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From LeverNews.com — Lever Time is the flagship podcast from the investigative news outlet The Lever. Hosted by award-winning journalist, Oscar-nominated writer, and Bernie Sanders' 2020 speechwriter David Sirota, Lever Time features exclusive reporting from The Lever’s newsroom, high-profile guest interviews, and expert analysis from the sharpest minds in media and politics.
Arjun Singh 0:00
Arjun from the levers, reader supported newsroom, this is lever time. I'm Arjun. Singh, forget the dollar. How about the next time you go shopping, use a Trump coin, or maybe you prefer Moon coin or Ethereum. It may sound bizarre, but that's the world the cryptocurrency industry wants you to live in and thanks to political spending, it's about to become a reality in 2024 the crypto industry entered the political arena and became a juggernaut, spending hundreds of millions of dollars. The industry managed to win over both presidential candidates and topple some of their harshest critics in Congress. Now, with Trump's return to Office, the industry is poised to get even bigger and even more embedded within our society. So how'd they do it? And what do they want? That's what we'll hear today on lever time, when I sit down with the levers Freddie Brewster, then later in the show, documentarian Cullen Hoback joins us to discuss his new film and explain who the mysterious figure behind the rise of crypto has been all along.
The other day, I was talking to one of the reporters here at the lever Freddie Brewster. It was a couple days after news broke that Donald Trump had asked Elon Musk to head a new government organization called the Department of government efficiency, which Musk has just been calling Doge. So it's been an interesting couple weeks. A lot of important stuff for us to talk about Freddie. But first, I just wanted to know, have you heard of this new fictitious as of now government agency called Doge, that Trump is allowing Elon Musk to spin up out of the ground the Department of government efficiency. Also, Doge is a clear reference to the cryptocurrency that Elon Musk has been hyping. I guess. What I want to know, do you know what a Dogecoin is?
Freddy Brewster 2:03
Yeah, Dogecoin is based off of, like a meme of a dog, like, right? Yeah, uh huh. It was in the early 2020s I forget the exact year, but it started as, like a gimmick, and, you know, it's grown quite a bit. You know, it's not nearly on the level as like, you know, the more popular ones like Bitcoin or Ethereum, yeah, but it has grown in value. For sure, Elon Musk
Arjun Singh 2:29
didn't create this coin. In fact, its creators have admitted that the digital coin, whose mascot is a cartoon dog, was created as a joke, almost a parody of the crypto industry. Yet that didn't stop Musk from trying to hype the coin everywhere he could, whether that was on the campaign trail with Donald Trump or on Saturday Night Live a few years ago. My question is, what is Dogecoin? Well, it's the future of currency. It's
Elon Musk 2:57
an unstoppable financial vehicle that's going to take over the world. I get that, but what is it? Man,
Arjun Singh 3:03
oh, and right after Musk said that on SNL, the coins price plummeted 30% and that right there is kind of a problem a lot of people have with cryptocurrency. Crypto is not very regulated and it's not a stable investment. In some cases, cryptocurrencies can reach epic prices and collapse when the hype fizzles out. In other cases, they're literally scams, preying on innocent customers and fleecing them for money. It's all made cryptos. Critics concerned that these digital currencies are increasingly becoming get rich quick schemes with little benefit to the consumer, and at its worst, it can lead to a dangerous speculative bubble. But as an industry, oh, we are just getting started.
In the 2024 election, the crypto industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars bankrolling campaigns left and right, and of course, making big bets on both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
Speaker 1 4:02
The biggest winner in this past election is the crypto currency industry. They poured buckets of cash into this election, just three Super PACs together. They spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars this past election cycle, and were really laser focused on ousting candidates who are unfriendly to their industry. The industry's
Arjun Singh 4:21
strength was so strong, it became a remarkable point of unity between the Trump and Harris campaigns, with both trying to prove who was the better friend of crypto. But even more, the crypto industry had another goal, purging the crypto critics from the halls of Congress.
Speaker 1 4:37
You know, it all kind of started with Katie Porter in the Senate primary here in California, they spent ten million running ads against her. They also ousted Jamal Bowman, New York congressman. But perhaps their biggest prize, easily, their biggest prize is knocking off Sherrod Brown in Ohio. It's
Arjun Singh 4:55
also worth noting that Donald Trump and his family Hawk their own coin and some within. His administration have a lot of investment in cryptocurrency, including his vice presidential candidate JD Vance. If Trump strengthens crypto, it's very likely people within his own administration are going to get very rich off of it. And for Freddie, the story of how crypto is changing our political system hits close to home. In his home state of Ohio, the crypto industry poured 10s of millions of dollars into the state to help one of their own, a long time crypto advocate named Bernie Moreno in his Senate race. And I'm up against the most anti crypto guy in America. It's actually not Elizabeth Warren, it's Sherrod Brown, who's the head of the banking committee in the United States Senate.
