Crypto (Part One)

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We covered Ross Ulbricht's story and the origin of Bitcoin in a July 2019 series entitled Crypto. We also revisited the topic in January 2023 with a series entitled Crypto Revisited. So, while Red Pill Demerica is working on its first video documentary, we thought we'd rebroadcast these two series. And a quick disclaimer, we are not financial advisors. Nothing in these episodes should be construed as financial advice.

We don't now, nor have we ever owned Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency. Now, with that out of the way, enjoy the show.

If you haven't heard about Bitcoin by now, you must be living under a rock.

Bitcoin. Bitcoin. That was the moment that I wanted to use Bitcoin. I personally, I own Bitcoin in my hedge fund. Do you think this is a currency, a currency that's really going to work eventually?

Well, I think it is working. This internet cash has become all the buzz. But recently, the hype has taken a different turn. Many powerful people seem to fear digital currencies. I look for colleagues to join.

The truth.

Welcome to Red Pilled America.

Is Bitcoin dangerous to America? The topic has been popping up more and more on our screens. But the speculation was sent into overdrive after President Trump condemned Bitcoin and other new digital currencies. A crypto is being talked about. The president actually weighed in and tweeted about.

That said, if you stay with us, you'll know more about Bitcoin than most. And today that's vital, because some say the disruptive technology driving this new phenomenon could even be bigger than the internet. Understanding Bitcoin has now become mandatory.

It's somewhere in between. The exact use case has not quite been pinned down.

Person A may have had a bale of wheat that you wanted, but they didn't need furs, so the trade wouldn't happen. You'd have to find out what person A wanted, let's say they needed wood, then you'd have to find person B that had wood and trade your furs with that person, assuming they wanted furs. Then you could take your newly acquired wood and go back to person A and trade your wood for their wheat. That is, assuming they still had the wheat. As you can see, bartering was a bit complicated, and as societies grew, it became even more difficult.

So a need for currency arose in order to facilitate trading.

You know, money is based on faith. People need to understand that. Because, after all, back in the days when we used gold, we'd make gold valuable. The answer is people made it valuable. They decided it was valuable.

S. dollar, was backed by gold. This was known as the gold standard. Our central bank, called the Federal Reserve, would issue paper money with the total of all U.S. dollars in circulation, representing the physical amount of gold held by the Treasury Department.

The paper itself had no intrinsic value, but it was a form of accounting that represented an actual portion of gold. In other words, the dollar was just an accounting system to keep track of how much gold everyone owned. The Federal Reserve could not just print up extra paper money at will. It was generally limited by the amount of the precious metal held by the Treasury, but that officially changed in 1971..

I have directed Secretary Connolly to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets,

Today, the value of the dollar has plummeted by 84% since Nixon made that announcement. Again, Billy Bambrough.

S. system at the moment and many other monetary systems around the world are based on fractional reserve lending and on central banks deciding how much money to print, when to print it, how to manage the economy.

S. dollar was no longer backed by gold, but instead it was backed by a promise from the United States government. Its value being derived by, among other things, how stable the government is and how much money is in circulation. The U.S. dollar became just an accounting system of value, backed by nothing but a promise, with the banks acting as a trusted third party that records the economic transactions in a ledger, like our bank statements and credit card transaction statements.

With gold no longer restraining how much money was in circulation, the central bank was free to create U.

S. dollars out of thin air.

But even with the stability of our government, in the early 1980s, some began to question our currency system and the government's ability to monitor almost every financial transaction. At the time, U.S. cryptographer David Chom expressed the idea of an anonymous electronic money to avoid Big Brother's watchful eye. A cryptographer is someone that designs safe ways to transfer information electronically without the information being intercepted or duplicated by a third party.

However, the idea didn't spread. Corporations and merchants weren't so keen on the concept of anonymous internet cash. They liked capturing your data from traceable electronic transactions like credit cards. But, perhaps more importantly, consumers weren't lining up to use digital money.

David Chom said at the time, As the web grew, the average level of sophistication of users dropped. It was hard to explain the importance of privacy to them. By the end of 1998, David Chom's DigiCash filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The other electronic currency outfits failed as well. People hadn't yet understood the precious data they were giving up to big tech companies with every internet transaction.

And besides, in the late 90s, it was easy for everyone to open an account with a bank or a credit card company. They welcomed everyone. No one was being banned from these financial institutions. So the demand for a new internet cash was near zero. Still, by the turn of the millennium, even with the failed attempts at a cryptocurrency, a few forward thinkers saw the eventual development of internet cash that was completely separate from the U.S.

dollar. Again, Milton Friedman. So that I think that the internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government. The one thing that's missing, but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash, a method whereby, on the internet, you can transfer funds from A to B without A knowing B or B knowing A. The way in which I can take a $20 bill and hand it over to you, and there's no record of where it came from.

