Ethereum vs The STABLE Act | Rohan Grey

🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: http://bankless.substack.com/ ✊ STARTING GUIDE BANKLESS: https://bit.ly/37Q17uI ❤️ JOIN PRIVATE DISCORD: https://bit.ly/2UVI10O 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ 👕 BUY BANKLESS TEE: https://merch.banklesshq.com/ ----- GO BANKLESS WITH THESE SPONSOR TOOLS: ⭐️LEDGER - BEST HARDWARE WALLET TO SECURE YOUR CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/ledger 🚀 ZERION - INVEST IN DEFI FROM ONE PLACE https://bankless.cc/zerion 💳 MONOLITH - GET THE HOLY GRAIL OF BANKLESS VISA CARDS https://bankless.cc/monolith 🤖YEARN - YIELD-SEEKING MONEY ROBOT THAT FARMS DEFI FOR YOU http://bankless.cc/yearn ------ Ethereum vs The STABLE Act | Rohan Grey Rohan Grey is an assistant professor of Law at Willamette University, an Advisor to politicians including Rashida Tlaib, and one of the authors of the STABLE Act, which wants to impose Federal Bank Chartering upon any stablecoin issuer. Interesting, this proposed legislation includes entities like Square's Cash App or PayPal! Anything that offers a claim on 1 Dollar is cited by this law. Rohan and the STABLE Act appear to be an outgrowth of the rise of MMT and the power and ability of the state to solve economic problems like poverty and joblessness. Rohan wants to protect 'money', which he believes is a public institution that needs protecting! Also interestingly, the goals of the STABLE Act and DeFi are highly similar, yet are opposing in their strategies for achieving these goals. Tune into the conversation to learn about a diversity of perspectives regarding how to protect money! The STABLE Act: https://tlaib.house.gov/media/press-releases/tlaib-garcia-and-lynch-stableact Coin Center's comment on the STABLE Act: https://www.coincenter.org/the-unintended-consequences-of-the-stable-act/ ------ Don't stop at the video! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program http://bankless.substack.com/ Visit the official Bankless website for resources http://banklesshq.com/ Follow Bankless on Twitter https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ Follow Ryan on Twitter| https://twitter.com/ryansadams Follow David on Twitter https://twitter.com/TrustlessState ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time we may add links in this channel to products we use. We may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. We'll always disclose when this is the case

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08David Hoffman?

  Si vous voulez vivre une vie sans banque, vous devez obtenir un portefeuille hardware. Il n'y a pas d'alternative à stocker votre crypto de façon autonome. C'est pourquoi j'ai quatre ledgers que j'utilise pour gérer mes différents actifs crypto en utilisant l'account Ledger Live aussi. Ledger Live est comme votre base de base pour gérer vos comptes Ethereum, DeFi et crypto. Il fait un très bon travail d'aggreger tous vos portefeuilles Ethereum différents si vous êtes le type de personne qui utilise plus d'un. Mais vous pouvez aussi ajouter d'autres cryptomonnaies comme Bitcoin ou Cosmos ou quoi que ce soit votre blockchain préférée. Et puis il va afficher un portefeuille aggregate de tous vos comptes à la page principale. Une chose que Ledger fait un très bon travail est d'activer tous les verbes monnaies

• 0:51David Hoffman?

  dont nous et Ryan parlons avec le Cube Banque Sans Skill activé dans l'application Ledger Live. Donc maintenant dans l'application Ledger Live, vous pouvez acheter, vendre, louer, échanger et stakez vos actifs crypto, ce qui fait un très bon travail d'accomplir tous les verbes monnaies dans le Cube Banque Sans Skill. Quelque chose de nouveau dans Ledger Live est le swap Ledger, où vous pouvez échanger les actifs l'un pour l'autre directement à l'intérieur de l'application Ledger Live, s'assurant la tristesse dans votre activité financière sur Ethereum et sur Bitcoin. Si vous voulez apprendre plus sur ce que vous pouvez faire avec un ledger, allez sur le blog post "Le pouvoir de Ledger Live" sur le site Ledger où ils partagent certaines des choses plus avancées que vous pouvez faire avec votre ledger que vous n'avez peut-être pas connu. Il y a un lien dans les notes de la présentation qui vous emmènera dans la boutique Ledger

• 1:34David Hoffman?

  où vous pouvez obtenir votre portefeuille hardware Ledger préféré. J'aime personnellement le Ledger Nano X, mais j'en ai aussi deux. Ils sont deux options super. Quand vous possédez un ledger, vous possédez vos propres actifs de la façon dont ils ont été conçus pour être gardés par le utilisateur et le utilisateur seul. Alors allez obtenir votre ledger aujourd'hui pour s'assurer que vous êtes autonome possible. The Bankless State of the Nations are brought to you by YARN. YARN is DeFi's first self-building, community-run project, which I just get really, really excited about. YARN is a system that seeks out yield in DeFi, and it does that in a number of different ways. A very aggressive way is with the vaults, where you can deposit your preferred asset of choice,

• 2:16David Hoffman?

  and different DeFi experts will come in and generate a strategy for what to do with your deposited token. And so it'll go find ways to get yield in that deposited token in DeFi. For those who want to just earn yield on their stablecoins, the Earn system is for you, where you can deposit your preferred stablecoin, and YARN will go and figure out which money market on DeFi in DeFi is producing the best interest rate, whether it's DY, DX, it's Compound, or AVE. It looks around DeFi to see where the yield is coming from, and it directs stablecoins automatically, so you don't have to. Check them out at yarn.finance to get started, and also check out the stats page to see what other people are doing as well.

• 2:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, we are super excited to have Rowan Gray here. He is the Assistant Professor of Law at Willamette University. He is the President of the Modern Money Network. He's an advisor to politicians, including Rashida Tlaib, and he's one of the authors of The Stable Act. We recently had a State of the Nation show with Coin Center, where we brought this up, and they said, "Why don't you bring Rowan on the show, so he can speak for himself?" So that's what we're doing. We're bringing Rowan on the show to talk a little bit about The Stable Act and some of his core beliefs. Rowan, welcome to Bankless. It's great to have you. How are you doing, sir?

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me. Well, I'm still alive, so that's a bit of a surprise. Appreciate you having me on.

• 3:36David Hoffman?

  Surviving the tsunami of Twitter DMs and terrible comments, I'm sure.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, flaming bags of dog shit on my lawn notwithstanding every day.

• 3:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Metaphorically speaking, well, who was it? Was it Bilaji recently, David, who talked about... Or was it one of our guests talked recently about Twitter being sort of like the French Revolution, where there's people with pitchforks trying to chase you down and guillotine you the entire time? That's very much been my experience. I'm sure it's yours lately as well. But we are not here to do that. What we want to find out, Rowan, is what some of your... Maybe we'll start there, your first principles. So David and I, the Bankless Nation, the Bankless program, has a variety of first principles, reasons why we are in this space. We describe it in various ways. One, of course, is like...

• 4:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  More self sovereignty to the people, more power to the people away from the institutions that have historically controlled our lives. For us, it's very much about a public good, a public infrastructure that we are creating, a public money system that's accessible to the world and that is credibly neutral. These are some of the principles that undergird the bankless movements, we would call it in crypto and DeFi subset of that movement. But let's talk about you first. What are some of your first principles? Why are you doing what you do? Why do you care so much? What is the foundation of your belief system?

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, thanks. It's a good question. I mean, the first thing is that I'm, you know, I'm a leftist, I'm a progressive. So the people who don't want to take any value in that can sort of tune out here. But I believe pretty deeply in individual sort of freedom and individual empowerment. And I think there's a role for monetary systems to play in empowering individuals and in sort of allocating social resources and structuring the social provisioning process.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  A lot of what I focus on are the ways in which public institutions undergird markets, undergird systems of production and to sort of trace back or peel back the layers of what may seem to be sort of neutral or decentralized or sort of, you know, free market processes to look at the structures that underpin them and that govern them, where there is some sort of actor who is exercising some sort of power and to try to look at how we can make those systems more democratic and more accountable to average people, not just people who are born into privilege and wealth and access to means and things like that. I'm an Australian, as

• 6:12Speaker 02

  you can probably tell by my accent, I moved to the United States in part because I am pretty acutely aware of how imperialism works in the modern age and and there's not really much attempt to much use in trying to change the world from Australia, at least in public policy, when the United States can pretty much exercise a veto in anything that we do. So, you know, if you're living in ancient Rome and you wanted to make change, probably going to Rome was the starting point. And I moved to to a point where I was about 15 minutes away from Wall Street after living in DC. So you can sort of take what you will from that in terms of where I see the power lying. Not because I have any love for bankers or anything like that, but because that's sort of where in in the modern global economy that the sort of power lies.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  I think probably where we disagree, it may be a good starting point, is just, I think I have a very different theory of where money comes from and where its value derives from. I don't think that it comes from sort of markets. I don't think it comes from some sort of technology of a medium of exchange or some sort of commodity that solves barter in a double coincidence of wants. Those were certainly ideas that I was introduced to as at a young age and through sort of standard economics education. And the more I looked into it, the more I looked into the history, the anthropology, the legal history and the sort of legal institutions behind those systems. It became clear to me that that was a myth and largely propaganda. And once I started looking at where money sort of actually comes from and how it actually operates throughout history in large advanced societies,

• 7:36Speaker 02

  it led me to the kind of understanding of money that I have today and the kinds of attempts to make change that I do today. So I care about, you know, things like private anonymous cash. For example, I care very deeply about, and I care very deeply about how to make sure in a digital world, those kinds of features get retained. But I think where I would disagree with a lot of people in your community perhaps is the idea that we can achieve that without it being a fiat instrument, without it being a tool of public money. And I think that that's probably why I think that a lot of the work that's going on in the crypto world is a distraction and a sort of wasted energy. And that the real fight, the real struggle will be over anonymous digital public cash, which is where I think we should all be focusing.