Speaker 1 5:39
Yeah. Sharon Brown was the last elected statewide Democrat in Ohio. He was extremely popular in the Northeast. That's where he's from, you know, he had huge union support for, you know, a number of years, even as you know, Trump made inroads into union members in the state. But part of his popularity in Ohio is that he, you know, railed against NAFTA. You know, he wrote a whole book about how NAFTA gutted the Midwest, gutted Ohio industry, and just kind of was bad for the place. So it's been interesting to kind of see that flip. But part of the reason why that flip happened was because the crypto industry spent $40 million in the state trying to elect his opponent, Bernie Moreno. Bernie Moreno is he's like a car dealership owner and like a cryptocurrency blockchain, like an entrepreneur. Not that like too deep of ties to the crypto industry, but definitely some, like tangential ties. And the reason why this is like, by far the cryptocurrencies, like, you know, biggest knockoff is because Sherrod Brown was the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, and he helped block some key legislation that moved through there, you know, that the industry wanted to see passed. He received an F grading from this nonprofit dedicated to tracking, you know, a crypto stances for politicians. It's
Sherrod Brown 6:59
not just about a few bad actors that didn't do things quite the right way. These crypto catastrophes have exposed what many of us already knew, digital assets, cryptocurrency, stable coins, investment tokens, or speculative products run by reckless companies. We know that's true that put Americans hard earned money at risk.
Speaker 1 7:17
He was kind of like public enemy number one, as far as lawmakers were considered.
Arjun Singh 7:24
And I feel like the way that the crypto industry was spending money, it wasn't like all of a sudden, there was this popular fanfare over crypto and this public outcry for legalizing crypto. They sort of come in and blanket the airways talking about other issues, right? But it's, it's kind of insidious the way that they, they actually were pushing pro crypto candidates. Because they weren't really pushing pro crypto messaging in this election, right? Like they would target different sorts of issues exactly
Speaker 1 7:54
like rile voting. I haven't seen any ad that touted some politicians, you know, pro crypto stance on something I've only seen. You know, just funding from these ads about how a certain politician is, is bad, bad for the area, doesn't stand for that area's values, or how, you know, ads supporting their candidate that you know are, you know, this guy's great, blah, blah, blah, or this, this woman's great, you know, you know they do X, Y and Z, and so, you know, there's all you know, like, for example, like, you know, throughout the election, you know, the crypto industry would routinely highlight how, you know, like, Coinbase was the number one pusher of some of this stuff, how 52 Americans own crypto, and how crypto is becoming an increasingly important aspect of local economies. But that's, you know, based off some like kind of bunk internal polling. And then also, you know, it kind of, you know, goes against a recent Pew Research poll that found 63% of Americans say, quote, they have little to no confidence that the current ways to invest in trade or use cryptocurrencies are reliable and safe. So how did we get here? You know, how did these pro crypto candidates get elected? Buckets of cash and deceptive ads. That's how it happened. And
Arjun Singh 9:11
I feel like that made it a bipartisan thing. It's like, I mean, Democrats, for a long time, had actually been kind of the ally of crypto, partially because of Sam bankman Fried grew up in Palo Alto, California. Comes from a liberal background. I think his parents had actually, they had some connections to democratic politics. And then Harris, all of a sudden, says, Hey, don't go to Trump. You have multiple Democrats writing to the DNC saying, Hey, we got to get these guys on their sides. And I know you've done some reporting on that, what's been the Democratic Party's relationship with crypto? Yeah,
Speaker 1 9:45
so the industry really grew into like a force to be reckoned with in the 2022 primaries, largely with Sam bankman freed. He spent, I think it was little over $120 million in. Primary and midterm election races largely backing Democrats. One of the largest crypto cheerleaders has been Richie Torres Congressman out of New York. But the way Sam bankman Fried was able to gain inroads with Democrats, or just government officials in general, is that the standard revolving door type, you know, lobbying and affiliations with the industry. For example, you know, he hired former CFTC regulators, which is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is, you know, the the the Indies, or the, excuse me, the government agency that the crypto industry would really, like to oversee crypto. FTX is his company, Sam Arjun fruits company hired former CFTC employees who would reach out to their former co workers to arrange same day meetings with Sam, to curry favor, to try to get you know, some types of, you know, you know, different policy and rule making go to go in their favor.
