to get 60% of the population that has smartphones and no other means of supporting themselves in this system, and we're going to sort of work with that.
	And the people who don't have smartphones, they're going to have problems.
	I mean...
	The name eludes me.
	It's the public system in India, right, that you get assigned the number.
	It's not a CBDC. It's been around longer than CBDCs, but people look at it like a prototype of CBDCs.
	The caste system?
	No, no.
	It's like a social insurance number.
	I have a chapter on it in the book.
	But there are documented cases of children who can't go to school because their family doesn't have that number.
	There's a documented case of someone who starved to death because they couldn't receive their food rations because they didn't have that number.
	Is it going to get that Hunger Games-like here in the West?
	I hope not.
	But I don't think that bureaucrats and technocrats are going to lose a lot of sleep over people who don't have smartphones.
	You're probably right.
	Yeah, just look through the cracks and the system will just say, goodbye, you know, you're being replaced anyway.
	You're going to be in a tent city or whatever, you know?
	Yep, yep, exactly.
	All right, well, I can't believe that it's almost been an hour.
	I just looked at the clock and I'm like, no way.
	I know.
	This is a fascinating conversation.
	Mark, I want to give you an opportunity to tell us about EasyDNS.
	That's your company.
	Yeah, sure.
	I mean, yeah, started it in 98 with a couple of partners, bought them out in 2005.
	We were like a pure play DNS provider.
	Then we became ICANN accredited.
	So we do domain names and like, you know, a thousand different TLDs.
	And then we added web hosting, VPS hosting, email, and that's our main gig.
	And we've been taking Bitcoin and Ethereum and Doge, believe it or not, since 2013.
	Wow.
	Okay, and EasyDNS is your philosophy.
	I mean, are your servers in multiple locations?
	Do you have high redundancy?
	Do you have high resistance to censorship?
	Or what's sort of your profile?
	Yeah, I mean, we've done a lot of work over the years of being like pro-free speech against cancel culture.
	Our main data center is right here in Canada.
	Because we're a DNS company, our name servers are all over the world.
	I don't know how many name servers we have at the moment, but we are pretty rigid.
	We require a court order to divulge information and things like that, and we don't just do takedowns because someone yells at us that someone's a mean person, so we don't do anything like that.
	And, yeah, so we've got a pretty good track record for standing up to, you know, authorities as diverse as the City of London intellectual.
	The City of London, UK, has their own police division and their intellectual property unit once tried to get us to take down a bunch of BitTorrent domains.
	Really?
	Long story, we won that case.
	The U.S. FDA, we got into a little thing with them.
	And we, long story, so I don't want to take up too much time, but then they sort of sent us this spreadsheet full of, you know, we want you to take down these domains, and we politely told them no.
	And so, you know, we've had a few turns in the ring, you know, standing up.
	The FDA asked you to take down domains?
	Yeah, I mean, there was one we did take down because airmail chemist was on our system back in the day.
	We didn't even know they were on our system.
	And someone overdosed, right?
	They ordered something off of airmail chemist.
	And so we were contacted by the FDA. We went back and forth with them.
	They're actually pretty cool about it.
	And we sort of said, okay, this is what we'll do.
	We will put in a set of rules for online pharmacies that they have to be accredited by one of these three independent online pharmacy accreditation entities.
	And if you're not accredited by one of those three entities, and we actually had copious interviews and meetings with those three entities to make sure, you know, what are your accreditation procedures.
	So then we said, OK, we're going to put in this new policy for online pharmacies.
	And then after that happened, the FDA said, well, now that you've got this new policy, here's a spreadsheet of the following domains that you have to take down.
	We looked at it, and some of them were Canadian domains that were licensed by Health Canada.
	And we said, look, these are Canadian domains licensed by Health Canada.
	We are not taking these down.
	And so we did it.
	Wow.
	So I've been dying to ask somebody this question, somebody who knows this, but...
	We have this talk of the internet kill switch.
	I've talked about it.
	And my understanding was that the easiest way for governments to try to take down any web domains would be to go after the name servers, the NS nodes.
	How effective would that even be?
	A hundred percent.
	It's like turning off a switch.
	You take out the name servers and the domain disappears from the Internet.
	That's what happened to WikiLeaks back in 2010.
	We got embroiled in that situation, too, when their DNS provider cut them off.
	You can either go to the DNS provider, cut off the name servers completely.
	You can go to the registrar, which is sometimes the same entity, sometimes a different entity.
	And you can have the registrar yank the domain from the zone, which has the same effect as pulling the name servers.
	And so what happens sometimes, you're going to love this one.
