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It's more than just a ticket. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Josh Rascheitz, and today we're going to talk about money.

Rather apropos for a personal finance podcast, but on a deeper level than what we usually talk. We're going to talk about what money means, your right to money, and what happens if money doesn't mean anything. This week, my friend Gabriel Custodiat and I are launching a brand new course.

You can buy it now at BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com. But I want to read to you our intro for the course because we're going to be talking extensively about these topics. And today, we're going to be talking about your right to transact, your right to access money. Here's what we wrote as the teaser to get you to come and buy the course.

Imagine this. Your bank accounts are frozen. You must flee the country with only what you carry. Gold is suspicious and cash has limits. You cross the world and find a public computer, download a single program, and type from memory a private key. You now have access to $2 million worth of Bitcoin, unattached to your identity, tucked away for just this scenario, and the knowledge to buy, trade, and convert it into any local currency in the world.

Cryptocurrencies are the ultimate exit strategy for inflation, social collapse, and other disasters, but only if you acquire and use them correctly, which 99% of people fail to do. In this two-part course, privacy consultant Gabriel Custodiat explains step-by-step multiple ways to legally buy Bitcoin with no attachment to personal information.

He then explains how to use it, how to protect it, and how to convert to other crypto for speculation or added privacy. The course includes everything you need to understand this process from A to Z, no prior knowledge required. As authorities crack down on cryptocurrencies, it is critical to have up-to-date, tested methods for private Bitcoin.

There is much confusion about this process. The aim of this course is to give you all of the information you need with minimal diversion. No confusing tech vocabulary, no moralizing, no hacker-level computer skills, only the focused steps to teach you how to make the most radical personal finance decision of your life.

That is our new course. If you'd like details on it, go to BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com. But we're living in quite interesting times, where I feel it would be appropriate to talk about why would a guy like me or a guy like Gabriel even put out the information? Because after all, why should people need something, some way to transact?

Why should people need some way to exchange value? In a little bit, we're going to get to an article that was published today in the Wall Street Journal called "If Russian Currency Reserves Aren't Really Money, The World Is In For A Shock." And it is a shocking article, but I want to begin with an argument about why you and I fundamentally have the right and freedom to transact with one another, regardless of what "they" might say.

There's a thread that came to the internet a few weeks ago, written by @punk6529 on Twitter. Here is his Twitter thread. This was written when the Canadian government a few weeks ago was systematically freezing people's bank accounts with no judicial process, no oversight, not even involving law enforcement, but simply giving carte blanche permission to financial institutions to freeze the bank accounts and funds of anybody that that financial institution suspected of being involved with the Freedom Convoy.

And in that context, 6529 wrote this on Twitter. And we're going to go through this, because I believe this is an important thing for you to think about with regard to money. "There are no other constitutional rights in substance without freedom to transact." I've been meaning to write this for six months, but the Canadian response to the Trucker protests is illustrating this so vividly that today is the day.

I assume we are in agreement that constitutional democracies are a good form of government, or at least a better form of government than the other methods we have found to date. This means that I am taking for granted the following assumptions. People have fundamental rights to speech, assembly, religion, and so on.

People are innocent until proven guilty. The state cannot punish people without due process, which generally means that, in a court of law, the state has to prove you have broken some specific law. If you disagree with the principles above, I guess that's fine, but weird, but probably you can safely exit this thread now, because it is unlikely that we are going to agree on anything else.

People who know me in real life know that I have been harassing them for years that, without the freedom to transact, you have no other constitutional rights. And mostly they look at me strangely and I look at them strangely because it seems obvious to me. Freedom of speech might require such activities like a website, a pamphlet, an advertisement, paying a graphic designer, traveling to a different location, all of which cost money.

Freedom of assembly might require such activities like taking a train to Washington DC, booking a hotel room, hiring a taxi, buying a hot dog with mustard while you assemble, all of which cost money. Freedom of religion might require such activities like renting a space for a facility, paying the salaries of religious officials, buying food and consumables, all of which cost money.

I can go on but I think the point is clear, the exercise of rights costs money. Historically, the risk of financial censorship has been much lower because for the literally whole of human history, until approximately 2001, it was mostly uncontroversial that people could have decentralized, non-custodial mediums of exchange.