Arjun Singh 11:07
It's like, comically corrupt, almost, oh yeah. Like, it's as if he was broadcasting right to everybody. This is what I'm trying to do. Or, yeah, it's
Speaker 1 11:14
like they, they read the they read the master plan. Go and listen, yeah, and, you know, just use, use that. You know, it's, it's just straight up, right out of the textbook on how to gain influence and access in Washington. You know that is hiring former regulators and giving them a ton of money well.
Arjun Singh 11:36
And I feel like that relates to that when Sam bankman Fried was going to Washington, DC. He was trying to be this poster boy saying, regulate me. Regulate me. And I heard a venture capitalist actually once say, anybody who says regulate me is absolutely not who you want to be writing the regulations of any kind of industry. So outside of crypto, is troublesome environmental impacts. To me, this basically feels like it's a financial instrument, but one that's just not regulated, like other financial instruments, like you've seen, this industry that's rife with fraud. There was a company called Celsius, one of its own employees was documented as calling it a Ponzi scheme. Can you talk a little bit more about that regulatory issue, like, Why did Sam bankman Fried want the CFTC to regulate crypto as opposed to another government agency? Was it just as simple as this is where his connections were at, or was there, you know, some sort of wonky kind of trickery going on there? Yeah.
Speaker 1 12:36
So the big debate in the crypto world when it comes to like who they want to see regulate them. It's either the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. And the SEC is a massive, massive agency with more than 4000 employees in a budget worth more than $2 billion and they have investigative powers that you have to register with them, and, you know, all different types of requirements and restrictions that really make it easy to look into the inner workings of certain companies, whereas the CFTC much smaller, much, much, much smaller, there's only 725 employees. I remember, if I remember right at the top of my head, and a budget that's just a couple 100 million dollars. They also don't have as broad, ranging investigative powers as the SEC does. And according to the their own Chairman, the CFTC chairman, Rost Benham, they largely rely on tips and complaints to investigate malfeasance, whereas, you know, the Securities and Exchange Commission, they'll go in and actually investigate this type of stuff and try to find the wrongdoing. So that's largely how they want. You know, this industry to run is through the CFTC and then also, you know, there's a debate range you know, raging about whether is, is crypto a security, like a stock or a bond? If it's considered a like a security, then that comes with certain types of fiduciary responsibilities from the crypto like coin makers or even even the exchanges themselves. If it's considered a stock or a security, then they have a say, you know, whoever owns those, those, you know, crypto tokens, you know, they have a say in the direction of the company, if it's considered a commodity, which is, you know, what Bitcoin is considered. And commodities are more like kind of like oil, gas, Grain futures, that type of stuff, you know, then that's regulated by the CFTC, and you don't have the same types of, you know, say, over the direction of a company. You're more just betting on the, you know, future price of this type stuff.
Arjun Singh 14:54
I found the term coin maker is very amusing because it reminded me of Dungeons and Dragons. And it's like, it's hard sometimes to to take this world seriously when you have, like, coin makers, and you've got things that are currency, but their mascot is a cartoon dog. And I think there's literally, there was a coin called shit coin. At one point, Donald Trump has created a cryptocurrency, but at the same time like that, wackiness belies what is a very serious problem, which is this is like a multi billion dollar,
Speaker 1 15:25
multi trillion dollar, multi trillion dollar industry, multi trillion dollar
Arjun Singh 15:29
industry. You know, back to what you were saying about the Securities and Exchange Commission. Is what you were talking about, about how the SEC has more enforcement power. Is that why you saw people like Mark Cuban urging potential Kamala Harris administration to fire the SEC chair. Gary Gensler. I think you've heard other people in the crypto space say that Gensler is someone they don't want around. Why are crypto people so upset about this guy, Gary Gensler, and I guess if you could just tell me a little bit about Gensler. I mean, is he a good faith fighter against crypto or, you know, does he also have some issues around cryptocurrency himself? Yeah, Gary
Speaker 1 16:10
Gensler has been public enemy number one for the crypto industry. He's been pretty aggressive on cracking down exchanges for not properly registering with the SEC for different, you know, coin makers for selling unregistered crypto tokens. And he's been doing quite a bit back and forth with Coinbase. In particular. Coinbase is, like the, the one of the most popular crypto exchanges. And the reason why they, you know, the crypto industry doesn't really like Gary Gensler, is that he he believes that the rules, the regulatory rules on the books with the SEC, are enough to enforce current regulations, to get the guess the crypto industry, but the crypto industry, they want the SEC to make new rules to govern their industry, rules that are specific to the crypto industry and that would also go in their favor more you know. Gensler, you know, largely sees crypto, you know, currencies, tokens, whatever you want to call them, coins, as a security, he believes they pass what is known as the how we test, which is a super old type of test that's been litigated by the Supreme Court on how, what defines a security. It's kind of our, you know, too in depth and, like, you know, nitty gritty, to really lay it all out right here, but,
Arjun Singh 17:39
yeah, but it's a test to make sure that this thing isn't just a token that goes out there, and it's actually a means that financial institutions can generate more wealth off of, yeah,
Speaker 1 17:49
yeah. And he has, you know, he has thrown some bones to the industry. He's overseen, you know, a number of it, you know, you know, acceptance of the crypto industry and cryptocurrencies into the larger financial market. But you know, you know, for gains, genslers credit, you know, you can only oppose a multi trillion dollar industry for so long before it starts to notch some minor wins.