	You can leapfrog us or whoever the DNS provider is or even whoever the registrar is.
	Again, sometimes we're both.
	You can go to the registry operator and you can get them to yank the domain.
	And this has happened to us.
	Once or twice over the years, we get an email from Verisign who runs.com, right?
	So we'd have a customer that's got a.com name.
	We're the registrar or the DNS provider or both.
	And we get an email from Verisign that says, the following domain has been removed from your account and suspended pursuant to a sealed warrant.
	Have a nice day.
	And it's like, okay, well, like, okay, we're done.
	It's over.
	There's nothing we can do.
	The two times that that's happened, it wasn't really like, it wasn't like a high profile, like natural news or zero hedge.
	It wasn't anything like that.
	If it was, we would like, you know, do what we can to appeal that.
	It just, it looked like, you know, something like a, like some kind of pharmacy that not only was selling generic drugs, but like, you know, I know the State Department has taken down websites for selling anything from counterfeit Gucci bags to illegal silencers, suppressors for firearms.
	But my concern is, and thank you Todd for just hearing this, and I know this is not why we had you on here, Mark, but Europe is passing a lot of censorship laws.
	More U.S. states, and Canada, exactly, where they're saying that if you disagree with, it could be transgenderism, it could be Israel, it could be the war, Ukraine, I mean, pick your topic.
	If you disagree with any of those things, then you are engaged in hate speech, and that is being criminalized to the point where police, I think it's in Ireland, they're going to start arresting comedians.
	Who make jokes about this.
	So couldn't that bleed over into a lot of takedown requests based on these hate speech laws?
	Yeah, absolutely, 100%.
	Bill C-63 in Canada, the Online Harms Act, actually has a provision in it where you can be placed under house arrest or forced to wear an ankle bracelet if you haven't committed a crime yet.
	If someone thinks you might commit a hate speech crime in the future, You can be placed under house arrest or have an ankle bracelet on.
	And some people on my team, I'd be lying if I wasn't worried myself, but some people on my team are like, this could get really bad.
	Should we even think about redomiciling the company?
	I'm not there.
	I don't think we're going to get there, and I'm of the mind of, we'll fight it, right?
	We get a bad takedown request, and we're just going to say no, and we're going to spin up the lawyers, and we will fight it.
	Mark, you just need to make ankle bracelets great again.
	That's it.
	Yeah.
	The trend is worsening.
	We're seeing an acceleration of tyranny against the freedom to express dissent against any narrative.
	Well, I've been wrong about this for so long.
	I'm going to go out on a limb and be wrong again, possibly, and say, I think this is the top, right?
	Like, I really think...
	I've researched history a lot, and I think there are these hinge moments in time when it appears like the powers that be are insurmountable and just consolidating their power are actually when they are the most fragile and ready to implode and disintegrate.
	And I think we are in one of those moments right now in history.
	I think that the reason The reason these governments are pushing this so hard is because they're afraid.
	They're scared because they see the ground shifting beneath them, and that ground is shifting to the decentralized revolution.
	And so they know that the nation state as we understand it today is not even going to exist in a few generations.
	And there's no avoiding that, but they're trying to avoid it.
	And so, I mean, that's one of the things I say about CBDCs.
	The big wild card on the rollout of CBDCs is the global financial system may not hold together long enough for them to be deployed.
	That's right.
	Amen.
	You are exactly right.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Well, speech is being decentralized through a lot of apps like Bastion that we interviewed, the founder, does not require domain name resolution because it's peer-to-peer IP traffic, right?
	Simplex as well, yeah.
	And so Noster and things like that.
	Exactly.
	And so...
	You're going to have more decentralized speech, decentralized video platforms, and then also, like through our AI project at Brighteon AI and other similar open source AI projects, decentralized knowledge.
	So people don't have to go to a centralized search engine like Google to ask questions and get good answers.
	They can do it locally in a decentralized manner.
	So Bitcoin goes right along with that.
	I mean, I want to live in a world where I'm using decentralized money, knowledge, Healthcare, i.e.
	extracting medicine from herbs in my back forest.
	That's why we launched the show, because we want to live lives of decentralized almost everything, except maybe national border defense.
	Hey, I want my doorbell to be decentralized.
	I don't want it to go into Amazon's cloud.
	I got a certain box on the shelf up there.
	I want it to go there, not to Amazon.
	Decentralize all the things.
	I want to have open source decentralized humanoid robots because I don't want, you know, because robots are coming, right?
	I don't want robots that are talking to the cloud and it becomes that movie iRobot with Will Smith where there's like a virus and all the robots turn bad or on purpose accidentally turn bad and start killing everybody.
