Latest / The Aaron Day Show / S3E22: You Don't Own Your Stocks. EXPOSED.
Transcript
- The Aaron Day Show starts now live. All right. Welcome back to the Aaron Day Show. This is season three, episode twenty two. And we actually have a ton of information to go through tonight. And actually, this is a topic that I have discussed on the show for months. which is the Clarity Act. And I mean, I've done a couple of dedicated podcasts to it, but I've written articles and, you know, talked about it at length. And for some reason, people still believe that this is a pro-crypto, pro-free market bill. And so just yesterday, they released another, like a And as I explained earlier, on numerous occasions, the longer it takes to get a bill across the finish line, the worse the bill becomes. Because in essence, you have to get more and more buy-in, either from special interests or from the political parties themselves who always want to consolidate political power. This is always the case. And you can look at the history of any bill going through Congress, but particularly anything in the realm of financial regulation, it always gets worse. And so They've been talking about getting this Clarity Act over the finish line. They were going to have it done by July the fourth. This was the big push. And you've seen Trump and Treasury Secretary Besant out there talking about how important this bill is. And they didn't get it done on July the fourth. And then now they're running up against a deadline where if they don't get it done by some point in August, it's probably dead. So the prediction markets have it at less than fifty percent right now. But we haven't known what the new provisions of the bill are that have been proposed. We haven't known what the negotiations behind the scenes have been until yesterday when we got a glimpse when they dropped the new documents. And as expected, the one thing you could tell is that over the last couple of weeks, law enforcement agencies have come out and started to endorse the bill. You've seen Democrats like Mark Warner from Virginia come out and talk about the importance of the bill. Well, that's a bad sign. That's a bad sign if you are a listener to this show, you know that we're concerned with human freedom and privacy and sovereignty. And I have made this statement several times, and I seem to be the only one saying this, but if you actually read the bill, I believe that it's completely justified. This is the largest surveillance bill in U.S. history. And it's getting even worse. So I'm going to actually walk through some of the stuff that I've already talked about before. Some of the things that we have known were in the bill. And remember, the Clarity Act, this started out as a bill passed about a year ago in the House. And then there were two different competing versions in the Senate. And so now there's a new draft. And so they have to basically agree in the Senate. And then they have to actually... work across the aisle there's a lot of work to do to get this done but there have been all these different versions floating around and as is usually the case by the time you actually get the thing across the finish line you get the worst elements of all of the bills and i say this from the perspective of if you're actually interested in freedom and privacy And as I've discussed, and you can go to day twenty twenty six dot com, my U.S. Senate page, and I have had a I'll go through that as part of this as well. A section where I rate these bills, all of them, the whether you're going all the way back to the Patriot Act, to the Genius Act and everything else. And I give you all of the detailed information about it, the summary, who voted for it, where it actually hits on a variety of different freedom dimensions, who the lobbyists are, how much money has been spent. I give all of that detail. And so the algorithm that I have for rating these bills, I applied to this new bill. And it is the worst of them all. It scores an eighty three out of one hundred in terms of kind of a technocracy score. This bill is not only how we will own nothing. Well, excuse me, it is not only the largest surveillance bill in U.S. history, it is how we will own nothing. This bill is about how everything that you own will be tokenized and put under the control of governments and other third parties. And this is not a conspiracy theory. This is literally the construction of the bill. And I want to start with, I think, the most important thing to understand about the Clarity Act, because people think that the Clarity Act is about crypto. And crypto is a very small part of what the Clarity Act is about. So, for instance, if you think you own your stocks, you don't. And the Clarity Act is going to actually be the mechanism by which you're dispossessed of all of your assets, not just a control system for how you pay for things. The reason this is important is if you're listening to this and you say, well, I don't care about crypto at all, or I'm just in gold and silver. Yeah, I knew crypto was a scam. Understand that as it stands today, you don't have self-custody of your investment portfolio, of your retirement portfolio, your four one Ks, the stocks that you hold in publicly traded companies. You don't actually have that in your own possession. You use a broker. And I'll explain the mechanics of how that works. But right now, the name on your stock certificate that you think you own isn't yours. All of these public stock certificates are owned by one company, a company called Seed & Co., whose CEO happens to be ex-CIA. We actually literally have a structure where there is a middleman in the middle of holding all of the certificates together. for all publicly traded stocks. And then you go through a broker to kind of get a reference, an IOU on these things that seed and company owns. And this is confirmed on investor.gov by the SEC itself. So again, you don't have to take my word for it. You can look up all of this stuff. You can look up seed and company. You can look up, you know, do I have custody of my own assets? What is that relationship like with the broker from an ownership perspective? And so, I mean, I've talked a lot about the importance of