 If your support of Bitcoin puts you in the same category as the framers of the Constitution Bitcoin is special, Bitcoin is the future Bitcoin will undermine their ability to control us It has all the trappings of religion Those who are not getting into Bitcoin now, it's because their DNA was not meant to survive FTX is the safest and easiest way to buy and sell crypto Sam Bankman Fried is in federal court right now for his arraignment The collapse of FTX gave the Biden admin a perceived moral license to go after crypto And the governments aren't exactly going to let us walk in the front door with this new open source money called Bitcoin Everything you're seeing now, we've seen before There's nothing new, it is just typical Bitcoin 15 years after Satoshi Nakamoto dropped a nine page white paper on an obscure email list sketching out an idea for a new peer-to-peer digital currency Bitcoin has become a global phenomenon And nowhere is its pomp and promise more on display than at the blockbuster annual conference put on by Bitcoin magazine here in Miami Beach But it's also had a disappointing couple of years Bitcoin was supposed to be an inflation hedge But after the Fed fired up its money printer during the pandemic, the dollar lost value And Bitcoin went in the same direction Bitcoin was supposed to be a way to transfer money from one party to another without going through a financial institution to quote Satoshi But 15 years later, a lot of users are still trusting regulated financial institutions to manage their holdings Bitcoin was supposed to be above politics But the community around it has seen bitter infighting Just saying, that's not how you use Bitcoin though That's not how you use it, you should use Bitcoin in this particular way And some worry that Bitcoiners' intolerance of dissenting ideas has turned it into something akin to a religion or a cult And yet the Bitcoiners we talked to in Miami seemed convinced that it's value proposition As a decentralized money that governments can't censor or destroy is as strong as ever Are Bitcoin's troubles a sign that the project is failing? Or just the inevitable bumps on an upward trajectory which will one day result in monetary freedom for the entire world? Attendance here at one of the largest Bitcoin conferences in the world is down by more than half amid this so-called crypto winter I think if you were to compare like last year's conference to this year's one There would be noticeable dramatic difference I'm not a fan of the the mania bull run phases because of the type of people that it attracts You might call them the tourists or the LARPers Or in many cases the scammers There's a big chunk of crypto that needs to burn on a raging funeral fire There were criminals, scammers, grifters Overleveraged business models that should never have been implemented FTX has arrived in Trail 5 So I just got one question Who am I? Just a few miles away from this year's conference is the Miami Heat's home court formerly called FTX Arena after the crypto platform paid $135 million for the naming rights back in 2021 In January, when FTX collapsed into bankruptcy and its founder Sam Bankman Freed was arrested for alleged fraud The signage was removed Bitcoiners believe that any cryptocurrency other than Satoshi's original creation should be referred to as a shitcoin and that the crypto industry is a cargo cult run by scammers who have the mainstream media and much of Silicon Valley fooled Exhibit A, Sam Bankman Freed He's a criminal, he should go to jail People who conflate what they did with Bitcoin have got it entirely wrong The way I like to describe the crypto industry and blockchain is it's an arbitrage on the trend It's sad and it's disgusting, it's got to stop Bitcoiners also see the FTX collapse as a reminder that you can't trust bankers or tech founder Media Darlings like Bankman Freed to take care of your savings whether they're outright scammers or not Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve, Satoshi wrote in 2009 The message is, trust nobody and become your own bank which Bitcoin makes possible I think it just shows that these large centralized institutions are always going to be at risk, right? So the ethos of Bitcoin is not about putting all of your money into a giant centralized custodian So none of that would have happened in Treadfy because everyone would have been bolstered everyone would have been bailed out But in crypto, the bad actors were allowed to implode publicly and people got hurt but that overall is just the immune system for crypto showing itself Another reason to be your own bank is to avoid financial censorship so that everyone from third world dictators to DC regulators is prevented from telling you how you should spend your money The fall of FTX precipitated a crackdown in Washington that was meant to send a very strong anti-crypto message in the words of former congressman Barney Frank We don't need more digital currency We already have digital currency It's called the US dollar FTX certainly gave them political cover to do this then they opened up the toolkit and they went to their favorite tool which is politicizing the instruments of finance Nick Carter is a writer and crypto investor who coined the phrase Operation Chokepoint 2.0 a reference to the Obama era policy of bullying banks into denying accounts to payday lenders, pornographers, firearm stealers, strippers and other fully legal industries