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In his investigative series published last year, Mark Goodwin revealed a complex web of figures, companies and technologies building the "Bitcoin-Dollar" system, consisting of Bitcoin and privately-issued dollar stablecoins which operate on public blockchains.Key players, including Brock Pierce and Peter Thiel, have ties to intelligence agencies, organised crime and venture firms, suggesting a merged intelligence community influencing the development of this system.The construction of The Chain involves a network of companies, including PayPal, Palantir and Facebook, which have contributed to the creation of a new financial system, enabling surveillance and the circumnavigation of government-issued money.The US government, led by Trump, is embracing Bitcoin and stablecoins to extend dollar hegemony and potentially service the country's ballooning debt, Goodwin writes.Last year, Mark Goodwin and Whitney Webb published a four-part investigative article series titled ‘The Chain’ on Unlimited Hangout. The Chain is “a deep dive on the creation of the Bitcoin-Dollar system, which names the names and explains the technology upholding the deflationary and highly-surveillable digital financial system fast approaching.”After the final part, Goodwin published “a concise post-mortem on The Chain series.” The following is his “post-mortem” to which we have added some additional resources noted in .Breaking (Down) The Chain: An Investigation Post-MortemBy Mark Goodwin, 18 November 2024Months of research and 82,000 words later, The Chain series has concluded - at least in its current online form. What began as a simple investigation into the stablecoin issuer Tether quickly unravelled into a decades-long web of figures, companies, investors and technological mechanisms that conspire to build what is referred to as “The Bitcoin-Dollar” system.This financial instrument consists of two main components: the first being Bitcoin itself, a distributed digital asset boasting deflationary monetary policy and trustless settlement on a transparent ledger; while the second is privately-issued tokenised government debt that operates on public blockchains, known as dollar stablecoins.The Chain of Custody: The “Mafia” Holding The Elite’s Bitcoin, Unlimited Hangout, 8 July 2024These two elements could not be further separated in regards to the publicly stated ethos of their champions. Bitcoin will circumnavigate the government and separate money from the State, while stablecoins aim to strengthen the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, provide much-needed demand for government-issued debt reserves, and further perpetuate the US dollar as the de facto medium of exchange to the unbanked citizens of the globe. At the surface, Bitcoin and the digital dollar appear as if oil and water, unable to co-exist in the same space, and molecularly opposed.And yet, collectively, the dollar and Bitcoin are to form the backbone for an entirely new financial system, a yin and yang construction that allows an entirely new commodity class to co-exist with a hyper-dollarised world. It was my opinion before embarking on this research vein – see 2021’s ‘The Birth of The Bitcoin-Dollar’ – that the coincidence of this structure emerging at the onset of the US government’s greatest-yet threat of a debt crisis was likely not an accident.Upon further investigation of the primordial Bitcoin community, and the ensuing class of stablecoin issuers – not to mention the cross-section of these parties – I must unfortunately now conclude that the emergence of this system immediately after the 2008 financial crisis, and the subsequent phase-shifting adoption of Bitcoin by the institutional authors and beneficiaries of the pandemic’s financial stimulus, was the work of a modern intelligence community that has merged with the Silicon Valley technology meridian since at least the 1980s, but unabashedly since the formation of the CIA’s venture firm In-Q-Tel just before the turn of the millennium.The Chain of Issuance: The People and Patents That Built The Financial Surveillance Network, Unlimited Hangout, 7 August 2024While not a popular opinion in many circles, the patterns are visible of the now-merged intelligence, organised crime, bankers, venture firms and technologists within the story of The Chain, and thus the formative incubation of Bitcoin itself.Take for example, Brock Pierce, an early pioneer of virtual assets who worked with Goldman Sachs’ Steve Bannon and modern economists to trial monetary policy experiments in online video games, and whose fellow co-founders of the Digital Entertainment Network – Marc Collins-Rector and Chad Shackley – were both found to be sexual criminals with large stashes of underage pornography.As an early Bitcoin evangelist with his hands in the venture pie of nearly every important exchange and software company within the early blockchain space, the former Disney star Pierce reeks of a private-sector, blackmailed agent of the currency speculator stalwarts that have run the public sector in the shadows. Pierce tellingly commented that “if the government were knocking off people in this field, I would know,” upon the drowning of stablecoin developer Nikolai Mushegian just days after Mushegian stated that the CIA, the Mossad and the “paedo elite” were going to kill him.Operation Underworld, one of the earliest unions between organised crime and the early US intelligence apparatus (dominated by Wall Street bankers and lawyers), demonstrated the need for the intelligence state to partner with mob affiliates for better data on ports of the US’ east coast during the second World War, and thus this merger – as outlined eloquently and prudently at the onset of Whitney Webb’s ‘One