Bonus: Angela McArdle | Why Washington Fears Bitcoin Adoption

BONUS: Angela McArdle | Why Washington Fears Bitcoin Adoption

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] I love talking about this kind of stuff because the Bitcoin thing, like I was an early-ish coiner because my show fans were like, dude, Bitcoin, and I was like, nah, it's fake and blah, blah. I had all the objections that at any, as any sort of tech Luddite or, or actually reasonable person might have had back in the day, 2013 or so, and I remember a show fan was like, look man, I love what you do.

I'm giving you. A quarter of a Bitcoin. It's not much, but it's just a little tip. Save it. You never know. It could go up. And you know what's funny? I saved it. I saved it, and I saved it. And I saved it. And I saved it. And now it's worth like $25,000 and it's, I, no one is going to give me a more generous gratuity in my life.

That's a very nice tip. Yes. And, but back then it was probably like 30 bucks. Yeah. You know? And he was like, here's 30 bucks. It was generous back then. And the only reason I didn't throw it was on a piece of paper. So I had to like scan the text. Yeah. And put it [00:01:00] into a wallet. I forget how I did it 'cause it's been several years, hence.

But I just thought that was kind of funny. And it really does sort of, it's a good almost metaphor for this story of Bitcoin because it's like, this is crap, but is it? I'll save this sheet of paper. What does it cost me to save a sheet of paper? I moved seven times, found the sheet of paper and was like, huh, I wonder if this still works.

Google how to use a paper wallet. Ta-da. New car. Right? So like it was just like unbelievable, uh, at the time. And other people were early Bitcoiners, but some were early Bitcoiners out of necessity. And some of the people we're gonna talk about today, like Ross Alrich. And folks like that who started the Silk Road, this was kind of a different thing.

Do you mind giving us a little background on him? I read the book that was about him hoping I could interview him and then, you know. That didn't happen because he was in prison for

Angela McArdle: life. Yeah. And I mean, he's out. So, you know, maybe it'll happen, maybe it'll happen one day. He's kind of keeping to himself a little bit.

Jordan Harbinger: I can't blame the guy he was in prison when he thought he was gonna die in there. I'd be playing some [00:02:00] Xbox and hanging out with my family at this point.

Angela McArdle: Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. Uh, he's, he's been around here and there. I think, you know, you may or may not see some photos of him. With a, with a certain, uh, president at some point in the, in the near future.

Jordan Harbinger: No

Angela McArdle: big surprise. Yeah. Um, yeah, but I mean, I mean basically, you know, Ross was an early Bitcoin adopter and he created the website, silk Road. Which only took Bitcoin and you could transact almost any kind of business on Bitcoin. And he got in a lot of trouble because people were quote unquote selling drugs on Bitcoin.

With Bitcoin on the Silk Road. Uh, you know, they were also selling things like surfboards. So, you know, it was an early Craigslist for Bitcoin and the Feds really didn't like it because it was not dependent on the dollar. And I think that really freaked a lot of people out. So he was busted through a very lengthy sting operation with the FBI.

There were a lot of horrible accusations thrown at him that all of a sudden, you know, evaporated before the eve of trial, [00:03:00] like murder for hire, like all kinds of stuff.

Jordan Harbinger: So, so that's, yeah. Let me pause you right there, because I was like, wait, he didn't go to prison, or, or he wasn't only accused, I should say, of money laundering or whatever they threw at him, or tax evasion or whatever it was.

I'm like, I distinctly remember reading in the book him trying to suppo, allegedly trying to hire like a federal agent or a biker to kill somebody else. And it was like that. There was a couple of them, but basically every wouldbe hitman on there was an undercover cop anyways, and, and it was kind of like all fake, right?

Angela McArdle: Yeah. And I mean, I think the really damning evidence on that is that none of those charges were brought. He didn't go to trial for that. You know, the feds have this, this way of doing things where they throw everything horrible at you. It destroys your reputation, and then it just sort of magically evaporates on the eve of trial.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. Well, the prosecutor, just from a legal perspective, will say, what can we accuse you of that might get you to a plea deal? Okay, we're not doing a plea deal or we're doing a plea deal for this, that, and the other thing. Alright, what do I actually have evidence for? [00:04:00] Uh, 10% of that maybe if we're lucky.

