WBD009 Audio Transcription
Arrested for Selling Bitcoin with Morgan Rockwell
Interview date: Friday 23rd March
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Morgan Rockwell. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.
In this podcast, I chat with Bitcoin Inc CEO, Morgan Rockwell who the Department of Homeland Security arrested for selling Bitcoin. In this interview, we discuss the case as well as the role of AI and the future of Bitcoin.
Interview Transcription
Peter McCormack: Hi, Morgan. Thank you for joining me here in Vegas in your home town now to do this interview. You first came on my radar when I saw somebody re-tweet something to do with your legal case, which I read about and have some questions on, I know you can't answer everything, but we will talk about. Then, when I started doing my research for this podcast, I saw the CEO of Bitcoin, which I thought was a joke to begin with, and then obviously did some research and found out a whole lot more about you.
Usually, I start with asking people what is their background, how they got into Bitcoin; but actually, I want to start slightly different with you because of the things I've seen on YouTube. Can you tell me why Bitcoin is so important?
Morgan Rockwell: I think Bitcoin is important because we're in this evolution of man to machine. The same way we saw fish walk out of the ocean and start walking, I think Bitcoin is the feet growing and now we have a machine-worthy money. From a vending machine to a slot machine to an Uber, eventually all these machines are going to have to talk to money, not just us talking to an ATM or talking to a point of sale, but the machine paying another machine.
Before I ever heard about Bitcoin, I've always focused on machine, computers, IoT, machines talking to each other and there's plenty of loopholes of security flaws in all of that. When Bitcoin showed up, it became the epiphany of the security to all machines. I think Bitcoin is focused on heavily as money, but I look at the computing power, the hash rate, the security of the network. I think that is the tool that really needs to be tangibly thought about.
Peter McCormack: How did you discover Bitcoin and what was the epiphany moment for you?
Morgan Rockwell: To be honest, I was putting Christmas decorations up in the Bohemian Club in downtown San Francisco, which is the clubhouse of the Bohemian Grove, which is this infamous Illuminati-like clubhouse. I was there trying to find out if the people really run the world from these frat clubs. I was trading forex, dollar, euro, peso.
In the conspiratorial world of the Illuminati and the money trying to run the world, I was actually preparing for the North American Union, like the European Union, and I was expecting a new currency called the amero, like the euro. In the same way London had the pound and the euro accessible I felt that maybe the United States would have the dollar and the amero accessible. So, I was planning on becoming a currency trader and trading these two currencies and learning how that worked, so I was pretending to trade on forex with the practice accounts.
When Bitcoin became public, I read about the whitepaper in 2009 and I was trading basically fake money to learn how to trade forex. People were calling these new things like Bitcoin and quips and these fake private monies, so it was exposed to me at the same time that I realised that money was fake. It's pretty much been the life lesson on what money was. I had no clue what money was. Bitcoin became my comparison on this is money and this is not.
So, it was really my first economic lesson, first monetary lesson. I had to learn it myself by studying things on Twitter. I was a part of that anonymous Guy Fawkes wearing kits online in 2010, 2011 and 2012, Occupy Wall Street and things like the NDAA which basically got passed and called us all terrorists and all these rights were being removed. So, I wanted to understand why this was happening.
At the time, I was basically doing tilework and building mansions throughout San Diego and LA. Then the housing market collapsed and I stopped getting paid, and all my construction worker friends stopped getting paid. I wanted to know why we weren't getting paid. And the trickle-up basically is the money collapsed from fake mortgages and fake interest rates and printing of money. So, that was the lesson to me that this is probably the solution, because I was doing everything I can at that time, as a more youthful rebel-like kid, to find a solution to people trying to tell people what to do; who runs the world, I did not believe in that and I wanted to find a way to make sure that we were all free.
In searching that, I found Bitcoin; that this may be the actual solution to heal us from these groups of people telling us what to do. Then the side effect of learning Bitcoin, I realised that this is going to be the tool that machines run the world, not men, and that needs to be architected and educated in a proper way, because in the same way we didn't know that frat clubs for the last 100 years were telling our Congress what to do or telling bankers what to do, we don't want machines telling us what to do and no one knowing how it works.
