What Bitcoin Did

At 5am, Lauren Rodriguez woke to laser sights, a drone flying through her house, and 40 armed federal agents raiding their cottage, all because her husband built a Bitcoin wallet.

Keonne Rodriguez co-founded Samurai Wallet in 2015, a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet with privacy features including Whirlpool, their CoinJoin implementation. For nearly a decade, the wallet operated openly on the Google Play Store with no issues. Then on April 24th, 2024, the FBI and IRS launched coordinated raids on the Rodriguez home in Pennsylvania and co-founder Bill Hill's home in Portugal.

The charges: conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money service business and conspiracy to money launder. The problem: FinCEN's own guidance stated that non-custodial wallets are not money transmitters. And six months before indictment, prosecutors asked FinCEN directly whether Samurai was a money service business, FinCEN said no. The prosecutors buried that answer, a Brady violation.

Lauren walks through the full story; the raid, the discovery process involving 17 terabytes of evidence, the sudden judicial switch from a neutral judge to a former chief of the SDNY criminal division, the five-minute hearing where every defense motion was denied without explanation, and the impossible math of a plea deal versus a 25-year trial exposure with a hostile judge.

Keonne is now serving a five-year federal prison sentence. Lauren is fighting for a presidential pardon for both Keonne and Bill.

Sign the petition and support their case at BillandKeonne.org.

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Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny

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Sign the Petition & Donate: https://billandkeonne.org/

"5 to 10% is going to cause immense damage. When cash flows stop at the margin, everything collapses because of leverage."

Nik Bhatia returns to break down the macro landscape as war in Iran sends oil to $100, the dollar surges, and volatility clouds the outlook.

Nik explains why he's wiped the slate clean on his macro thesis, why the US economy may still avoid recession despite the chaos, and how the Genius Act could reshape the global dollar system through stablecoins.

We also get into AI job displacement, why treasuries are still the bedrock of global finance, Bitcoin's decoupling signal, and whether the four-year cycle is finally dead.

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Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny

Nik Bhatia: https://x.com/timevalueofbtc

Is Bitcoin's four-year cycle still intact, and what does that mean for the next six months?

In this episode, I sit down with The Rational Root to break down where we are in Bitcoin's cycle, why on-chain data is flashing bear market signals despite Bitcoin holding up through the Iran war, and what the bottom formation could look like from here.

We discuss the shift from retail hype to institutional adoption, why OTC buying from ETFs and treasury companies dampened this cycle's price action, how gold and AI stole Bitcoin's mindshare, and whether passive flows from the likes of Saylor could prevent another leg down. Root walks through his key on-chain charts and explains why he thinks there's still a probability of one more drop before Bitcoin starts its next move up.

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"Our entire financial system will blow up without their factories, without their oil. And they know that. So they can wait."

Luke Gromen is a macroeconomic analyst, investor and founder of FFTT.

In this episode, we get into whether the Iran war exposed a far bigger geopolitical shift than most people realise, why Luke thinks missiles and drones may have changed global power forever, and what all of this means for oil, markets, Bitcoin and the future of the dollar system.

We also get into why Bitcoin held up better than expected during the conflict, why Luke still thinks risk assets face serious danger ahead, and how AI could trigger a major credit event faster than almost anyone expects.

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"Statistically, right now, we are basically at the bottom. This is as cheap as Bitcoin gets."

Matthew Mezinskis is a macroeconomic researcher, host of Crypto Voices and one of the leading voices on Bitcoin's power law and global money supply data.

In this episode, we dig into why Bitcoin's quantile regression is showing we're scraping the absolute floor, why the four-year cycle is completely intact despite everyone calling it dead last year, and what the Fed's balance sheet actually tells us about where Bitcoin goes next.

In this episode:

• The Power Law: Why Bitcoin at $63k represents the cheapest level relative to trend in its entire history, and what the quantile regression is actually showing

• The Four-Year Cycle: How the 2024-2025 price action perfectly follows prior cycles despite the "cycle is dead" narrative.

• The 550k Projection: What the power law projects for Bitcoin by 2029-2030.

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

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Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny

Matthew Mezinskis: https://x.com/1basemoney