And that's enough to bring crazy federal minimums. So we're gonna go with, uh, tax evasion. And it's like, wait a minute. You're accusing me of trying to murder FBI agents five minutes ago. Now it's tax evasion, which like Martha Stewart is guilty of. Right? It's like it's, come on man. It's like a game of,

Angela McArdle: of chicken with you.

You know, they, they say that they're gonna throw everything at you and sometimes they do, you know, but it's really just to get you where they want you at. And so he was made an example of two life sentences plus 40 years, no eligibility of parole. No eligibility of parole. The judge who issued the sentence was a crazy activist judge who also made comments about race de early DEI stuff making an an example out of him for everyone else.

Jordan Harbinger: What? That doesn't what you should have had more people of color selling drugs on Silk Road. I mean, what is the argument here?

Angela McArdle: That's the privileged, uh, white boy argument. We need to punish you extra hard because you're clearly a privileged white boy, [00:05:00] and, and we don't like that. Whatever that means.

Whatever that means, you know, it's bad. And so we have to really throw the book at you.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. How long was he in prison?

Angela McArdle: 11. Between 11 and 12 years.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my gosh. Trying count. Anything like that, you know, early

Angela McArdle: time as well. My gosh.

Jordan Harbinger: Stuff like that for nonviolent crime just boggles my mind.

Angela McArdle: Yeah, he did not hurt anyone.

No

Jordan Harbinger: one? No. Oh my God. Unbelievable. Okay, so he was pardoned by President Trump in case people are, you know, wondering why we're saying was in prison. He's not dead. He was pardoned by President Trump and he's out. Hopefully. Who knows? Maybe we'll see him on the show. That's not a hint. It's just a, it's a, it's a wish.

So if he ends up hearing this or you can get him a note, great. I would appreciate that.

Angela McArdle: I'll pass it along. I will pass it along, pass it

Jordan Harbinger: along. It'll, it'll put it in the stack of requests that's now taller than the ceiling. But it's very interesting to me that he is also not the only one. People might say, uh, it wasn't Bitcoin.

He was early. It was a market thing. It was an eco economics thing. It was a money laundering thing. He's [00:06:00] not the only person that the government, the federal government has gone after for Bitcoin related stuff. Now, that doesn't mean that people who do Bitcoin aren't guilty of other crimes if they are indeed money laundering.

I mean, we do know that criminal organizations use cryptocurrency oftentimes to transact. But they're kind of counting on us, deliberately conflating somebody who has a lot of Bitcoin and maybe has. Problems figuring out how to get their books straight with somebody who is deliberately laundering hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.

Am I on the right track?

Angela McArdle: Yeah. I mean, they wanna poison the, well, they want the average person to, in their minds, equate Bitcoin with terrorism, cryptocurrency, bitcoin, anything on the internet, uh, involving, you know, non fiat dollars. They want people to just think terrorism, or they want people to be freaked out for whatever reason and just not use it.

Oh, I'll get scammed. It is a scam. It'll disappear. That is the agenda.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you hear a lot [00:07:00] about that. Whenever anybody says, Hey, I used Bitcoin, or I got into Bitcoin early, or I used Bitcoin for this use case. One of the examples that you might be familiar with, I'm on Reddit like many other nerds, and I go into subreddits where I have nothing to do with it.

It's a subculture I've never heard of, but it's kind of interesting. So I'll be like, in the sex workers subreddit, be like, what are these people talking about? Right. I'm so curious. And you'll catch a thread that's like, does anybody else use Bitcoin? And it's funny because even in this sort of like subculture of people who are largely unbanked, because what they do is illegal, but kind of is, maybe shouldn't be according to a lot of people, probably yourself included, should at least be decriminalized.

And they're like, no, it's a scam. And it's like. But if you put your money in the bank and someone says, if you try to accept PayPal and somebody puts the wrong eggplant emoji in there, PayPal decides you're a sex worker and freezes $50,000 and now you are totally screwed. Like you're losing your house, you're losing your car.

You can't go to college anymore like you are in trouble. It's like [00:08:00] you're crapping on other people for using Bitcoin to get around this particular problem. The fact that not even the government corporations are deciding that what you do is against their terms of service and today is your unlucky day and all of your money is just gone now forever in escrow while they quote, unquote figure it out while they're making interest on your money and you can't touch it.

