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Speaker 2: Ever, and welcome. This is Financial Survival Network. I'm your host,
Carrie Let's person you're about to hear from. If I
had listened to him twelve thirteen years ago, well I
probably wouldn't be doing this podcast now, or if I
was doing it, it would be from my villa and
the Mediterranean. He told me that I should buy bitcoin
right then, and there he had the wallet, he was
ready to sell it to me. I'm sitting at a
table in a restaurant in Broadway in New York, and
bitcoin had just gone up to ten dollars, and I said,
you know, I think it's a little high priced. I'm
going to wait for it to go back down to seven.
And you know what happens when you say I'm gonna wait,
you never do it. And of course I never did
till many years later, till it was fifty thousand a coin.
But this guy, of all the people I've net talked to,
and it's thousands of people over ten thousand podcast interviews,
probably had the best calls of anyone talking about Trace
mayor Trace. It's great to have you back on the show.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'd great to be here, Carrie, And that was
quite an interview. I think we can still find it
on YouTube. So if I are seen years ago.
Speaker 2: It should be on YouTube, or I probably have it
in the archives. If I can find it, I'll put
a link to it in the show notes of this interview,
which will be on Financial Survival Network dot com. So
what's been going on here since we last spoke ten
twelve years ago.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, this little magic internet money thing, it's become something.
And now the President of the United States has created
a US Bitcoin Strategic Reserve.
Speaker 4: We have strategy and publicly traded company.
Speaker 3: They've acquired close to sixty billion dollars of bitcoin as
a reserve treasury reserve asset on their balance sheet. And
we have lots of copycats, a couple hundred of those
treasury reserve companies.
Speaker 4: And then the retail space, everybody's.
Speaker 3: Heard of bitcoin almost everybody's bought some or used it
or sent it around or somehow played with the technology.
So we've had just deep penetration of the technology from
where it was thirteen years ago. I mean, it's really
kind of crazy to think about what bitcoin was like
back when we kind of had that lunch.
Speaker 2: The wild West, for sure. So let me ask you
a question, how did you know?
Speaker 3: I think there's uh a lot of human capital that
went into it. When you do the work, uh, you know,
the consequences follow, and so our mind has to be prepared.
We first we have to have good soil to plant
the trees in the trees being thoughts or ideas, So
we have to have good purposes or intentions that we
that we then get grasses and shrubs and trees. These
are thoughts, ideas and convictions, and those come because we study.
In bitcoin's case, is highly interdisciplinary mathematics, cryptography, internet protocols,
computer networking, thermodynamics. You know, you got the hardware, the
software mining. Then you layer on top of that all
of the sociological and economic aspects, game theory, and you
need you need the Austrian school of economics, not political dogma.
Because of you start from a wrong premise. You're going
to even if you reason correctly, you will still get
an incorrect conclusion. So you have to start from like
real premises, from the Ostrian school. And that means that
you're now into praxeology, the study of human action. Yes,
you're into all these types of things, and all of
our universities and these types of courses. In the economics,
they just teach the political dogma and they, I mean,
they don't even acknowledge that there's an entire branch called
monetary science. And so you know, I was I had
put in the work in all of these different areas. Intellectually,
I'd even had a lot of practical experience playing with
digital currencies that came up in these virtual games and
stuff like that. And you know, I'd also experimented with
PGP encryption and peer to peer networks like LimeWire and
kazah and eventually bit torrent and before that, things like Napster,
and I'd even played around with things like egold in
gold money dot com, which experimented with the first versions
of sound money in the digital age. And so you know,
it was it was for me. I had a rich
garden of the mind which had been cultivated, pruned. You know,
everything wasn't just growing wildly, but you know, it actually
seemed to have been organized in a very methodical and
deliberate way. Looking back, you know, seeing kind of the
divine providence at work in my life. And so, you know,
when I did come into contact with bitcoin, and at
this point, I was already running my blog Run to Gold,
which I had started in January two thousand eight. Yeah,
and so you know, i'd been writing about monetary science,
monetary sovereignty, some of the financial issues and my conclusions,
you know, studying the stream school, trying to apply it
to current events and everything for blog articles. So you know,
I'd been putting in the hard work that was needed
in order to then when I was exposed, you know,
to bitcoin, I could fit it into a model that
already existed. I had a very well cultivated garden, and
it was like, oh, this bitcoin tree can go right
over here, boom and it. You know, it's like there
was a spot especially for it, and you know, and
so then once you know, I get that, get get
the little bitcoin seed planted in there, Well, I have
to water it, I have to dung it. I have
to prune it. I have to you know, I have
to let time go by so that it grows. You know,
everybody wants the flower, but nobody wants all of that stuff.