For hundreds of thousands of years, humans used commodity money, from cowry shells to gold. And then in the last few hundred years, we have had various forms of cash-based instruments as well. All of these are non-custodial, decentralized, and not KYC'd. KYC of course is know your customer, which requires individuals interacting with banks or other financial institutions to turn over all of their private information so that their identity be verified and to make sure that they're not associated with any activities that are forbidden by the government that is controlling the KYC institutions.

Or they're not on some bad list of some kind, some naughty list. Over the last 20 years, the institutional environment has shifted to a posture that non-custodial money is default suspicious. Central banks who want the death of cash, Patriot Act and derivatives thereof, geopolitical pressure points via the banking system (pay attention to that one because we're going to be coming to some genuinely unprecedented moves in a moment).

But 6529, the goal is preventing money laundering, stopping terrorism, and reducing tax evasion. I agree that these are a) the stated goals and b) an actual subset of the actual goals. I am also against money laundering, terrorism, and tax evasion. The problem however is that there is both short-term and long-term goal creep.

In the United States and EU, banks and payment processors have been pressured to cut off accounts to gun shops, adult businesses, crypto businesses, and other perfectly legal businesses. I consider this to be undemocratic. If a country would like to make pornography or guns or cryptocurrency illegal, it has every right to pass laws to do so, and then the citizens can re-elect or de-elect the politicians who voted for it and/or challenge it in court.

What happens instead is hidden deep bureaucracy type BS where the banks point to their regulators and say "well they told us to close high-risk accounts" and the regulators point to the banks and say "we never said that, just be careful". And the net effect is that you don't have a bank account anymore and there is no recourse, no due process, not even an actual law that says you should not have an account.

It is deep bureaucracy running a parallel, opaque, unwritten legal system. Deeply undemocratic. Even in the current system, being unbanked and having to rely on cash is more or less ejecting you from the modern economy. Paying bills, getting a paycheck, paying vendors, investing in a 401k, buying crypto even, all require access to traditional payment rails.

But guess what? It's getting worse. Many central banks have stated goals for their CBDCs to eliminate cash, allow global transaction censorship, apply deeply negative interest rates. A system of this kind would be the most powerful system of centralized control the world has ever known. Even Stalin, Hitler, Mao did not have the ability to apply global transaction censorship across their empires at the touch of a button.

What will happen is some aspiring dictator will censor their opponents' spending during an election period and they won't be able to buy a tomato, let alone run a campaign. With such power and no due process, it's a certainty. Power hungry people tend to run for office. Notice that the third goal is mission creep.

Nobody started this process in 2001 saying the goal is to be able to apply negative interest rates to your savings. And yet here we are. Below a certain negative rate, people will withdraw their money. So let's prevent them. The way this process has been working is that we are the frog and we are being boiled slowly.

Every year, the reporting requirements get a little broader, the penalties steeper, the restrictions on cash withdrawals more severe. And most of all, the presumption of innocence is turning into a presumption of guilt. Sir, why do you want to withdraw $5,000 in cash? If you've got nothing to hide, why do you need non-custodial instruments?

Non-custodial is dangerous. I remind you that, literally, for the whole of human history, non-custodial was the main form of the mediums of exchange. It is a very recent concept that this is a bad thing. It is effectively a quiet power grab by the state. This is why one of the reasons that crypto has been generally disliked by central banks in particular.

Here they are closing in on the end of cash and now a new form of digital cash emerges. And in their view, they need to reel that in too for the rest to work. So back to constitutional rights. I would generally prefer the term myself. I'm going to read 6259's post the way that he or she has written it.

But I would generally prefer human rights. I don't think much of constitutional rights. I think a lot of human rights guaranteed by a constitution. A constitution being something that limits the government's ability to remove your rights. The rights exist whether they are constitutionally protected or not. But when a people gives in a constitutional democratic society, when a people gives a government a charter and they give a government a monopoly on the use of force, they do so with a clear document stating the domain in which that government can act and restricting that government's permissions.