• 8:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, so we want to get to that. We want to talk about that a little bit. Even including kind of your description of like the history of money and where it came from. I wouldn't say that David and I are necessarily of the, of cut of the cloth of like hardcore Austrians, like you might see many in the crypto space. So I would say that we are like also very open to the idea that the money is not just like from a barter system, that it is kind of a debt type instrument. It's definitely a social construct, very open to that idea. So you might actually find less divergence of opinion there. But before we

• 8:52David Hoffman?

  We did an entire podcast on that concept. It's actually one of our very first podcasts where we kind of went through like the barter myth. And instead, the How money was created by a community where they created depository institution, right? Like I, when the, in the podcast, I called it a granary, right? A, a place where, you know, farmers come and deposit their food, right? And then their deposits were given credits. And that's basically the formation of a, a money by a, a social system. That when you scale that up, you create a nation state with a, with a, with a fiat, right? And I, and I think that's kind of how, where you're coming from, Rowan, where that's kind of more or less how money is made.

• 9:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  But before we even get there, David, you know, like, uh, I, I definitely want to get there. But I actually want to hear more about Rowan, uh, on kind of the, the problem statement today, right? So, so, so before we get to that, um, let's talk about Rowan. What do you think the problems actually are with today's money system? Cause we have a nation state controlled money system. We have fiat, like fiat one, that is the reserve of, uh, the world. What's wrong with it today? Why, like, does it need to be changed? What's not working for the people?

• 10:07Speaker 02

  That's a great question as well. I mean, I think the first thing is that, um, we haven't sort of created a democratic society and then created money out of that as a democratic system. We had systems of empire, of warlords, of white supremacy, of slavery based economies, of feudalism. And we fought sort of tooth and nail to carve out pockets of public accountability democratic institutions that are very fragile. I think we're seeing that right now around the world with the rise of strongmen, authoritarians. I think we're seeing that right now, even the United States with, with things going on that if we don't keep actively fighting for those and expanding them, they're going to contract again. And that the default throughout history is that most of these sort of governing institutions have not been democratically accountable. It's not that we start with sort of public democracy and then wonder what happened.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  And so what I think we saw after the post-war era was a, a kind of moment where the, the energy pushed towards more democratic accountability. With some notable kind of exceptions, particularly including things like race in the United States. There was a very kind of white bent to the New Deal kind of compromise. But, and, and Of course, an imperial bent outside of the US with the Marshall Plan. But if you if you look at what happened probably from about the nineteen seventies onwards, there was a kind of empire strikes back and and you know historians of political economy and and others will call that the kind of neoliberal era. But what it was was an attempt to renaturalize money and the economy as something that exists as a product of markets and quote unquote private enterprise.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  And that was a very successful propagandistic effort. People have sort of documented the the big money from from rich people and companies that went into constructing that to buying up university departments to building narratives in the media. And the narrative that we have today is that money is not a public good. It is something that comes from markets that the that the sort of dominant metaphor in public finance is the taxpayer. Because where does money come from? It comes from somebody who pays taxes. Well, that kind of begs the question of where did the money to pay taxes come from, right? It had to actually been created before it could be paid in taxes. But if you start with the idea that money grows on taxpayers or grows on on people, then you end up with sort of Margaret Thatcher's world where there is no such thing as public money. There's only taxpayer money.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  And I think that's the world in which we live today, where public policy is being constructed on the basis that money is scarce, that investment has to rob Peter to pay Paul. That, yes, in theory, there is sort of a productivity gain from from efficiency or from full employment. But real, you know, in in most contexts, zero sum game, no free lunch thinking is the dominant way of thinking. And that, you know, private investment, it can do things that public investment can't. So I think that's the dominant starting point. And the other big narrative, I would say, which is a little bit away from from what we sort of think about in this conversation with money, but not that far away, is the fight over full employment, the fight over

• 13:04Speaker 02

  what it means to be a worker in the in the economy and to add value, where we had debates in the nineteen forties and then again in nineteen seventies about guaranteeing everyone a right to participate in the economy and to labor to add value through their labor. And we're still fighting that fight today. We have millions of people unemployed who are Love to earn money, who would love to contribute to some collective common good, who can't do it because we have not got a full employment economy where there's more work to be done than people to do it. I mean, there is work to be done, but we're not paying people to do it. So I think the failure of full employment, the neoliberalization of finance and money, and the kind of dominance of private interest in collective governance is where I would see the problem today.

• 13:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  On that last point, the dominance of like private interests, like what we would, what we would talk about is probably the dominance of banker interests, right? Whether that's commercial banks, whether that's other forms of plutocrats, plutocracy, even kleptocrats, we might say, but also central banks. So one of the like the thesis in Bankless and in the crypto world writ large is that like the Cantillon effect or the Cantillon effect, as some call it, is basically positions the kleptocrats and the plutocrats and those in charge closest to the money spigot.

• 14:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so when they start printing money, like buying back bonds or purchasing stocks or quantitative easing, injecting it into the economy, the recipients of those funds are those who hold assets. So if you hold stocks, if you hold real estate, you know, if you hold crypto even, you are a recipient of that inflation and that issuance, it's not necessarily going to the people. And that has led to massive wealth inequality among a number of other factors over the past couple of decades and is continuing to increase.

• 15:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that a problem that you see as well? Because for us in crypto and in Bankless, right? Like, that's the state doing something that is not good for the people. That's the state implementing monetary policy decisions that are actually benefiting the wealthy and the bankers and excluding the people. Is that a criticism that you see as well?

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's one little technical quibble which we don't have to go into, which is I don't think quantitative easing is necessarily all kind of monetizing government debt is the moment where a lot of this necessarily happens. Because I think if you look at government debt as a form of money, then there's actually a separate layer going on there. And the reason I start with that is because I think where I look at this and see a problem is that central banks are one institution in the public system. And that institution is built and constructed in a certain way to give bankers basically direct access and to to put their interests in the interest of what we might call free enterprise. Above other democratic considerations. And so I spent a lot of time, you can search my Twitter record and things. Complaining about the nineteen fifty one Treasury Fed Accord.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  Where up until that point, the expectation was that the Treasury, that is to say, the Secretary directly accountable to an elected president. Would be able to determine interest rates and to to basically sort of have dominance over the Fed. And there was an institutional fight between the Treasury and the Fed at that point. Where the Fed representing certain free enterprise interests aggressively pushed to take that power back. And it came down to literally somebody being sick in hospital on one side of that fight and the other guy double crossing them, basically. Like it was a it was a knife edge historical turning point. And now, if you read macroeconomic theory, you read central banker reports, they'll say central bank independence, the ability to set interest rates according to how we think should be done.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  Over elected representatives is a critical bulwark against government spending run amok. So the entire edifice of central banking today is built on a fundamental distrust of elected officials and people representing the interests of the public. Now, you can take that lesson that the government is corrupt and that any kind of public governance is corrupt. Or you can take that lesson that the private banking interests won a critical fight against democracy. And that we've gone on a bad direction there. And I I take that second view. So I completely agree with you that central banks today are a reactionary tool of class interest against the public. But I think the lesser there is, we shouldn't cede, you know, public governance to those actors in the same way as we shouldn't have ceded it to the feudalists.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Or to the slave owners, right? That there needs to be a a re litigation of central bank supremacy within public finance. And if you look at, for example, bills we've worked on with Rashida Tlaib. We proposed minting a trillion dollar coin, which caused some people's heads to explode, which was kind of the point. But the point there was the Treasury would issue that. You can, again, look at, look at all the resources that we put out about that. We called it fiscal money for fiscal policy. We don't need to come with our hand out to the central bank. We don't need to ask them for permission. We don't need to issue Treasury securities, which people are going to misunderstand and think as debt as something different from money. I don't think it is different from money, but it's, it's easy for people to get confused because they think of it like their own debt. But we don't need any of that.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  If the government wants to spend on emergency cash relief to every single person, which was the first bill I worked on with Congressman Wintley, then the way to do that is issue the money and give it to people and do that through elected officials and through their representatives and leave these central bankers to their bullshit and don't let them be gatekeepers to good public macroeconomic policy. So I think we probably agree on the diagnosis, but I'm not sure we'd agree on the solution.

