Brownstone Institute/Daylight Freedom | Privacy coins/tokens / CBDCs - Aaron Day | ETHDam III - 2025

Welcome to East to East to East to East to East. Aaron, are you ready? I'm trying to figure out. There we go. Yeah, I can see that.

All right. Well, maybe not everybody knows this, but uh Aaron flew a long way to be with us and yesterday ended a 40day. Yeah, a 40-day um uh hunger strike trying to make a difference and to raise awareness for Roger Ve. So, he has eaten for the first time last night properly and it's still a work in progress, but right now he's going to deliver a keynote to discuss the dangers of CBDC's and what we can learn more about them. Aaron This is your time to shine.

Great. There you go. Uh, you're starting with a with a presentation. That's bold. That's always very bold.

Everybody in the Middle East and Kill Them All. And then they have the former Secretary of State Maline Albbright on 60 Minutes, one of the most popular news shows in the US. And they asked her, they said, like there's reports that more than half a million Iraqi children have died as a direct result of US sanctions. And she looks back at her with a straight face and she goes, "It was a really tough decision, but I think that it was worth it." You know, is the price worth it?

I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it. Worth murdering half a million kids because of what the government did. And I apologize for crying, but it just disgusts me from my core when I see government people murdering people around the world. It's not just theoretical. These are real people with real lives.

And Bitcoin has the power to undermine everything they're doing to people around the world. And I'm sorry for shouting, but it just disgusts me what these people in government do. And they do it through central banking and through the control of the money supply. And Bitcoin takes that away from them. [Music] I got to stand up because I'm just so excited about Bitcoin.

I can't talk about it while sitting down. So, anybody here that's sick of the government inflating the money supply to pay to kill people all around the world, stop using their money. Use Bitcoin. I The answer is here. We can put a stop to all of that.

You don't have to support them in any way. Start using Bitcoin. There are so many websites that accept Bitcoin now. More and more coming online every day. If you have a business, you need to start accepting Bitcoin.

What Bitcoin allows every single person in this room and on the planet who has access to the internet, you can have your own private bank account, right? It's called a Bitcoin account. And it's impossible for the government to seize your account. It's mathematically impossible for anyone to block you from sending or receiving money with anyone else anywhere in the world. And if you're careful about how you use it, it can be done anonymously as well.

This totally strips government's control over the money supply away. There is nothing they can do about it. There's no way they can stop it. The only way they could stop it would be to shut down the entire internet in the entire world. And that's not going to happen.

I'm This is what every libertarian's absolute dream come true. It's here and it's called Bitcoin and we need to spread the word to everybody about it. And I'm glad you guys are here and we're here to answer your questions about it. And when you're done learning about it here today, tell your friends, tell your family, help them set up Bitcoin wallets. Help tell everybody that you know about Bitcoin.

Anytime you need to buy something, ask the merchant if they'll allow you to pay in Bitcoin. And anytime you receive US dollars, convert them to bitcoins, then use them as bitcoins. We need to spread this. And the world is going to be a much, much, much better place because of it. And it's not a question of if this is going to happen.

It's just a question of how soon it's going to happen. And with your help, we can make it happen sooner rather than later. That's why I got into Bitcoin. I'm not sure why other people got in Bitcoin involved in Bitcoin, but that very speech by Roger, I was there. That was 2012 in New Hampshire at the Liberty Forum.

And I know that very speech inspired hundreds of people for the first time to get involved with crypto. And at that point in time in 2012, this is why people were interested in Bitcoin. They were interested in separating money and state. They were interested in stopping the endless wars caused by central bankers. But you can hear in Roger's voice both righteous anger at what Maline Albbright was doing and the murdering of Iraqi children.

But behind that is his love for humanity and love for the power of voluntary interaction to transform people's lives all over the world. That's why they're trying to stop Roger and that's why we have to stand up for him. But what happened? What happened to this original vision and energy behind crypto? Well, it was hijacked.