	I want a local robot that is not connected to Jack, right?
	Yeah.
	I can pull the plug if I have to.
	You know what I mean?
	Yeah, I want my own cloud, not big techs.
	That's right.
	Mike, just stick with Rhodey.
	You got everything you need.
	I know.
	He's pretty cool.
	And he's sleeping right now, which is good.
	We should not disturb him at the moment.
	I'm sorry I've kept you a little bit long, Mark.
	I don't mind.
	This has been fascinating.
	Todd, any last question for our guest today?
	Yeah, Mark, clown world turned inversion into a sport.
	And I, for one, am really grateful that you are intent on blowing it up.
	So thank you for your service, sir.
	Well, thanks for having me on.
	It's an honor and a privilege.
	Well, we've had a great time speaking with you.
	Love to have you back.
	The website, folks, is bombthrower.com, or you can go to easydns.com.
	Let me see if I have that brought up.
	Yeah, here it is.
	Easydns.com for your domain name hosting and web hosting.
	People are always asking me, where can I go to get my website hosted?
	I'm like, I don't know.
	We host our own stuff, so I really don't know.
	I'll recommend you from now on, Mark.
	I mean, host your own stuff.
	You still have to get your domain someplace, so we're happy to do that, too.
	Exactly.
	All right, well, Mark, thank you so much for spending time with us today.
	We really love your philosophy, and stay strong there in Canada.
	Justin Castro Trudeau, that guy has done more damage to your country than any one person in history.
	This too shall pass, and it'll pass with a vengeance, but yeah.
	Man.
	Yeah, the Canadian people are strong and resilient, so yeah, you will overcome the damage that he has done.
	But thank you for joining us today.
	It's been a pleasure.
	Thanks.
	Nice to meet you both.
	Take care.
	You too.
	Take care.
	Thanks, Mark.
	All right, cheers.
	All right, Todd.
	So let's take a quick break here, and we'll come back for a little bit of after-party discussion.
	Sound good?
	You got it.
	Perfect.
	All right.
	Let's do it.
	All right.
	Cheers.
	All right.
	We'll be right back, folks.
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	All right.
	Welcome back, folks.
	This is the after party.
	It's going to be maybe a not crazy long discussion today because we went a little overtime with our guests, but really awesome guests, right, Todd?
	Did you enjoy it?
	Yeah, I really enjoyed him.
	I really enjoyed him.
	You know, I love people who are just kind of normal dudes, level-headed, or dudettes, I'd say.
	Yeah, yeah.
	But, you know, in doing my research, I was listening to some of his interviews, and he was being interviewed by, you know, some Bitcoin maximalists.
	And, man, I heard so many times, which is what triggered me, you know, they just referred to everything else as a shitcoin.
	Oh, really?
	Yeah, the ad-hom became nauseating to me.
	It just kind of was off-putting.
	So, you know, Mark, if you're watching this, After party, after it's published, you know, I would suggest to you and others to just take the pedal off the gas of referring to other projects as shit coins, because there's a lot of people out there with big hearts and a lot of people maybe who have made investments or whatever, that you never know which one of those coins or projects might change the world in a different context.
	Well, I think it was really pivotal that Mark talked about how he holds Monero and he does see value in other projects.
	But there's no argument that Bitcoin is the base layer.
	I think he was right about that.
	And Bitcoin is the one project that's so large that it's proof of work, algorithm and consensus system is practically impenetrable, which is really saying something.
	And it doesn't have to rely on proof of stake or other systems or any kind of, you know, a voting system.
	I actually like that about Bitcoin that there's no voting.
	Because voting always ends up getting rigged one way or another, or proof-of-stake systems.
	Usually the people who found it have all the stake, you know?
	Oh, yeah.
	And it's like, well, this doesn't seem very decentralized, actually, for a lot of projects.
	But I totally get your point, too, Todd.
	Like, when I was paying that consultant in Australia, I did not pay with Bitcoin.
	I paid with Monero.
	Because if I were to pay with Bitcoin, I would have to trace all my UTXOs, the unspent transactions, and I would have to check my notes and find out which UTXO is not not traceable back to my KYC account at Kraken or wherever, because I don't want anybody snooping into who I'm paying or why I'm paying them.
	It's not that there's anything illegal, but it's just none of their damn business.
	Right.
	Right.
	So, but with Monero, it's just like hit send, I don't have to worry about it.
	Yeah.
	So, I mean, I think that there is, you know, as I move forward, it's I want to be able to stack some Bitcoin, right?
	Just because.
	I want to be able to have kind of a diversified portfolio of crypto.
	But my heart is with private crypto.
	Yeah.