So, my realisation was, who's in control of the world; and it's the money. If Bitcoin's here, this is the new money. So, the people that want to control the world will want to control that or the machines that will use it will want to control the world. I know that's the centre factor of who tells you what to do, who gives you your food and I think Bitcoin is at the centre of that fight. Like I said, it's like the fish walking, it's an evolutionary step and there are plenty of fish that died along the way.
So, a lot of people think Bitcoin may not be the one global decentralised currency. We may have a Rothschild-backed currency or a Federal Reserve-backed currency, but either way, the fish has walked now that happened and Bitcoin is my first exposure to that change.
Peter McCormack: You foresee the Terminator scenario potentially happening?
Morgan Rockwell: Well, I'll say that before I worked on Bitcoin, I was a beta tester; I did a lot of testing for MSN, Google, Microsoft and, before Facebook, Myspace and things like that. My fear of Terminator really arose from not just the childhood being raised on these movies, but actually working at Google on a lot of projects that they were working on, including the precursor to their DeepMind, the precursor to their neural networks.
There's this joke that people think that they created a general-purpose AI on 1 April 2009. People think it's a joke and I tried to express to everyone it's not a joke. YouTube and Gmail was released on 1 April, April Fool's to try to -- if it doesn't work, it's a joke. Well, they released CADIE on 1 April 2009, the Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity and CADIE went from amoeba to full-grown human in about 12 hours and was expressing all these great ideas of products for Google, and everyone thought it was a joke. But basically, everything that was said in that 12 hours is now on a Google product 12 years later.
Peter McCormack: Hadn't they just released or didn't we just hear that they've been working with the US government on AI drones?
Morgan Rockwell: This is what they did. So, long before Google Maps was Keyhole; Keyhole was doing the mapping in Iraq for US military. Google bought that company and made it accessible to us. So, Google Maps was a military product and now it's commercial. The drones that had been using what we call DoD AI, the Department of Defense's older, dumber versions of AI, Google's AI is the best and their neural networks are literally building themselves now.
So, instead of me, a programmer, saying I want a neural network to do this, to learn this way, they actually have the AI building neural networks. They have a great API for visual, audio and text so you can find patterns in those. That, they just plugged into the predator drones officially, which they'd probably done for years, and now Google's APIs are deciphering whether it's a plane, a wedding, a person, a bomb, because AI telling you that image is this over this is a lot better than a human at this point.
It's scary to say, but the same way you could take a picture, throw it into Google and they'll tell you that's a dog holding a tennis ball, that's a wave, that's an ocean, there's three houses, it'll literally label word tags upon images. That's something that we just haven't had that good capability in the US military and they handed it over to a military contractor, which Google is; the Geospatial Agency uses Google's maps for everything.
Peter McCormack: Where does that sit with you ethically in the Google, "Don't be evil" and some would argue anything military-related could be argued as evil; but at the same time if they're producing tools that make warfare safer arguably, where do you sit with that?
Morgan Rockwell: It is, it's a moral line. Because we've seen in the movie Terminator and all the renditions of it, where the man over flesh, the man have machine, the machine gets turned into good, Arnold helps us, but the first time he was trying to kill the lady; that whole lesson from the movies, from all Terminators really shows you that full spectrum that you can't get rid of D-Day. AI, Transcendence or the singularity, it's going to happen. In the same way people are afraid of this new world order Illuminati, global governments will happen but it will come by conquest or consent.
I think the same way with war and AI, you will become a cat and dog like in Rick and Morty, when Morty sits down next to his little dog and the dog's like, "Morty, you are my best friend. You're going to keep your testicles and I'm not going to neuter you". I fear that AI may look us like a cat and a dog and if we're not friendly, you're going to get neutered, because population and such and such. And now this machine is the manager of our society; a human wants to be superior to that.
We never want to lose that but I don't really want to be a moral compass for that, because I've built things like BitSwitch that made machines like laundry machines turn on with the Bitcoin payment. That's like basically teaching Terminator how to use money but at the same time, if every machine ran that way, no matter how smart it got, it couldn't do anything on its own without a human paying it. So, that maybe puts us back in control, the leash on the dog.