Arjun Singh 18:13
Well, and that leads me to, kind of my last question for you, is that now we have an incoming Trump administration. So I know Trump, he's been campaigning as very favorable to Bitcoin. There's a moment that I really like, and I know I played it on the show before, but I want to play it for the listeners again. It's when Trump was handing out Bitcoin burgers at some sort of cryptocurrency confab to just really hammer home that this guy says he really loves crypto. What does crypto look like under the Trump administration, and really, most of Congress, to be honest, because it sounds like they've won both sides of the aisle. They've now got the President as well. So we know there's the Department of Doge, which I should make clear, is not related to the cryptocurrency, but kind of seems like it's part of a, you know, a way to hype up that Bitcoin, or that cryptocurrency. And we have people coming into the administration, JD Vance, who has a lot of connections to the crypto industry. We know crypto donated heavily to Trump. So what are, what are they looking at right now? Do we have an idea of how crypto either grows or is there going to be any effort to limit it under a Trump administration?
Speaker 1 19:25
Yeah. Well, you know, according to the crypto industry, there have been 271 pro crypto House members, so in this upcoming session, wow. And that's coupled with roughly about 53 senators who have friendly views of the crypto industry. According to Stan crypto, you know, one of the industries like, you know, it's like the major industries like, you know, rating system on if you're good or bad with crypto, you know. And now couple those, you know, what's going on in Congress with the Trump administration. Who Trump previously, you know, was. Was really skeptical of the industry, skeptical of Bitcoin and some of these larger currencies. But that all started to change when they started, you know, dumping buckets of cash on him in this campaign over the summer, he promised to make America the crypto capital of the planet. And experts told me this is, will be the most pro crypto administration ever. You had mentioned Elon Musk. Elon Musk is a, you know, super big in the the crypto space. He may, you know, help make Dogecoin. You have JD Vance, who, according to financial disclosure records, holds between 500,000 and million dollars worth of bitcoin. You have Howard lutnic, who is CO chairing Trump's transition team. Lutnick is the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, which is a investment banking and financial services firm that counts crypto companies as some of its clients. And they even have, you know Trump and the Trump family themselves, who are involved in a crypto project called World Liberty financial. So this will be a very pro crypto administration coming forward, and they're really going to be laser focused on agencies such as the SEC and CFTC, which we talked about, but also the Treasury Department and the IRS experts told me that the industry would like to see an ease of restrictions on anti money laundering rules and rules barring financing of human trafficking and terrorism funding. This really comes down to what's known as know your customer requirements, which makes it hard to hide identities and for the crypto industry to really, truly know who exactly their customers are. But you know, a core part of crypto is, you know, the suit, pseudo nominee, pseudonymous identities, right? Like you have, like a number that's attached to your wallet or whatever, not necessarily your name and social security number, like you would if you own stocks and bonds.
Arjun Singh 21:58
Yeah, and your point, right there touches on something that's important. So later in the show, I'm going to talk to a documentarian about the origins of Bitcoin and the people who created Bitcoin, you know. And one thing that we're going to discuss is the very anti establishment libertarian ethos that was around the initial crypto community. But when you've done this reporting, and you've seen who's making big gains from crypto. Who's backing all of this crypto? I guess, just what do you make of the idea that crypto is anti establishment, decentralized system that fights entrenched power? Is that a is that what we're seeing happening with cryptocurrency, at least in America right now?