	And frankly, always will be.
	Well, I'm right there with you, but I wouldn't even say my heart.
	It's just from a practical standpoint.
	Right.
	Right.
	Private crypto is safer and easier for me to use.
	Yeah.
	And it's less complicated.
	Yeah.
	Now, what's interesting is it's way more complicated on the programming side.
	It is.
	To do all that encryption.
	Like, think about Firo and Rubin and all the stuff that Firo has gone through.
	It's complicated for them.
	But for me as a user, private crypto is not complicated, whereas Bitcoin is way more complicated for me to use.
	Right.
	Right.
	And by the way, I just have to get this out there into the airways.
	Mike, had another wonderful lady reach out to me today really wanting help with crypto.
	Yeah.
	And I just want to let everybody know, I can help you with tax strategies to help you keep more of what you earn, but I am out of the crypto help desk business.
	Oh.
	I just need to say that.
	You had so many success stories of helping people recover lost wallets and so on.
	That's what happened.
	Now everybody calls you and wants your help.
	I did.
	I did.
	And I think people, because our shows are timeless, they go back and binge-watch from the beginning.
	And at the beginning, we said, hey, just give me a buzz.
	I gave my email address, and people are asking just these...
	Lots of questions.
	And it's not that I don't want to help.
	As a matter of fact, I helped the lady today.
	She had four very specific questions, and I answered them, but I did preface it by saying, hey, I'm going to answer these, but I can't keep this as an exchange.
	It goes back and forth.
	And I hope everybody understands the reason why.
	It's just crypto...
	It is so massive, and there are so many moving parts, and there are so many people who, frankly, just don't necessarily have business getting into complicated private crypto specifically.
	I wish I could help everybody, but I just wanted to set the table that I can't.
	Well, and it gets into issues like recording your seed phrase in a safe way so that you can recover crypto.
	Now, I think I told you about this.
	I had an incident in the last week where I had a computer system that was hosting a Monero wallet.
	And that thing, I think a DLL got overwritten in the OS or corrupted.
	And the DLL was just gone.
	And the Monero wallet, well, in this case, I think it had Exodus on it.
	It would not run.
	And at first I tried replacing the DLL. That did not work.
	That's like a Windows nightmare.
	And so I eventually had to just consider that system lost, and I just recreated the wallet on another system, re-entered the seed phrase on Exodus.
	And to the credit of Exodus, it rapidly disappeared.
	Even before it had synced the full Monero blockchain, clearly, because it had recovered my apparent balance within like a minute.
	That's awesome, Mike.
	Yeah.
	I mean, the Exodus wallet does a lot of things behind the scenes that the user doesn't see.
	And it's actually complicated.
	And I noticed, by the way, that Exodus at times has had a warning that said, if you're using Monero on Exodus, sometimes your account balance may not look correct because of difficulties syncing with the Monero blockchain, but don't worry, your funds are still safe.
	But that makes people nervous if they don't understand what's happening under the hood, right?
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah.
	People freak out.
	The number changes on the screen, and they're like, oh my God, it's all gone, but not really.
	Crypto is hard until it's not.
	But the other thing that I realized this last weekend, I was doing some spring cleaning, and I have this one specific place in my home to where I have a fireproof bag that has some hidden things in it, and I'm like, You know, it's been probably, I'm not even kidding, Mike, two years since I've opened that bag.
	And I started going through it and there were some projects, crypto projects and investments that I know were in there just because I'm going through my notes.
	And I'm like, oh my God.
	Gosh, I really have to dedicate some time to see what's going on with a lot of these projects.
	I mean, there's one that I had like, and I know these are kind of ridiculous, but it's like $314 billion of whatever this token was.
	Is it worth that thing now?
	Yeah, I mean, because you never know, right?
	Right.
	It's kind of like that guy that I helped him restore his Bitcoin, and at the point in time, he didn't know what it was.
	I mean, at the time that he spent the money on it, it was $300.
	Well, guess what?
	By the time he recovered it, with my help, no, it was $125,000.
	Oh, because he had two coins.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, he had acquired those for $300 way back when.
	So it's those way back when stories that are kind of fun in crypto, right?
	Yeah.
	So it's kind of like, I guess the moral of the story is you have to keep your crypto private and safe, and you put them in special places, but also you kind of have to take copious notes so that if you go two years and go back, You have breadcrumbs to be able to say, ah, okay, I have 3 million M2 coins.
	Well, what the hell's an M2 coin?
	I can't quite remember, but, you know, I'm going to find out.
	Yeah, that's a really good point, and especially as people age, sometimes they can have more cognitive problems.