And that's how I see constitutional rights. So you can think of them as constitutional rights if you like. You can think of them as human rights. I believe they are human rights. So back to constitutional rights. One, you have constitutional rights. Two, you need money to exercise them. Three, the state acquires the power to cut off funding.

What might happen next? I know what happens. All of 6529's friends think he's overreacting. At which I present to you the liberal prime minister of G7 country known for its extreme good nature and general easygoingness. Herein we have a picture of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Prime Minister Trudeau has a political problem.

The specific political problem is some truck drivers have blocked part of Canadian cities and highways to protest his COVID-19 policies. This is A, annoying him, B, annoying his voters, and C, probably bad for the economy. I don't actually have a view on the substance of the trucker protests and if Canada's COVID policies are good, bad, or neutral.

I would further guess that the truckers are probably violating a variety of Canadian laws relating to how they can protest. What would be a normal constitutional democracy political response to a problem like this is either A, let it play out if you think it is in good faith, or B, encourage the local authorities to arrest them and try them in a court if you think it is not.

Either is fine. The right to assembly in Canada probably does not allow you to block the highway for days for everyone else. I assume Canada still has police and courts so they could presumably arrest the highway blockers and take them to court. When you go to court in a democracy the following typically applies.

You are innocent until proven guilty. The state has to be specific about which law you have violated. The state has to prove it, usually beyond a reasonable doubt. I understand that at times this is annoying for the state. You have to collect evidence. The defendants will get their own lawyers.

There is time and expense involved and sometimes you might not win. This is the price of a free country. But this is not what is happening today in Canada. The state has invoked its Emergencies Act, which is defined below. It seems a bit ambiguous to imagine that the protests exceed the capacity of a province to deal with it or threaten the sovereignty of Canada but, let me read the Emergencies Act language.

What constitutes a national emergency? The Act defines a national emergency as "an urgent and critical situation of a temporary nature that "seriously endangers the lives, health, or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it" or "seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity of Canada." The emergency also "cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada." The Act outlines four different types of national emergencies, a war emergency, an international emergency, a public welfare emergency, and a public order emergency.

In this case, the government is invoking a public order emergency. I'm even willing to stretch and say, "OK, maybe it was correct to invoke the Act and let's see what he plans to do with it." What was done with the Act made my jaw drop, however. It is my "oh, this might happen in the future" scenario, but today.

Canada has asked every single financial system provider, from banks to credit card companies to investment firms to crowdfunding platforms to crypto companies to insurance companies to freeze the accounts of anyone directly or indirectly supporting the protests. Given the powers of the Emergency Act, there is no due process on these actions and no civil liability for this freezing.

In the short term, the goal is to shut down the protests by nuking the protesters' financial infrastructure. I have to say, this is not the model of criminal justice I expect to see in a constitutional democracy. You can't just go around freezing people's savings instead of, I don't know, arresting them and charging them with a crime.

Even worse, the indirect supporters. The indirect supporters have been very fuzzily defined in the press releases. It might include the crowdfunders, but it might include a family member who sends money to someone protesting in order for them to buy a meal. They are being treated as terrorist financiers. But 6529, these guys are terrorists.

They are trying to overthrow the government. I don't know. I am not so sure about this. I do not live in Canada, but Canada has a pretty advanced security infrastructure. I do not think it is at any real risk of being taken over. But what is a real risk is that constitutional rights will be curtailed, not through laws or court cases, but through weaponization of the financial system.

Today, you are on Trudeau's side and dislike the truckers. But it is not always this way. Would you feel the same if Donald Trump were freezing all the financial infrastructure of BLM and all their indirect supporters? It is a terrible precedent to set. In politics, you must always, always, always invert.

The way to judge an idea is not if your team in power should do it. The way to judge the idea is if you think your worst political enemy should have this power and if you feel comfortable that the team you hate won't abuse it. It is a mistake to roll out the whole anti-terrorism infrastructure for political protesters and their indirect supporters.

The next time around, the other team will use it against you, and this begets a cycle of political violence that ends badly. I have just been discussing the immediate term effects. The long-term effects will be worse. I suspect, without explicit action, many of the people unbanked now will not be re-banked because financial institutions won't want the headache of doing so.