Speaker 1 22:38
I mean, they may say that, but that's a load a crock. You know, you can't be too decentralized or anti establishment when you know Goldman Sachs holds, holds your reserves. Large banks hold crypto reserves. Deal in the space, and you're pushing for the Trump administration to hold, quote, unquote, strategic Bitcoin reserves. How anti establishment is that? You know, all that is, is just to prop up the industry, to allow Bitcoin prices to spike higher, because it has the backing, the good faith backing of the United States government like that, that type of relationship benefits one side entirely. It doesn't benefit the government to hold Bitcoin reserves. It benefits the, you know, Bitcoin industry and Bitcoin holders to have the United States government holding Bitcoin
Arjun Singh 23:29
in talking to Freddie, I found myself taken aback at how big the crypto industry actually is, mainly because it feels like it just showed up all of a sudden and sucked in massive amounts of money. And the reality isn't that far off. It starts with a mysterious and anonymous programmer named Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. So after the break, I'll sit down with documentarian Cullen Hoback to learn about the origins of Bitcoin and why Cullen believes he's discovered the real identity of its creator. We'll be right back. You.
Cullen Hoback 24:11
Back in 2008 this anonymous figure going by Satoshi Nakamoto releases his idea of how to make digital cash for the internet. And this is something that the cypherpunks, people who really cared about digital rights, saw the surveillance state that was coming. It's something that they had been trying to create for well over a decade, and it was deemed impossible, yet somehow the Satoshi guy shows up and figures it out. Of course, nobody knows if this is their real name at the time, Cullen Hoback
Arjun Singh 24:43
is a documentarian in his latest film, money electric, the Bitcoin mystery. Cullen takes a look at the history of Bitcoin and more specifically, who the mysterious creator of Bitcoin is. It's not a stretch to say that Bitcoin was. Wished into existence one day, Bitcoin at its core, is just a bunch of lines of code, but what makes it unique is the use of something called blockchain in bitcoins, case and for other cryptocurrencies, the blockchain acts as a sort of ledger. It's carried across computer networks to maintain all of the changes that happen to it, and importantly, it documents when and who it goes to, and it's very difficult, if not impossible, to alter anything on the blockchain. This is bitcoins biggest sell as to why it can compete with a currency like the US dollar. And one day it just showed up. The first Bitcoin transaction took place in January of 2009 and it was sent from Satoshi Nakamoto to a computer engineer named Hal Finney. For a while, Bitcoin stayed in this cyberpunk community. It was something of a novelty. I mean, less than a year after Finney got the first Bitcoin, a Florida man paid someone 10,000 bitcoins in exchange for two Papa John's pizzas at Bitcoins, current price, though, that transaction would be worth almost a billion dollars. I know they should have sprang for Pizza Hut.
Cullen Hoback 26:04
For me, it was like, Okay, is there, is there some new story here that could breathe life into this old mystery? And when I was wrapping up the Q series around the same time, El Salvador makes this announcement that they're gonna be adopting Bitcoin as legal tender, which is a pretty big deal, you know. Okay, now bitcoin is being used by countries, nation states, so that got me curious. And I was like, All right, well, who's behind this global adoption effort? Might there be some connection to this mysterious figure, Satoshi?