	They might not have as good a memory functioning, and banks are pretty forgiving, where if you lose everything, you can just go in and show them your ID, and they can tell you, oh, here's your account, and here's how you access it.
	They can reset your password.
	But the downside of that is that banks tie everything to your ID and you don't really own your money in the bank.
	The bank owns it and they may or may not let you take it out depending on how evil the government is that you're living under, right?
	So there's a downside.
	When you have self-custody and you're taking responsibility for your own wallet, whether it's Bitcoin or Monero or Epic or whatever else, There is no saving you If you don't take responsibility for your passwords and seed phrase and your custody, nobody else can come wave a magic wand and fix it for you.
	Yeah, I always like to say when I was covering crypto weekly is that in crypto, you are your own bank.
	And when you have a problem and you call customer service, it's going to ring your own cell phone and customer service is likely going to suck.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's you.
	Hey, you know, this show is decentralized.tv, Mike.
	We've interviewed a lot of great guests centering around decentralization, and I just wanted to give a couple of updates, if I could, just to let people know.
	I mean, we've talked about...
	Different ways to be able to take self-custody and beat different kinds of inflation, such as food inflation, energy inflation, etc.
	So this weekend, I got my Tico, Tampa Electric Company.
	You know, I went solar.
	And I just love it.
	This was $675 every month.
	And here it is, Mike, $24.75.
	Wow.
	That's my monthly note now.
	Wait, show us.
	No, I mean, where does it, which line is your $24?
	Amount due by April 9th, $24.75.
	That's the current monthly charges, and it shows that I am at a year-to-date, I am, they owe me for negative 1661 kilowatt Really?
	You know, all I know is that I am so happy that I, you know, practice what I preach.
	We preach of taking where we can, being able to seize control, right?
	So solar, I was able to invest in solar, nothing out of pocket.
	It immediately lowered my, you know, I have the cost of the solar, the loans, 25-year loan, ended up being like $313 a month for 25 years, but I was paying $675.
	Right.
	So you cut your electric bill in half, basically.
	In half.
	I didn't have to come out of pocket, and now my electric bill is $24 instead of the $675.
	Now I do have to pay the $313, and I just filed my taxes, so I'm going to get a $30,000 tax credit back as well.
	Right?
	So that's a good guy because the government, that's part of the deal right now to be able to encourage people to do that.
	So that, A. B. My food forest has exploded.
	That's what I was going to ask you.
	Oh my gosh.
	I'm getting a lot of fruit.
	But more than anything, I told my wife, I said, I walk out there and everything is becoming so just magnificent.
	Oh, yeah.
	And you can feel the energy when I walk through it.
	I'm not kidding you.
	It is they give off this specific energy and I'm just, I'm loving it.
	I'm loving it.
	And the third thing that I'm going to be updating people on this weekend...
	I've spent all day yesterday and today building my Flow Hive number two.
	If people go to flowhive.com, you'll be able to see what I'm building.
	But I am getting into the beekeeping business.
	I have a local beekeeper who's bringing over 3,000 bees on Saturday.
	I have the Flow Hive set up.
	In the back.
	And so I'm going to start learning how to do it.
	But the cool thing is, Mike, is that when you start doing this, you start realizing there's so much that you don't know, but it opens up a whole new world.
	There they are.
	There's the flow hive.
	Yeah, and so for me, it's like now I can see how this is going to be a wonderful hobby for me.
	It's going to be food for the soul.
	I can't wait to learn.
	But to be able to get this bounty of honey on an annual basis, if I do it right, I intend to be able to do it right.
	Wow.
	So those are a few updates.
	I'm just super excited about everything that's going on.
	All right.
	When it hits the fan, party at Todd's house, unlimited honey and papayas.
	And by the way, by the way, by the way, I was thinking about that.
	You know, when it hits the fan, people might want to come raid my food forest.
	So you know what I think I might change, modify just a bit?
	Maybe the bees that I raise, I'll raise killer bees.
	Are you kidding, everybody?
	You can have killer bee honey.
	Africanized killer bees.
	Don't mess with my food, Forrester.
	I'll say, sick them, roadie.
	Oh, man.
	I like the way you think, though.
	Swarm technology is being used for drones.
	You could just use the bio version of honeybees.
	Yeah.
	Right, right.
	Or maybe I have two areas back there, you know, one that's kind of like behind closed doors.
	It's the secret swarm, you know, and I'll pull those out when people enter my backyard.
	But no, it's just very cool.
	And it's one of those things, Mike, that I was thinking that it's like I'm sure glad that I took the first step to actually do these things, right?
	I mean, and they went from interviews to action.