So, this is not just a short-term thing, but an uncertain duration ejection from the financial system. No banking, no credit cards, no investments, no insurance (which for truckers means no job) this type of punishment requires due process. This can get so, so, so much worse though. If we end up with a fully custodial system, no cash, no non-custodial crypto, full control digital currency, then these types of actions can happen at the push of a button, instantly, across large groups of people.

"Oh 6529, we would never abuse this power!" Right, of course not. And yet here we are with Canada, close to my least likely test case for weaponization of the financial system against domestic dissent. Every day, every month, every year, I am here to say the same thing. The internet, computers, big data, machine learning allow us to centralize information flows in a way that we could never have had before.

It is exciting, but it is also dangerous. It is critically important that we don't sleepwalk into an economic, digital, and metaverse architecture that is completely centralized. Whether it is on the corporate or state systems, it will eventually end up under state control because states control the exercise of power.

Joshua Sheets would add, "Violence." But what about criminals 6529? Do you think I do not worry about criminals? I worry about criminals more than you do. Unlike you, I think criminals are smart and can read and plan. Wait, what do you mean? If you centralize the greatest honeypot of power and money in history in the hands of a handful of companies in the state, the really smart criminals won't be running around robbing banks.

They will aim for corporate or political leadership. And then they can win everything. Criminals working in their private capacity have done a lot of damage and we should try to stop them. But they are minor players relative to the arch-criminals who grabbed power, launched world wars, destroyed countries, economies, cultural heritage, and killed tens of millions.

TLDR, financial systems underpin everything, including our constitutional rights. Weaponizing the financial system to resolve domestic dissent or even criminal justice issues is a terrible precedent to set. We must preserve non-custodial wallets at all costs. Finally, I would like to thank the Government of Canada for providing a sneak preview of what I have been worried about.

A lot of you will still think I'm a bit of a conspiracy theorist. I'm not. But fewer of you than a week ago will think that. I would like to end by wishing our Canadian friends good luck in resolving this issue. I do not think this is the end of democracy in Canada or anything dramatic like that.

I think things will eventually resolve, but this is not the way to do it. Bad precedents should not be normalized. In any case, if this is your first time here, we love the open metaverse and believe in interoperable, decentralized internet architecture. See more here. So if you're interested, you can go to Twitter and you can follow @punk6529 if you appreciated his comments on that particular issue.

I'm going to try to be thoughtful in this episode about how much I add because I don't want to muddy the water by adding excess commentary. I think 6529 did a great job of laying out the points. The point is that you, as a human being, have fundamental human rights.

These are your rights regardless of your citizenship. These are your rights regardless of where you live. These are your rights regardless of whether you are Ukrainian or Russian or Canadian or American. These are your rights. Now you can be deprived of your rights with due process when you commit a moral crime.

In that case, you can be deprived of your rights. But absent such a trial, you must not be deprived of your rights. That's why the Canadian situation was so shocking, so absolutely shocking for the precedent that it sets. Your ability to exercise your human rights is fundamentally tied in to your ability to transact.

In order for you to transact, you need to have some form of money, some ability to transact. Yet the direction, as outlined by 6529, is very much in the direction of control. This is centralized control and custodial control. This is fundamentally new in human history. This is fundamentally new and as such, it requires tremendous analysis and tremendous safeguards to make sure that it's not abused.

So this is why I personally, I've talked for some time now, while I missed the Bitcoin train earlier in regards to making a fortune with a run up in the price of Bitcoin, I am ideologically very committed to seeing Bitcoin and/or other expressions of abilities of people to exchange value in decentralized ways.

I'm very ideologically committed to wanting these things to succeed because they are a very important component. That's one of the reasons why I am doing this new class, BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com, because you need to have the ability to stockpile your own assets, to protect your own things. You can do this today with physical currency, but with all the currency controls, that's hard to do.

Also with inflation, that's hard to do. You can do this with physical assets, such as precious metals. Those work, but they have certain disadvantages. It's hard to bring those back into the financial system in an effective way, especially in an increasing digital world. This is why it's so important that we need some form of decentralized digital currency or currencies, and we need to be able to transact with one another with privacy.