• 18:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's probably true. And by the way, I, I do think there's a third option there, right? So you've got corruptible bankers and corruptible politicians. And you said you had to pick one or the others. We kind of think both become corrupted over time through the, the money system. But I'll let David jump in with a follow up here. We'll get more to that later.

• 19:15David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I, I think this is actually where we could start to tease like the more concrete components of this conversation with specifically with the Stable Act. But also, Rowan, with the problems that you are trying to solve with like, you know, your, your life's work, you know, when you wake up in the morning and, and try and get things done or, or things specifically with the Stable Act, like who, who are the people that are being like, who are the losers that are trying, that you are trying to protect, right? Who, who are the disenfranchised that the current system is set up to that doesn't include, right? Like, what are the main fundamental issues that you see that things with like legislation like the Stable Act can help protect? Like, what are the really big problems that, that you are concretely trying to go after?

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think I probably should have mentioned one other thing at the beginning to clarify here, which is, in addition to sort of financial interests, there's also technological interests, right? There are also, and I think we can go back to the early history of governance here, like the 5,000 year history of debt and things. And it was not just financiers, it was also the scribes and the lawyers. Basically, anybody that had control over the complex tools of administration of governance, who exercised power from their position with those tools. And so today, obviously, finance is crucial, right? How are you going to pay for it? Who's got money, who doesn't is a critical like layer of power. But there's also who runs the technology, right? Every computer around us in our pockets, et cetera.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  And I think we're seeing now a realignment of power around that. In the same way as we saw with the railroad, in the same way as we saw with oil and steel and other sort of forms of technology at different points in history, that there's a new power structure emerging around digital computing technology. And there are going to be people who are going to be the new scribes, the new governance architects of the future that's being built right now. Whether that's Mark Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt, or it's a tribe of very, you know, white, male, technologically savvy, free market oriented people who distrust any form of collective governance. You know, whether, whatever the group is, they are positioning themselves to be

• 21:21Speaker 02

  the new elite in whatever kind of bureaucracy comes after the one that we've emerged out of right now. And so to go to your question with this bill, there's a couple of things. One is, there's a history of financial interests playing cat and mouse with banking regulation. The minute you regulate banknotes, they switch to deposits. The minute you regulate deposits, they switch to another kind of instrument. And there's a constant game of pushing out to whatever margins. And when those actors eventually need public support, and we can talk about why, but inevitably they do in moments of crises. They then come and ask to be bailed out in the name of the average person or in the name of the entire economy.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  And the lesson I think of banking history, of shadow banking history, is the way to deal with that is to. Regulated on the upswing is to acknowledge that they're engaging in activities that, you know, while they've tried to put a different face on it, put a different label on it, are still fundamentally the same activities that we've regulated in the past. And to minimize how systemically important they are. So with this bill, there's a couple of things. One is if these kinds of stable coins become successful in the way that they hope, you know, whether it's Mark Zuckerberg with DM or Circle and Tether or DAI, if it becomes successful and it's mass adopted, there will be millions of people who aren't, you know, bankless nerds who who follow the podcast or, you know, people who are deep in in in the community,

• 22:47Speaker 02

  right? Capital C. It'll be people who just expect to be able to use this as another PayPal, right? Who who don't want to think about it, who get a wallet. It's it's been made super easy to download on their phone or whatever else. And one day they wake up and the whole thing is suddenly that their money's gone, right? That's the kind of risk if this if this kind of energy succeeds in its wildest dreams. At the same time, if it doesn't succeed like that, what I think is going to happen is the same kinds of financial institutions and big money investors that have played this shadow banking game at every other stage in history will get in, will eventually turn around and get some sort of regulation, just like USDC is trying to do now, partnering with Visa, just like others are trying to get bank licenses or money transmitter licenses.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  They will glom back on to the official system. They'll start complying with the Patriot Act and everything else. But they'll do so with just a little bit more power than they did before. Just that little bit less accountability. We'll we'll we'll forget some of the lessons about democratic oversight that we had last time. And we can see this already with money transmitters. Money transmitters get to do things that banks wouldn't be allowed to do. And the reason we have money transmitters is because there was a hole in the banking regulations at a certain point and they exploited it. Right? PayPal is doing things today that it wouldn't be allowed to do if it got a banking license. And it it didn't get that banking license because it managed to find that loophole. And so I think on one hand, it's about protecting the consumers who will be using these systems. On the other hand, it's about realizing that there's a power realignment between tech industry, telecom and.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  And banking and to try to address the new lords before they they start doing the next thing that they do. Because once upon a time, you know, Jeff Bezos and and, you know, Zuckerberg and others were just young punks with a startup, right? And now they're super, super kind of, you know, oligarchs who don't really give a shit about any accountability to any public at

• 24:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  all. I I think what you're saying is like, the the new boss is going to be the same as the old boss, unless something

• 24:46Speaker 02

  But they're gonna know how to code, right?

• 24:47David Hoffman?

  That's gonna be And you were recently on Dimitri's podcast and Dimitri on an even earlier podcast with somebody from the DeFi ecosystem, the decentralized finance ecosystem, Van Spencer. Dimitri gave the opinion that like, the reason why he thinks the world of DeFi, and to me, when I hear DeFi, it's almost synonymous with Ethereum. He saw that DeFi is cool and valuable explicitly because of regulatory arbitrage, right? Like, the DeFi ecosystem is unregulated, therefore, we can do cool new things in this new ecosystem. What you are worried about is that these cool new things becoming really, really big and then starting to represent systemic risk. And

• 25:28David Hoffman?

  things like Circle and and USDC are just leveraging new rails with that are unregulated to do new things. And I would totally agree. I do, I do agree that like, there is like the centralized actors like USDC, like Paxos, like any like Tether, that are definitely skirting regulations in order to establish their businesses and establish their own native currencies to be a part of this ecosystem. Now, I do want to draw a line, and this is where I think a lot of the crypto folk get really upset about some of this regulation is that there doesn't seem to be room for what me and Ryan are really bullish on, which is protocols, money issued protocols. And we can definitely debate about like, the decentralization

• 26:13David Hoffman?

  of something like DAI. Like, I feel you are fully aware about veils of decentralization or decentralization theater. And and DAI is definitely not as like decentralized as like Bitcoin is or TCP IP is. And so there are, there is a centralized team, there are centralized beneficiaries. But it's still more decentralized than than Circle, right? It's still more decentralized than Tether. And what what I'm hoping to get out of this conversation with you, Rowan, is is for you to include room in your mental models for what's going on in this industry that does allow for a fully decentralized currency to exist that doesn't that it would be outside of the stable act, right?

• 26:55David Hoffman?

  I do believe that there is the possibility for protocol-driven money that is that wouldn't that just wouldn't necessarily be doesn't cause the some of the existential risks that you are worried about. I don't see when your previous conversations, I don't see you including room for completely computerized, completely protocolized, completely humanless monies. And I me and Ryan are bullish on these possibilities coming out of our industry.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  So yeah, I think there's two things there. The first thing is, and I appreciate you guys taking the time to listen to all the conversations and things. I hope you've seen this bill isn't targeting private currencies. Bitcoin is its own unit of account. Ethereum is its own unit of account are not actually a stablecoin under the definition in this bill, right? The instruments that qualifies as stablecoin under this bill are instruments explicitly designed to function as public money, by which I mean denominated in the fiat unit of account and to circulate in ways that public money is trying to do. And just to get it out of the way at the first instance, because I'm a big believer in decentralized anonymous digital fiat cash,

• 28:05Speaker 02

  my goal is to build a system where if you want to do peer-to-peer cash transactions in US dollars with nobody able to see it, you can. My view on that as a as a as a theory of money is that the only way to do that in a safe, secure and and stable way long term is for the government to issue itself. That isn't say the government issues all money, right? But it is to say the US dollar issues issued by the government has unique properties relative to a US dollar denominated token issued by anyone else. And so we can try to play the game of My token is safe, just trust me. And I think we've played that game throughout history with bank deposits, with banknotes.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  And the time and time again story is the only actual thing that can be guaranteed is when you issued a dollar yourself to ensure that the dollar convertibility. So the first thing is no Ethereum, no Bitcoin. If you want to issue a private currency, more power to you. The second thing is about the technology. I don't have a problem with people developing technology. The problem here is the systemic risk that comes with its wide scale adoption in day to day transactions. And so when it comes to what you might call sort of computerized money, I think the reality is that the economy is not built on humanless transactions. The economy is built around human beings. If you and I transact with a piece of paper or a paper dollar bill,

• 29:27Speaker 02

  the paper dollar bill is is computerized in the sense there's nobody involved in it, right? But if you and I have a dispute there, we go to a court and the court adjudicates that. The court doesn't say the piece of paper has decided, right? And and my my old advisor at Cornell, James Grimmerman, who's a coder, wrote a great piece called All Smart Contracts Are Inherently Ambiguous. And there have been others who've talked about this in the context of code, you know, going back to Larry Lessig and others, that code itself is not a substitute for law. It can automate certain physical processes, but the the economy and commerce is built on legal institutions, of property rights, of contract dispute resolution, of accounting principles,

• 30:07Speaker 02

  of limited liability for entities and corporations, for tort law, even in instances where you didn't explicitly contract. All of those things continue to apply regardless of what technology you're using to interface with another human being. And so I could have a a perfectly written code. And then we could disagree about how to interpret that code in light of an existing arrangement. And that disagreement is going to come down to a court and a judge looking at two human beings on either side of a dispute. Whether or not the judge chooses to agree with the code or not will be a question for the judge. And so I think that this, you know, to me, it's sort of like saying the trench bull in in Matilda. Well, I'd love a school without children. How easy would it be to run a school if there were no messy children involved, right?