Roger wrote a book about it. Most people haven't read it because just two and a half weeks after it was published, he was arrested in Spain and thrown into the same prison. fellow libertarian and friend died. What Roger outlines in this book is that a combination of the deep state players in traditional finance and then self-interested insiders, Bitcoin core developers basically hijacked it for their own ends. I wrote a book as well called The Final Countdown.

And it even gets worse. The more that you look into this, this whole narrative shift from digital cash to digital gold was pushed by the very same people who in the United States developed all three US CBDC pilots. There is a retail CBDC pilot in the US called Project Hamilton. This is a collaboration between MIT, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and it actually has a Bitcoin core developer named Andy Fields as one of the co-authors of the white paper. So, at the time, everybody is sitting there telling you, you don't need to use this for cash.

Those same people are funding crossover developers to build a CBDC that can do 1.8 8 million transactions per second. So you're told you have to be stuck with seven transactions per second. And for years they've been building and polishing this system. This CBDC isn't an open permissionless system.

None of the CBDC's are open permissionless systems. The entire purpose of this as stated by the head of the bank of international settlements is about control. So if I could do one thing in this talk, it's to express the urgency of the threat of CBDC's because I go to conferences all over the world and what I hear and sense is either complacency or defeatism. I hear people cheering on stable coins. I've been on some of these X spaces, OGs in the space.

stable coins are great for crypto adoption or I guess we lost on the medium of exchange so we should just accept stable coins. All right. Well, first of all, the point of Bitcoin was to be peer-to-peer digital cash that didn't have third parties. A stable coin is fiat with about 15 levels of risk, programmability, trackability, and censorship. It couldn't be further from crypto.

And if we don't fight for medium of exchange, then it's literally the end of free will because what happens is they don't stop with just tokenizing money. They're going to tokenize all of our assets. People see Larry Frink talking about tokenization and they say, "Oh, this is great. Black Rockck's going to buy my blockchain." No, they're not.

That's not what they're interested in. They want to be able to program and control your stocks, your bonds, your house, your car, your money, all of it. And this isn't theoretical. This isn't a conspiracy theory. You go to the Brownstone Institute.

I've written several articles about this. This has been a plan that actually started in the 1930s to build a global technocratic state. It first starts by building CBDC's across the globe and interconnecting them. Today there are 134 countries representing 98% of the global GDP at some stage of development on of CBDC's. In 2020, there were only 35 countries even researching CBDC's.

Now there are over 65 beyond the research phase. And obviously as we're sitting here, I'm sure everybody here is aware that the EU may adopt a CBDC as early as October of this year. Once the CBDC's are rolled out and linked, they have a variety of different ways that they're trying to implement this. Technically, the Bank of International Settlements is working on this. There's something called regulated liability network.

But the idea is this. Let's say the US creates a CBDC or a stable coin which is a backdoor CBDC. They put it on a platform, a regulated liability network and is a platform that has both CBDC's and other assets that are tokenized. These regulatory liability networks are connected Japan, UK, so on and so forth. What you get at the end of that process is a single interconnected global ledger of all assets on Earth.

Once that's done, the next step is to change what backs the CBDC to energy credits. So then at that point in time, you have a single global currency backed by energy credits, which is not some save the earth plan. This is literally a bunch of people getting together, creating their own manufactured scarcity, and then premining their coin. They're going out and buying forest. They're going out and doing things to basically pre-mine these energy credit based coins.

Those coins will then be tied to social credit scores, vaccine passports, and digital ID. So when I say it's the loss of free will, it truly is a complete digital control system. This idea of technocracy, Patrick Wood has written about this extensively. This movement goes back to the 1930s. I mean, you can see them.

They had their whole cult thing with garb and their own everybody wore gray suits. They had their own color of gray called technocracy gray. People would get Cadillacs with the same color of gray on it. And the sole purpose of technocracy, their viewpoint is humanity is going to destroy itself. The plebs are too stupid to do anything about it.

