 I want to play this little clip from Gensler, the video that he put out after the Kraken action that has been circulating, especially among what you might describe as the Bitcoin maximalists. I want to play this and get your reaction because they are saying that this validates the view that it's Bitcoin and self-custody are the only way to go. So let's just play this before I can get your reaction. Crypto, not your keys, not your crypto. You see, you're basically an investor in their platform. If it goes under, and we've seen plenty of that recently, you end up in line in the bankruptcy court. That's why it's so important that these companies and platforms comply with the securities law. So the point there is that Gensler is quoting the famous, not your keys, not your crypto line, and that is kind of validating the idea that you really shouldn't even have your crypto on an exchange. If you want total security and sovereignty, what do you make of that, Nick? Yeah, I agree, obviously. We invest heavily in startups that help people self-custody their coins. So I clearly support that. Crypto only works if people have some self-custody because otherwise we give all the power back to the intermediaries and we haven't accomplished anything because then the government can co-opt the intermediaries and use them as they will. However, I'm also pragmatic and I recognize that exchanges will exist. There's demand for their services. We can't do everything in a non-custodial way. And there's a whole set of allocators that will need centralized touch points to custody their coins, to trade on them, et cetera. The decentralized infrastructure isn't the totality of the industry and it will never be. So in my view, the challenge is to improve the exchanges that do exist and pressure them to be as accountable as possible, which is why I'm an advocate of proof of reserves, for instance. Regarding whether it validates Bitcoin maximalism, I mean, staking can be done self-custodially. It can be done on your own. Even there's actually services that allow you to stake. If you don't want to stake yourself, you still retain access to your coins, but you're relying on a more sophisticated pool that will help you do it, which is not a securities transaction in my opinion. Kraken may have left themselves open to that allegation in terms of the structure of I think that is, I'm actually sympathetic to the SEC in that particular instance. There's certainly ways to stake, even as a retail individual who's not very sophisticated about the technology or anything, there's ways to outsource that to others, which don't render it a security. So I don't see it as vindicating Bitcoin maximalism in either direction or, yeah, so staking ultimately will be more decentralized by virtue of the fact that Kraken is out of the business of doing it. Just a comment from Bitcoin motorists writing in from YouTube saying, I just buy Bitcoin, I don't stake. Should I care about any of this? And I mean, I guess the answer is, if you don't own your keys or you don't have your keys, you should be worried about it regardless of whether or not you're staking, right? I think you should care that the SEC is harassing the exchanges. A lot of people that may think that they're totally insulated from that, they still have some reliance on an exchange as an on and off ramp. We do need these touch points with banks. And with the traditional financial system, we'll always need that. We don't have a perfectly peer to peer economy of Bitcoin that I'm not even sure that's really possible. So yeah, I mean, I'm concerned that the SEC is going after Kraken in particular has been one of the most reputable and successful exchanges. And I'd be concerned if they're going after Coinbase too. Even if you don't agree with everything Coinbase does or everything Kraken does, we still do need these credible intermediaries. You said that you do have some sympathy for the SEC in this particular Kraken case. And you also mentioned earlier that part of the red flags with FTX for you was that they were offshore, presumably that the red flag was that they're not complying with US regulations. So what are the realms that you see regulation being appropriate for the crypto space and where should they just the government just be completely hands off? Yeah, great question. I mean, I don't think that a no regulation world is the best because clearly the crypto industry has failed to self-regulate. I think you could ask exchanges to do proof of reserve. That's similar in some ways to having oversight over, you know, I would say it's actually more of a substitute for a really aggressive top down regulatory stance. I think asking exchanges to segregate client and operating capital in an accounting and a literal sense is completely the right way. And if you look at NYDFS, they had guidance recently that they published asking for that segregation, asking to privilege client deposits in the case of liquidation. I totally agree with that. You know, it doesn't make sense for clients of exchanges to be really subordinate junior creditors in the case of bankruptcy. There you should have a trust style product in the name of the client such that they're insulated in the case of bankruptcy or something like that. So, you know, those are really common sense things that I think should exist. Yeah. Aside from that, I think, you know, I will other domains where regulation regulation is warranted would be a kind of a securities law framework where we allowed to bring, we were able to bring tokens into a concert with securities law through some disclosure framework that was fit for purpose, the way we have a disclosure framework for equities. The things you need to disclose are different. So we will need a revised framework. However, the administration is not implied anything or suggested that they might want to do that. So that's more of sort of a wish list item, but I don't think it'll happen anytime soon. This idea of digital cash being, you know, one of the fundamental propositions of cryptocurrency, what is for people who might be watching this who are curious about cryptocurrency, but they're not steeped in it like you are, could you just make the big picture case for why you think this industry is thriving and or, you know, why it's grown so much in a relatively short span? And what is the like, what's the point of it? Why is digital, the idea of digital cash good and necessary? And why is decentralized finance a good thing? Well, there's two main things that, two main trends basically that crypto people, it's a broad tent are fighting against or trying to restore. One is there's a sound money contingent. So basically believing that we should re-institute a monetary system that has less discretion. And so that's a rebellion against the waves of credit that are created with basically discretionary monetary policy. That's a long discussion, of course. So that's a big part of it. The second is a push to restore transactional privacy that has been eroded since really the seventies since finance was digitized. That's and since, you know, intermediaries have been more empowered and there have been a specific number of legal cases, especially the third party doctrine that meant that financial privacy has been effectively eliminated in the U.S. And a lot of us identify this is a very dangerous trend and they're trying to push back at it. So defy and stable coins and, of course, Bitcoin are attempts to restore something which we once had, which was financial autonomy and the freedom to transact without asking the state for permission. Hey, thanks for watching that excerpt from our live conversation with SEC Commissioner Hester Purse and crypto investor and writer Nick Carter about the government's escalating crackdown on cryptocurrency exchanges like Kraken and the broader defy economy. Join me and Nicholas be here every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern for more conversations like this and subscribe to recent YouTube channel for notifications whenever our videos go live. Thanks for watching.