• 30:53Speaker 02

  Having an economy where there's a money that doesn't involve people is, in my opinion, not a coherent concept because the economy is made up out of people. Just like the internet is. There's ICANN, there's ISP providers, there's people running individual servers in their basement. There's property rights around the land title of your basement, right? So I, I just, I think I question the premise that we can automate social interaction to a point where society is not involved.

• 31:20David Hoffman?

  So the, the way that I see you trying to eliminate risk out of the public institution of money is through an MMT type of perspective where you want stablecoin issuers like USDC to get a federal banking charter. So they can get that FDIC insurance in case that something goes wrong. What ends up backstopping the risk from platforms like USDC is the ability to print money. Is that, is that accurate?

• 31:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I just to be clear, FDIC insurance, I think, is actually one of the like lesser tiers. It's actually access to the Federal Reserve's balance sheet and the general protections that come with being part of the banking system. And again, colleagues of mine and my advisors have written a piece called the Finance Franchise where they, where they look at the history of chartered banks. And originally charters would come through specific pieces of legislation. The Massachusetts Legislature would pass a bill creating the Massachusetts Bank. And it was explicitly acknowledged as a kind of public-private partnership. It was like the Panama Canal. And over time, those private corporations or quasi-private corporations began to consider themselves independent of any public accountability. Right? Give me all the benefits of limited liability and none of the obligations to actually serve a public interest beyond profit.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  That's the, that's the neoliberal, as long as I'm earning profit, I'm doing good for society, right? And, and so the, the FDIC insurance is less important. The real important thing is if you're the creator of the dollar, whether that's the Federal Reserve or the Treasury or some consolidated government that sits above any one institution. It's the sort of, you know, constitution and everything else. You, you, you make the dollar. So yeah, there, there is an infinity sign next to the amount of dollars that can be created by the US government. Of course, that doesn't mean they should create an infinite

• 33:00David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  But it does mean if if a dollar bill is a promise to pay $10, then you go get a take a $10 bill to the bank and you ask for the dollars, they'll just give you two $5 bills.

• 33:10David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Because it's the same thing. Whereas a bank note is a promise to get those US dollars. If you take a bank note in 1830 to the bank and you ask for US dollars, the bank may or may not have US dollars. And that's the same true whether it's a centralized stablecoin issuer like Tether or USDC, or a decentralized like DAI where the theory is that there's collateral sitting somewhere. And that collateral is either actual dollars or worth enough dollars. And hopefully, the value of that collateral won't change. But all of that is a theory that when you come with your token with a promise to pay, somehow I'm good for it. And I think our view is one actor in the whole system has a unique answer to that. There's one unique answer to that, that problem set, and that is if you actually issue the dollar, you can always pay.

• 33:55David Hoffman?

  Right, right. And that's, that's where the de-risking of a, of a money system comes from is, is the inherent solvency of the original issuer. In, in the DeFi space, in, in what we call trustless finance or decentralized finance, we, we attack that same problem via the, almost the opposite route where like the, if a, an application on Ethereum is going to be quote unquote, trustless, it needs to be over collateralized. And I, I've heard you on, on various podcasts talk about or, or criticize like what's going on in the crypto space as just like the next iteration of financial like innovation or engineering, right? Where you said like, uh, you know, we, we allowed the shadow banking institution to happen and then it got out of control and now it's massive.

• 34:38David Hoffman?

  And now they are saying like, uh, they just give the same old excuses as to like why they shouldn't be regulated. And now you're, what you say about DeFi is something along those same lines. Like we have this new platform for innovation and this time, quote unquote, this time it's different, right? Same old excuse as, as we've all heard before. I actually do think that quote unquote, this time it's different. And, and the fundamental reason why is that there is a design ethos that is backing institutions like Bitcoin and Ethereum and DeFi. Protocols that could produce a dollar-denominated stablecoin that they're designed, good, good protocols that get me and Ryan and the bankless world really, really bullish are protocols that are designed to withstand World War III.

• 35:22David Hoffman?

  Right? Ethereum 2.0, it's in its rollout phase. It's been designed with an anti-World War, with World War III resistance. Like, what if nuclear bombs went off? Ethereum 2.0 should still operate. And a lot of the DeFi protocols that, that we are really excited about are the ones that plug up all potential attack and risk vectors in order to make them World War III resistant. And so earlier you said, you said, we were talking or caricaturizing some DeFi protocol that would produce a dollar where you would say, hey, use this money. It's risk-free. Trust me. We actually don't ask for your trust. And that's why DeFi is so cool to us is that the way that these protocols are set up are inherently over-collateralized.

• 36:03David Hoffman?

  With all possible attack vectors, hopefully sealed, probably not sealed, and many Bitcoiners would criticize the DeFi ecosystem for not having adequately sealed protocols. But that is the vision. We, we believe that we can create these like inherently strong, hard protocols that are, are de-risked by the market. Because if they do have a chink in the armor, if they do have a failure, then they die. And then they get replaced by new ones. And those ones are supposed to be better by the laws of the free market. And so what we are excited about is the potential for having de-risked financial institutions that don't actually require, you know, money printing to backstop risk. That, and that's kind of where, where our perspective comes from. Is that, is that new to you? Or is this, is this old information?

• 36:47Speaker 02

  No, this, this is old information, but I'm happy to go there because I don't think I've done in some of the other interviews. So there's, there's two things there. One is, um, when it comes to the collateral, you say over-collateralized, right? That's a conclusion, right? That's not a, that's not a statement of fact. You're saying that ex-colateral is, is over whatever line that you consider to be the line of safety. And maybe that's just where we frankly disagree is that I don't think those theories of over-collateralization actually survive the tail risk kinds of risk that I'm talking about. And then the second point there is. Well, if it's got a chink in my armor, it'll fail and something you will take its place.

• 37:24David Hoffman?

  Looking for the front page of DeFi, look no further than zerion.io. Zerion is your home base for managing your DeFi portfolios. Zerion offers a central place for you to engage with all of the DeFi protocols and assets that you engage with on a daily basis, but all in one central spot. Here you can see I've loaded up a wallet and Zerion is giving me the portfolio performance of all the assets in this wallet over time, as well as a breakdown of all the assets that I own, as well as all of my transaction history that I've ever done in an easy to view fashion. Zerion also lets you invest right into DeFi's best yielding financial opportunities right from their homepage.

• 38:05David Hoffman?

  Zerion also makes it super easy to access interest in DeFi using applications like Compound and Aave in the background. And you can also exchange your assets using the Zerion app, using an exchange aggregator in the background to make sure that you always get the best rates. You can even use the Zerion mobile wallet to add your MetaMask or Argent or another Ethereum address right into your mobile wallet. So you can see your portfolio and engage in DeFi on the go. Here I just loaded up my Argent wallet and now I'm going to load up my MetaMask as well. And Zerion will do the same thing. It will add all of my assets and wallets together, all in one space and give me a portfolio summary of what's going on. Adding wallets is trivially easy.

• 38:46David Hoffman?

  If you already have a MetaMask, you can get it right into the Zerion app and it can sync with your desktop app as well. And the best part is you can also buy Ether right into the app itself. Use the Invest tab to look at all the things that you have invested in, as well as other opportunities. And coming soon to the Zerion app is the ability to buy and sell your assets straight from your mobile device as well. So download the app, it works on iOS and Android. Go to zerion.io, plug in your wallets and get a historical report of your portfolio over time, as well as a comprehensive breakdown of all the assets that you own and how much yield they're generating for you. We're also brought to you by Monolith.

• 39:26David Hoffman?

  Monolith is your cool new DeFi account, your DeFi savings account, your DeFi checking account. Except the cool thing about the Monolith DeFi account is that it gets software updates, right? You actually get to increase the usefulness of this over time. So here are some of the features. Monolith is a smart contract wallet with a lot of the features that you would expect if you've come to know DeFi and what it is. You can, you can add money to it. You can put that money to work in Compound and accessing yield. But you can, and you can also swap through Uniswap. What was cool with Monolith is that they will send you a very sexy Monolith Visa card that connects to your smart Monolith smart contract wallet on Ethereum.

• 40:05David Hoffman?