Angela McArdle: Yeah. What's the greater risk trying Bitcoin or getting Deb banked and losing everything you might as well did. Can you just diversify a little bit? Just diversify.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes, one of the, one of the wealthiest people that I used to know. Was a former exotic dancer and she would go to, she was in Vegas. She would go to this, uh, like sex shop essentially after work every night because it was open 24 7.

It had a Bitcoin machine and she would feed in, you know, 600 bucks or whatever it was that she made. Maybe it was like 6,000. 'cause it's Vegas. Who knows? And she would buy a bunch of Bitcoin and she was like, I just hope it doesn't go down right. And she just kept doing it, kept saving it. She would spend stuff here and there, cash it out at the same machine if she needed to.

And she just had a bunch of Bitcoin and she was [00:09:00] like, wow, I think I might be able to retire if this doesn't go down. And now she's like, I think I might buy another yacht. Right. You know, because it's. It skyrocketed. It's kind of a, it was kind of a funny story. She's not only retired, she could like buy the clubs she used to work at.

Probably.

Angela McArdle: Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, it's amazing what it can do for people. Obviously, you know, there's, there's some downsides to being one of the, one of the pioneers. Um, one of those downsides would be, you know, the feds catching you and locking you up. If they don't, they don't like what you're doing. But, um, everyone else is, seems to be pretty safe.

Jordan Harbinger: So who is catching the eye of, I know you're, you wanted to talk about a few people here besides Ross Ulbrich, who people are gonna debate and write in and say, no, he tried to do all these other illegal things. He ran an illegal marketplace. Like even if we grant them that, which is, you know, he's pardoned, so whatever for the sake of argument, what if we grant them that?

What about people like Roger Ver, because what has he done? I mean, he is also. Facing a lot of actually inter, I think, international pressure from the US government.

Angela McArdle: Well, his situation was just resolved, [00:10:00] so I worked pretty closely with Roger's team and they're keeping their cards. Pretty close to their chest, you know?

But it is public knowledge that his case was dismissed and he was facing up to 109 years plus a huge, huge fine for alleged tax evasion. So it was a lot of work. A lot of work. But he is in the clear, as far as I know, you know, but he was like a very early adopter of Bitcoin, called Bitcoin. Jesus provided seed capital to lots of organizations like Kraken.

He's basically like a giant Bitcoin philanthropist and protected a lot of people who were unemployed, fired, you know, had their careers ruined during COVID. So it's not a surprise that the Biden administration went after him because he was not only, you know, an early pioneer of Bitcoin, but he was really doing the Lord's work with helping people who had been silenced to him, COVID, dissidents, all of that good stuff.

And I just think it's, it's, it's very related, the parallel [00:11:00] economy and sort of like. Offboarding from just like mainstream culture, you know, mainstream thinking. They really did wanna make an example out of him. You know, I think he funded WikiLeaks. It's a big deal. Oh,

Jordan Harbinger: I see. Okay. So C can we re, can we back up a little?

'cause I think there's people watching this who are listening to this, who are like, why does the government give a crap about somebody who's an early Bitcoin adopter? What is the big deal? Yeah. I mean, if you owe a hundred million dollars in taxes, okay, I, I get it. But they send you a bill for that. They don't just like kick your door in generally.

So. What exactly, for people who are kind of like not following along at home because they're confused, why on earth would it be a priority for the B Biden administration to go after some Bitcoin influencer, which is essentially what Roger is right at this point? Well, I

Angela McArdle: mean, you know, what are the implications if you get a quarter of the population away from the dollar?

They're not putting the dollar in banks. They're not putting the [00:12:00] dollar towards their insurance policy. They're not buying bonds, they're not engaging with organizations that prop up the United States dollar. They're not contributing to their taxes. They're not part of the United States debt

Jordan Harbinger: system. Oh, okay.

But let me pause you here. I understand that that would be a grave threat to the threat to the economy, however. There's a very, very, and I'm pro, I'm not explaining this to you, I'm explaining this to the audience, so bear with me. There's a very big difference between guy who has a hundred grand in Bitcoin, which is one Bitcoin, and somebody who is completely off grid, unplugged from the economy, doesn't have health insurance.