Now, here's where things are passing quickly, quickly, quickly. There's a quote by Vladimir Lenin. He says, "There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen." Friends, we are living in some of those weeks where decades happen. What I just read to you was published on February 14, just over two weeks ago.

But now, all of that has been pushed to the rear by a brand new crisis, a genuine legitimate crisis, with the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian government. Now here at Radical Personal Finance, I want to stay as close to exclusively focused on the financial aspects of this, the things that might affect your life and my life.

There is a lot to cover. In days to come, I will try to cover the collapse of the Russian stock market, the closure of the Russian stock market. I will cover the situation of the Ukrainians fleeing Ukraine, Russians fleeing Russia, the devastation of property, the horrible loss of life, etc.

But today, this morning, I saw this article in the Wall Street Journal, and I thought, "We have to talk about this." The headline is this, "If Russian currency reserves aren't really money, the world is in for a shock." We'll come back to that in a moment. First thing you need to know, though, is that some of the sanctions that have been passed on Russia by so many other governments around the world are fundamentally new in many ways.

So let me go back about four or five days to when the sanctions were announced. This is a Wall Street Journal article headline, "Sanctions on Russia's Central Bank Deal Direct Blow to Country's Financial Strength." "Targeting the reserves held by Russia's central bank is potentially the most powerful weapon in the West's financial arsenal and takes aim at the heart of Russia's financial system.

It is a move with few precedents that amplifies other Western sanctions but also carries risks. The United States, Europe, and Canada pledged Saturday to prevent the Bank of Russia from deploying its $630 billion stockpile of international reserve, quote, "in ways that undermine the impact of our sanctions," they said in a joint statement Saturday.

The move directly targets the war chest that President Vladimir Putin has built up in recent years to help insulate Russia's economy from outside pressures. "The move could be a hammer blow to Russia's financial system, limiting the government's ability to defend the ruble in currency markets, to make overseas purchases, and to backstop banks that have been hurt by international sanctions," economists and central bank officials said.

"Russia spent years building up its reserves, converting revenue its oil and gas companies generate through sales abroad, into a massive mountain of securities, bank deposits, and gold. Foreign reserves are, by their nature, held abroad, often in government bonds of other nations, and at accounts with commercial banks and other nations' central banks.

The moves announced Saturday would affect close to 40 percent of Russia's reserves that were held in North America and Europe as of last June, according to a recent report by Russia's central bank." Now for the rest of the article you can of course pull up wallstreetjournal.com and find "Sanctions on Russia's Central Bank Deal Direct Blow to Country's Financial Strength." I don't know, of course, none of us do, I don't know what was in President Putin's mind and what was not, but it would seem to me that this, I would guess that this blindsided him.

I don't think he planned for his country's foreign reserves to be frozen. The reason I want to point this out to you is that it's a lesson of exactly what we just talked about at a small scale at a larger scale. We talked about Canada freezing truckers' credit cards and their wives' credit cards and bank accounts and such.

And now here we're talking about some of the most powerful, the most powerful country in the world, the United States, together with many European countries and Canada, freezing the assets of another sovereign government. Now I pray that this move has the desired effect to bring peace, to stop violence, war, etc.

But this is fundamentally as here we go. Here's the quote, I was about to say it's a nuclear bomb in finance and here it's quote, "symbolically speaking, it's a nuclear bomb in the world of global finance," said Soni Kapoor, a finance professor and CEO of the Nordic Institute for Finance, Technology and Sustainability, an Oslo-based think tank.

This is an absolute nuclear bomb in international finance. Which brings me to today's article. Headline "If Russian Currency Reserves Aren't Really Money, The World Is In For A Shock." Sanctions have shown that currency reserves accumulated by central banks can be taken away. With China taking note, this may reshape geopolitics, economic management, and even the international role of the US dollar.

What is money is a question that economists have pondered for centuries, but the blocking of Russia's central bank reserves has revived its relevance for the world's biggest nations, particularly China. In a world in which accumulating foreign assets is seen as risky, military and economic blocks are set to drift farther apart.