  So it's a really awesome tool to live a bankless life with a savings account that gets software updates. So this is something that you're never going to find out in the real world, but you can still do real world things with, you know, real money and like buy your groceries. So that's just fantastic. Coming soon to Monolith, actually already here to Monolith is now you can buy, die and get it sent to your wallet directly, right? So it's also being an on-ramp. So you don't have to go through your centralized exchange like Coinbase or Gemini or wherever. You can just go straight from your bank account right into your Monolith checking account smart contract wallet. So check them out at monolith.xyz.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  And then the second point there is, well, if it's got a chink in the armor, it'll fail and something you will take its place. That's exactly the argument that was given for free banking. And what we saw was every time one of those failed, a bunch of people got hurt, right? Say, say DM actually takes off and then it fails. And then Mark Zuckerberg goes, well, we've learned our lesson. You know, the next people that come after Facebook will, will have a better system. Well, there's two potentially two billion users in the middle of that learning process. And, you know, not, not shade at you, but there's a lot of tech people that think the entire world is their playground to not learn the lessons of history and to repeat them. Like, oh, maybe I'll just do some human experiments. Oh, that's unethical. Oh, there's problems with doing that. Well, I guess I learned something this time.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  No, actually we learned that lesson 100 years ago and nobody should have. Let you pretend we hadn't learned that lesson and try it all again. And when it comes to these DeFi things, I mean, again, if we're talking about twenty million dollars, it's it's a rounding error. If we're talking about two hundred billion dollars, that's not the kind of lesson we just let fail. It is too big to fail, whether whether we want it to be or not. If there's if there's two trillion dollars of customer funds in these systems, they're too big to fail. We can't just say lesson learned, the free market will pick it up. That is the kind of Austrian response to the global financial crisis is we'll just liquidate everything. Right? Just let everybody go under, let mortgage owners go under, let people lose their jobs and the market will readjust. Yeah, millions of people die in the meantime.

• 42:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  So here here's, I think, maybe a difference in kind of foundation, because what you were saying is basically like everything ultimately settles back to the nation state legal system, right?

• 42:23Speaker 02

  With fiat currency, yeah.

• 42:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  With with fiat currency, but like with law in general, it all kind of settles to that layer. We are like much more bullish on a new social layer that is being created, just like, you know, some things in the human experience are settled outside of the nation state and outside of the legal system. Things like, you know, ethics, morality, sometimes those things get written into law, but religions are another human institution where some sort of settlement can happen. Like, you you made the point that basically crypto systems aren't decentralized because at the end of the day, property has to settle to some sort of legal system.

• 43:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  But what about property transition between countries that don't trust one another? Who is the the judge that supersedes between a China that is antagonistic against a United States of America, right? Which judge from which country sort of decides? This is why we need overarching, credibly neutral systems that essentially can provide the the ability to transfer value and a property rights system that don't have any biases to one nation state or another. We're talking about not like just a money system, we're talking about a new social coordination system that is being built on these crypto rails, and this is powerful stuff, and it's outside

• 43:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  of the legal system in some ways, the nation state legal system. And the thing about this is, right, like, It is immune in some ways from the authoritarianism that you also want to to prevent, right? Because it is not of the nation state. It is a different social structure and social system. We're bullish on that. But what we see when we look at the stable act is a little bit of like, we're with you on the the DM stuff and the Facebook and the Zuckerberg trying to become a new banker and centralized control. I hear you. Like, we're with you. Like, we understand what you're talking about. I'm even with you on kind of these new crypto banks

• 44:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  becoming like the old crypto banks that we used to have. Like, I get it. We're with you. Where we depart is we believe that there are credibly neutral protocols that can be developed. And a protocol, like the Constitution is a protocol. TCP IP is a protocol. No single country owns the protocol of TCP IP. It's a standard for the communication of information of data. We think such a thing can exist also for value and for property. And we think that you should not squelch that. You should be like, we're on the same team. We want a more bankless world, basically. And we want some of that innovation and that protocol

• 45:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  to also grow in in in the US. So maybe it was a misinterpretation of the the stable act. Maybe some things should be like crafted in it to like protect what we're trying to do on the kind of the DeFi side and the self sovereign side of things. But we absolutely want the ability for every citizen to run a node, an Ethereum node, without fear of some kind of legal reprisal, because some some some company has issued a stable coin that is against a regulatory regime. So I guess maybe without getting to the specifics of the stable act, like

• 45:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you resonate with that? Are you OK with this experimentation happening? Do you believe that maybe you're skeptical of it? That's fine to be skeptical of it. There's tons of people who are skeptical of crypto. But are you fine with letting that experiment play out? And seeing if we can actually build a bankless money system? That it sort of meets the standards of not having central intermediaries? What do you say?

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Well, so there's a couple of things there. One is, again, this bill isn't stopping anyone from creating a private currency. So you want to create a private currency? Go for it. It's the point in which you start issuing a stablecoin denominated in US dollar or another fiat currency instrument and trying to pass it off as public money, where there's going to be an issue. And then to go from there, the point about the nodes, just to be very clear, and I've clarified also, but I'll clarify here. The law regulates the issuance of stablecoins and requires you get a banking charter for doing that. What people responded almost immediately was, you'll never stop us because these networks are decentralized, right? So immediately, they probably lost you if you agree that there's this veil of decentralization, right? But that was their response. Well, we're going to create a network where there's only nodes. There's only nodes. There's no one else above nodes.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  So you can't go after anybody who is for these stablecoins unless you go after every node operator. And my response was, if that's true, then the only response is to go after every node operator. Because if you have 100 people engaged in a criminal enterprise, the fact that there's 100 instead of one doesn't mean that they're not all liable, right? But, and this was a crucial part that everybody stopped listening. I don't think that's actually an accurate description in these contexts. I don't think Ethereum is decentralized. I don't think if there was a stablecoin issued on the Ethereum network, that it would be impossible to identify the issuer above a node level. I don't think that's true. And so it wouldn't be going after node operators on Ethereum. It would be going after the issuer of the stablecoin on Ethereum.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  And if people say, oh, you can't find us, we're hiding amongst the nodes. I just call bullshit on that, frankly. But if you were going to design a system like that, if you were going to say, OK, we want to keep doing this, and we get caught up on Ethereum, we get caught out. So this time, we're going to design a system where we are perfectly hidden amongst the nodes. On that system, the answer would be OK. We're going to go after each node operator. And I think that's, that's the line where I am willing to take a hard stand because you can't hide amongst a hundred people to do something that would be illegal if you were doing it on your own. That's the basic principle here. That isn't to say we're coming after node operators who run an Ethereum node. I'm, I'm happy that people fundraised off that. I'm happy that people managed to turn me into a villain off that. Good luck with them, right? But that's not at all what this was, Bill was about.

• 48:23David Hoffman?

  I mean, would you be open to carving that out in such a bill to just clarify?

• 48:27Speaker 02

  I've literally, I've literally said to people, first of all, the way that we wrote the bill was that any activity that, commercial activity, so if you're running a non-commercial, if you're engaging in non-commercial node validation, fine, you're immediately exempt anyway. But any commercial activity related to this stuff would have to get prior approval from regulators in the same way as if we issued dangerous drugs, you got to get prior approval. Now, what I would support and do support is have a carve out for people who are engaging in node operations as long as that operation is not the only entity responsible for issuing the stablecoin, right? Any node operator who is not the primary actor or a member of the class primarily responsible for issuing stablecoins would be exempt. That's fine.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  Now, there's a question of how you draft that. I think that should happen at the layer of regulation. The bill gives regulators the authority to write that law. If you want to lobby for regulators to put that rule in place as an interpretation of this law on day one, I'll sign that. No problems, right? What I am not going to allow, or I don't think is reasonable to allow, is someone to say, okay, I'm going to create a decentralized blockchain where the whole network, every single node is identical. There's no miners, there's no validators, they're just all identical, and the whole thing together issues stablecoins. But you can't come after anybody unless you come after all of us. If that, if that's created, the answer is to go after all of them.

• 49:50David Hoffman?

  So, so the, the node operators don't have any explicit relationship with a specific protocol on Ethereum. So like, you know, one, one protocol on Ethereum might just simply be like the USDC contract address. And so while I run a node or I'm mining a transaction, I'm processing those transactions from that. Contract address, even though I'm not the issuer. And so in terms of USDC, it sounds like the stable act would go after USDC, the issuer, circle the issuer.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 50:18David Hoffman?

  And then, and then with DAI or Maker Dow, you know, you, you're, you're calling bullshit on the decentralization theater. There are people there that we could go talk to and exert regulatory pressure upon them. And therefore, you know, we don't even need to talk about nodes in that instance either. Kind of going back to what I was saying, though, with like World War Three resistant protocols. The goal of Ethereum is to produce such a human removed entity, a human removed protocol that is in itself is almost synonymous with Ethereum. When something is completely decentralized in, in with, and there are contracts on Ethereum. There are protocols on Ethereum that are 100% human removed. And when that.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  I don't agree.

• 51:01David Hoffman?

  You, you do, you don't even, you, it sounds like you don't even think that's actually possible.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  No, that if every single person who's running an Ethereum node today turned it off, where would those smart contracts exist?

• 51:13David Hoffman?