tokenization. And the reason for this is cryptocurrency is really going after five percent of global assets. In fact, the slide should actually say money represents five percent of global assets. And you can think about this yourself. I mean, how much of your own... wealth are you holding in your bank account probably not a lot right a lot of you know your net worth is probably in your house or it's in investments or or at this point you know the way things are going maybe you don't have any assets at all uh based on the devaluation of the currency but in any event people focus so much about money and digital currency without really taking the broader picture which is that these other assets you know your house your car your retirement accounts, commodities, that makes up the other ninety five percent. So this is a much, much larger market size here. So when people talk about the dollar or the yuan or whatever it happens to be this, you know, we're talking about whatever, three trillion dollars for the Chinese digital yuan. It's these are small potential market sizes. But when you're starting to talk about The tokenization of assets, you're looking at six hundred trillion dollars plus. And that's before you start talking about derivatives. And then once you get into derivatives, you're actually talking about quadrillion. Literally. So this is two hundred times the size that the market size for tokenized assets is two hundred times the size of the supply of money itself. This is why the Clarity Act is so important. The Clarity Act is not about cryptocurrency or about this little niche asset class that people think is going to go to the moon. This is about taking your real-world assets and basically tokenizing them, computerizing them, turning them into a computer file that you don't actually control. So now all of a sudden, people understand the idea of what a CBDC is. A CBDC is a form of digital programmable money that the central bank or the central bank in conjunction with the government can program. They can decide where you can spend it, how much of it you can spend. They can take it away from you if you don't follow the rules. They can completely censor your speech. And they can track all of it. Everybody kind of is getting a better idea of what CBDCs are. Well, now apply that same surveillance and that same control to everything that you own. People like to talk about the Canadian truckers. The Canadian truckers being a perfect example of financial censorship and having their bank accounts shut off. But now imagine that happens. You speak out of line. You don't say what the government wants to hear. You deviate from... the authoritarian norms, and now all of a sudden your investment account is frozen, your ability to sell your house is frozen, perhaps even your ability to use your car. You can actually shut off increasingly the ability to even use your assets, let alone sell your assets. This is what the Clarity Act is actually about. So I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that it's the biggest surveillance bill because it literally encompasses everything that you own. This is Klaus Schwab's absolute dream, what's going on with the Clarity Act. And now one of the things that you might have seen, you'll see Larry Fink from BlackRock and you'll see people coming out from Fidelity and other places. And they're all excited about the Clarity Act. And they're all talking about the tokenization of assets. Howard Lutnick's firm, Cantor Fitzgerald. They have been working on behind the scenes, getting all of these platforms ready, ready for the Clarity Act to be dropped in. Now, the thing that I want to say about crypto is, And the tokenization of assets is, if you remember, at least what we thought the point of Bitcoin was from the beginning, was to be peer-to-peer digital cash that you could use without third parties. What you will note when you see people supporting the Genius Act and now the Clarity Act, you'll see this laundry list of people coming out celebrating the bill. These technologies were meant to get rid of these middlemen. These are the middlemen that the technology is supposed to displace. So what's happening is we're keeping the middlemen. We're keeping the high costs and the high surveillance of the existing system. But now we're adding more programmability and we're adding much more granular control over what can be done with everything that you own. So you really, at this point, won't own anything. If your mortgage and everything... You could argue you don't own these things already, but you could argue that your stocks and all these other things... They're being built to be frozen and clawed back. Or basically, if you're not on a whitelist, you can't even engage in commerce anymore. So all of these things actually fit together. The tokenization of assets, digital ID, which in the US is now in the form of real ID. All of this is meant to gatekeep who can engage in, I don't even know if you call it voluntary trade at this point or not, given the barriers that are put in place. But this is the complete... digital control system and this clarity act is actually the biggest component of it it's far worse than what people were worried about when you were talking about cbdc's so the stuff i'm going to talk about tonight i'm not going to go over all of the details from the previous analysis uh you can watch the previous podcast or as i said i'll pull up day twenty twenty six dot com we go through the build page But I'm going to talk about the highlights, the six hundred and sixteen page crypto draft that was circulated just yesterday. And by the way, the thing that you're going to hear about this as you're if you're watching this on social media is that people are talking about, hey, they just put in ethics, you know, reform, ethics regulation in this bill. that will prevent politicians from launching meme coins and all this other stuff. They're actually trying to position this as reigning in government corruption and this being about an ethics win. This is the highlight. And by the way, as we talk about this, you'll see exactly how cynical this process is. But by the way, the only reason people are even not writing in the