Nation Under Blackmail’ – perfectly exemplifies the reasoning for the mafia and the State to work together: networks, information and money.In the 1940s, the networks were smaller and slower, the information was lossy and hard to transmit, and the money was greenbacks – paper bills that, while serialised, were quite hard to track.Interestingly enough, it was likely the emergence of more advanced surveillance techniques by the Treasury, the IRS and their law enforcement partners that led to the arrest of many figureheads of the 20th century crime syndicate. But these arrests did little to stop the flow of goods from drug runners, bootleggers and human traffickers, among the many other trades of the black market. In fact, it appears that the intelligence apparatus simply stepped into the void left from the controlled take down of the mob, leading to further consolidation within the centralisation of the offshore dollar market.Offshore markets are essential to the modern intelligence state, which fights to service the budgets of its black-book operations using clever accounting schemes to launder payments, while also investing via private brokers into private companies built to privatise projects that were once fully-siloed within the national security state’s jurisdiction.The Chain of Consensus: The Cartel Behind The Blockchain, Unlimited Hangout, 11 September 2024Take, for example, Peter Thiel’s Palantir, a CIA cutout that developed as the private-sector iteration of DARPA’s TIA, or Total Information Awareness, which was founded after advisement from the CIA’s Alan Wade and the architect of TIA, John Poindexter.Today, Palantir feeds off of billions in government contracts to satisfy the brokering of data needs of both the public and private sectors. Their first customer was the CIA, which also provided the seed money for the founding of the firm, and they were subsequently funded by the CIA’s In-Q-Tel. They even accept Bitcoin. But before Palantir was officially incorporated, it began as the anti-fraud algorithm at PayPal, known as “Igor.”PayPal’s first institutional investor was the California tech incubator Idealab, whose founder Bill Gross would later go on to start Near Intelligence Holdings, the “world’s largest source of intelligence on people, places and products. ”Gross’ GoTo.com/Overture holds the patent that upholds Google’s AdWords - the backbone of Google’s monetisation, which remains critical to the US economy. Palantir itself holds 160 patents for its global surveillance network that all reference patents held by Gross.Even PayPal’s first board member, Scott Banister, was a Vice President at Gross’ Idealab, who lent his Palo Alto couch to PayPal’s cryptographer and CTO Max Levchin the week he first met Peter Thiel.The aforementioned Brock Pierce ran the Clearstone Global Gaming Fund formed out of the Idealab facility Clearstone Ventures, which was co-founded by Bill Elkus, a trustee of Jeffrey Epstein’s J. Epstein Foundation.Steve Bannon, Pierce’s “right hand man,” filmed Epstein for 15 hours as part of a failed effort to rebrand Epstein after arrests for sex crimes, and Howard Lutnick – the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald which holds the Treasuries backing Tether’s USDT stablecoin – bought the home neighbouring Epstein’s own (which was previously owned by Epstein) for “$10 and other valuable consideration.”Lutnick, the current co-chair of Trump’s transition team, also sits on the board of the Tether-funded, Earth observation satellite firm Satellogic alongside former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, which aims to provide anyone with the funds to gather human movement data and commodity surveillance from their fleet of cameras orbiting the planet.All this is to say, it can be hard to know where the lines between the mob and the intelligence state are drawn. But make no mistake, The Chain‘s construction was not intended to be as transparent as the blockchains they manage. Nor was it built in a day. Ironically, it was likely our government’s own want to circumnavigate its own legislation that pushed the intelligence state firmly into the private sector.The Chain Of Command: How Facebook’s Libra, Bank Regulators, and PayPal Built A New World Currency, Unlimited Hangout, 31 October 2024When bureaucratic red tape - see: The Constitution - prevents the acquisition of certain personal data of citizens from government-funded data brokers, the private sector becomes available as an enabling environment for otherwise unconstitutional surveillance. Many of the defenders of the free market, which are certainly rooted in well-read intentions, miss that the regulation and deregulation via the public sector leads to a further lack of competition in the formation of king-made networks and market monopolies, which often lead to further customer restrictions on speech, all within the framework of supposed free markets.The internet and Bitcoin’s blockchain take a similar misdirection dialectic, but via a differing philosophy - decentralisation. Bitcoin is less decentralised in nature than it is distributed, with its consensus mechanism standing across rungs of infrastructure that uphold our internet, and the panopticon leviathan living inside its fibre optic cables.No longer will the Federal Reserve’s 12 regional Fed banks decide monetary policy or limit reserve settlement to those within their regulatory regime, but the energy generators, the chip manufacturers and the internet service providers - at both the software and hardware level - become the new industries of consensus. The neo-banks, likely to emerge from FinTech-integrated social networks - an industry pioneered by Peter Thiel at PayPal and Facebook - are ready to embrace the oncoming regulation presumed to be