	What I am thinking of now is the amount that I invested in the food forest is it's like I'm growing money now.
	No kidding.
	I mean, I'm walking out there.
	I have this peach tree that is just going to be so bountiful.
	These little peaches are coming in.
	They're so darn cute.
	But to me, it's just a miracle seeing it all come in.
	Oh, yeah.
	Absolutely.
	I love the fact that you actually take the actions.
	You practice what you preach.
	You're involved in it.
	And, you know, I'm the same way, as you know, working on a number of projects right now.
	I'll give you more details about that.
	I do have one thing to announce here, which is kind of related to one of our affiliate sponsors, which is Above Home, that sells the de-Googled phones.
	We now have a Brighteon edition of the D-Googled phones that's available.
	And if you go to abovephone.com slash DTV... You can show my screen, guys.
	You can get a de-Googled phone, ask for the Brighteon edition, and it comes with some special default pages in the browser for Brighteon, and we're also adding our app to the above-phone ecosystem.
	And then, coming up, this is not yet available, but coming up soon, we're going to have a smaller version of our large language model AI system that works on the phone.
	Wow.
	Again, we're still a couple months away on that, but that way you'll be able to walk around with a knowledge base to ask it questions offline.
	So even if there's a power outage, even if the grid's down...
	Mike, what about their laptops?
	Are you going to be able to put the full version?
	Yeah, that's the plan of the above books that they sell.
	The above books, right.
	Yep.
	And then we will have the larger language model on there with the appropriate software to run it.
	We've actually just produced a standalone executable version of our language model.
	That fits inside of four gigabytes.
	And so all you need is one EXE file, and actually it works on Windows and Macs, by the way.
	It's based on the LAMA file code libraries.
	But it's pretty cool.
	You launch it, and it just launches in a browser, and you can just chat with the language model locally through your browser tab, even if you're offline.
	Hey Mike, can you speak to the importance of getting a de-Google phone and just kind of comment a little bit on the current events that happened today that we're all hearing about with Apple?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	So yeah, a major bug was found in the Apple processing units.
	I think it's the, is it the M1 chips?
	Is that what they're called?
	Yeah, I think so.
	And it's a side-channel attack that takes advantage of the vulnerabilities of the cache memory that sits closer to the CPU, and it means that all of your encryption keys on all of these Apple devices can be sniffed out by malicious code running at the same time that you're running an encryption app.
	So basically, this is an NSA backdoor to all Apple devices, and it's a bug that's in the hardware, can't be fixed with a software update.
	So folks, if you think Apple is secure, your world just got blown up.
	So that means anything that you're doing on your Apple phone that you think is encrypted is not.
	If you're entering a password, it can be seen.
	If you have encryption keys for your crypto wallet on an Apple device, that can be sniffed out.
	Anything, all forms of encryption are now basically exposed on those microchips for Apple.
	They're going to have to recall, like, millions of phones.
	Yeah, if people trust Clown World, you know, that's okay.
	Keep trusting.
	But a good alternative solution is above phone, Mike.
	That's right.
	So abovephone.com slash DTV. That does help support the show a little bit.
	They're an affiliate sponsor.
	And they sell Android-based, de-Googled phones that do not report to Google.
	They do not spy on you.
	They don't even have Google on them.
	No Google Play.
	No Apple.
	Yeah, there you go.
	Now, it's Google hardware that has been...
	Mind-wiped and then reloaded with this new de-Googled operating system.
	And then AbovePhone has a lot of special solutions and applications on there for all your private messaging, your VPN, and they even have the ability to pay for the phone services using crypto, including Monero.
	So you can have a totally private phone-like ecosystem that is not tied to your credit card, not tied to your name.
	So...
	Check them out.
	You can actually pay for the above book and the above phone with crypto.
	In crypto.
	That's right.
	Yeah, very cool.
	Private crypto.
	Yep.
	And I just published an interview with Ramiro, who was here in studio, to talk about all this new stuff.
	So that's online now.
	Now, I want to ask you, Todd, then, to plug what you have, which is decentralizeddirectory.com.
	Tell our audience a little bit about that.
	Yeah, decentralizeddirectory.com.
	I would say that the greatest value that I add is, you know, we can architect our financial life, Mike, lawfully to keep more of what we earn.
	And I've helped a lot of people arrive at that conclusion.
	And if you go down, Mike, and scroll down to where it's key partners supporting decentralization.
	Is that it?
	Click here to explore.
	Yeah, and then if you go down, and if people want to click on the tax, what is the middle one?
	Protective Unincorporated Nonprofit Association.
	Yes.
	If people want to just review that and it is of interest at all, basically, Mike, this is a no-brainer decision.