streets about this is they've already bought the propaganda. They bought the, oh, the Clarity Act is about clear rules for the road. America is going to lead in innovation because of the Clarity Act. And I'm telling you, entrepreneurs are not sitting around waiting for hundred page bills that add surveillance and add all kinds of constraints on their ability to engage in trade. This is not what people are waiting for at all. And now it's like yesterday, Russia announced that they were implementing crypto regulations. So then all of a sudden, well, if Russia did it, we have to do it. As if what makes a country competitive is the extensiveness of their rules and surveillance. It is a complete inversion of how free markets work. It's also a complete inversion of the United States itself and the founding principles. So I was stunned. I'm still going through in more detail and cross-referencing and trying to project out what all of this means. But I'm going to hit some of the high points today because it's critically important at this point that people know. And when you see traffic online, I mean, I've been on podcasts. I went on the Sal and Mark Edge show last night. And they had me on, and obviously they get it. But they were even saying that a lot of the people they've had on the show, which this is an agorist-centered audience. He said a lot of the other people they've had on the show have been pro the Clarity Act. And it's mind-boggling to me because I will say no one's wanted to debate me on this topic. And I comment on it quite frequently. And I'll put things out there. No one's refuted the idea that it's the largest surveillance bill. And yet still people are... are saying that this is going to be somehow this great windfall for freedom and crypto in America. And that's at odds with the reading of the bill in any way, shape, or form. The House has passed the Clarity Act. The Senate has not finished this yet. And as I said at the beginning, right now there are... Fifty Republicans support it. It has to get to sixty votes. Rand Paul is against it, and I believe Josh Howley is against it. Those are the only two Republicans to come out against it. But it has to get to sixty. So... If you'll recall, one of the things that I've been saying about the bill in its previous versions is that basically they will track all of your transactions. At the heart of this is your transactions and your transaction history. the construction of your trades. So in other words, what you're buying and selling over time. They're mapping out basically all of that over time, storing that information for five years, sharing that information with multiple departments of the U.S. federal government, and also sharing that information with foreign central banks. This has been a part of it from the very beginning. Now, on top of that, so that was the bad, at the heart of it, one of the major issues with this. But to get from here to sixty votes, They're trying to entice law enforcement agencies that have come out in support of it and Democrats. And overall, if you look at what they're saying is they want, a Democrat will say they want more consumer protection and more consumer protection means more government control. Consumer protection from the government is never about protecting the consumer. It's about empowering the government. And that's always the case. So when you ever hear Elizabeth Warren talk about protecting the consumer, you better grab your wallet. Um, So that's the instance there. But in getting law enforcement out, there are a lot of people in the crypto community that have been completely duped. And I will explain how by the language. They've put in language that makes it sound like it's great for open source developers, that it's great for DeFi. And when you read the actual languages, it's a language, it's a complete rug pull. Not only in what it states explicitly, but also what it invites. So in a lot of cases, part of the bill is they punted the hard stuff. And I'll explain what that is also. So this bill only goes from bad to worse. And, you know, actually the one safeguard that they did promise got pulled out of this bill. They actually promised that the United States would not issue a CBDC. That was part of this bill originally. It was a CBDC ban. That got stripped off. And then I think it got put into some other piece of legislation. And now where they came out on it is, oh, well, there's not going to be a CBDC until Well, I mean, I've got news for you. As I've reported on numerous occasions, they've already built the CBDC. This is Epstein funded through MIT Multimedia Lab. It's Project Hamilton, Project Cedar, regulated liability network. So there are people out there saying, oh, this is great. Nothing can happen until twenty thirty. If the technology is off the shelf. Remember, guys, twenty thirty is when they wanted to go live with this stuff anyway. It is a complete propaganda operation to convince people that. The CBDC issue is dead because there are a lot of people out there that think, oh, well, we never even started to work on this. Go to the MIT Digital Currency Initiative. These things that I've said, I wrote about it in my book, The Final Countdown. But, you know, this isn't, again, this isn't even like secret information. You know, when I wrote this book, I found this information on their websites. They don't even hide this stuff. Project Hamilton, which is the replacement for the digital dollar, has two Bitcoin core developers that have worked on it. One of them, Corey Fields, he's on the white paper. He's a co-author of the white paper of Project Hamilton, funded by Epstein's group. You can't make this stuff up. But even that was deleted from this bill. So they nixed that. Now, the Genius Act is already law. And I mentioned this several times. The Genius Act is effectively now, in conjunction with the Clarity Act, a backdoor CBDC. So what do I mean when I say that? So it's not a CBDC in the sense that it's not the central bank issuing the digital currency. But that's actually not what people are worried about. When you look at financial surveillance in the United States and in other countries, by and large, it's not the central bank that is going