You know what I mean? Like you're explaining somebody who's like, I refuse to rely on the dollar. I know a couple guys like that. They still have to pay taxes in Canadian or US dollars. They still have to buy health insurance. They cash out Bitcoin here and there because their kids go to a private school and they need to pay the tuition for that.

So like they're not completely disconnected from the [00:13:00] economy. They're de-risked from the US or the Canadian dollar crashing as far as they're concerned. 'cause they have their money mostly in Bitcoin. But there's just a big difference between somebody who's like, you know, living in a compound with barbed wire and uses solar panels in a water purifier and Bitcoin versus somebody like me who's got like a trivial amount but still believes in it.

That's really what you're gonna have. You're gonna have a quarter of the population, if you're lucky, that has any of this. It's gonna be in an ETF that they bought with dollars, and they're gonna watch it go up and down until they retire. Like we're not going to see in the next few years anyway, this massive chunk of the population just de dollarize, that's borderline crazy in my opinion.

Angela McArdle: But the feds don't wanna risk it. They did not. Especially the Biden administration. I mean, like full disclosure, president Trump has been incredibly friendly. Two, the Bitcoin and broader cryptocurrency community, but the Biden regime wants, they want total control, just absolute totalitarianism. And they had a very different agenda for the United States.

[00:14:00] And you know, we're talking about someone having a hundred thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin. There are people who have many thousands of Bitcoins, and they do view those people as existential threats to our financial system in the United States. I mean, we could just move over to that if we needed to.

Imagine you just start purchasing Bitcoin, just trading in your dollars, and there's someone who will do it for you and then buy them back. At a much higher amount because they have an amount of cash that, you know, you and I can't relate to, and they're like, whatever. You know,

Jordan Harbinger: I think the instability of Bitcoin is tough, right?

The fact that it fluctuates so much. I mean, people don't love that. They don't love the fact that the, that nothing is insured. The, the infrastructure's not quite there yet, so. Yes, I get it. But like a Russian oligarchs hold a lot of US dollars. Shouldn't we be more worried about them? There are people in China that have tons of US dollars.

I don't know, man. Seems like a little bit more of a threat than a guy who got really lucky about cryptocurrency in 2014.

Angela McArdle: Yeah, I mean, but it's, you know, it's the sum of the parts. They [00:15:00] understand what Bitcoin is, which is, you know, a little bit different. Then a lot of other cryptocurrency, there's a finite amount.

You can't, you can't print it. There's no money. Printer go Burr with Bitcoin, you know, it's a little different and so I think it's, it's a lot more threatening, you know, it's a totally different system and it also seems to be maybe the only one that's gonna replace it. You know, there've been, there's been talk about.

Lab created gold recently. There's a lot, because a lot of skeptics of Bitcoin, people who don't like it, they're like, well, we need to go back to the gold standard. Okay, well when we have the cubic zirconia version of gold, you know, that kind of freaks me out.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I mean the gold standard has major pro.

I'm actually doing a whole show about why that is, just so, obviously not the solution. At all. And people who are gold bugs are like, I don't wanna digress too much, but basically, no way. You'd have to decrease the money supply like crazy. And it's also not even gonna solve all the problems that people think it's gonna solve.

Angela McArdle: It's like the US Constitution. I think it was the very best thing they had, and I love that it [00:16:00] existed for so long, but it didn't ultimately. Do its promise job.

Jordan Harbinger: What's disturbing about some of the cases that I researched before this and that you had mentioned before this, there's guys who are in prison now, like Ian Freeman, who essentially operated, I mean, I'm gonna simplify it here, but a bitcoin vending machine business and everybody, he

Angela McArdle: had an ATM.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. Yeah. And so people used it for illegal things. Surprise, surprise. And now he's in trouble for that. But it's like. Okay, so what you're saying is you should send JP Morgan Chase to jail because my friend took 80 bucks out of there and went and bought blow with it in Las Vegas. Seems like they should be liable.

Seems like they're facilitating crime, right? That's just exactly the same kind of point. When I looked at this case,

Angela McArdle: it is the same. Ian had Bitcoin ATMs that the Feds alleged were not properly licensed. People committed financial scams by using them. But Ian had better, it's called Know your Customer. He had better know your customer policies than most financial institutions do.