Speaker 4: Nobody wants to do.
Speaker 3: The work that is precedent to the flower or the fruit.
You know, everybody wants to eat the mango, but they
don't want to like grow the mango tree from a seed.
And so, you know I I did that, and so
like the rest is kind of history, and that's you know,
those are trades that we make with our future self.
Why why did I do that instead of watching you know,
cap videos on YouTube and going to the beach and
staying out late and you know, like I never drink alcohol.
A lot of my friends were drinking alcohol.
Speaker 4: They would stay out.
Speaker 3: Late, they'd have a hangover in the morning. I'm reading
Austrian school aeronomics book, you know. So I'm making trades
with my future self. So it's not like it just
happened by accident. It's not like I got lucky, you know,
I got fortunate. And I do think there was an
aspect of being in the right place at the right time,
and that's called opportunity and preparation combined with opportunity.
Speaker 4: That's what a lot of people call luck.
Speaker 2: Well, in the Hebrew the symbol for luck, the word
is mauzle, and the symbols comprised of time, play, action,
and that kind of sums it up. So looking at it, though,
like me, I think I brought a lawyer's mindset to it.
Was much into economics in many ways, as you not
so much into math. But where I went wrong is
I'm the hardened skeptic and I always thought that the
government would do its best to close it.
Speaker 4: Down, and which I'd tried.
Speaker 2: But you know, they could have shut down the notes.
I mean that was the ultimate attack of the notes,
physically and cyber, but they never did because my theory
was crypto is the best way to pay off a
politician ever created.
Speaker 3: Well, it's I know that I'd say that because it
is very traceable, especially now with tools like chain analysis
and all the washing analytics. So it's not necessarily a
very good tool to use for engaging in crime like
bribery politicians.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, it could go to the relatives and
the friends and the lawyers.
Speaker 3: And all that's getting very much. Those those loose ends
are being tightened up with all of the AML, the KYC.
Speaker 4: And we saw this with Operation Choke Point.
Speaker 3: You know, they wanted to operational, they wanted to weaponize
the financial and monetary system to suppress political opponents.
Speaker 4: They did, and they did.
Speaker 3: You know, they very got real, like very real, just
pure expression of political power.
Speaker 2: Guns, online gamblingde orange zack lenders, yeah, payday lenders, everything.
Speaker 3: Crydo industry. Even Milania Trump got debanks. She talks about
it in her Memoirs of America. And so you know,
we had this private sanctions regime. No notice, no due process,
no ability to appeal, no reason, no way to even
know what you did. It's being done by private actors,
but at the behest of regulators. But they're not putting
anything in writing. Yeah, it's government action through their puppets,
their puppet regulated parties. You know, some countries like Uruguay,
for example, having access to a bank account is a
civil right. And so you like you have to be
given a bank account, Yeah, because you need one in
order to participate in society.
Speaker 2: I was surprised I was never debanked. Honestly, they just
keep offering me more cards and more accounts. But as
very real. But we're kind of past that at least
for now, and probably won't go back to it anytime soon.
So future here, we got thirty seven trillion of debt,
we've got hundreds of we've got a few trillion of bitcoin,
you know, maybe five to ten trillion altogether of cryptos
out there.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean the bitcoin market casts about two trillion
right now, another one trillion for all the other all coins.