Arjun Singh 26:36
Previously, Colin, worked on a documentary series called Q into the storm, where many believed he revealed the identity of Q to be a man named Ron Watkins. So this isn't his first foray into this kind of a world, but still, I wanted to know what made him want to investigate Bitcoin. Well, since
Cullen Hoback 26:53
almost the beginning, the mystery around Satoshi has actually been a draw for Bitcoin. It's had a marketing value for Bitcoin, and so my interest in Bitcoin in the beginning was whether or not it had really addressed this. What did it set out to, which is being digital cash. So I really wanted to chart the history of Bitcoin. It didn't seem to me that there was a film that kind of captured the whole story of Bitcoin, kind of the crypto ecosystem, and then helps audiences kind of understand how it works at the same time. I wanted to show this global adoption effort in real time. Get in there with cameras and have kind of an action driven story, and then connecting to all of that, of course, is the Satoshi mystery and seeing how it dovetails with those other two storylines. But it's tricky, because it's hard to just make a film that's about Bitcoin or about the history of Bitcoin. I like making things that have an element of genre to them, and in this case, mystery is sort of the obvious genre choice, right? And I felt that there if Satoshi was involved somehow in this global adoption effort? Well, it wasn't like they had just mic dropped back in 2011 or whatever and disappeared, which a lot of people kind of believed it would mean that, oh my gosh, they're actually part of something that could make themselves the richest person on earth, and that, I think, creates this sort of need to know who this individual might be, what's motivating them, who might have this much sway and power
Arjun Singh 28:27
over the future, and Satoshi creates Bitcoin, it seems almost with an ideology in mind. But is that accurate? Was there an intent that Bitcoin was supposed to be part of a bigger movement or serve a different purpose. It really sounds like this Satoshi character drops this tool, if you will, onto everybody, and the culture around it erupts around
Cullen Hoback 28:49
him. I mean, I think Satoshi was very ideological, yeah. What was that ideology? I think they're best described as a soft libertarian, someone who understands the governments will exist but resists them. You can see it in the very first Bitcoin block. Satoshi actually hides this message, which was a headline to something which had been published in the London Times that same day. I think it's like chancellor and brink of second bail out of banks. It's pointing to the banking crisis at the time. So while I don't think that Satoshi wrote the code in anticipation of that crisis, or because of the crisis. The crisis kind of happens after most people believe he wrote he started work on the code. Or at least, Satoshi has claimed they started work on the code. It served as a kind of call and response. It said, All right, in a world where money is kind of inflated away, what if there was something with a limited supply a kind of digital gold that could be used to transact with and if you read through all of Satoshis, messages, emails, forum posts, you can see that there's a an ideological bent there, though it's masked by a formal demeanor. There. Seems to be this effort to kind of come across as an academic, to seem, yeah, to seem very, very, to seem very formal. And I think that a lot of folks have tried to look at that formality and say, Okay, who else is this like? But of course, there's sort of another explanation for why they may have been writing in a kind of formal, academic manner, and that would be to be taken seriously, right?
Arjun Singh 30:23
So I really enjoyed the documentary, because it's a brilliant look at the culture and the people around Bitcoin, in the Bitcoin industry and fervor. But notably, you identify a man named Peter Todd, and you say that Peter is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. Now, Todd has denied this. So first, tell me a little bit about this guy, Peter Todd. Who is he? And most importantly, why do you think he's the guy who created Bitcoin?
Cullen Hoback 30:52
Well, he's a self taught coder, so he's so the code is what he did was what I believe he did was genius, right? But you don't necessarily need to be able to write a cryptographic functions or something to do that. So I think when building a case repeater, you have to go back in time a little see what he was doing. Get into his head. We can talk about what he's like in the present, but back when he was 15 years old, in 2001 he's already communicating with Adam back Hal Finney, another, the guy I mentioned earlier, who was the he received the first Bitcoin transaction. He was someone who believed in Bitcoin before almost anyone else. And here's Peter emailing at the age of 15, trying to solve this problem. He's writing about hash cash, which is Adam's invention. He understands already that he can't get around what's considered one of the biggest hurdles, which is the double spend problem. That is, if you create a permission in the system, how do you prevent someone from spending the same coin twice? So I don't know what you were doing at 15, but you know, I'm not, I'm not on on mailing lists trying to solve the Digital Cash problem with world renowned cryptographers. I didn't realize
Arjun Singh 32:09
he was so young. He's in high school, and this is all happening. Yeah,
Cullen Hoback 32:13
he's in high school, and I don't and I haven't really seen anyone contest that he had the skills I had, C Plus Plus programmers, PhDs, look at his code. Look at Satoshis code, look at Adams code. Analyze all the code to see, you know, okay, yeah, they, they could have done this. They had, they had the skills, right? He's also a young libertarian, and his dad's an economist. His mom taught him about cryptography. So he's, you know, he's really steeped in these ideas. He goes to school, he gets a fine art he's getting a degree in Fine Arts. But as he's doing that, he's merging sort of coding skills. It's almost like a time stamping system that he's building in these clocks, where the art itself is the code within the clocks. So there's a very similar kind of mindset and theory going into his art that you could draw major parallels, I think, to Bitcoin. The same ideas are going through his head around the time. Then come 2008 I don't know how many people on the show coders really know what GitHub is, but GitHub is just a place where you can leave commits for your code, and you'll put updates, and you'll do all that stuff on there. Peter's commits drop off right when Bitcoin picks up and when he re emerges again in 2012 on GitHub. You know that's also when he kind of re emerges in the Bitcoin community. So there's this strange gap in his commits that lines up pretty closely, actually, almost exactly, with bitcoins development period, and then sort of following him going off to do a physics degree. And I think it's interesting when we talk about the code, which is something I wasn't really able to get into in the film, because, you know, the the code was described to me as something that looked like it was written like by a mechanical engineer or somebody who had a mind in physics. These are from different people who who had analyzed the code. It was close to the metal. It's like knowing, needing to know how the engine works of the car to drive the car, versus some coders who will just drive the car, right? So for me, these are all things that go okay, well, this lines up with him.