Merchants and individuals are incapable of making their own decisions. Only scientists and engineers are capable of making decisions on behalf of saving society. And at the core of this ideology going back to the 30s was to shift the economy from a pricebased system to an energy creditbased system. Now obviously in the 1930s they didn't have the technology to do that but they have the technology now. This product exists.

If I had time I'd play the video of it. You'd think it was a Black Mirror episode. It's not. This is a Doconomy Mastercard in partnership with the United Nations Climate Action Fund that people voluntarily sign up for tracks the carbon of your purchases and then shuts off the card when you use too much carbon. What does this mean?

Go to Mastercard's website. For years, they have been building the infrastructure to track carbon, tie it to financial transactions, and then censor your ability to use money. Larry Frink has been talking about tokenization and how excited he is about the tokenization of equities because I'm sure he's very interested in giving up voting control. I would argue that we already have a CBDC and the problem isn't just the central bank. A lot of the nuance is about who's issuing the programmable trackable digital currency.

But the truth is the Federal Reserve, commercial banks, federal government all have a role to play. And we need to go back to the original premise, which is to separate money in state. The Federal Reserve is obviously a useless third party in the middle that prints money out of thin air and then adjusts interest rates, causing people to default, stealing their actual real world assets for for money that that is backed by nothing but debt. We know the EU, as I mentioned, is not only looking to launch a CBDC as soon as 2025, but looking to ban privacy coins by 2027. Again, this has nothing to do with money laundering.

Just like the reason Roger's facing his situation and Ian Freeman, who Mark is going to talk about, is spending eight years in a federal prison. These people were targeted specifically because they were effective at promoting cryptocurrency as an alternative to these central bank digital currencies. In the United States, we have a CBDC. The way money works is the federal government issues an IOU to the Federal Reserve and the Federal Reserve does they don't print the money. They create an entry in an oracle database.

It's literally a central bank digital currency. All of the bills that the US government pays to murder all of these people around the world and do all of this is generated in an Oracle database. Our money is programmable. Health savings accounts, food stamps, all of it. Oracle databases are programmable.

Microsoft SQL databases are programmable. That's what runs the current system. It's already trackable. 13 different programs. Bank secrecy act.

You have the NSA. You have a whole long list of programs. This goes on today and it's already censorable. Everybody from Melania Trump to Baron Trump to Kanye West, the list goes on, have had their financial transaction censored. And it wasn't, by the way, by the Federal Reserve.

Those instances were directed by the woke policies of the commercial banks themselves. So this is why I say none of these players have clean hands. This is why we have to separate from it all together. And in the US, just a month or so ago, the US Treasury decided to change the criteria for mandatory reporting in 30 specific zip codes. So now if you do a financial transaction in 30 zip codes in California and Texas, you have to report those transactions if it's over $200.

So this is all in the existing system. Stable coins are backdoor CBDC's. These are quotes from members of Trump's cabinet and inner circle. David Sachs will foster stable coins but only under strict rules. US Treasury Secretary, stable coins must be secure and compliant to protect the dollar's global standing.

Howard Lutnik, we're going to use digital assets to pound forward. Donald Trump is leading the way. This is all about control KYC AML and ramping that up. There are two bills. I'm not going to go into all of the detail.

Stable bill in the House, Genius Act in the Senate, which just failed by one vote. But don't worry, they're going to bring it back. Somebody needs to be bribed. some banker has to pay off a senator, it'll pass. But understand what's in these bills.

There's a moratorum on algorithmic stable coins for 2 years under the stable act. Mandatory AML KYC compliance, centralized freeze and seizure power, mandates issuers, even foreign ones, to implement freeze and recovery protocols, strict reserve requirements. And here's the thing. So if we ended up in this situation, I will tell you these bills are designed to make it so that Tether and USDC are going to be forced to be acquired by a large bank like JP Morgan Chase or Goldman Sachs. And it doesn't make a difference from the standpoint of liberty and freedom if your digital programmable token was issued by Jerome Pal or if it was issued by Jaime Diamond.