After Moscow attacked Ukraine last week, the US and its allies shut off the Russian central bank's access to most of its $630 billion of foreign reserves. Weaponizing the monetary system against a group of 20 countries will have lasting repercussions. The 1997 Asian financial crisis scared developing countries into accumulating more funds to shield their currencies from crashes, pushing official reserves from less than $2 trillion to a record $14.9 trillion in 2021, according to the International Monetary Fund.

While central banks have lately sought to "buy" and "repatriate" gold, it only makes up 13% of their assets. Foreign currencies are 78%. The rest is positions that the IMF and Special Drawing Rights (SDR) and IMF created claim on hard currencies. Many economists have long equated this money to "savings in a piggy bank," which in turn correspond to investments made abroad in the real economy.

Recent events highlight the error in this thinking. Barring gold, these assets are someone else's liability. Last year, the IMF suspended Taliban-controlled Afghanistan's access to funds and SDR. Sanctions on Iran have confirmed that holding reserves offshore doesn't stop the US Treasury from taking action. As New England law professor Christine Abely points out, the 2017 settlement with Singapore's CSE TransTel shows that the "mere use" of the dollar abroad can violate sanctions on the premise that some payment clearing ultimately happens on US dollars.

To be sure, the West has frozen Russia's stock of foreign exchange, but hasn't blocked the inflow of new dollars and euros. The country's current account surplus is estimated at $20 billion a month due to exports of oil and gas, which the US and the European Union want to keep buying.

While these balances go to the private sector, officials have mobilized them. Stopping major banks like Sberbank from using dollars, and excluding others from the swift messaging system, still plunges the economy into chaos, especially if foreign businesses are afraid to buy Russian energy, despite the sector's explicit exclusion from sanctions.

But hard currency will probably keep gushing in through energy-focused lenders like Gazprom Bank, and can theoretically be used to pay for imports and buy the ruble. Yet the entire artifice of "money" as a universal store of value risks being eroded by the banning of key exports to Russia, and boycotts of the kind corporations like Apple and Nike announced this week.

If currency balances were to become worthless computer entries, and didn't guarantee buying essential stuff, Moscow would be rational to stop accumulating them and stockpile physical wealth in oil barrels, rather than sell them to the West. At the very least, more of Russia's money will likely shift into gold and Chinese assets.

Indeed, the case levied against China's attempts to internationalize the renminbi has been that, unlike the dollar, access to it is always at risk of being revoked by political considerations. It is now apparent that, to a point, this is true of all currencies. The risk to "king dollars" status is still limited due to most nations' alignment with the West and Beijing's capital controls.

But financial and economic linkages between China and sanctioned countries that are only allowed to accumulate reserves and, crucially, spend them, there will necessarily strengthen. Even nations that aren't sanctioned may want to diversify their geopolitical risk. It seems set to further the "de-globalization" trend and entrench two separate spheres of technological, monetary, and military power.

China itself owns $3.3 trillion in currency reserves. Unlike Russia, it cannot usefully hold them in renminbi, a currency it prints. Stockpiling commodities is an alternative. The conundrum creates another incentive for Beijing to reduce its trade surplus by reorienting its economy toward domestic consumption, though it has proven challenging. What can investors do?

For once, the old trope may not be ill-advised. Buy gold. Many of the world's central banks will surely be doing it. Here you have insight into the largest of systems. I wanted to juxtapose these two scenarios because at its core, both are dealing with the same fundamental problem—the ability of an outside actor to unilaterally remove access to your money.

In Canada, it's the large and powerful nation-state expressing its ability to unilaterally remove access to those political dissidents who are causing it an annoyance and embarrassment. The big government against the little people. Here in the story of Russia, you have a massive plurality of the world's governments, especially the large and powerful ones, coming against Russia and saying, "You're not allowed to invade Ukraine, and we're going to take your stuff." It's shocking to see the stories that are coming out.

I have been trying desperately to figure out how the system of the Russian oligarchs works, and why governments are seemingly seizing the yachts of the Russian oligarchs and seizing their other property. I've been trying to figure out if there's been some kind of rule of law and some kind of adjudication of personal guilt.

I think that in most cases, there probably is a lot of guilt. My understanding of the collapse of the Soviet Union led to just a lawless situation in which the strongest came in, both from the West and also within Russia, and took over and created fortunes for themselves. But I've not seen where there's actually been any kind of trial, and yet you're seeing news articles come out about yachts being seized around the world, property being seized, etc.