out and doing the surveillance. It's not the central bank that is putting in the reporting requirements. That is a function reserved usually for the legislature. And it certainly is the case in the United States. So all of the stuff that people don't like in the United States about our existing system, which is already highly surveilled, You don't like the fact that there's, you know, transaction reports on, you know, suspicious activity reports that go to the Treasury Department on any transaction more than ten thousand dollars. You don't like the know your customer anti money laundering laws. You know, all of these forms you have to fill out when you open a bank account, when you open a crypto account, where they ask you all this information, you have to provide biometric information. Americans spend sixty one billion dollars a year complying with know your customer anti money laundering laws. And it catches almost zero criminals. This has been demonstrated. There's all kinds of documentation on this. This was an extension of the Bank Secrecy Act from nineteen seventy. It has completely failed. And what its stated mission was and its stated mission at the time in nineteen seventy was to combat. organized crime to combat the mafia. This was the original idea behind this. And when you had a suspicious activity report of ten thousand dollars, well, that's like the equivalent of eighty thousand dollars today or ninety thousand dollars a day. So there weren't a lot of suspicious activity reports being generated. Well, this is how government works. The threshold number never changes. But based on inflation now, every average small business is subject to the suspicious activity reporting. So all of that reporting, and there are other things too, and I'll talk about this later, but Johnny Sununu, who I'm running against here in New Hampshire for the United States Senate, he was involved with the Patriot Act and some other things, including voting on the bill to make national security letters possible. So they can come in and basically shut down your bank account, and they'll issue a national security letter, and you can't tell anybody about it, including a lawyer. and I've documented this even before Genius and Clarity talking about the surveillance, the tracking, even the programmability that we already have within our existing system. Well, all of that came from Congress. So understand that first. The central bank is an unnecessary, useless third party, but the surveillance and the censorship comes from Congress. And so what they did with the Genius Act was they said, oh, if you're going to be a legitimate regulated stablecoin, you have to back your stablecoin by U.S. treasuries. So in other words, you can't back it by gold. You can't back it by other cryptocurrencies. You have to back it with U.S. treasuries, which is a way for the U.S. government to sell more debt. They estimate three to four trillion dollars of government debt will be sold to back these stablecoins. So this was one part of the Genius Act. But one of the new pieces in the Clarity Act bill, the Senate thing yesterday, is it gives the government the ability to force stablecoin issuers to seize, freeze, or burn your stablecoins. They can force you to exchange one stable coin for another. So if all of a sudden they decide, hey, this platform, we don't like USDC on Ethereum. We want to switch it to... You now need to substitute your USDC for Tether backed by the Trump network or whatever it happens to be. Yeah. World Liberty Financial, let's say they issue, they come up with a blockchain that's going to be used for back. Literally, this is what is in the new form of the Clarity Act. It's awful for stablecoins. So when I say backdoor, what does this mean? It means the government, the United States government, has complete control over stablecoins. They have the ability to seize, freeze, burn, or even exchange stablecoins. And it actually even gets worse from there. And so this is, yeah, so seize, freeze, or burn, and then reissue. The reissue thing is really fascinating. So under this, they could say, hey, you're using Tether, you're using USDC. All of a sudden, hey, we want to roll out a CBDC. Well, guess what? Under this legislation, they could seize your stablecoins and then reissue them on a CBDC. It's in the statute, section one zero nine zero six. And I encourage you all to look this up. Again, these people that are supporting this bill, they can't have read it. There's just like – it's just – I don't know. You go through and you look at this thing, and again, I would be shocked to see that anyone in the Liberty community or the crypto community has actually read the bill and comes across supporting it. I haven't seen it yet. All I've seen are – fake accounts and people who haven't read the bill and people who are buying this headline narrative that, oh, if this passes, three trillion dollars is going to come in and buy Bitcoin and buy your bag and this is going to moon and all this other stuff. There are non-thinking, non-reading people that believe that. But I just can't see anyone reading the bill and coming away with this thing. Here's the other piece in this new revised language. They can hold your money for six months. Without a judge, without a warrant, and without a charge. This is one of the new additions. Section one zero three zero five. A hundred and eighty days. Now, I mean, look, if you're if you're used to crypto and, you know, you've dealt with whatever Coinbase or any kind of exchange, you're used to this kind of thing happening where, you know, your money gets frozen. This is this is common. This is now institutionalized. They don't even need to act like they have a reason for doing this. If they think it's suspicious, that's good enough. There's no bar. There's no burden that needs to be required, that needs to be met, no judge that needs to sign off. And on top of that, this actually extends to the exchanges themselves. The exchanges can freeze your money, and now they have immunity to from being sued themselves. So if Coinbase decides, hey, I don't like this guy, they no longer have to prove to anyone or prove to you that they have a reason for seizing your