that regulators would rather see disappear So again, a perfectly legal industry in the US that's being targeted through the bank regulatory apparatus It really kicked off this year in January It involved virtually every financial regulatory agency in particular the bank regulators and the objective was to stymie the legal crypto industry in the US not through any lawful mechanism but through insinuations, through threats Operation Chokepoint 1.0 was carried out by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which was the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren and now she's become the Senate's most vocal Bitcoin critic If I buy Bitcoin, am I buying a share of stock Or am I buying a pork belly Or are you buying air? Rogue nations, oligarchs, drug lords and human traffickers are using digital assets to launder billions in stolen funds evade sanctions and finance terrorism Warren said last year when promoting a bill that would extend the state's power to surveil people's finances Crypto is helping fund the fentanyl trade and we have the power to shut that down If I were Elizabeth Warren, what would you say to me? First of all, I would shake your hand I would say hi, it's really good to meet you I would also say you are purposefully misinformed about crypto She doesn't understand Bitcoin, she doesn't understand energy She's part of the elite She's part of the corrupt political structure you have in the US and she's anti-human, she's anti-freedom I've been trying to clean up this industry for a while because I firmly believe that there are affronts to private property rights Caitlin Long, who spent 22 years in corporate finance is the founder of Custodia which she hopes will become America's first Bitcoin bank It's designed to be the antithesis of the company run by Bankman Freed, whom Long clashed with on stage at the same Bitcoin conference back in 2021 Satoshi gave us money that isn't debt I like to use the phrase a fool and their leveraged Bitcoin are soon parted Sam, do you agree? Not with a lot of it Um, uh, this is not shocking FTX allegedly squandered its customers' holdings Custodia, by contrast, plans to go much further than even a regulated retail bank by keeping 108% of its customers' cash in Bitcoin on hand at all times Thus, it won't have any need for federal deposit insurance Look, you can take the position leveraged just bad It's not a crazy thing to think However, I think you probably also have to be willing to sacrifice more than most people realize in order to get there I think you have had to sacrifice the majority of the growth that the industry has had to date And he and I were arguing over whether leverage was good Leverage is never good in crypto, period Anything that is circulation credit that goes above one times leverage, right That is creating claims to the underlying out of thin air It is fractional reserve banking And we are fundamentally committed to not doing that All of those crypto lenders I knew were going to fail Why? Because there's a finite number of Bitcoin All you're doing is creating fractional reserve Bitcoin And that's all going to come back to haunt you When inevitably there's going to be a price correction and everybody wants the real thing Yet the Federal Reserve rejected Custodia's application to become a member of its network on the grounds that it's, quote, crypto activities are highly likely to be inconsistent with safe and sound banking practices So the crypto industry was proposing a solution to the inherent instability of the banking sector And yet that solution was denied because the Federal Reserve didn't want to give a crypto-focused bank access to the payment system It's extremely perverse Long is suing the Federal Reserve to force it to reconsider But part of Satoshi's vision was to create a system in which regulatory approval wasn't necessary Bitcoin is the first digital currency you can hold yourself So why do we need to trust a third-party middleman at all? You read the white paper, you read what Satoshi said Trusted third parties are security holes Jameson Lopp is a Bitcoin developer and the co-founder of CASA which helps its customers safely self-custody the secret passwords or keys necessary to spend their Bitcoin If you lose them, the money is as good as gone But if you're not holding them yourself, are they really yours? The Bitcoin writer and evangelist Andreas Antonopoulos coined a popular saying in the space Your keys, your Bitcoin Not your keys, not your Bitcoin Your keys, your Bitcoin Not your keys, not your Bitcoin Most people don't want to be their own bank But what we're really saying is like if you want to have a level of bank security if you want to be able to operate in such a way that you don't have to ask permission from a third party then you do have to take on some responsibility Self-custody especially appeals to Bitcoiners worried about Operation Chokepoint 2.0 and the plight of the Canadian truckers who occupied Ottawa last year to protest a cross-border COVID vaccine mandate Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded to the demonstrators by using emergency powers to force financial institutions to freeze all funds sent to support the cause These illegal blockades and occupations received disturbing amounts foreign funding So a group of activists used Bitcoin as it was meant to be used getting about $630,000 worth to the truckers Since the funds didn't go through the