I haven't been able to figure that out yet, as far as has there been any proper due process of law or not. So I don't know that yet. But the point is, at either end, you certainly see these nations coming together and saying, "We are going to freeze billions and billions and billions of dollars of the Russian government." And again, I'm hoping that it has the desired effect to restrain Putin in his bellicose ways and cause him to not be able to perpetuate loss of life, etc.

But I'm concerned about the precedent, because I don't particularly consider that any nation should have that power. And we live in a world right now where the United States is the world's sole superpower, able to express and to impose its will upon clearly any nation on the earth. And now it's power in the financial system as well.

And the United States is not a righteous nation in any way. It is not an upright nation that knows how to follow rule of law. It makes it up as it goes along with the "might make right" philosophy. But at this point in time, being so powerful, it doesn't need to do things that needlessly harm others by going and invading.

It's built its empire, and so now it can proceed forward with that empire. So it's deeply concerning as a point. Now, what do you do about it? As I said, number one, try to keep your nose clean. Do your best to follow the laws, do your best to not run afoul of anything, do your best not to protest, not to do those things, etc.

So keep your nose clean and do your best not to anger powerful people, because they have powerful people, powerful governments especially, have the ability to have vast power. In addition, it makes you see why there are certain attributes of financial assets that are powerful. In the Wall Street Journal article, what did you see here?

You saw how, what are the solutions, right? Well, Russia could stockpile barrels of oil. It's a commodity. Gold is a commodity. Why do central banks have it? Because it's a store of value, but it's one of the few stores of value that's not somebody else's liability, as the article itself talked about.

You can do the same thing. You can store physical assets, and that works. Physical assets are not passed. Any Canadian trucker that had $10,000 Canadian physical currency, unless they were physically arrested and the money seized upon their arrest, they weren't barred from transacting. They could go out and they could spend their currency.

What was frozen was digital money. Anything that's digits on a screen. So possession here is very, very important. Currency still works. It doesn't work for necessarily a government. It's on a sanction list or a criminal who's on a most wanted list. It's very hard in those cases, but currency still works.

Problem is, there's war on cash, global war on cash. So the ability or the right to accept currency is diminished. Other commodities have their value as well. So there's the reason why you have the classics of gold, gold and silver coins. Other commodities may work. It's just depending on the other commodity, you wind up with bulkiness of some commodities.

You wind up with obsolescence of other commodities. And as you think about commodity planning, as I've covered previously, most commodities, meaning physical things, things that people desire, they have problems that gold and silver or precious metals generally don't have. So you could store your wealth in apples, bushels of apples, but it takes an awful lot of space to store your wealth and the product itself is perishable.

You could store your wealth in container loads of sneakers, but it's bulky and the product itself will eventually deteriorate. The glue will deteriorate. Everything will break down even if it's not exposed to anything and it runs the risk of becoming obsolete in terms of style. Other commodities have unique problems.

You could store your wealth in the form of guns. Guns are generally attractive and valuable, but now you run additional legal risk that a government may declare that your legally purchased, legally owned guns are suddenly contraband. You can own your wealth in the form of gold and silver coins.

Recently I talked about when the United States seized gold coins from its citizens and then devalued gold, stealing 40% of the value from its own citizenry. So gold and silver coins are not without risk, but they are some of the lower risk options. All of these things have the limitation of being physical assets though, which is what brings us to Bitcoin, where when you look at Bitcoin, it provides a glimmer of hope that perhaps we could have a decentralized store of value that is not subject to the actions of a nation state.

And if you can do that anonymously, it's even better. That's the point. So I would ask you to consider signing up for my class. Go to BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com to sign up. BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com. I think you will love it. I think you will learn a lot and I hope that you see the value for it, the need for it.

Obviously I don't expect that any of us will necessarily have to do what we put in that snazzy little intro, but if you ever did need it, it would be really nice to have. Go to BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com, sign up today. BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com. BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com. Go there now. BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com. With a Planet Fitness Black Card, you don't just get a great workout, you get a great perk out because your membership is packed with perks.

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