And you may get that without knowing who I am. That kind of thing will develop on the internet. The race for a cryptocurrency was largely shelved by the early 2000s. But little did the cypherpunks know that their passion was about to be given a rebirth by a mysterious, anonymous figure. A figure that would develop a disruptive new technology that could threaten the government's monopoly on printing money.

I mean, there's so much information out there about lifting weights, pelvic floors, cold plunges, anti-aging. So I launched Body and Soul to share doctor-approved insights about all of that and more. We're tackling everything. Serums to use through menopause, exercises that improve your brain health, and how to naturally lower your blood pressure and cholesterol. Oh, and if you're as sore as I am from pickleball, we'll help you with that too.

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I asked him, why was he running for president? And he answered, without missing a beat, because I want to be the most famous man in the world. Since then, I've become a go-to person when Trump and those around him want to talk. And now, every week, I'm going to share those insider stories with you. Listen to Fire and Fury, the podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We talk Frankenstein, we talk writing leads, we talk Barbie, we talk Doctor Who.

As a result, there was no demand for cryptocurrencies. But an event of global proportions was about to give rise to a mysterious character that would breathe new life into the idea.

I don't think anyone really expected a bank as big as Lehman to be in a position that it's in now. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated.

quote. Satoshi was proposing a new form of internet cash. It was the Napster of currency. The system Satoshi developed was a decentralized currency system called Bitcoin, one that eliminated the need for banks as the middleman. Again, Billy Bambra.

S. currency is just an accounting system, with third parties like banks, credit card companies, and other financial institutions all recording transactions and keeping track of value.

In one way or another, each of these third parties fall under our central bank, the Federal Reserve. Satoshi designed a system that replaced this centralized banking system with a decentralized collection of computers that automated the accounting the banks performed. This automated system, known as the blockchain, records electronic transactions on a public ledger residing on thousands of computers all across the world in a way that is near impossible to hack. The system removed a costly middleman like Bank of America, Visa, and PayPal that deducts large fees. This blockchain technology also partially anonymized every transaction, keeping everyone involved out of the watchful eye of the government.

Satoshi Nakamoto created the first internet cash. Instead of shells or gold coins or paper dollars, this new internet cash system used bitcoins. The technology was revolutionary.

When I send an email to someone, both I and the person receiving it have a copy of the email. Satoshi's technology devised a way to send a digital object, the bitcoin, to someone without leaving a copy with the sender. So when I send a bitcoin to someone to purchase an item or pay for a service, I no longer have a copy of the bitcoin. The person I sent it to now has the possession of that digital coin. It's handed off, just like cash is.

The transaction is recorded into a public ledger through an automated system of computers throughout the world, removing the middleman and the fees they may charge. A key of the system is that the computers that perform the computation behind these transactions are rewarded with bitcoin. Just like when people mine mountains in the hopes of finding gold, these computers compete to perform the computation of bitcoin transactions in hopes of being rewarded with bitcoins from the system. As a result, these computers are called miners. Satoshi released the blockchain computer code that operated this new internet cash system on January 3rd, 2009,, and the first transaction was recorded just a few days later, when Satoshi Nakamoto sent 10 bitcoins to a member of the cypherpunk movement, Hal Finney.

A key feature of this bitcoin system is that there is a limit to the amount of bitcoins in circulation. Unlike the U.S. dollar that can be printed by the Federal Reserve at will, the maximum number of bitcoins that will ever exist is 21 million. Satoshi forced the bitcoin system to mimic the limit set up by the gold standard, where the number of U.S. dollars were confined to the amount of gold in the treasury department.

This is a very important point. Today, as the Federal Reserve continues to print money, the U.S. dollar loses purchasing power over time because there are more dollars in circulation. If you think of dollars as shares of stock in the United States, the more dollars that there are, the smaller the share of the United States you own. So the value of a U.S.

dollar decreases from year to year. That's why the price of products continues to rise every year. It's because your dollars are losing value. Satoshi wanted to solve this problem of inflation by limiting the number of bitcoins that could ever be in circulation to a finite number, 21 million. So, from year to year, the value of bitcoin will not be diluted like the U.S.

dollar. The first known commercial transaction using bitcoin occurred in 2010, when a programmer named Laszlo Hanieks bought two Papa John's pizzas. The price tag for the two pies? 10,000 bitcoins. In December 2020, the same amount of bitcoin would trade for roughly $230 million.