He was [00:17:00] notorious for like some, you know, little old lady calls up and is like, do you have the Bitcoin ATM? I wanna use it? And he says, well, what are you using it for? I'm giving money to my husband. Well, who's your husband, by the way? Do you know your husband? Have you met your husband? That's outrageous.

You know? And he's like, Hmm, I don't know. That sounds suspicious. You sound a little too shocked. Looks her up online, calls her kids, finds her adult kid. Do you know your mom's trying to cash out $25,000 into Bitcoin? The kids are like, what? Scam? Shut down. You know, he was very on top of it, but you can't catch every single one because people are.

They're hiding the fact that they're being scammed because that's what they're told to do. And it's not like it only happens with Bitcoin, like very tragic, but elderly people fall victim to scams all the time.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes, we've done shows about this as well. Romance scams and things like, things like that. So if that is what they're saying he's facilitated, then we need to put uh, the people who run, what is it called?

Steam, apple and everybody else. 'cause [00:18:00] those are the gift cards that the scammers ask you to buy. Right? They ask you to buy Apple iTunes gift cards. That's crazy. Spotify funds, and I wanna say twi, Twitch and Stream and Xbox cards. Those are the same. This essentially just replace Bitcoin with that. Those are at Target.

You can't get Bitcoin at Target. So it's like, wait a minute, what is more accessible and what facilitates more crime? I guarantee you the romance scams that are using non cryptocurrency, those gift card things, I guarantee you those dwarf Bitcoin crime. Oh, because try, try and get, try and get my 80-year-old dad to buy Bitcoin.

I'll see you in three years when he finally follows your instructions.

Angela McArdle: I know. It's, it's, I've been trying to help my dad and we're just, we're go, we're in an endless loop of two-factor authentication drama.

Jordan Harbinger: Um, couldn't pull money out of that. Yeah, it texted me, but it was, it said 10 minutes and I went and ate a sandwich.

Don't eat a sandwich. Just sit there until the text comes in. Alright. I got the text. Okay. What does it say? It says, what do you want for dinner? No, dad, the other text. I don't see another text. I mean, you can do this, I can do this for it for hours'. You

Angela McArdle: couldn't pull the money out if you tried. Um, [00:19:00] it's right.

Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Scam proof. It's

Angela McArdle: crazy. You know, like if somebody calls you and they're like, this is the IRS I'm going to be asking you to pay in Bitcoin. That's not the IRS, bro. Um, so, you know, there was,

Jordan Harbinger: everyone knows the IRS only accepts iTunes gift cards, Angela. Right,

Angela McArdle: right. So, so those were, those were some of the.

Things that Ian got dinged for, and, and that's why they locked him up. And, and quite frankly, he was very outspoken. He was also an early adopter radio show host when talk radio was still a big thing and he had a huge audience at some point. So, you know, he was, he really had a target on his back. The feds did not like his, his outspoken libertarian activism.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's scary. What's, what's possibly, again, people can wrap their minds around this, Hey, these things were being misused. Maybe your policies are outta place. Where it gets worse are putting developers behind bars as well. Uh, there was something called Tornado Cash, I believe it was, which is like basically a privacy tool that was open source built on Ethereum, which [00:20:00] is for other people who, dunno, another cryptocurrency that's got a large market share similar to Bitcoin.

Uh, to keep it simple. They were basically arrested and charged for what seems like writing code, which is kind of terrifying

Angela McArdle: that that is exactly what, so I'm, I'm in touch with most of these guys. Uh, Roman storms, he's not had a sentencing yet. He was found guilty and there's, there's like a, a hiccup with a, with a case and they're gonna be revisiting, sort of tying up loose ends in December.

Um, but he's, he's a software developer. He is, uh, a very nice person. A nerd who wrote code and he is facing prison time over it. The Samurai wallet developers, they just had their sentencing yesterday and I've been in touch with them and you know, they were advised to take a plea deal because of how awful the courts are.

Even though, by the way, all of this falls under the purview of something called the Blanch memo, where the Assistant Attorney General under President Trump said, we will end Biden's operation choke point. We will not go after [00:21:00] cryptocurrency innovators. We'll end a policy that is called regulation via Prosecution.

If you can wrap your head around that, which means is there a gray area? Well, we should throw them in jail and that'll help us resolve the gray area. So, you know, the president has been, has, he's made himself really clear that we don't wanna lock up software developers. We want there to, we wanna keep innovation in the United States.

