The RFK Interview

An in person interview with presidential candidate RFK Jr. who shares his takes and policies on the state of crypto in the United States. To learn more, visit https://www.kennedy24.com/ ------ 🏹 USE PODCAST24 FOR 10% OFF https://bankless.cc/Citizen2024 ------ 🎧 Listen On Your Favorite Podcast Player: https://bankless.cc/Podcast ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP SMARTER https://bankless.cc/uniswap 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

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

• 0:04David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, we are here at ETH Denver, where 20,000 investors, builders, and users of crypto have descended every single year to mingle. And one of those individuals is RFK Jr. RFK, what brings you to Ethereum Denver? Why are you here? What interests you?

• 0:18Speaker 01

  My presidential campaign is, you know, one of the priorities for us is transactional freedom and promoting America as a hub for cryptocurrency innovation and, you know, as an alternative to rebuild the middle class in our country to end the war economy. Fiat currency is the product of a war economy. It's the way that wars are financed. When wars used to be financed by gold, they would end when the gold ran out. Now, they never

• 0:55Speaker 01

  end because we can just print money all the time. If we had cryptocurrency as a central part of our monetized economy, it would inject discipline into that process and it would decrease the chances for war. It's a way to rebuild the middle class, to provide an off-ramp from this monopolistic, globalized banking system. And, you know, and that's critical for us. Jamie Dimon actually made a statement this week in which he said that the plan was for the regulatory agencies to obliterate Bitcoin. And that, you know,

• 1:40Speaker 01

  is a method of controlling all of us. And that, and the central bank digital currencies, and the end of analog currencies, we ought to be moving in the other direction. During the Great Depression, there were over 3,000 local currencies in our country. And that is where we need to be moving, back toward more currencies to rebuild the American middle class, not make them the slaves to the Fed.

• 2:05David Hoffman?

  If elected president, how would you engage with the crypto industry? Crypto's becoming increasingly partisan in Capitol Hill. What would our relationship look like if you were president?

• 2:15Speaker 01

  You know, I'm going to have, I'm already talking to the top people in the crypto industry and about how do you do this? How do you make America the hub of crypto innovation? How do you end the SEC's war on crypto? How do you encourage individual Americans across the board to own crypto, to protect themselves as a hedge against inflation? And how do we unravel the Wall Street control of Main Street, of the local economy? And when I get into the White House, I plan to bring in those people as advisors

• 2:56Speaker 01

  to figure out, how are we going to make crypto as part of the American experience and part of the commitment to America for freedom?

• 3:09David Hoffman?

  As the crypto industry, what advice do you have for us as to how we can make it easier to advocate for us in the world of politics? What can we do to make your job easier?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Get involved in the political process. Put out the word. There's only one candidate who is pro-crypto. And that's President Biden. I don't even know if he's conversant with it, but his administration has been extraordinarily hostile to it. The SEC has been trying to destroy crypto. The pressure on the banks to not accept crypto. The banks that are accepting it have been punished for it. All of the tools that they're using to try to destroy crypto and drive it out of this country, it's not good for our country. President Trump said earlier this week that when he was asked about crypto, he said, "I believe in one currency, and it's the dollar."

• 4:02Speaker 01

  So I don't think either of these candidates is a friend to crypto. I understand the importance of crypto. I understand that transactional freedom is as important as freedom of expression. And I learned that during the Ottawa trucking strikes.

• 4:21David Hoffman?

  Over the last two years or so, some of the regulations coming out of the SEC and really just the Biden administration as a whole has pushed a lot of energy and excitement about the crypto space offshore. Really, the pendulum has shifted towards the East in Asia, and that has been where a lot of United States companies have had to move in order to do what they want to do in the crypto space. What is your plan to bring all of that just economy and business and jobs back onshore?

• 4:47Speaker 01

  That innovation is migrating offshore because of the hostility of the United States government. There's countries like Switzerland, like Portugal, like Belgium, Singapore, that have no, that treat crypto as a currency, which it ought to be treated as. It shouldn't be treated as a security. It shouldn't be taxed at every transaction. And I'm going to change that rule. And I'm going to make this country the most crypto-friendly country in the world.

• 5:17David Hoffman?

  Well, RFK, I really appreciate you coming to the place that we all converge on every single year, Ethereum Denver, being in the trenches with us. So I really appreciate you just being shoulder to shoulder with the cryptocurrency industry here.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 5:29David Hoffman?

  Cheers.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  David, thank you.