	If somebody has W-2 or 1099 income to where they're paying more than $5,500 in taxes, this is an absolutely no-brainer.
	I mean, just...
	So I really encourage people, if you do want to keep more of what you earn, and now we aren't talking about tax evasion, there is something called tax avoidance, which is the lawful avoidance of taxes, meaning, and you know this, Mike, I'm sure, is that if we never sign that first bill,
	W-2, way back when, when we were 17 and everybody said that's what you had to do, we would have never been contractually obligated to be able to pay federal and state income taxes.
	So there are a lot of people who are becoming what's called state nationals and jumping through a lot of hoops, and that's cool for a lot of people.
	For me, that's not the easy button.
	I like the easy button, and I know that there is a lawful way, a protective tax structure that allows you to be able to lawfully It's provided by the IRS, a tax-exempt entity that allows you to be able to contract.
	Basically, you pivot from if you contracted with someone as a contractor A 1099 employee, you can change that and contract as your entity where you control everything, but you then are tax-exempt.
	And as I understand, this is a vehicle used by a lot of members of Congress and wealthy elite.
	A lot of elites.
	This has been around over 40...
	Over 40 years, and it is what the elites use, and there are so many advantages to it.
	I talk about keeping more of what you earn.
	That's just the tip of the iceberg.
	You go a little deeper, and you're able to protect your private property.
	Man, oh man, back in 2008, Mike, I went through a really tough time in my life to where I made a bad bet on a business.
	I had to file personal bankruptcy at that point in time.
	Oh my goodness!
	If I would have known about this entity, which I personally had now for over four years, I would have never lost my hope.
	Wow.
	Yeah, it's that powerful.
	Well, that's powerful.
	Okay, so let me just remind the audience, your website, Todd, is decentralizeddirectory.com, and you can book a call with Todd, but don't ask him about how do I log into my crypto wallet, because that's not what this is about.
	Right.
	I don't want to waste anybody's investment of their time or mine, frankly.
	It is like if you're a W-2 earner, 1099 earner, you'll likely want to have a conversation with me.
	Just keep it at that.
	Fair enough.
	Well, this feeds into the whole philosophy of the show, which is we want to help people...
	Control their lives, have more self-sovereignty just in terms of their own decision-making, and not be tied down by nefarious forces and overburdensome regulations or what have you.
	Now, we comply with the law in everything that we do.
	We don't engage in money laundering, and we don't tell people to speculate in things.
	We abide by the law, but we research a little deeper than most people, I would say, into what's possible.
	You know, I had one consultation this last week, and they were like, well, why haven't I ever heard about it?
	And I'm like, well, those who have these, they don't really want to talk about it.
	They don't want to screw up a good thing.
	And then the other question, why hasn't this entity been legislated out?
	It's because the legislators have them.
	This is what they use.
	We have to break the spell.
	I mean, these people want to keep more of what they earn, too.
	Yeah, isn't it amazing how someone becomes a member of Congress and then somehow their personal wealth explodes and their assets explode and all their stock bets do really well and it's like, how is that happening?
	Well, because they have inside information.
	And it's legal for them.
	It's legal, by the way.
	The insider trading, that actually is legal.
	In Congress, they can do it.
	In Congress.
	Yeah, I guess if you want to engage in insider trading, just get elected to Congress and then you can do it legally.
	For the rest of us, it's a felony, but for Congress, it's perfectly legal.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Well, Todd, good show today.
	Great conversation.
	We've covered a lot of bases.
	I know you're going to be out for a couple of weeks.
	Two weeks.
	I don't know what you're doing.
	I don't need to know.
	It might be a fishing adventure.
	Not sure.
	It's all good.
	I'm going to tame Africanized killer bees, Mike.
	Oh, are you?
	Yeah, there you go.
	Part of the new Todd Pitner decentralized weapons platform right there.
	But we'll pick it back up with you when you're back.
	In the meantime, we've got a couple of older episodes that have yet to run, so we're going to put those out and get caught up.
	So thank you, Todd, for your time today.
	It's been great.
	Thank you, Mike.
	And Mark Jephtovic, thank you for being an awesome guest.
	We want to definitely have you back on again.
	You were thumbs up.
	Let's take a shot at pronouncing his last name.
	Yevkovic.
	I'm just going to say Jevtovic.
	But I think, wouldn't it be more Yevtovic?
	Yevtovic.
	That's cooler.
	That sounds way cooler.
	Mark Yevtovic.
	Mark Yevtovic.
	We should just give it up now.
	We have Russian missile systems now.
	By the way, my wife is Russian, you know?
	Yes.