funds. So it isn't even just that the government can do this. The actual exchanges can do this. And of course, these exchanges are now heavily regulated. So who do you think they're going to sign with, side with? This is why you see Brian Armstrong out there urging everybody to sign this legislation. By the way, if you would please like and share this. I have no idea what's going on. I've been extremely heavily shadow banned. I put out a post on this very topic yesterday that probably would have gotten a hundred thousand views yesterday. Normally, and it's like less than a thousand views and the number of shares is equal to the number of likes. There's something, even right now, our traffic is about a tenth or a twentieth of what it should be. And I don't know what it is that I'm putting out. If you look at the content, I've been putting out a lot of content rating all of the countries on the basis of technocracy, where they stand with respect to digital IDs and surveillance. And I put out a couple of those posts today and, you know, Once you start talking about these topics, the algorithms don't like it. It's not because people aren't interested. People are interested in things like flock cameras and other things. But this stuff that we're talking about right here hits a nerve because if people knew what the Clarity Act was about, no one would be celebrating it. And we're near the finish line. And this thing could be stopped. I urge the crypto community to read this bill and stop promoting it. I'm going to talk about some of the other things that you've been fooled to believe are a part of this bill. No, this is not going to make DeFi a thing. This is not good or does not enable privacy coins. It's not great for open source developers. I'll go through these other elements as well. This is something that I wrote about in an article and I talked about on a previous podcast. There are thirteen sections of this bill that call for studies, reports and future rulemaking. So there's stuff in there that isn't explicitly defined today, but that it gives these agencies the power to decide in the future. That is something that you need to understand. And you need to understand the history of financial regulation in this country. And you need to understand that never works to our advantage. So if somebody is like, well, at least we still have self-custody. Understand one of the things in these thirteen sections of the bill is to begin doing a report and an investigation into self-custody wallets. So people will buy the headline on this. Oh, these are clear rules. And yeah, we have self-custody. They've already opened up the door. They're already, as part of this future rulemaking thing, they're going to clamp down on self-custody. And people are walking right into it. So this is, as I said, Congress has already ordered a study on your self-hosted wallet. And what is the framing of that study? The framing of that is around money laundering. And I'm telling you right now, I mean, again, I would love to debate with somebody out there who can say with a straight face that an actual problem that we have is people laundering money, not governments laundering money. This is about control. This is going to be used to try to wreck self-custody wallet providers because the self-custody wallet providers are going to be forced to comply with this. So, I mean, I will say this, you know, moving forward, we need open source wallets that can't be compelled to this kind of regulatory burden. Because then all of a sudden you're going to find your favorite wallet is going to be providing a backdoor or providing some compliance mechanism here. Even about your holdings on things like privacy coins. Guaranteed that's coming. And they've already opened that up in this bill. So section one zero three zero seven. And again, I may put out an article about I'm going to be putting out content in various formats about this topic because it's it's that important. But I mean, again, download the bill yourself. Run it in your own AI. Ask it questions. and then ask it hypotheticals and then dig deeper. Keep asking questions about the history of, well, what does this mean? Rulemaking. Don't just look at something and say, oh, well, you know, this says, well, I'll get into this later. Maybe not today, but when I talk about the lawsuit that I filed against the state of New Hampshire and how I drafted the legal documents, you can simulate these things. You can do research on, okay, what is the track record of Congress when it gives away this rulemaking power? When a bill gives rulemaking power to an agency, what generally happens? And one of the beauties of AI is you can actually collect and analyze that information. And so I think there are going to be some decision tools here where I can finally show people definitively why you shouldn't trust government based on what they've actually done. And most people are just in an absolute vacuum. And as I said, crypto people are the most ignorant, naive people I have ever seen. with respect to running PACs and hiring lobbyists and drafting legislation. Anybody who signs up for this, I'm going to boycott anyone who's participating in this. Not that I was using Coinbase or any of these other things yesterday, but Kraken's on the list. I'm out on all of it. Anybody participating in the drafting of this bill and pushing this bill is against human freedom because the bill is that bad. So... look at these sections. There's one section whose whole job is to write the next bill. So this is the report on legislative recommendations, section one zero five zero four. Every legal exchange must build full bank secrecy act surveillance on you. Now, remember what I said earlier, we spend sixty one billion dollars a year complying with this and it doesn't catch criminals. It doesn't stop money laundering. In fact, There are countless examples of large banks that end up paying huge fines, multi-billion dollar fines, because they were involved with money laundering for drug cartels or whatever. But the bank secrecy laws didn't catch any of it. They were found out after the fact. The actual Bank Secrecy Act didn't stop this activity. It was found after the fact. So the BSA