traditional banking system they were hard to stop An activist filmed himself handing out seed phrases where the code words used to access self-custodied Bitcoin This grassroots solution was imperfect laborious and in need of improvement but in the end it worked A world where most people hold their own Bitcoin keys would be a world far more resistant to financial censorship and surveillance But is it really possible? It's definitely a breach of a person's privacy freezing their bank accounts especially if they've committed no real crimes Do you think there's ever a future where we can get grandmas to self-custody? Well it's definitely possible You know I can tell you from experience we have plenty of people in their 80s who are clients of CASA The answer lies somewhere in the middle You know I think we will have a diverse ecosystem and range of custody and it doesn't actually necessarily need to be a binary thing It doesn't have to be just trusted third party or just self-custody What really worries me is if too much of the Bitcoin goes into too few hands especially if they're like regulated companies that can be easily targeted by nation states that is when Bitcoin itself you know as a network becomes a bit more prone to you know nation state actions And that for many at this conference is the entire point of Bitcoin effective resistance against authoritarian government action As most of you know that trucker strike was a peaceful demonstration of people who were demanding rights that are sacred and are taken for granted for every American Walking around the conference all of the elements of the Bitcoiners creed were on full display which Nick Carter says has turned into a religion It has its own heroes, icons, doctrines, saints and heretics On one hand, having a devoted following that won't abandon a project through the rough patches is a key to long-term success On the other, fanaticism leads to poor decision-making and can drive away vital allies Certainly not the only secular religion out there but it's a you know particularly pernicious breed Nick Carter was in Miami this year during the conference but says he didn't attend any of the sessions because of safety concerns Much of the community turned on him when it was revealed that his investment fund had a stake in cryptocurrencies other than just Bitcoin So he penned a eulogy for Bitcoin maximalism declaring that there's an awful sickness pervading the space I have been a full-time Bitcoiner for 10 years and I've dedicated my professional and personal efforts to the sector tirelessly that whole time and yet because I'm more of a Bitcoin moderate a lot of the hard line of Bitcoiners don't like me but I think what we need to realize is our enemy is not inward we shouldn't be doing the circular firing squad thing Something all Bitcoiners have been saying for years is there's a big difference between Bitcoin and crypto a distinction that now even the head of the SEC Gary Gensler made when talking about crypto regulation Speaking Monday on CNBC Gensler said that Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that he has prepared to label publicly as a commodity There has been a decent amount from Bitcoiners some that I respect that have essentially been cheering on government attacking people The end game is attacking Bitcoin There's an expression in crypto not your keys not your crypto Bitcoiners should be trying to win in the free market and organize Bitcoin such that it is the most compelling blockchain the most credible one the most decentralized they should not be trying to utilize the instruments of state power to suppress their perceived adversaries Bitcoin has its own merits it stands on its own two feet we don't need financial regulators to try and pick and choose which winners there are Jameson Lopp has also been on the receiving end of Bitcoin maximalist rage after his company Casa made the business decision to expand its service to help Ethereum owners self-custody their holdings In 2019 a teenager called in a swap rate on his home because according to Lopp the kid didn't like his opinion about how the Bitcoin protocol should function in response Lopp shared a video of himself firing an AR-15 on Twitter then he took extraordinary steps to make himself impossible to track down in meat space which was later written up by the New York Times It's a result of social media you can instantly go from being essentially a nobody with no one paying attention to you to being someone who has attracted the ire of millions of people in a matter of moment it's similar to sort of political theater and phenomenon where you know you build up your narratives you build your audience and your following in your community and in one of the ways that you create more cohesive our audience is by having enemies that you attack in certain ideological ways and so that basically that same thing is unfolded within Bitcoin most of the religious imagery present at the conference was shrouded in irony but as with so much of digital life it was hard to tell where the joke ended I don't believe that there's any moral status in your portfolio and there is a faction within Bitcoin that believes that the only moral asset to hold is Bitcoin itself nothing else Bitcoin religion is not a universalizing one it actually just concentrates the membership and they become increasingly radical and disconnected from the real world so if they want to succeed they need to