	And I want to say the last name as I hear her say it.
	Okay.
	Because I think you say it differently.
	But Medvedev.
	Wait.
	Medvedev?
	Oh, man.
	Now I'm...
	Oh, I say Medvedev.
	It's Miedvedev.
	Miedvedev.
	Miedvedev.
	That's how she said it.
	Miedvedev.
	I will try to get that right.
	Well, you may have it right.
	My wife may have it wrong.
	No, she knows better than I. She's Russian.
	Or my enunciation may have it.
	But Miedvedev.
	Miedvedev.
	That's how she said it.
	Miedvedev.
	I was happy that I could just pronounce it Advevka.
	The city.
	Because everybody screws that up in America.
	Everybody gets that wrong.
	Avdievka.
	Okay, got it.
	People have really screwed up Pitner.
	It rhymes with a lot of things.
	You know what I mean?
	Yeah, I would imagine.
	I would imagine.
	But hey, at least Putin has a simple name for Westerners to pronounce.
	So that's kind of easy.
	It's only five letters.
	Pretty easy for Americans to figure out.
	Otherwise, we'd be completely lost.
	Wouldn't even know who the president of Russia is.
	I remember when Putin first came on the scene, Putin, Putin.
	Putin, yeah.
	Putin.
	My daughters and I cracked up because they were, you know, anything associated with poots, right?
	It was just funny.
	So, oh, he's a Putin, girls!
	And they cracked up.
	They would belly laugh.
	It's the little things Mike and Mike.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	All right.
	Well, we'll end it there.
	But great show today, Todd.
	We covered a lot of bases and we didn't get too out of control either.
	So that's a good sign.
	Yeah.
	I don't think there'll be a lot of heavy editing in the after party.
	Hopefully not.
	Okay, Mike.
	Well, listen, I hope you have a great, great next couple of weeks, and I can't wait until the next time we're on together.
	Okay.
	You too, Todd.
	Have a great adventure.
	We'll talk again soon.
	Take care.
	Okay.
	Cheers.
	All right.
	And thank you all for watching today here on brighttown.com, the free speech platform that hosts Decentralized TV. Be sure to check out all the other episodes at decentralized.tv.com.
	There are close to 40 episodes there.
	They're pretty much evergreen.
	You'll learn something incredibly valuable in every single episode.
	So if you want to have a binge watching weekend or something, they're all free to access.
	No registration required.
	Enjoy them all.
	You'll learn empowering information that can truly alter your life for the better.
	Thank you for watching.
	We need to put on our calendar our one-year anniversary of our first episode.
	Oh, that's true.
	I don't even know what that is.
	I have no idea.
	But we'll figure it out.
	But yeah, we have to do something special on our one-year anniversary.
	Something special.
	Hmm.
	We do have a stuffed astronaut in the studio right now.
	Can somebody throw me the stuffed astronaut without awakening Rhodey, if that's possible?
	What's funny, Todd, is we have a guest coming in studio who is an expert in what he says is the fake moon landing narrative.
	Oh, good.
	Don't let him eat the astronaut.
	Just bring it on around.
	Okay, just bring it over here and then throw it.
	Throw the astronaut at me before he takes it from you.
	This is not DTV, man.
	Toss it.
	Okay.
	Yay!
	No, no, no.
	Rhodey is awakened now.
	So this is our stuffed astronaut.
	Oh, Rhodey wants to tear this astronaut.
	Wow.
	No, no, no, no.
	Is that the actual one that landed on the moon, Mike?
	This is...
	Not only do we have this, we have an astronaut helmet for Captain Rhodey.
	But I'm not going to put it on him right now because he's too...
	No!
	No, this is not for you.
	No.
	Off.
	Okay.
	Well, that's...
	There goes the rest of the show, but there's our slumping astronaut right there.
	So, maybe we could do something sort of moon landing oriented for the one year show.
	Yeah.
	We could go to a studio.
	Where did they film it?
	In Phoenix or somewhere around there?
	I don't know.
	It's hard to keep track of all the different stories and explanations.
	But I do have inflatable moons.
	I have inflatable moon beach balls here as well.
	All right.
	I'm sure they won't last very long once he gets his teeth on them.
	No.
	But it's possible.
	Anyway, just sharing a little bit of upcoming, a little preview of what's coming up here.
	I will hold my breath.
	Okay.
	There you go.
	Maybe NASA is in the house.
	Sort of not really making it.
	There we go.
	Okay.
	No.
	Off.
	Okay.
	I gotta go.
	All right.
	We'll see you, Mike.
	We'll see you.
	Bye, everybody.
	Cheers.
	Bye-bye.

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