itself is fundamentally worthless. But then if you're a large financial institution and you're involved with this, No one goes to jail. There are only civil penalties. And now it's gotten to the point where the big banks just bake this in as a cost of doing business. So, yeah, I've got to pay this fine. All right. Well, it's worth it for me to work with a cartel. So it's all theater if you think that these bank secrecy laws actually prevent crime. They're there to protect crime and they're there to protect the criminals. They're there to protect the existing banks. It has nothing to do with your safety whatsoever. If we were going to do anything, if you asked me what we should be doing, we should be repealing the Bank Secrecy Act. We shouldn't be adding any of this legislation. We should be getting rid of the SEC. We should be removing these organizations. These organizations do not protect consumers. They protect incumbents. They don't stop criminal behavior. They codify it and they give institutions that look like they have integrity monopoly control over it. So that's what should be happening. So the fact that I've seen no argument in defense of the Bank Secrecy Act that it does anything to prevent criminal activity. And so now one of the cornerstones of this bill and now what politicians are even saying, and they're trying to even say, well, this is going to be great for free markets that we have the Bank Secrecy Act. Yeah, that's what we need. Let's go from sixty one billion dollars a year. Let's go to one hundred and fifty billion dollars a year in compliance costs, in forms, in biometric screening and more middlemen. That'll stop crime. That'll open up free markets. It's objectively false. It's provably false that the Bank Secrecy Act has improved either safety and security or free markets. So the Clarity Act never says anything about Monero or Zeno. It doesn't have to. I mean, this is all more ways of trying to squeeze privacy coins off of exchanges. Because when you see all of the layers of all of the reporting that has to be done, again, these exchanges have to record all of these transactions, all of your transaction history. If you pull your money off of an exchange, that's tracked. They are closing off the gates everywhere. And giving massive, massive power to the regulatory bodies as well as actually to the few exchanges and large crony players that are left. So Congress has already ordered a study of our privacy tools. So digital asset mixers, tumblers, this is section one zero three zero nine. So again, the point on this is there's nothing here that provides clarity. There isn't any clarity if you're in privacy, other than we know that they've ramped up the BSA. We know that they've ramped up the other reporting requirements. And then they have ordered... study into these things into greater detail after this bill is passed. And I encourage you to look up, again, the history of, does that break towards individual freedom or does that break towards more government control? And you will find that inevitably, all of the time, a hundred percent of the time, this goes against individual freedom. So you already have BlackRock, JP Morgan, Franklin, Templeton, Cantor Fitzgerald, all of these organizations have been tokenizing anyway. They've been building these platforms. They've been working on it. But it's really the passage of the Clarity Act that gives them the ability to go full steam ahead. So what that means is it's not, oh, if they pass the Clarity Act, then there's some period of time where people have to actually build these platforms to be able to comply with the regulation. No, they've already built the platforms. This is how we will own nothing. Again, if you imagine all of your stocks all of a sudden become digital tokens and those digital tokens have CBDC level surveillance, that is what we're talking about happening with the Clarity Act. So the Clarity Act is the platform that tokenization runs on next. Your house, your bond, your retirement fund. It is literally how you will own nothing. So if you're going to take away two points from this, it's the largest surveillance bill in US history. And this is how you will own nothing. This is something that Klaus Schwab could not have envisioned. a better construction for how people's assets can be stripped away from them and then given back to them as digital contracts that are under the control of the state and other third parties. So they do have the thing in here for open source developers. So there's a test. So can you touch anyone's money? So if you're an open source developer, there's a carve-out in here where it's, you know, non-controlling means lacking the unilateral and independent ability to control, initiate, or effectuate a user's transactions. This is the bill zone text, section one, zero, six, zero, four. So if you write code, publish it, and walk away, you're protected. But if you hold an admin key, run an upgradable contract, take a fee, run the website, you arguably control and the shield evaporates. So this is very, very narrow protection. And then when you see what happens, they've closed off. So you may write and publish code, but anybody that uses that code, they're still subject to all of these rules. So they basically closed off your ability to use these protocols. And by the way, for people like Roman Storm, all of this is... is kind of moving forward. So even the bill has a language that says, well, yeah, open source developers in the future won't be held liable, but it doesn't address or, or anything that's happened in the past. So this bill does not apply retroactively. So who decides what counts as control? By the way, this is a big one too. People will read something and say, oh, well, this says what the parameters are for whether or not you control an asset or not. Well, it turns out that's not the case. The bill gives the prosecutor after the fact the ability to draw that line. This is where people get fooled all of the time. I mean, again, if you're new to crypto and you're new to politics and you're sitting there reading a bill and you're believing what it says, learn what the consequences are of bills. Learn what happens when something becomes a