But you've got like this rogue southern district of New York that's just full of these, like, they're like biden's flying monkeys. They're like, uh, blue flying monkeys. And they, and they hate us. And, and they just wanna lock us all up. So,

Jordan Harbinger: I mean, look, at the end of the day, I, I'm a attorney I used to really like, and still occasionally do really like stuff that comes out of the southern district of New York.

They, they actually were like, we're doing the right thing. We're trying to do the right thing. Some of it though, is obviously unhinged because, for example, this regulation by prosecution. To briefly explain what this means is essentially, hey, there's no law against it, and let's say Jordan did it. [00:22:00] There's no law against it.

Jordan went out and did it. Shoot. Well, other people are gonna do that then, and we don't want them to, well, you should make a law against that. Uh, that sounds like a lot of work. What we'll do is we'll ruin Jordan's entire life in such a large and public way that no one else will ever have the guts or the stupidity to do anything similar again.

And then we don't have to make a law against it because people will go, Hey, what, why hasn't anyone done this? Oh my God, he's in prison for 300 years. I'm not touching this. That's what they're trying to do with that. And that is not how you should legislate. Anywhere in the free world,

Angela McArdle: it's dystopian, it's Soviet, you know, and it's, you know, not only are we just ruining people's lives, but it sends a strong message.

Do not innovate, don't create anything new. If you're in the United States, every innovation is gonna have to be done outside of our country, which is terrible. You know, there's all, there's another man in in prison right now whose name is also Roman, Roman Sterling off, who's accused of creating Bitcoin fog, another mixing privacy tool.[00:23:00]

He didn't even create it though, you know, and that's just like, it's a mix of, it's a, it's a mix of regulation via prosecution and just incompetence on the, on the prosecution side

Jordan Harbinger: here. Here's a question for you that, that may be better for a First Amendment attorney, but. How is this not actually protected?

It is

Angela McArdle: protected speech under the

Jordan Harbinger: First Amendment. It's, it's okay because that's, and that's an argument that they've made. Law school was a long time ago, but this is protected speech.

Angela McArdle: Yeah. I'm a, I'm a paralegal. You know, my background is more real estate law and some constitutional law where those, where those intersect.

But absolutely this is protected speech. It's because it's code. They're writing code writing, you know, like they are just literally writing code. I don't understand how it, and they're like, well, you know, but someone in North Korea we heard allegedly used your code to do something bad. And that's how far out on a limb they take these arguments and that's how bad Southern District of New York is right now.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's, that's pretty scary. I mean, think about you design, say you design. [00:24:00] A potato cannon, like a really cool one, like those YouTubers use, and it goes really far and someone goes, oh my God, I wanna make one of those. That's so cool. And you go, okay, well the plans are online, they're 20 bucks on the website.

Or actually maybe they're free. So you buy those and you make a potato cannon. You launch a potato and everyone has fun. And then another person goes and launches a grenade with it at a bunch of people, and then they go. You showed him how to make a mortar rocket launcher, and he used it for something illegal and people died and you go, but I made plans for a potato cannon.

And they go, we don't care. He misused it. So that's your fault. That is actual insanity.

Angela McArdle: And that, and that is basically how it works. That is how it works. It's like a kafkaesque, uh, nightmare. Court is not designed. You're not innocent until proven guilty. You're guilty. And then they backwards engineer it for the outcome that they've already decided.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. To create a more maybe understandable [00:25:00] example. You can drive a car and you can get to work, or you can buy a car and you can drive it into a crowd of people. Do we hold the auto manufacturer reliable for when people misuse vehicles? Ab obviously not.

Angela McArdle: No. But they don't want lots of unregulated Bitcoin ATMs out there, you know, so we'll throw Ian in prison.

Heaven forbid they go after the people who actually did the scamming and robbed the little old ladies. Not a single one. Not a single one. And people came and testified on his behalf saying, by the way, he made sure that my, he prevented my mother from being scammed. You know, he had better policies. That's the same with Roman Sterling off, who's in prison for Bitcoin fog.

They wanna take down Bitcoin fog, so they find someone who made one transaction with it, because he's just, when you're in this space and you're interested in innovation and technology, you will try all kinds of new things. So he uses Bitcoin fog. And they'd say, you know, we wanna take someone down for Bitcoin fog.