imposed at the onset of Trump’s second term.There were millions in campaign financing waiting for a candidate to so brazenly champion the blockchain industry, and thus, Trump’s campaign pivot on Bitcoin should be of no surprise. It his affinity for stablecoins however - no better exemplified than his appointment of Howard Lutnick as co-chair of his transition team, whose firm Cantor Fitzgerald holds billions in government debt for Brock Pierce’s Tether (not to mention hundreds of millions in Bitcoin) – that offer a quiet-part-out-loud insight into his plans to service our ballooning debt via the sale of securities to the blossoming stablecoin industry.https://youtu.be/IjR3Hj0aRW4Howard W. Lutnick: Howard Lutnick at Bitcoin Conference 2024 in Nashville, 31 July 2024 (21 mins)You can also watch the video above on Rumble HERE.Trump would even go on to announce his own blockchain project, World Liberty Financial, with a stated mission to extend dollar hegemony via tokenised dollars, with the co-founder of Paxos, Bill Teo, chosen to lead its stablecoin component. Paxos was the former partner of Facebook’s stablecoin project, Libra/Diem, and currently issues PayPal’s own dollar stablecoin, PYUSD.While these stablecoin issuers might offer a way out of massively irresponsible fiscal policy, and certainly remain mission-critical to the “tether”-ing of Bitcoin’s price appreciation to the US dollar system, luckily, they do not retain any direct control over Bitcoin’s blockchain. Yet, with the proliferation of investment into Bitcoin mining firms and computation farms, and an amassed fortune of Bitcoin the asset, those surrounding the neo-money printers of the Digital Federal Reserve are set to capture any ground the Bitcoin community cedes in their supposed fight with the State.It is, of course, important to note that who made Bitcoin is significantly less important than who stands to benefit from it, in no small part due to its distributed and decentralised nature limiting any singular body from perverting its monetary policy and diluting the capped supply. This is a state change of money, and demands an honest introspective investigation of the net benefits of a capped monetary supply in neutering the State’s ability to debt pardon en masse. It is only upon a deep distilling of the commentary coming out of the mouths and think pieces from the affiliates of The Chain that one can begin to visualise the mechanisms being built to allow the United States government to, in fact, use Bitcoin and stablecoins to debt pardon – at least, crucially, one more time.Regardless of the success of the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve now being proposed by Senators adjacent to the incoming second Trump administration, the freedom derived from blockchain-native assets likely remains strictly economic for a select few, while the programmability and surveillability downsides of privately-issued stablecoins on public blockchains remain as fear-worthy as the CBDCs we have learned to reject.Trump Embraces the “Bitcoin-Dollar”, Stablecoins to Entrench US Financial Hegemony, Unlimited Hangout, 29 July 2024So, what solutions are available to combat the effects of the careful, discrete construction of The Chain system?For starters, the rejection of all dollar instruments native to the Bitcoin blockchain itself. Bitcoiners should learn from the dollarisation of Ethereum, and how the proliferation of stablecoins centralised consensus and opened entirely new cans of regulatory concerns.In addition to the simple prohibition of tokenised government debt on chain, Bitcoiners would be smart to optimise consensus today to encourage and enable self-custody and transactional settlement for not only the many billions of world citizens that do not currently hold Bitcoin the asset, but also the billions not yet born.Stablecoins are not an appropriate scaling mechanism for a new financial system - it is simply a worse implementation of the current debt-based monetary system, with privacy, programmability and surveillance concerns.The beauty left in Bitcoin is that, while its monetary policy can never be perverted, its consensus remains malleable by nature of being software, and thus can be enhanced to service a global economy of those wanting to opt out of the current system. This lever should be explored at great length and with great haste by the technologists and dissidents still active in the Bitcoin industry.The main flaw in the thesis presented in The Chain, according to its author, is why exactly would the PayPal Mafia and its ilk perpetuate tokenised dollars pegged directly to US government debt, while simultaneously building tools to privatise monetary issuance, allowing real-world assets to back exchangeable digital twin counterparts on blockchains? This question poses many follow-up threads for discussion, but perhaps can be answered by a need for US-based stalwarts - cartels, for lack of a better word - to preserve the public sector as a legislative body and regulatory regime due to its role as an enabling environment for their de facto monopolies. As Thiel said, due to know-your-customer regulation that appeared after the events of 11 September 2001, perhaps a company like PayPal could not have virally grown in the manner that it did before that world-altering event.The power structures of the United States government actually prevent newcomers from gaining serious market share over their king-made platforms, such as Facebook and PayPal, via the enforcement of copyright and patent law, not to mention domestic and international sanctions. Want to play ball in the largest buyer economy in the world? You’d best respect the IRS, the SEC, the CFTC and the regulations and executive orders they strive to uphold. Read the full article