law and then learn what happens when it goes from being a law to something where you're actually having to deal with law enforcement or deal with it in the courts. Those are two separate problems. And the amount of discretion that prosecutors have here is enormous. It's a complete loss, again, for freedom. The shield kills one legal weapon, but pure code... Publishing isn't money transmitting under section nineteen sixty. So this is the exact charge used on Roman Storm and the Samurai developers. And that that weapon retires, but only going forward. Again, I can't stress that enough. So this doesn't mean if this gets passed that these guys are going to be free. They've explicitly outlined that. Eighteen USC, nineteen sixty. So the shield only starts the day this becomes law. Roman Storm was convicted before that day. The bill does not undo his conviction. Now, I don't know how this would apply to the fact that he's up for retrial. So maybe there's some solace there. But this is section number one zero six zero four. But by the way, every other weapon. So it may be lawful for you to be an open source developer. who writes code, provided that you don't have a controlling interest, as determined in the future by a prosecutor. So again, I encourage you to learn how courts work. But every other weapon stays loaded. So sanctioned laws can still target a smart contract itself, like the tornado cash fight, the Bank Secrecy Act, or anything beyond pure publishing. the SEC and CFTC still maintain their fraud authority. So this is no big, great opening. There's really no way to look at this as being something that promotes freedom. So yeah, Roman Storm and the Samurai guys in the future... wouldn't get punished. But if you look at anyone that uses their service, services like those in the future, should someone create them, they're bound by all of these regulatory constraints, including the BSA and everything else. So this was the strategy shift. This is how they're trying to fool everybody. They're not trying to arrest the author. Instead, they licensed every door to using the protocol. So the protocol is legal, but using it is not. And again, this is going to be really tough because people, once you get something this far into the process, people just want to get something done. And these lobbyists and lawyers, some of these people get paid two thousand dollars an hour or whatever to work on this stuff. And so by the time you're this far into it, they're like, well, we just want to get something done. They want to protect their ego. They want to protect the fact that they put all this time into this. But it's a complete sunk cost because the bill is absolutely a disaster. So, you know, so here's an example. So the website gets illicit finance duties. The exchange runs chain analytics and files a report on you. Treasury can cut off any flow at names. Mixers and self-hosted wallets get studied for the next bill. Legal protocols, licensed doors, reportable flows. That's why this is the biggest financial bill since the Patriot Act. And again, this is sections one, zero, five, zero, two, BSA, another section, one, zero, five, zero, five, and then one, zero, five, zero, seven, and one, zero, five, zero, nine. Look it up. So they legalized writing the recipe and then licensed every kitchen. So you may build the printing press, but every newsstand needs a permit. Every reader shows an ID and the treasury can order any book pulled. That's not free software. That's free code in a controlled harbor. And the DOJ side is fighting to shrink even that before the floor vote. So again, I will tell you right now, this bill, as I've outlined it and as I've discussed it, it gets worse than that. This bill has already deteriorated from what was previously out there. And again, they have to get... These ten votes and the ten votes have to come from Democrats at the end of the day. So the appeal is now being explicitly made and the propaganda is all around promoting the Bank Secrecy Act, promoting surveillance. They're actually trying to sell the thing that we don't want. to get the actual ten additional votes. It's an absolute disgrace. Cynthia Loomis is a terrible person. who is monetizing this personally and knows nothing about it. I mean, she has zero understanding of how crypto and self-custody works. I've talked to her. You can listen to her, even what her story is about crypto. But she's out there. She will spin anything to try to get this done. And she's now spinning the BSA and she's spinning surveillance as a way to get this done. So, you know, as a reminder, the income tax started at one percent only on the rich in nineteen thirteen. Five years later, seventy seven percent of workers paid it. Social security numbers were never to be used for identification in nineteen thirty six. Banks required them by the nineteen sixties. Every exclusion gets walked back. When BlackRock finishes tokenizing the world, they'll remove crypto's exclusion the same way. The cage was already built. Again, why do you need BlackRock? If you have the ability to tokenize and trade assets peer-to-peer, what is the purpose of BlackRock? But yet, BlackRock and Seed & Company and Coinbase and all of these intermediaries, these people now support the bill. It's not a threat to them. They're capturing it through this bill. And it doesn't benefit you at all. Oh, and by the way, going back to what I said, it's the biggest surveillance bill since the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act's special measures power, which was once aimed at the world's worst money launderers after nine eleven, is now aimed at your digital assets. So this bill even touches the Patriot Act. I mean, I'll probably do another, I'll do a podcast on the Patriot Act at some point because it feeds into this, you know, Johnny Sununu thing who voted for it and then voted for reauthorization of it after claiming he tried to make it better for civil liberties protection. But in essence, he was just lubed to make sure that it got reauthorized. This guy's voted for everything. Patriot Act, even though he's not in the Senate, he's come out in favor of the Genius Act, the Patriot Act. He voted for Real ID, voted for