  And they will, they would be stored in the database, which.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  So if, if every single person who ran one of those nodes destroyed those, those nodes, where would, where would the smart?

• 51:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, then, then it would be eliminated, but.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  So we've identified a layer of human beings, haven't we?

• 51:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah, but, but we're talking about like 8,000 nodes, I think, just got spun up in the last week. And then I think it's over like 12,000 now, like at some point where we have to talk about how feasible it is to even be able to track all of this stuff.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  Okay, but now you've switched gears, right? Let's be honest here, you switch gears from there's no people to there's a very large network. Okay, how many, how many people are in, are in organized crime networks? Do you think there are mafioso groups that don't have 8,000 members? I mean, there are, right, that we know there are because we've seen them in throughout history, right? 8,000 sounds like a big number when you're used to networks of 20 servers. It's not that big a number when you're looking at criminal enterprises that span nations.

• 52:04David Hoffman?

  I don't think that's a fair comparison because mafia, mafia networks are human to human and they, they create trails. But nodes are, one node is completely independent from any other node. I could have three nodes in my house that are all independent from each other. And, and it's just part of this. Like nebulous set of, and then at the end of the day, you're totally right. These, these Bitcoin Ethereum, protocols on Ethereum, they're created by humans. But at some point, it becomes such like a, kind of like a virus. Like, how do you control a virus? Like, it's just, it just, the whole idea about these systems is that they are so easy to self replicate that they, it's like a termite. You can't get rid of it.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  But we do, we do get rid of termites. We do get rid of viruses.

• 52:44David Hoffman?

  Not very well.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Not well, but, but not zero, right? Like, New Zealand has just eliminated COVID, right? And the way they did that was, they dealt with a country of five million people and they put a wall around it. Now, I'm not saying that's the right way to do every kind of problem, but I think that there's, you know, you've got to be honest here with yourselves. There is a difference between saying there's a large distributed network and that there's no individual people involved in that, right? The three nodes you're running, you choose, you choose what you're putting on those nodes.

• 53:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think, I think if this is an argument that the nation state could stamp out like a Bitcoin or Ethereum. I think like a coordinated nation state attack against these systems could do them significant damage. There are humans that run the validators and run the machines. One of the guarantees that we haven't talked about yet is of course, the crypto economic guarantees. Which is the reason that people don't shut off their validators is because they're incented not to. So if one country goes like authoritarian on a decentralized network like a Bitcoin and Ethereum, but another country or some small pocket decides not to, they benefit disproportionately.

• 53:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so they don't. That's why these, these crypto economic systems are so resilient to that kind of attack. At this stage, whether a nation state could take it down or not, is not really the issue. I don't, I don't see the US or like a Western liberal democracy doing that at this point. I mean, like, I guess two other issues I could have had with the stable act, right? Or the, the.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  Can we just go on that, on that question?

• 54:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  Before you go to the stable act, which is, that's also true of like Nazi gold, right? If, if we say we're not going to let Nazi gold go into people's bank vaults. And then Switzerland puts its hand up and says, I'm not going to look and ask questions. Or Argentina says, yeah, sure, you can come here and set up a pig farm, doesn't matter. I mean, the argument there is not unique to computers. It's just pointing out that people can engage in arbitrage between nation states. And that's why there's a bunch of billionaires with bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. I get your point on that, but I'm not sure it's unique to crypto. It's just if I'm rich and powerful enough, I can find someone willing to let me do what I want.

• 54:58David Hoffman?

  What is unique to crypto specifically with Bitcoin and Ethereum is these protocols are designed to be as viral as possible. Right. They are engineered to be unstoppable, which means that like the having a conversation about whether we can or cannot. I think is futile, like if these things are doing their jobs, they are untouchable. Therefore, like any sort of like top down control upon node operators. It's not going to work because even if you do control the node operation from inside the country that you have domain over. The network is ultimately unfazed as a whole due to all the nodes that you don't have domain over. So then why do you even bother trying to exert control under your own constituents?

• 55:40Speaker 02

  Well, I think this is where there's maybe a misunderstanding of the point of the bill, right? The point of the bill is not to stamp out networks. The point of the bill is to manage systemic risk from those networks. And so what the goal of the bill is, is to prevent these stable coins from becoming the new banking. Right. From becoming the new primary layer of the economy that millions of consumers are putting their money into. Now, we didn't stamp out torrenting, right? But that doesn't mean that most official commercial companies right now get all of their content by illegally torrenting. Now, I happen to have no problem with torrenting, right? I think that's quite fuck IP producers, but I think the, the, the point there is you don't need to stamp out a whole network.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  You just need to make that network unattractive to the point of becoming central to the official economy. And in the case of the United States, like I think, yeah, the United States probably should take responsibility for the rest of the world in, in, in what happens to the US dollar. But if you had a system where no individual consumer in the United States and no major company and no business, small business in the United States. Was using a risky stablecoin. I would consider that a success in the sense that the systemic risk of stablecoins to the US economy is going to be reduced. There's not going to be that bank run in Mary Poppins of of average Americans, right? That's the goal. So, yeah, you're not going to stop someone in Siberia running a node necessarily like that. But you are going to stop that from becoming the new shadow banking that has trillions of dollars in the American economy.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  When there's a crash, they're too big to fail. But that's the goal, right? It's a feature, not a bug.

• 57:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Another another piece of the the stable act is. There seems to be an issue in the stable act when any currency kind of uses the unit of account of the US dollar, right? So you could envision something possibly that's not been created yet, something like a DAI. But much more decentralized, right? Maybe maybe sort of as decentralized as Ethereum and Ether and Bitcoin. But is somehow pegged or leverages the unit of account of the US dollar. You seem to have an issue with that, right? So this is different than a a circle or a Coinbase or a Facebook issuing their own kind of stablecoin.

• 58:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a very decentralized protocol network issuing an asset that might be backed by collateral or however they do it, that that is decentralized, but is using the unit of account of the dollar, the stable act. The brand. Yeah, uses the the stable act, my understanding would prohibit that too. Why? Like, what's what's what's the issue? What's the issue there? Why? Why can we not use the public good of the dollar with these with these DeFi protocols?

• 58:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's a good question. And just to be clear, the point here is not anything that ever uses the unit of account. It's the unit that issue that issue something in the unit of account with the expectation that retain a fixed or or so stable as so fixed as to be stable value. So stocks, for example, are issued in a unit of account, but stocks fluctuate in value, right? That nobody holds a stock expecting it to maintain. A stable nominal value relative to the US dollar. They they fluctuate. Now, one moment where that becomes an issue is the money market mutual fund industry. They issued shares. Right, that were in theory, a share can fluctuate in value, but the point of the MMF shares was that they were supposed to be stable in value. They were supposed to never break the buck. Right.

• 59:16Speaker 02

  And when they broke the buck, it was a huge source of systemic risk because they had built an entire business model on the expectation and belief that they can't do that. And so when we look at how instruments function, it's not the collateral backing in and of itself that's the problem. It's the promise of stable value that can't guarantee. Because if people take it seriously, if it takes it its word, yeah, yeah, this is stable. We're literally calling ourselves stable coins. Right. And then they start using it as though it's as good as US dollars, right? People use money market mutual fund shares as though they were as good as bank deposits. They weren't, and that caused a huge systemic risk. And when you look through the history of common law obligations, monetary obligations in contract law, in in financial commerce, things like that.

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  What the over and over, a really important layer was what they called the nominal layer. So people, you know, Austrians and others will complain about the real purchasing power of the US dollar fluctuating. Right. But what a hundred dollar bill will guarantee you is you can pay a hundred dollars worth of debts. That's a nominal layer. You can you can disagree how important you think that is, but on that layer, the nominal guarantee of a hundred equalling a hundred. If it turns out a hundred doesn't equal a hundred, that's incredibly risky and destabilizing to the whole monetary economy. We had banks that issued banknotes that were worth ten pounds. And then people realized those banks were risky. And every time they walked into a store, they had to negotiate how much of a discount they would put on that banknote. So there'd be a ten dollar banknote.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  And you would pay for something worth seven, and they'd say this banknote is actually only worth five. And the next day it might be worth eight, the next day it might be worth four. But if that banknote is designed to function like it's always going to be worth ten, and everybody starts using it interchangeably with with US dollars. Right. Oh, who cares if I have a hundred dollars in my actual bank account or in cash? Or I have a hundred dollars in my stablecoin balance. They're the same thing. They're both a hundred. And then it turns out one day the stuff that was in your stablecoin wallet is now worth fifty. That is the source of systemic risk here. The nominal stability, not, not just, and, and that's tied to the unit of account because we get, we denominate debts in the unit.

• 1:01:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Rowan, I take, I take your point about money market mutual funds acting as kind of a shadow bank. Like we've seen that, that, that happened. Like, one could also argue that, that Eurodollars right now exhibit those same behaviors. And by the way, that's a absolutely massive market, much bigger than the $30 billion or so in stable coins out there. So I, I'm hopeful this bill has something to say about that, if it's, if it's targeting.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  I mean, to my understanding, Eurodollars would meet the definition of, of the stablecoin deposit.