But I guess getting to your point, President Trump, he said,
maybe we'll pay off the thirty six trillion dollars of
that with a little bit of bitcoin.
Speaker 2: How do you do that when you make the coin
go up to fifteen million?
Speaker 3: Right, Well, it's the same as you would do with gold,
right like Franklin Roosevelt had the revaluation from twenty dollars
announced to thirty five. So you know, if you have
the bitcoin price go up and the liabilities are staying
the same.
Speaker 2: But this is different because there's only so much gold,
and different parties control the largest amounts.
Speaker 4: Like China and Russia, HRO.
Speaker 3: It doesn't benefit us if the price that gold goes up,
it benefits them exactly.
Speaker 2: So instead you take an asset that was originally worthless,
you seize it from unsuspecting drug dealers and money longers
and other ne'er do wells, and you tax it, and
you tax it, maybe do a windfall profits tax, or
maybe it just doesn't qualify for capital gains although it
does now. And then then basically you pump it up
to a fifteen million because it becomes a true competing currency.
And then before you know it the depth you have
your choice. You can you can keep getting twenty five
bases points interest, or you could take these bitcoin to payoff,
or we create a new coin that's backed by bitcoin
and then we use that to pay it off, something
to that effect. How likely is this, Well.
Speaker 4: We look at Senator Witness.
Speaker 3: She's introduced a bill and it would have the US
government buy I think four million bitcoins or something like that,
different iterations of it.
Speaker 4: So you know, there's that what.
Speaker 2: If it's been buying it all along? What if the
Fed's been buying bitcoin all along and you don't being
what they've confiscated. Yeah, we don't necessarily know the true
We have no a true ownership of all the utxos.
I mean maybe Chanealysis has some idea, but it would
definitely be a way that the US government could exert
some dominance over their geopolitical foes.
Speaker 4: If we look at it, we have gold.
Speaker 3: In twenty two trillion dollar market cap, half a billion
dollars of daily emission new gold being mined. Bitcoin is
about a tenth the size, two trillion dollars fifty million
a day. Then the US dollar, you know, so we
got gold, the US dollar, Bitcoin, those are kind of
our three main reserve assets. And then around bitcoin, we've
got the Euro, We've got the U on the yen,
you know, stuff like that. You know, if Bitcoin can
go up to you know, five or ten trillion dollar
market cap, now you're looking at a displacing any of
these other fiat currencies, which just further entrenches the US
dollar and allows extension of the US dollar through you know,
additional credit creation for maybe another twenty forty years, but
it keeps you know, if the US can control the
top three search results effectively for world reserve asset, gold, bitcoin,
and dollar and use stable points for all of that,
you know, they can box out the geopolitical rivals from Europe, China,
et cetera.
Speaker 2: So you see it, I see it. I think there's
a few other people that see it, not a lot,
but somebody who's actually working from the government actually has
figured this out already.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, it seems about a year ago, a year
and a half ago when the ETFs got approved. A
year before that, it just seemed like there was an
about face from the government. So maybe there was something
deep in the roots of the Pentagon that changed and
they decided, you know what, we're going to use bitcoin
in a geostrategic manner, and all of a sudden, Oh,
instead of Operation choke Point, it's Operation Floodgates.
Speaker 4: Yeah, operation floodgates, like open.
Speaker 2: Them, that's what we should call it, Operation Floodgates. Yes, So, yeah,
it seems obvious to me. I've written a couple of articles.
Has gotten completely ridiculed about it. But there is no
other way because there's only so much gold, and like
our adversaries have it, and you can only how much
can you make it go up to? Can you make
it go up to?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean two hundred and fifty.