Let's say that he's the architect of it, and let's [00:26:00] throw him in prison.

Jordan Harbinger: Unbelievable. Yeah. With

Angela McArdle: no evidence, no evidence. It's, um, but, but you understand like when you go to trial. There's your story and then there's the other side's story, and what they'll do is they'll just carve your evidence and your story right out, and you just have to proceed with whatever narrative they give you and their facts, and try to fight your way through it.

It's very, very difficult.

Jordan Harbinger: Do you think there are more Bitcoin pardons coming from the Trump administration? Yeah,

Angela McArdle: absolutely. Absolutely. I've been in with the administration and I know that things are not proceeding at the speed that they want. You know, CZ just received a pardon, which I think is, is just a really good sign.

Jordan Harbinger: He's the, the founder, CEO of Binance. Which is a, essentially a bit Bitcoin bank for the layman, it's a cryptocurrency bank. You can, it's called an exchange. You can buy cryptocurrencies, trade them on this platform. And he was, why did he go to prison? Tax evasion? Is that what we're going with again?

Angela McArdle: I think [00:27:00] so.

I think there was that and one other thing, you know, he's, he was out when he received his, pardon? I've been in touch with the administration. I, I just set up a meeting between, uh, one of the big Bitcoin guys and the, and the president, and I heard it went well. So I think they're gearing up for midterms. I think that they know they need to do outreach to this community.

Jordan Harbinger: How do we sort of make sure that financial privacy remains a protected expression of speech? That's the really scaring me because, I mean, I want privacy, right? I think a lot of Americans realize it's more important today than ever, and this is going in the opposite direction.

Angela McArdle: Well, uh, Bitcoiners don't like this, um, answer, but it's, I think it's the correct answer is you have to become politically active.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh yeah, you're right. Bitcoiners are allergic to this. Yeah,

Angela McArdle: well there's all different ways to do it and from my perspective, it's a defensive posture. You know, you can, you can remove yourself as much as you want. You can go off in the woods, you can go off grid, you can go totally on Bitcoin and there's still chance you're gonna get Ruby ridged to be totally [00:28:00] blunt.

And so you have to be somewhat politically active. You know, my recommendation is that Bitcoiners kind of form an alliance with Maha people. Flood into the libertarian party. Don't do a bunch of libertarian party activism. You don't need to do that, right? Pop up twice a year with demands for the midterms.

Pop up with demands for the presidential candidate. Threaten to spoil their elections unless they do X, Y, Z. If they do it great and then you disappear and don't spoil their elections. I think that's a really, I mean it worked quite frankly, you know, I made a deal with President Trump that if, if he would free Ross Ulbrich, we would all vote for him.

And we did. And he stuck to his word and he freedom. So I'd like to continue to repeat that. You know, once a year, I don't know, even every other year. You know, beyond that, there's, there's really good organizations like Bitcoin Policy Institute that, you know, they do a lot of lobbying work. When people tell me they're running for Congress, I'm just like, oh, okay.

You know, I don't think the work gets done there. [00:29:00] I think it takes relational politics done at a very high level. With the president, with his, you know, his immediate staff with, with cabinet members. That's where I have made gains. That's where Kennedy's made gains, and I think that's where the Bitcoin community needs to put their political

Jordan Harbinger: awareness.

So a lot of people, I, I know we're running outta time, but a lot of people might say, well, Trump is only ending the prosecution of these crypto guys because he's got his own cryptocurrency. And so that it's, it's entirely self-serving.

Angela McArdle: I don't care. Whatever. I don't care what his motivation is. I care about results.

He responds when we reach out. He is aware. We are not at the top of the food chain right now. You have foreign policy things, you have a a lot going on. Um, but we are on the list and that's what matters. But we just have to by hook or crook, we just have to keep reaching out and do the work and don't care about the motives, and don't care about what his kids are doing or X, Y, and Z.

Like [00:30:00] you take care of you and your community and don't worry about someone's motives as long as the outcome is good.

Jordan Harbinger: I think some people might disagree with that, but I understand where you're coming from.

Angela McArdle: I know they do, you know, but that's why they're not doing the politics, and I am,

Jordan Harbinger: I suppose that's true.

Angela McCardle, thank you very much. Interesting conversation. Thank.