• 1:01:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, but, but that aside, one thing that is being missed here, I feel like is, I can't click view source on my Eurodollar. Like, I have no idea what's inside my Eurodollar. And like, what's back there?

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  Eurodollar is issued by a, a European bank.

• 1:02:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, a black box. Like, so the difference with DeFi is this, you can actually like click view source and see all of the assets, all of the collateral that back a given asset, right? This is a much more.

• 1:02:23David Hoffman?

  Easiest audit ever.

• 1:02:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Easiest audit ever. It's a much more open and transparent monetary system. It doesn't have the black box flaws that something like the Eurodollar might have or some traditional finance.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  Those banks submit to audit requirements, they submit to reporting requirements. The problem is their theory is wrong. Their theory of why they work the way that they say they're going to work is wrong. And so you could, you can audit that code, right? But you may look at a certain thing and interpret it slightly differently. You may, you may look at an upgrade and think, oh, there's nothing wrong in this upgrade and you made a mistake. Or let's be honest, if this becomes systemically important, how many people are auditing that code? How many? I mean, do, do we really think that 200 million Americans are going to start using stablecoins as their primary means of payment? And they're all going to be inspecting the source code? Of course not. They're going to trust certain actors in the same way as we trust, we trust auditors and intermediaries for credit reporting and all other kinds of stuff.

• 1:03:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let me ask you, let's say the crypto people are right, right? I think you think this is not going to be the case, but let's say that Bitcoin or Ether become a reserve asset for the world, right? Would you have something like, would you have a big problem with that? Like fundamentally, because your whole, the, the whole fear of money that you have is basically to, to save us from the systemic risk. We need it in the hands of a public institution that can sort of print money, right? So to prevent bankrupt, right? So I understand that, but you can't do that with a Bitcoin or an Ether. So it, it would seem to be the case.

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  The mining pool you could.

• 1:03:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, sure, but it seems to be the case that you would be against a monetary system like that too. Even if the people chose it, if kind of the free market chose it and essentially we adopted it. Like that, that's where some of this becomes a little bit of like, you know, at, at what point does the nation state sort of restrict individual choice? And say, no, sorry, citizen, you can't choose your own money. This is the money that we have for you. It's a public institution. You have to adopt it like we're banning these, like how far, how far do you push it?

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  Well, for the, for, for first of all, nobody's banned gold. I'm not recommending banning gold. I have never said anything like, but I've never said, I've never recommended that in my life. I don't think Rashid Lee was doing either, right? But, but to go to your point, there's two things. One is I don't think that's going to happen. If you actually look through the history of gold standards throughout history, they have been actively maintained through public law. And I think going back to your earlier point, this idea of sort of creating a layer above nation states. You asked about China and the United States. I mean, this is real politic, right? They have armies. Do you really think that they're going to put down their armies and, and as ascribe to some liberal theory of property rights above the nation state? I mean, this is liberal idealism at its, at its highest, that suddenly people who have control over means of enforcement are going to just sort of out of the better nature,

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  agree to some higher ideal against their interests. That's, that's not how we've actually got any democratic gains throughout history. We've got it by seizing powerful institutions. I mean, there is no international layer there that forces those two actors to do what they want. They go to war and that's a problem. And there's a reason why we haven't had a war within the United States between states since the civil war, because we don't let individual states create armies against each other. Now, if you want to have some one world government based on a belief in private property rights, I mean, more power to you. But I don't think that. You're going to miraculously have the institutions of power give up that power in the name of of ideals. That's not how it works. It happens when people stand up and demand accountability.

• 1:06:02Speaker 02

  And up until now, the the flip side has always been democracy's been on the side of the debtors. It's been on the side of the people without property rights. It hasn't, the people who've been standing up to create supranational institutions to defend property rights have been usually doing so against the interests of working people. And so when it comes to your currency model, a hard currency, like the kind you're talking about, a commodity backed or a commodity linked currency, whether it's a digital currency or a real commodity, is pro creditor. It's inherently deflationary, which means if you got in early and you have assets that you own, you get richer and richer at the expense of every next generation. Now, to the extent that there have been moments in history where feudal lords have convinced peasants that it is in their best interest to maintain feudalism.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you can fool some of the people some of the time. I happen to think that those systems are pretty fundamentally anti-democratic. Now, luckily, that's not a problem we have to deal with in the stable act. The stable act is specifically dealing with an emergent risk right now in the banking system. If you you want me to ask me what I would do in the moment where we have a hard currency, I'd be in the room saying we shouldn't do this. We should have a currency linked to human labor, where everybody who wants to work to contribute to the common good can earn currency doing so, that we eliminate rent seeking, whether that's intellectual property or landed rent or whatever else, and that we provide free goods to people outside of the cash nexus, like we do with healthcare and education and everything else that that works well for universal service provision,

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  and that the laborers who earn the money to to contribute to the common good, provide the services that are then available to people who can't work. That's the kind of democratic monetary system I want to build. But it's not about protecting private property rights. Ted Turner owns half of Montana. Fuck his property rights.

• 1:07:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Ron, another thing that struck me as odd in the stable act is you are very sort of anti-big-bank, yet the stablecoin issuers would require a bank charter in order to operate. Like, we very much believe the sort of, you know, the banking system is a cartel of sorts, a protected cartel of sorts. Why force them to be members of this cartel? The stable act seems incomplete if it doesn't incorporate the other aspects of your vision, and it's just leaving the banking system as is, but like forcing stablecoin issuers to become banks. What's your response to that?

• 1:08:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good question. There's a couple of things. First of all, the bill that we released a month before this bill was the Public Banking Act, which would create new facilities at the Federal Reserve, create a set of grants, create an onboarding process for the chartering process to speed it up, to create a separate form of deposit insurance and securities license for actors that wanted to create public banking institutions owned by the public government, not-for-profit, without shareholders in the interest of communities. And that's specifically designed to make those commercial banks obsolete. We don't need them to do anything systemically important. Right now, one of the reasons why those commercial banks are important is because they run the payment system, right? They go under, people can't make transactions.

• 1:09:08Speaker 02

  Two, they're responsible for a large amount of investment. We don't get to make bank loans, the economy stalls. What we proposed with Rashida Tlaib's bill originally was anonymous digital cash and Fed accounts for everyone at the central bank, and a postal banking system where they could go deal with their banking services at the post office, right? The post office, the first internet, right? They subsidized packets going around the whole country. They created an information network where nothing existed, one of the most socialistic institutions in the US government. It operated since the birth of the republic, and it issued postal savings and deposit accounts in the 1940s and 50s and 60s until the big banks shut it down because they didn't like the competition. So before the big banks came for crypto, they came for public postal banking.

• 1:09:51Speaker 02

  And that was the bigger threat. That actually did threaten. And their commercial interests. Commercial banks don't get feel threatened by crypto. They're just gonna take it over when it becomes important. But what we're trying to do here is it's a lesser of two evils situation. I mean, I have, you know, personally, my politics go towards the side of I don't need commercial banks at all. But this bill is saying, if you're going to engage in banking activity, you need to be regulated like a bank and be in explicit public-private partnership. Because, you know, go back to that earlier point that I made about neoliberalism. The whole point of neoliberalism is to give the impression that actors that rely on public support are purely private. They don't have any accountability beyond the market and profit. So the shadow banks are doing everything that regulated commercial banks are doing

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  in terms of systemic risk, in terms of socializing the benefits and socializing the losses and privatizing the benefits. But they're doing so without any of the accountability that comes with the public-private partnership model. And so getting them out of the shadows into the regulated system is a critical step. Is that as good as replacing them with public banks entirely? No, but it's it's it's a it's an important step. And the the solution, in my opinion, is not to throw them even further to the shadows and say they've got even less accountability to the public. Is to bring them in. Now, in two thousand and nine, there was a point where they could have socialized and nationalized half of those banks instead of bailing them out. They didn't do that because the banking interest didn't let them. That's that was a failure, right? The next time this happens, maybe that'll go differently.

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  But if we had a system of anonymous digital cash, Fed accounts, postal banking, a government investment program, and a and a network of public banks, there wouldn't be much need for commercial banks anymore. And all the claims that the crypto-stablecoin community has is if you regulate us too much, you'll kill innovation. Well, I don't agree with that. I think there are ways to have public investment innovation that would not require them to be allowed to do whatever they want without accountability. So that's the alternative. You you you require them to get a banking license. Some of them are going to get banking licenses, going to come out of the shadows. Some of them aren't going to come into existence. And all that energy can be redeployed in pursuit of actual public financial infrastructure.

• 1:11:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Ron, is it possible for you to do all of this? Like, go pursue MMT, go pursue this new banking system in the US without crushing crypto through aggressive regulation and crushing DeFi and crushing this experiment that we're running to create a different set of social protocols that the world can run on top of? Like, we're worried that you're trying to crush the new internet here that we're building. And we think that a lot of the goals that you have are common with the goals of crypto and the bankless movement.

• 1:12:38David Hoffman?

  I think they're hugely synonymous, actually.