TARP. Um, but yeah, no, the Patriot Act has these special measures powers. And now, uh, as a result of the Clarity Act, if it passes, this will be aimed directly at your digital assets. So if you like the Patriot Act, you're going to love the Clarity Act. So if you want to look up what it is, it's thirty one USC fifty three eighteen a the Patriot Acts section three eleven Treasury names a target. a primary money laundering concern. No judge required, no trial, just a designation. This is the power that we're giving to the Treasury Department. I mean, I don't know how you guys feel about the history of... Larry Summers was the U.S. Treasury Secretary. You know, the guy in the Epstein files who it was alleged was the heir apparent to Epstein? That guy was a U.S. Treasury Secretary. Look at the history of recent U.S. Treasury secretaries. Why would you give anybody that power? I mean, you shouldn't want anyone to have that authority. But if you look at the rogues gallery of people that end up becoming U.S. Treasury secretaries, this should be very concerning to everyone to give this power. So again, section one zero three zero three extends the same power under the Patriot Act to digital assets. The Treasury can just name a wallet, can name an exchange, can name a protocol, a money laundering concern, and then order banks and exchanges to surveil it, restrict it, or cut it off. We are giving complete control over digital assets to the worst people on the planet. And then there are people out there that have the nerve to say, oh, this is going to pump my bags. You know, the story that people have sold themselves... About this whole thing is, well, this regulatory clarity is going to make it so that now pension funds and four or one K's can buy crypto. And so three trillion dollars is going to come in and we're all going to be rich. That's the headline story that people get out of this. No one's read the no one that's read the bill is is talking about the benefit of that. You would be talking about the Patriot Act. You would talk about the ability for the government to seize, freeze, exchange stable coins. You would be talking about five years of holding people's transaction histories, reconstructed transaction histories, and sharing that information with foreign central banks. You would talk about all of the regulatory requirements on the actual exchanges and brokers themselves. Even more and more employees have to go through more and more training. It's just layer after layer after layer of surveillance within the exchanges and everything else. And then on top of that, this list of thirteen different things that they're punting and doing research reports for a future bill, all of which, by the way, are focused not on Yeah, the paragraph doesn't say, oh, we want to make sure we protect people's individual rights. It doesn't say we want to make sure, like this should be another amendment to the Constitution is that people have absolute self-custody, the absolute right to self-custody of their own assets, right? That's not what it says. The report is reviewing self-custody wallets from the perspective of money laundering. They're already telling you what the next bill is going to be. On top of this, which if this isn't bad enough for you, I actually don't, I can't help you. And the fact that the Patriot Act is being applied to digital assets under the Clarity Act also tells you what you need to know about how surveillance bills work over time. The Patriot Act was sold as a tool to fight terrorist financing in two thousand and one. That was the scope. Now, twenty five years later, it can be pointed at your personal crypto wallet or any protocol the Treasury decides to name. Without a court order. So this reveals two pieces of information that you need to know. One, it tells you how bad the Clarity Act is, and then it also tells you where the Patriot Act has evolved to. But I'm telling you, the Clarity Act is going to make the Patriot Act look like the Declaration of Independence. This bill is that bad. And remember, I said at first, hopefully it doesn't pass, but whatever. Remember this. I've been saying this for a while. It's the single largest expansion to financial surveillance authority since the Patriot Act. So again, the Bank Secrecy Act costs sixty one billion dollars per year. Banks filed over four million suspicious activity reports in twenty twenty three. The GAO found less than three percent. Of currency transaction reports from twenty fourteen to twenty twenty three were ever accessed by law enforcement and only four percent of suspicious activity reports get any follow up. It's all just waste. In surveillance and it doesn't and government control and it doesn't catch criminals. This is from a GAO report, December, twenty twenty four. Wachovia laundered three hundred and seventy eight billion dollars for drug cartels. No one went to prison. HSBC laundered eight hundred and eighty one million dollars. A fine. Promotions, in fact. JP Morgan kept Jeffrey Epstein as a client for five years after his conviction. They got a settlement. Jerry Diamond, zero jail time. Ian Freeman ran a ten million dollar peer-to-peer Bitcoin exchange. I mean, not even an exchange. He sold people Bitcoin peer to peer. He operated ATMs. Eight years in federal prison. This bill does not help Ian's situation. This bill doesn't provide protection for people like Ian. This is a complete coup. It is a complete takeover. by treasury, by the existing financial system, and by the handful of crypto firms that are going to be able to afford the lobbyists and the compliance costs to be a part of this surveillance regime. So, you know, people cheering on the CEO of Coinbase. Are you kidding me? You think Brian Armstrong? Do you remember this? People are like, oh, Brian Armstrong went to Davos. Boy, we really have a seat at the table. He's becoming Davos, not the other way around. There isn't a single pro-liberty value Brian Armstrong has brought to this equation. All he's done is use the force of the state to carve out a moat for himself at all of our expense. So, I mean, I don't know. Probably if you're listening to this, you're probably not a fan boy or cheering this on, but, but, you k