Speaker 2: Thousand an ounce then we're gonna you're gonna crash the
dollar doing that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean gold is gold is already a massive
asset and its market gap is outperformed bitcoin's market gap
in twenty twenty five. So as a tool for monetary sovereignty,
gold is a phenomenal tool. And the market says that
my thesis has always been that bitcoin could also be
a very powerful tool for monetary sovereignty in a different
way than gold is. And because bitcoin started out just
crawling out of the primordial ooze, you know, sixteen years later,
here it is. But where's it going to be in
another sixteen years and another thirty years after that?
Speaker 2: It can only go higher, way I see it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because the dollar will only go lower.
Speaker 2: It's going to go you know, saw tooth. But it's
and the beauty is talking with your assistant about it.
The tops, the peaks are so easy to detect. I
knew it in seventeen. I knew it in twenty one,
you know, nineteen seven and sixty seven seven, I think
it was sixty nine seven. They were just so obvious
because the parabolic move has to.
Speaker 3: Die, yeah, because of the proof of work, nature of
the of the of the asset.
Speaker 4: Same with gold.
Speaker 3: You know, like we can get these rhino horns, but eventually,
you know, when you're producing so much of this and
you're having to convert electricity and hash power, or oil
and steel into gold or into bitcoin. That acts as
a natural corrective mechanism for the price.
Speaker 2: And it's just the nature of markets. When you get
a parabolic move, it's just the tree does not grow
to the sky right exactly. And you combine all the factors,
you know, because most of Wall Street financial experts they
just extrapolate. They say, whatever is happening today, we extrapolate
that into the future, and that's how we sell. But
it doesn't work that way because it's just like I
used to liken it too, commuting to New York City
on the highways, like it's direct the amount of traffic
was directly correlated to economic activity. And I would know
when something was going to happen because we hit peak everything,
every toll plaza, every highway going into Manhattan. I knew
it can't go on, and yet they're extrapolating as if
it can go on forever. And that's the mistake of
maybe it's by accident, maybe it's by design, maybe it's both.
But that's what I've always found, the flaw of extrapolation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is the madness of crowds, right, I
read behavioral economics. We're getting into, you know, Austrian business
cycle theory, you know, booms and bus and crashes. And
actually how FIA currency in our frash members or banking
system exacerbates these amplitudes causing damage into in this allocation
and capital into the economy.
Speaker 2: Multiple bubbles, oh, everything bubble. Back in the good old
days when there was a real currency, a sound money, gold, silver,
you can only pretty much have one bubble at a time.
Now you could have realistening, you could have crypto, you
can have stock market bonds, currencies, everything, the everything bubble.
Speaker 3: Right, It all gets correlated, you know, basically to M two.
Speaker 2: So you know, and then how do you stop printing
money in this day and age.
Speaker 3: It's not very politically palpable to do that. So you'd
take the inflation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's built baked into the cake. So inflation, what
are you thinking on?
Speaker 3: Well, the you know, fundamentally, it's a form of taxation
without representation, it's confiscation without due process of law. And
so you know, when you're when you're able to just
print this stuff out of nothing and confiscate surreptitiously tens
of millions of hours of people's labor. I mean, it's
just a terrible system to live under.
Speaker 2: It sounds like it's unconstitutional to me.
Speaker 3: Well, Article one, Section ten, Clause one clearly in constitutional
line and Jerry system.
Speaker 2: And the Fifth Amendment, taking without just compensation, it's a taking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I'm not sure under how we generally define
the takings, but it's definitely a you're diminishing the value,
and you're interfering with the obllegation of contracts, which are
you know, other constitutional clauses.
Speaker 4: That you could have in asiment laws.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it's clearly you know, the federal government has
no power to make anything legal tender, and if the
states make anything legal tender, it must be either gold
or silver. So the federal government can't make anything legal tender.
The states are restricted in what they can make legal tender. Somehow,
this federal reserve note got made legal tender by the
federal government. That's clearly unconstitutional. They don't have that power.
The states can't make a federal reserve notes legal tender.
So but you know, Roosevelt breached this, the legislature breaches
making it holding golden and using it illegal and then
in City versus Dover.