Arjun Singh 34:29
Yeah. I mean, when I think about cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, and I think, you know, listeners of lever time know that here at the lever we focus a lot on corporate power and the regulatory system. So maybe this is just my perspective and my niche world view on it, but I'm interested in how much of the financial world and different moneyed interests, whether that's a 16 z the venture capital firm or Elon Musk, you know, these very wealthy and powerful people. People getting into the cryptocurrency game, which starts with Bitcoin. What was interesting about your movie is that it seems like initially, this wasn't the culture that Bitcoin was coming out of. It wasn't necessarily a means to just get rich or amass a lot of wealth. There's this anti establishment, you know, almost anarchist attitude associated with the people initially around Bitcoin. And I guess I'd be curious to know from you, was there a transition from one culture to the other? How did the Bitcoin advocates talk about where you see cryptocurrency and Bitcoin today, which is just this corporate Bonanza going for cryptocurrency. And you know now you've got, like, Donald Trump saying that he's a he's a Bitcoin guy. What did they make of that?
Cullen Hoback 35:49
It's a really good point. And it's actually what attracted me to Bitcoin is, is it core ethos, what it was trying to solve in the beginning, you know, but, but what Bitcoin started as and what it became are two very different things, and the powers that aligned with Bitcoin over time, it ended up having these strange bedfellows. I mean, you have the crypto anarchists, the libertarians, the Wall Street guys, and then, and then it evolves to just anyone who's who feels like the current financial system has left them behind and is is looking for an opportunity, because they can't. They don't feel like they can make it work on Wall Street, and they don't. Maybe they don't feel like they can even afford a house, and like, Okay, well, I see people are getting 10x Games, 100x Games on this other thing, maybe I should put my money there. And that's part of the game theory of bitcoins design playing out. But it has been a little disheartening in recent years watching watching some in the Bitcoin community kind of contort their values to justify this unholy alliance with government entities in order to forward bitcoins value, and I think that and leaving privacy behind in the process, leaving the core mission of Bitcoin, which was to be able to transact anonymously, off the table, and instead kind of praising this notion of transparency, that every transaction that happens on a blockchain is there permanently. And if you're able to figure out who owned a wallet, you can you can figure out who they transacted with. So it actually can become a very effective tool for surveillance. And this is why cbdc is something else we get into in the film, I think, though they emerge, they're a direct response, I think, to Bitcoin. Yeah,
Arjun Singh 37:44
talk a little bit about that. What is the cbdc? So
Cullen Hoback 37:48
cbdc, Central Bank, digital currency. I think it's something that people may have heard the acronym and are just like, What is this thing? It's basically a digital dollar. Most countries right now are considering doing something along these lines. There's different ways of building it. It can be modeled kind of like Bitcoin, but it certainly doesn't have to be, and usually isn't. So it's just, it's a reinvention, really, of what the monetary system looks like as a response to something like Bitcoin, except when you think of a digital dollar. What it means is that right now, when you transact with $1 in cash, it's a little bit harder to trace if you transact with a Visa card, it's a lot easier to trace. This is creating a system where every transaction will likely be permanently visible to the government.