find a way to grow the membership of the Bitcoin space rather than impose all these additional requirements in terms of what it means to be a Bitcoiner as the quasi-religious fervor around Bitcoin has grown so too has the potential for a Bitcoin voting bloc Ronald Reagan once courted the religious right but in 2023 a parade of once and future presidential contenders made the trek down to Miami to pander to the Bitcoiners former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard showed up once we give up our economic autonomy we give up our freedom along with long-shot presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy freedom of speech and freedom of money are two sides of the same coin perhaps nobody better captured the mood though than Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr who in his keynote speech repeated the anti-elite populist messaging that's central to the Bitcoin creed control over the public starts perhaps as it means but it always becomes an end through exercising perfect control over society Bitcoin is a full work against precisely this kind of government and corporate expansion and intrusion RFK like Robert Kennedy basically what he's saying with that one is like government is not your friend an art gallery at the conference displayed work demonizing Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci and the World Economic Forum's Klaus Schwab what do you think about Klaus Schwab face? truthfully I don't think it's messed up anywhere near enough there are certainly a lot of people who get turned off by some of the vitriol whereas other people you'll get interested and sucked into it but if anything I think it may be overblown the vast majority of people who use Bitcoin don't know about any of that they just see Bitcoin as a thing that they're using it's not something that they have adopted from a cultural standpoint it's just a tool that they have adopted because of the properties of Bitcoin what's the purpose of Bitcoin? to not be with the government we should just be focusing on you know what our Bitcoin strengths which is like peer-to-peer transactions non KYC transactions and that's where I'm interested in what is Bitcoin? to me it's money in the original white paper Satoshi described Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system 15 years later it still isn't widely used as a medium of exchange at first its limitations were technical the network can't process more than about seven to ten transactions per second but a decentralized payment technology called the lightning network is endlessly scalable and has made paying for a cup of coffee with Bitcoin fairly seamless though not a lot of people are doing it yet I have 100% conviction I mean there's there's zero doubt it's just a question of you know at what pace global adoption will take place Chris Hunter founded Bitcoin Beach Wallet a lightning-based payment software that launched in El Salvador whose president Naid Boukele is another politician who is capitalized on his association with the Bitcoin community he announced at the 2021 conference that El Salvador would be first in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal currency it was 90 days from the announcement here in Miami two years ago when they were going to make Bitcoin legal tender only 90 days later on September 7th, 2021 did they actually launch the implementation with their Chivo Wallet which was the government-issued wallet gifted to every citizen nobody could manage a 90-day implementation like that properly and so there was understandably technical missteps and that was quite unfortunate because you know the average person in El Salvador or anywhere around the world doesn't really understand Bitcoin Salvadorans prefer to hold and spend the U.S. dollar which despite the recent spike in inflation still has a much more stable value than Bitcoin in terms of adopting Bitcoin as legal tender what really matters is do we get Bitcoin in the hands of people do they use it as everyday money and that's what's going to make the difference in terms of whether Bitcoin is widely used or not so will Bitcoin ever become a commonly accepted medium of exchange? that's partly a bet that technologies like the Lightning Network will continue making it easier and easier to use and it's also a bet against the dollar as exploding U.S. debt puts increasing pressure on the Federal Reserve to inflate the money supply the only way that Bitcoin is going to move forward and get mass adoption is through bottom-up grassroots movements Bitcoin has been eulogized repeatedly by journalists in the mainstream media and yet it has always come back surviving exchange collapses bitter infighting and government antagonism the access to the payment system should be something that is neutral apolitical it should be a common resource right and right now barriers are being inserted into access to payments and banking and it's becoming much more a question of do you have political favor as an industry and that's just not the way it should be in this country you know there is a saying which is Bitcoin is for enemies this is really supposed to be a neutral technology and platform where anyone who follows the rules can use it regardless of if anyone else disagrees with who they are and what they're doing as the human drama unfolds this decentralized borderless censorship resistant software network continues to function just as Satoshi envisioned