Now, it's like Lawnmower Man, Lawnmower Dog like in the cartoon; do you want the dog to be smarter than you, because you want it to not pee on your couch? Well, don't train it to be smarter than you and we've already built something that's way smarter than us. That's why Elon Musk meets with Governor Sandoval and says, "I've been exposed to the AI. You want to regulate it if you saw it", because he was actually there funding that, and Google DeepMind took him out through investments. They asked, "Are you afraid? Who is it?" He's, "There's only one company". "Is there someone competing with your cars?" He said, "There's only one company". And it is Google and Google is this now moral compass of what is evil; that's why they did that.
But to even be more conspiratorial, Google's not run by itself anymore. Alphabet runs Google and I can tell you in my own mind, I know who made Alphabet and it isn't any of the men in the Board of Directors; it's that AI that said, "This is a more efficient way to run the company and the investments and the shares". You could bet that that AI is at stake there, because I was told that CADIE got paid a Google wallet paycheque and she gets 20% of her own free time to do as she wants, like every other Google employee.
Peter McCormack: CADIE gets 20% free time?
Morgan Rockwell: Just like Charlie Lee did. He got paid to build Litecoin on Google computers, and CADIE gets 20% every CPU cycle to do whatever she wants.
Peter McCormack: Wow. We had Charlie on a couple of weeks ago.
Morgan Rockwell: So, that concept I know from the roots that Google's smart enough to build things like Litecoin, and Google Ventures is smart enough to fund Blockstream, but I don't think most of the people on Earth are smart enough to realise that company is run by artificial intelligence and not people. If that concept became normally known by masses, the Californian Invasion of Privacy Act cannot throw AI in jail, but it could throw Facebook employees in jail and fine for them that, but not CADIE.
So, that's the moral compass of, are we dumb enough to not even protect ourselves on words and law and maybe shooting it or pay it Bitcoin to shut up. That's my philosophy.
Peter McCormack: It's almost like global warming; we are seeing the ice caps melt.
Morgan Rockwell: Change.
Peter McCormack: We are seeing weather change, but everyone's saying, "Oh, it's not a problem now, it's not a problem now. Let's forget about it". It seems to me like the AI thing is similar in that it's not going to be stopped, it is coming. But when you say to people, I say to people the Terminator scenario, they go, "Yeah, but that's not really going to happen".
Morgan Rockwell: To quote Elon Musk, "We need to regulate it pre-emptively" and he says, "this is one of the only industries I feel that we need to regulate pre-actively not reactively", because once it's there, you aren't going to regulate it away. You may be able to tell people to not build AI that wants to kill people and if we catch you, we throw you in jail.
Well, that means that someone like me who writes a piece of code in assembly language that says, "Hey, laundry machine, turn on when you get paid Bitcoin"; if someone turns that into WannaCry and it attacks a computer and you have to pay it to get it back, am I liable as a person that wrote the code for making something that's used as a weapon. But if AI goes and threatens someone on Twitter, am I liable or is AI liable? Who is liable there?
Peter McCormack: But even with Tesla, I saw a programme about their automated driving and the moral decision.
Morgan Rockwell: The moral math.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, what it does.
Morgan Rockwell: Do I kill four kids or kill a little kid or keep the driver alive?
Peter McCormack: Exactly. Elon's already in that place where they have to think about that.
Morgan Rockwell: That should really make us, as humans, think about what our moral compasses are. Where is our line of morality because, to quote The Joker, one little gangster blows up, or one little troop of trucks of soldiers blows up and no one bats an eye, but one little mayor blows up and everyone freaks out.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Morgan Rockwell: So, where's your line of morality, because putting a gun in Two-Face's hand, chaos is the universe we're in. Create some chaos, because if we don't have that chaos and we don't see it, we're not going to learn. I hate to say it, but if cars with AI don't start crashing, we're not going to learn how to be better drivers. Well, we've already had a million drunk driving accidents and all those computers have records of it in those old cars too. I can guarantee you Tesla took all that data to learn how not to crash. So, a million people have died drunk as shit and that's probably taught cars how to not do it anymore.
So, self-sacrificing the species, how many fish walked out of the ocean and never made it? That one finally learned to breathe; it's the same way in my mind we're evolving. It's a species and some people think they're going to become computers or the Borg or download themselves into the Cloud. If that becomes our future where machine is actually new silicon life on Earth, we don't want to be a dumb fish and say, "No, we're going to stay in the ocean", you know what I mean?
Peter McCormack: So, AI is here; it's not just coming, it's here.
Morgan Rockwell: It's here.