Arjun Singh 38:32
So you did a previous movie called Monster camp, which I really enjoyed, which is about live action role playing or LARPing, and that's when people partake in these dungeons and dragons as games. But they dress up, they meet up in real life. In some cases, you know, they do mock fighting with each other. You did another series about Q Anon, which is a web of conspiracies that really just live online, but sort of filtered out into real life. Now, you've made a movie about Bitcoin. I wonder, Cullen, do you feel drawn to stories or people who who like to inhabit magical worlds, if you will, whether that's the sort of magical world that you get doing Dungeons and Dragons, role playing, or living as a anonymous online identity, operating in, you know, these kind of qanon like conspiratorial worlds where you feel like you're solving a puzzle and you're engaging with sluice. You know, even Bitcoin, in a way, it seems to be part of a digital ecosystem that has a fantastical element to it. People within these hacker communities, you know some that I'm familiar with, there can be a very good guy, bad guy ethos, almost a comic book way of looking at things and banding together to do something revolutionary. But I guess I just want to ask you, do you even think that these are magical communities? Do you see a relation between all. All of the films that you've made? Oh, sure, and
Cullen Hoback 40:02
some of them, and most of them I see in hindsight, right? I even even the relationships between someone like Ron Watkins and his motives and someone like Peter Todd and their potential motives. You know, I see parallels. But to your point, this idea of, I think that it's more like, some would say, fake it till you make it. Someone call it me magic. But it's believing in something that maybe that is almost like an alternate reality, and willing that alternate reality into reality. So it's it's live action role playing. But even if you go all the way back to Monster camp when people were dressing up like blue sea elves and hitting each other with padded weapons, they would play these characters. And you might have someone who was very insecure in real life take on a character who was high in charisma, and you would see that charisma bleed into their real life until they actually became a more charismatic person. And in fact, Bitcoin kind of works a little bit similarly. It's like if you believe in something or you take on a certain character, long enough you start to become that thing, it starts to affect the world, until your reality becomes reality.
Arjun Singh 41:14
So one final question for you. I think there's not an insignificant amount of people who see something like cryptos rise, and they've seen these debates about smartphones and social media, how quickly technology changes culture and society. And I guess I mean, this is, in one way, the natural progression of change, especially technological change. You can't really tell what's going to happen, because with so much of technology, people find uses and create uses that even the initial designers weren't aware of. And I guess, what do you make of the debate or the idea that humanity needs to be more mindful or cautious or thoughtful about pushing out new technologies. And, you know, considering what is, what has the potential to be a Pandora's box, like
Cullen Hoback 42:09
a technological freeze, like, once we had the Game Boy Advance, like, that's good enough, exactly.
Arjun Singh 42:13
I mean, I think that's kind of the heart of it, that I see this as, how do you regulate what we don't know, unless you just sort of freeze it. But, you know, I'll ask you, what do you make of that tension? And I guess what I just laid out over
Cullen Hoback 42:29
there, sure, yeah, there certainly is a tension. I mean, there's no putting, there's no putting, you know, anything back in the box at this point, all you can do is try to get ahead of it. So, and this is actually part of what I think when you look at bitcoins growth, if you were Satoshi and you had created this thing, wouldn't you want to get involved? Wouldn't you want to steer that technological growth? Wouldn't you still want to be behind that ship seeing how it evolves, it would be very, very hard to what just sit back and go, Okay, this thing that I was so passionate about, I'm just not going to, I'm just going to step back and let it happen, particularly because of the impact that it's having, and particularly because it didn't necessarily become the thing that you intended for it to become, you would probably very much want to be in the middle of that fight. I think that that's some of the motive that underscores Peter and his persistent involvement, since he sort of enters the fray. And I think when we're talking about, like, okay, like, what did, what did this technology become? People looking at an AI and saying, all right, what do we do about this? You know, all of the sort of, the sort of growth of all of this, you can't technologically freeze anything. You can't do whatever. I don't want to ruin the ending of three body problem. I guess I just did. But like, it's like, there's, yeah, it's not, it's not a thing that you can necessarily undo. So then you have to figure out what the best path is going forward. And so I think we have to accept that CBDCs are coming. Bitcoin is a reality. And then we have to say, Okay, well, what do we want that reality to look like? How do we bring rights like privacy, free speech, how do we make sure that those things are enshrined in the digital realm? And it's like all of these conversations that were happening hundreds of years ago around, okay, how do we make rights happen in reality, it's like they're all up for negotiation again, and they really shouldn't be. We should be figuring out. We should be figuring out, like, Okay, how do we have, like, a, you know, digital Bill of Rights? But we don't, and until we kind of accept that, that digital reality is reality, and that and that, we need to take the lessons learned in reality, and, you know, make sure they're applied there. Yeah, people are. People are going to Sure. Wish we had a freeze, but I think some of that desire comes from a lack of digital rights online.
Arjun Singh 45:10
Thanks for listening to another episode of lever time. This episode was produced by me, Arjun Singh, with help from Chris Walker and editing support from Joel Warner and Lucy Dean Stockton. Our theme music is composed by Nick Campbell. We'll be back next week with another episode of lever. Time you.