In the first couple years of bitcoin, few merchants were adopting the cryptocurrency. It needed a kickstart, one that could prove bitcoin's ability to actually serve as digital cash. That would come with the creation of an online marketplace that would not only prove the legitimacy of cryptocurrency, but would also show how much the government feared this new internet money. The first broad audience to see the potential of crypto was the libertarians. They believed in small government, liberty, and free markets.

They wanted an end to the war on drugs and saw the Federal Reserve as the key culprit behind the 2008 financial crisis. One of their leaders, Ron Paul, called for an end to the Fed and a return to the financial system backed by gold.

C.

, was not going to end the Federal Reserve's reign. The emergence of bitcoin provided a new revolutionary way forward. If the Federal Reserve could not be removed, it could just be ignored. If people adopted cryptocurrency, they could make financial transactions privately between two consenting adults without a banking system as the middleman, just like paper cash. Cryptocurrency promised true liberty, a paramount principle for libertarians.

I got into cryptocurrency very early on. That's Curtis Green, author of Silk Road Takedown. After the financial crisis, Curtis was, like most middle Americans, in a bad financial place. Jobs were not easy to come by. The Utah native had a bad back, so work options for Curtis were limited.

He began looking for online work and possible investment opportunities that could produce a quick return. That's when he ran across a discussion of bitcoin on a web forum.

An idea embedded in all of us is that digital files can easily be copied. So if someone can copy a digital bitcoin, it would allow a coin to be spent more than once, or the double spend. So how could internet cash not be counterfeited? Satoshi Nakamoto solved the double spend problem with bitcoin.

We talk Frankenstein, we talk writing leads, we talk Barbie, we talk Doctor Who.

I asked him, why was he running for president? And he answered, without missing a beat, Because I want to be the most famous man in the world. Since then, I've become a go-to person when Trump and those around him want to talk. And now, every week, I'm going to share those insider stories with you. Listen to Fire & Fury, the podcast, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're tackling everything. Serums to use through menopause, exercises that improve your brain health, and how to naturally lower your blood pressure and cholesterol. Oh, and if you're as sore as I am from pickleball, we'll help you with that too. Most importantly, it's information you can trust. Everything is vetted by experts at the top of their field, and you can write into them directly to have your questions answered.

So sign up for Body & Soul at katycouric.

com slash bodyandsoul. Taking better care of yourself is just a click away.

Silk Road was an anonymous online marketplace located on what's called the Dark Web. As we promised at the onset of this show, an entirely new language comes with the discussion of Bitcoin. So before getting into Silk Road, you will need to understand what exactly is the Dark Web.

The Dark Web is a collection of websites that cannot be found by searching Google or through normal web browsers. It's actually even bigger than the regular internet. The only way to get to a website on the Dark Web is to use a web browser called the Onion Router, or Tor, for short. Think of the Dark Web as an alternative internet universe, invisible to normal web telescopes like Google or browsers like Safari or Chrome. On the regular internet, anyone attempting to track a person can easily find your real identity, your physical location, all of the websites you've visited, what kind of computer you're using, your operating system, your browser.

They can follow you wherever you go next and gather information all along the way, including even your web logins and credit card info. Your so-called private information is typically out there for anyone to exploit, if they are savvy enough. Tor, on the other hand, allows web users to browse through an encrypted network, protecting the privacy and identity of all of its users. It does this with several layers of encryption around the user, hiding all of the user's private information in what could be thought of as a digitally locked box that can only be opened with a key. To add an extra layer of security, when a Tor user punches in an address for a website on the Dark Web, Tor does not take them directly to the website.

The browser instead routes the user through multiple Tor servers all across the world before reaching the intended website, making it near impossible for anyone to track the identity and original address of the user. Websites on the Dark Web only allow the Tor browser to connect to their site. to increase the privacy and security of its users. The Dark Web allows people to send emails, texts, and other communications privately and anonymously. This is how many journalists speak to whistleblowers and how citizens in countries like China or Iran communicate safely and avoid the censorship of their governments.

Using the Dark Web is how the famed publisher Wikileaks communicates privately with whistleblowers that give them leaked data, like the DNC emails, during the 2016 election.

This may lead many people to believe that the Dark Web is a network set up by anarchists and outlaws, but the Tor browser was actually designed in the mid-1990s by the Navy to protect U.

S. intelligence communications online. Tor gave journalists, their sources, dissidents, informants, activists, and others a way to communicate with intelligence agents without fear of being discovered. The Silk Road website that Curtis had heard about on the Bitcoin forums lived on this Dark Web, so he decided to check it out. What he found out was that Silk Road was an e-commerce website on the Dark Web, like eBay or Amazon, but the site emphasized anonymity and security.