• 1:12:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I mean, take your point. I mean, there are many in crypto who are very anti-MMT, of course, right? But like, go do MMT, right? And like, may the best system win. Why can't we just have that sort of relationship in a free and open republic such as the United States? What's your take?

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  My take is if you want to create a private cryptocurrency, I honestly wish you the best. I don't think stable coins meet that definition. And for example, if somebody said, hey, we just want to counterfeit US dollars, why can't we just be left alone? If you want to print US dollars at the US Mint, go do that and let the best man win. Well, no, there's a reason why those two things are in tension with each other.

• 1:13:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Counterfeiting is a little bit different.

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  Well, no, okay, let me be clear. It's different only in the sense that a bank deposit and a US dollar are issued by different actors. But counterfeiting a bank deposit is what a stablecoin is doing, in my opinion. Now, you may disagree with that, fine. But if you accept that view, that a stablecoin is an unlicensed bank deposit, and that the reason we license bank deposits is because they are an extension of the public monetary system, then these actors are not trying to just do stuff in the privacy of their own basement. They're literally coming for the US dollar. They're literally trying to encroach on the space of the public system. If you want to create a private currency in your own unit of account, by all means, I will defend your right to the death to do that, and I will defend it against other people who would love to shut it down. But if you want to

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  Start trying to mimic public dollars. You're not creating the new world. You're just doing the same thing that every other bank has done in history, which is piggyback on the public monetary system. And when it comes to building the internet, I know nobody in your world is going to find this remotely convincing. But I'm actually trying to save you from yourselves because you, if you, if you build an entire crypto community on the back of stable coins, which is what's happening before our eyes right now, right? Those, those Bitcoin Ethereum systems are piggybacking and increasingly dependent on stable coins. And that whole system comes crashing down. You will have destroyed the vision of the whole thing. And actually, if we look back at the birth of the internet, I worked for this, you know, I'm a, I'm a network manager, a sort of evangelist for this group called the Freedom Box Foundation. It's run by Evan Mogul.

• 1:14:49Speaker 02

  He was the, uh, he was the legal counsel for the Free Software Foundation. He worked with Richard Stallman directly for 25 years. I believe very deeply in free software, free hardware, free culture, free bandwidth. Right. And I think that if you look at even groups like the EFF and the sort of zealous defenders of section 230, they have become their own worst enemies because what is the internet now? It's a bunch of walled gatehouses run by big mega companies, right? That vision of the free, uncensored use net of the nineties. It, it exists around the margins, but it's fucking dead. And I wish it hadn't been allowed to die. And if we had made some different decisions earlier on, it might still be alive in a different way. And I think this is, this is one of those moments. If you, if you sell out to the US dollar, you will live to regret it.

• 1:15:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  When's your legislation going to come down the pike? That will support DeFi and true decentralized networks and protocols and crypto in the US. When is that legislation? If you believe in this vision and you want to save us from ourselves, how are you going to foster that innovation in the United States?

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, I, I have signed on board of coin centers, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm all in support of their, of their letter, trying to protect the right to self-host wallets. I, I have, I'm all in support of that. And I, I think it's really important advocacy work. And as I said earlier, and I wasn't being ironic, I'm genuinely happy they managed to fundraise off misrepresenting my words because. They're an important voice out there and I'm glad they've got a, you know, a, a place in DC. I wish them all the best on that work. I disagree with them when it comes to money because I think my understanding of money throughout history is it's not an anti-government tool. It's always a rich and powerful elite group relying on government supports to support, to, to, to fund themselves.

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  And if you want to create a private, a, a, a, a genuinely decentralized net, stay the hell away from money. Do it with information, do it with knowledge, do it with culture. I, I support all of that stuff and, and when it comes to bills like that, I mean, to be clear, I'm a monetary expert, right? That's where I focus on. I'm focusing on digital currency. The work that I'm doing around anonymous digital cash is honestly, there's about three people in the world doing it with me. I feel very alone. I would welcome people in the crypto space to fight on that and props to Jerry and Peter. When we had this conversation, they immediately went out and wrote stuff saying, if we're going to have a digital dollar, it needs to be anonymous in cash. And I said, yes, you guys are right. You're on the right track. We're completely aligned on this because as far as monetary systems and the digitization of money goes,

• 1:17:19Speaker 02

  these governments are going to build a surveillance system unless people step in. And every person who goes, you know what? I'm just going to tune out and drop out. Like that's the 1960s hippie approach. It didn't work. The people who stayed in the boring room, wearing the suit, built the, the, the Wall Street of the 1980s without them while, while they all left.

• 1:17:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can I just say, Rowan, I'm worried that you won't be successful in that. I'm worried that you won't. I'm worried that, I'm worried that what, what's going to happen is we're going to centralize more power in the current monetary system that we have. And people like you might want a private money system, but not enough people in the government do and we'll end up with something like the, uh, what China's doing with their digital currency. And like, so, so this is the thing, like, we can't put all our eggs in the basket that you're talking about. Like, we can't. As a society and as a people, like what happens if you're wrong? What happens if you don't win those arguments? We end up with a more centralized system that's now doing MMT and it's fully surveilled and we can't even open a bank account

• 1:18:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  against an authoritarian government who's like, what happens if you're Wrong about those things.

• 1:18:26Speaker 02

  Me.

• 1:18:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  We lose. We all lose.

• 1:18:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, but we we lose anyway, mate. This is my I I this is maybe a just a tactical disagreement or strategic disagreement. If you're talking about building a currency for World War Three compliance, I don't know what planet you're talking about after World War Three. Right. But you're talking about one where there's probably a nuclear winter for twenty or thirty years. You're talking about most vegetation on the planet's dead. But hey, at least I've got some digital gold assets. I mean, come on, this is not, this is not the priority in that moment. If you really think that there's a way to build around the the governments of the world and the control they have, I I I don't, I just don't agree with you. I don't think the currency layer is what stops tanks. I just don't think it's true. And, you know, mass revolution, sure, I'm with you.

• 1:19:08Speaker 02

  But but but like, making sure that your hundred million dollars is safe in your basement, it doesn't make a difference. You you can have as much gold as you want. I had this conversation with Dimitri. You can have as much gold as you want if they're coming from every single member of your family or your race. It's not going to help you. And what Dimitri said is, well, at least you can buy your way out. And that works if totalitarianism comes in one country. It doesn't work if it's everywhere. So if it's World War Three and it's authoritarian regimes from the US to China, where do you buy your ticket to? I mean, what Milton Friedman's grandson seasteading in the Pacific? You think you think that the cruisers in the Pacific are gonna gonna let him do that? Come on. I mean, what is the alternative? We're all in this, we're all in this bloody globe together.

• 1:19:51Speaker 02

  And we either we either stop them from building the the procedures of totalitarianism or we don't. But if we don't, digital currencies, private digital currencies not going to save, especially not one built on the US dollar.

• 1:20:03David Hoffman?

  Rowan, I I'm I'm struck by the very strong similarities that I see with what you are doing with what what me and Ryan are doing. While simultaneously, there being some absolutely completely polar opposite features as well. As far as like a discussion goes, I'm I'm really happy that that you came on and and gave us some of your time to go through some of these details. I think it was for me, it was really educational to kind of hear a similar yet opposite or or similar yet different perspective. And I think I hope a lot of the listeners

• 1:20:35David Hoffman?

  Learned about like what are because I do believe that there are some very real criticisms of the cryptocurrency industry coming from what you are saying and I do hope you know that at the same time like it is a constant conversation in the world of crypto that if we just end up recreating the same systems that we've seen before then we've lost like the crypto is supposed to be something new, something better, something cool. And likewise, I see you acting as a steward of public goods. I understand that you understand that public goods are some of the most important things that we can endeavor to create. And that's also something that we see ourselves doing here at Bankless and making sure that the listeners understand that there are more than one ways to get to public goods, I think is

• 1:21:19David Hoffman?

  really important. And I think you coming on and sharing your perspective, I think, was really valuable to what we call the Bankless Nation. I have an article that I want to send to you and then get your opinion on. It's called the Global Public Goods and the Protocol Sync Thesis. It kind of illustrates how we see public goods coming out of this space and I wanted to see if it resonates with you. And likewise, I think this will not be the last of Rowan Gray when it comes to crypto legislation. And I'm looking forward to maybe having you back on in the future to talk more about the subject matter.

• 1:21:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having me. And yeah, I completely agree. I think I think we do share a lot of common goals. I think we diverge at a very sort of early point in the road and that's where it ends up looking like there's a lot of difference. And look, if you're right and you succeed, honestly, I'm happy to, right? I think you're I think it's the wrong way, but I think we do actually want to avoid the same kinds of risks in the long term. So thanks for having me on. I appreciate the fair questions.

• 1:22:11David Hoffman?

  Cheers.

• 1:22:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Rowan, it's been a pleasure. Guys, that has been another episode of Bankless. Risks and disclaimers, of course. Eth is risky, so is crypto, so is Bitcoin. My goodness, MMT feels kind of risky, too. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but thanks for joining us on Bankless.