Speaker 4: The US Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
Speaker 3: So all three branches of government have clearly abdicated their
duty to uphold the Constitution. On what moneitors this in
the United States chooses, and it's so big now that
the US arene courts isn't going to hear it because
it's a outal question.
Speaker 2: So that's like the income tax probably wasn't legally passed
and Peter Schiff's father fowarded for years and he wound
up in jail. He's probably right, but there's no way
that any court is repealing the amendment. Was the thirteenth
Amendment to creating income fact I don't remember. Yeah, I
think I'm thirteen twelve. Thirteenth one was.
Speaker 3: But there's even less there's even less room to argue
here because Article one, Section two, Clause one is clear
clear on his face, there's prima facia. So but what
what happens is we just are going to lurk from
one crisis to the next until it implodes and deflation
or explodes and hyperinflation.
Speaker 4: And this is this.
Speaker 3: Is the this is the cause of so many of
the negative effects in society, as the corruption of our
monetary system. And Johann men Gutta wrote about this in
Fast part two. And they brought Isaac Newton and as
Master of the Men in sixteen ninety six to fix
the great the failure, and so he created the gold standard.
You know, so this is not new. We've been through
this before many cycles.
Speaker 2: You look at the breakdown of the family. It's directly
attributable to inflation because it used to be one parrot.
Back then it was the mother stayed home, raised the kids.
But then the cost of living got so out of
hand you needed a dual income family just to survive.
Speaker 3: And why did that cost of living get out of hand?
And it's because there was no safe store of value
golden economic freedom, bye green span. If there were, the
government would make it i illegal like that in the
case of gold. A good example is my father. He
graduates from college. He takes a job with the railroad
instead of the accounting firm nine hundred dollars per month.
And you know, back then it was twenty five point
seven ounces of gold seven hundred thousand dollars a year
and purchasing power for a brand new college graduate, no experience.
Speaker 4: And that's how much the standard of living has.
Speaker 3: Been eroded for the benefit of those that are closer
to the money printer.
Speaker 2: The bank's kasha and they love inflation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then the big corporations that are house by them.
You know, we've had huge productivity gains over the last
forty years.
Speaker 2: That's the only thing that's kept US afloat is those productivity.
Speaker 3: But it hasn't been to the benefit of the American citizen,
as clearly illustrated between my dad's salary starting now and
a college graduate starting today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, one.
Speaker 3: Tenth or one twelfth the value of what the purchasing
power because one as of gold. There is still one
ounce of gold today. And then when you look at
the Golden Constant by Professor Jastrom the book, the price
of all the other assets and services and stuff in
the economy, they rotate around gold, just like the planets
do around the sun.
Speaker 4: And so you know, when we're not earning.
Speaker 3: Twenty five point seven ounces of gold for our college
graduates coming out of school, yeah, they're wages have been diminished.
Speaker 4: In Article three of the Constitution.
Speaker 3: The federal judges their wages are not to be diminished.
That's part of an essential check amounts in our political
machinery to have in an event in judiciary.
Speaker 4: And yet what do we have.
Speaker 3: We have this unaccountable, unelected, unreviewable federal reserve deciding what
the length of the dollar is.
Speaker 2: Hey, and so we got to wrap up. I know
you've got another appointment. Any place we can find you
on the web these days.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I host the Bitcoin Knowledge podcast Bitcoin dot kN.
Speaker 4: Have a Twitter thing.
Speaker 3: I haven't really been acted there for a while, but
maybe I'll start something up there.
Speaker 4: Anyways, those would be kind of the two main places.
Speaker 2: All right. The links are in the show notes. This
interview on Financial Survival Network dot com. You got a
question for Trace myself, Shoot me an email kl at
Carrie LUTs dot com. Trace great reconnecting with you here
in your wisdom that's and born by over a decade now,
and we really appreciate it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thanks so much, Kerry. You do a great job.
Keep up the good work.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival Network your
solution to today's trying times. For the latest, go to
Financial Survivalnetwork dot com. Financial Survival Network now more than
ever