To do this, it married Tor and Bitcoin. The only way to visit Silk Road was through the Tor browser. And the only way to purchase products on the site was with Bitcoin, making the entire transaction between the seller, buyer, and website anonymous. And it was also the first massive trial for the use of Bitcoin as internet cash, and it was quickly becoming a phenomenal success. In addition to the marketplace, Silk Road had community forums where people talked and helped each other solve problems.

Curtis was drawn to these forums.

Community boards like these can be found all across the regular internet. Places like Reddit, 4chan, and the comment sections of websites are just message boards where people gather to communicate with like-minded folks. The boards on Silk Road were just the Dark Web version of those message boards. Curtis became acclimated with the predominant philosophy behind the core users of the site.

Many on the Silk Road message board were anarcho-capitalists, a form of libertarianism that has a radical view on capitalism, free markets, and the role of the state. They advocate for an elimination of the centralized state that they view is an oppressor that always rules by force and diminishes freedom. The Silk Road administrator himself would post on the message board that the site was founded on libertarian principles. Silk Road users vehemently opposed the war on drugs, and felt they should in fact be legalized because, in their view, besides the principle that people should be able to put in their bodies whatever they want, many libertarians on these message boards believed that the war on drugs was unwinnable. They thought legalizing drugs would reduce the violence associated with the street trade.

Because of the anonymous nature of Silk Road and the emergence of the internet cash bitcoin, Silk Road became an extraordinary petri dish. to experiment with these libertarian free market ideas. People sold all kinds of items on the site.

But the items that were most prominent on the site, the product that would eventually make Silk Road a national headline, were the drugs. I think it was 77% of the drugs that were on the site was marijuana. And so the grand majority is a substance that's legal in I don't know how many states now. Even in Utah, they just legalized medical marijuana. But the other 23% included MDMA or ecstasy, cocaine, heroin, LSD, meth, mushrooms, and other illegal substances.

How much of these were actually being sold was unknown, but they were no doubt listed for sale on the site. Enthusiasts of Silk Road believed that the portal itself was helping reduce the violence associated with the procurement of these substances on the streets, because the people would be buying them with or without the Silk Road marketplace. Many believed making the transaction anonymous and shipped rather than handed off in some back alley eliminated the potential of violence at the point of sale. Drugs have always been illegally sold online, but the emergence of the dark web and Bitcoin made Silk Road the right idea at the right time for this type of illegal marketplace. Curtis had libertarian leanings and believes people should generally be able to do what they want to do with their body, as long as it doesn't hurt another person.

I don't drink, but if I want to drink, I want to be able to drink. As long as I don't get in the car and drive drunk and kill somebody, then what I do in my home is my business. But he says drugs weren't the reason why he was at the site. It was the community board and their discussions of Bitcoin. I didn't go there because of drugs.

I'm not a drug dealer. I've never taken an illegal street drug in my life. But when I got there, I noticed that people weren't talking about that.

Hitmen were also not allowed, and neither was child pornography. Anything else that didn't meet these criteria was fair game. The site's community believed Silk Road helped people avoid the regulation of the state. In their eyes, an oppressive entity that attempted to control every aspect of people's lives. They thought Silk Road was a way to take back control from the government.

While on Silk Road, Curtis obviously saw the drugs for sale and noticed people talking about them on the community board. I saw that people were buying substances that were very questionable, and so I came up with the idea. It was called a harm reduction. He thought starting a harm reduction forum on the site could help addicts and others expressing an interest in self-harm. Years earlier, Curtis earned his EMT license and worked as a volunteer on an ambulance.

And I wanted to help people that had questions, because I have a medical background, and to help them if they wanted to commit suicide,

But Curtis couldn't have known that by taking on this role, his life was about to change forever. Before it was all done, federal agents would raid his home, torture him, fake his death, and framed him for a crime that threatened to put him in prison for life. And at the bottom of it all was a little thing called Bitcoin. It's a certifiable one-stop shop for illegal drugs that represents the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs online that we have ever seen. It's more brazen than anything else by light years.

Coming up in part two of Crypto. And that's the night he went and stole all the money and tried to blame me for it.

That's redpilledamerica.

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And guess what? It's free. Just sign up at katiecouric.com bodyandsoul. That's K-A-T-I-E-C-O-U-R-I-C dot. com.

slash bodyandsoul. I promise it will make you happier and healthier.

once they solve a few problems. I'm talking to people trying to figure out how to do things that no one on the planet knows how to do, from creating a drone delivery business, to building a car that can truly drive itself. Listen to What's Your Problem on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.