They're backdoor CBDC's. There's also federal oversight and control. I don't have a lot of time. This will be a two-part talk, but I will say when you dig into this, the Trump administration has huge ties to these companies. Trump's acting comproller from his first administration became the chief legal officer at Coinbase, who literally developed the USDC roadmap with Circle.

And Howard Lutnik is probably will turn out to be one of the most corrupt politicians in the history of the United States. His firm led a $600 million investment in Tether. His firm manages all of the treasuries for Tether. Tether, which has never passed an audit, but basically Howard Lutinik said, "Trust me, bro." So, we're now pushing, you know, whatever it is, 140 close to $200 billion dollars worth of stable coins based on the trust me broestation of a self-interested member of Trump's cabinet.

So the solution to this digital tyranny that we're facing in the form of CBDC's and stable coins and understand the strategy for the US in doing this with stable coins is to dominate and to keep the dollar as the global reserve currency. If you can there were 27 trillion worth of stable coin transactions last year. If they can basically force through these regulations, large banks to own all of that, now the US is dominating essentially in CBDC's. This is why Europe and everybody else are now ramping up their CBDC development. So privacy is not a feature anymore of the foundation of freedom.

The only way to defeat CBDC's and stable coin tyranny is to build outside of their system, not to integrate within it. But, and this has been said several times today, privacy coins must be as easy to use as traditional finance and CBDC's. If they're not, we lose. I remember the first time I did a transaction in 2012. It was nearly instant.

The fees were a fraction of a cent. It was better than any of my experiences with credit card processing or banks. That was in 2012. Well, that was before Google Pay, Apple Pay, Venmo, a whole variety of other things. Traditional finance has innovated and crypto has actually gotten more difficult to use and more expensive.

So, we need not only privacy coins, but we also need tokens because money only represents 5% of global assets. it's homes, stocks, financial instruments, everything else that makes up the other 95% of global assets. They're going to centrally tokenize those. So, we need a solution where we can privately tokenize and trade those assets and have those assets in our own self-custody. So, tomorrow at 3:00, I'm going to talk specifically about things that we can do right now to start facilitating trade using privacy coins and privacy tokens.

I will just leave this as kind of a starting point for the next conversation. The best thing we can do to help Roger now is show support. I'll show you a QR code in a second, but anyone that can show up to his hearing, we need to pack the courthouse on June the 23rd, uh, 2025 at 1:30 p.m. in LA.

We need to make a really strong showing. And then I encourage you to, uh, scan this QR code, go to free ro or go to free rogernow.org and sign the open letter in support. These signatures matter. This helped Ross Olrich.

It's helping to show momentum for Roger. And not to take away his thunder, but Mark Edge over there, a lot of people don't know this. Roger learned about Bitcoin from Ian Freeman, who's a great liberty activist, as as is Mark Mark Edge for 20 years. They've been involved with a syndicated radio show, bringing people into the Free State Project. My wife and I sat in on Ian's sentencing hearing.

He's in jail for eight years for completely fabricated charges about, you know, conspiracy to money launder. They basically had five different departments within the federal government set him up. It's a complete scam. But again, he was targeted like Roger and everybody else because he was an effective advocate of these alternatives. We can't let these people have a chilling effect on implementing and using these technologies, and we have to do everything that we can to defend these people.

So scan this QR code and please sign the petition in support of Ian. And you know with that tomorrow's talk will be called the revolution will be tokenized. [Applause] Thank you. Thank you Aaron. Um can we go to Slido please?

I think there's a few questions for you. Someone said, "You said it's not conspiracy as long as as it not did happen." How do you call it? I'm not sure. What is it?

Oh, it's No, it's a conspiracy. Conspiracy theory. Mike in the mic. I'm sorry. It is a conspiracy.

It's not a conspiracy theory. Okay. A conspiracy is just multiple people engaged in an enterprise to do something. Well, that is what this is. There a whole bunch of people conspiring to implement CBDC's and create a digital grid.

Conspiracy theory is something that's, you know, made up, not necessarily an actual conspiracy. So, anyway, um, another question from Mark. What can I or we do to help free Roger Ver? You mentioned the coming in person, signing the petition, the open letter. Yeah.

Yeah. Coming June the 23rd in LA, showing up to the court. And I know we're in Europe, so that might be tough, but if you know people that can go or if you can make it, that will help. And then go to free rogernow.org and sign the open letter.

And again, do the same for Ian Freeman at at freenow.org. Uh the it really does matter to show this public support. A lot of people say, "Well, this doesn't matter. It's just a petition."

But Ross Brig wouldn't be free without the 600,000 people that signed his petition. Yeah. Um, someone says, "CBDC's are a scam. People know that, right?" Right.

Fiat's a scam and they don't know that. Yeah. So, so no, they don't. And here's the problem with this. So, I pushed really hard, you know, and I mentioned this earlier.

I wrote this book, talked to VC about it. It wasn't the only reason, but it helped push him to push Trump to come out against CBDC's. And it's been a nightmare for me because now people are complacent about it. But when you look at stable coins, stable coins are exactly the same as CBDC's, but people are cheering it on as American innovation. We're going to have a competitive edge.

People are signing up for Jaime Diamond to give them a sensorable digital token. And so, no, people are not aware. the slight of hand and and the uh semantics has people fooled. Um, next question. 40-day fast.

Bravo. Did it have the effect you were hoping for? I it it raised some awareness, but I was to be honest hoping Roger would be here. So, me, too. Um, I'm still hoping I I'm Look, I'm optimistic about his case in general, but I really was thinking that he would have this resolved by now.

Only 5% of the world own crypto. 20% own stocks. The PR of crypto to the lay person is still scammy. What can we do to help spread this message? We have to make tools that are easy to use for the average person.

And I mean I say this when I do these workshops. Most of crypto is 20-year-old dudes developing to tools for 20 year old dudes. do a workshop with a hundred boomers and you will see you're you know you'll be like oh I didn't realize people had this problem. So if we can make crypto as easy as Google Pay, Apple Pay, Venmo, they'll use it. If we don't, they won't.

Period. Yeah. Um last questions. Stable coins true fact is regulators and laws will anyway manage the people with power now powered them then. Regulators gonna take control anyway.

Don't you think regulators gonna I just read that but regulators are going to take control? I'm trying to Does someone There's a person who asked that question. No, I'm not sure I understand it. No. What are we going to do?

Regulators. We're Okay, so the whole point of this is we need to use privacy coins. We need to use technologies that actually can't be stopped. That is what has to happen. And tomorrow I will be talking about Saul already talked about it a little bit, but I'm going to be talking about specific things related to Zeno that uh marketplaces and other tools that allow people to trade voluntarily privately now, not in the future, but today based on existing technology.

And by the way, I will say one last thing. The reason I'm excited about Zeno and what got me to even look at Zeno was I gave a talk about a year ago. It was the first talk I ever gave about Rogers shortly after he was arrested and he contacted me like a day or two after I gave the talk and he didn't want to talk about his legal case. He had watched a podcast I was on talking about how we need easytouse wallets and point of sales systems. And so he wanted to reach out to me to talk to me about how Zeno could be an effective tool in my arsenal.

So that's what based on that I read the white paper, went to the site, talked to the team, and it's, you know, not surprisingly, Roger was on to something. And that's why I'm so passionate not only about Roger's cause, but passionate about Zeno as an alternative. Thank you, Aaron. Thank you so much. [Applause]