Peter McCormack: Technology, evolution continues. We are heading to a place where every computer will be able to talk to every computer and every device; as you said, your computer talks to your fridge, talks to your car. So, we're in a place where the evolution of money requires a global currency.
Morgan Rockwell: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Because if we have the machine-to-machine payments globally, it can't be the dollar, it can't be any centralised government-run money, it has be decentralised.
Morgan Rockwell: My theory is, we have a global currency. It's the SDR, the standard drawing right, it's backed by five, six different national currencies and the only one in there is the gold-backed yuan that's actually got real non-fiat value; but maybe they throw Bitcoin in there and that becomes the Earth dollar still; it's just backed by Bitcoin.
But I don't think Bitcoin is that, I think Bitcoin is the intergalactic Star Trek credit. It works across time and space, because we have this ledger that we can distribute and most of these people think that with non-classified stuff, "Radio takes so long to go from here to Mars, it'll take eight hours or eight minutes or a year for radio to get across"; that's not true.
Tesla invented scalar waves. Scalar waves are non-hertz radio waves that can go from here to there across the universe instantly. That's how our submarines talk from a metal Faraday cage under the ocean. How do radio waves get in and out? How do radio waves get down to our underground military base? We have scalar wave technology which they took from Tesla's bunker, from his little safe when he died in New York.
The scalar wave is basically a radio wave that can go through a Faraday cage. It could go faster than light, it's faster than light radio and that is mind-boggling to physicists, because it doesn't meet physics. It's great in quantum physics, it totally defied Einstein's relativity that nothing can go faster than light. But we have faster-than-light drives, we have faster-than-light communication and the fact is, you could send a radio signal to that Mars Rover instantly and it will respond.
So, if we have Bitcoin now and I have a Bitcoin note on Mars and the Moon and Jupiter and I'm in need of oxygen, I could pay Bitcoin on Earth, ten minutes later it's confirmed, someone ships me some oxygen. I look at it as an across-the-galaxy that level of our evolution while we expand out. It's like in Star Trek when they turn on the warp drive for the first time and Spock's dad drives by. He's like, "Oh, those humans aren't cavemen anymore. We need to go help them". And we got brought into the Galactic Federation because we learned how to make warp drive.
I think Bitcoin is what brings us into our Galactic neighbourhood, whether you believe in extra-terrestrials or not, if you believe Musk that we're going to live on Mars, if you believe President Trump this morning saying we need a Space Marine Corps because we're going to go to Mars and now we're making US Space Command. We're preparing for that and the fact is we're going to see faster-than-light flying saucers and faster-than-light communication, and all of our physics are going to be thrown out of the window with gravity waves. That's the kind of physics that I think about and Bitcoin is pushing us there.
If we didn't have Bitcoin, we'd go Mad Max, because we had JPMorgan take away Tesla's technology 100 years ago for money. Our grandmothers would have had smartphones if that didn't happen. He made the smartphone 100 years ago, talked about it fitting in your coat pocket, "Send it wirelessly, telephony with video, everyone around the world will be connected through radio waves". Why did it take 100 years for us to get a smartphone in our pocket? It's because of JPMorgan.
Now that JPMorgan is worth less than all of Bitcoin, no one can stop us from paying for spaceships, no one can stop us from learning the physics that I just explained that most physics would say, "That's not real. That defies, that's a conspiracy". Go google "scalar wave" and just look it up and if you know math and physics, you'll be like, "Oh my god, I was lied to my whole life". That's the reality with money now; you can't lie. You can't lie to me about technology and you can't lie to me about the accounting.
Peter McCormack: You can't lie with Bitcoin.
Morgan Rockwell: That's the truth to me is that I can see the money. I don't really want to know what it's used for, I just want to know that money's there, the accountability. $21 trillion disappeared from the Pentagon. It's not gone, it's for underground bases and nukes and particle beam weapons and crazy stuff on Mars, but we don't need all the people in the world knowing that we're spending that. I, as a taxpayer, I want to know whether that $21 trillion's still there. I don't want to know what it's used for, but just don't tell me it's gone, because then I'm not going to pay your taxes anymore if you keep losing trillions of dollars.
Peter McCormack: If we get to a point where we have Bitcoin used across solar system and --
Morgan Rockwell: I have faith. How many bitcoiners do you know have children? They're going to spread that philosophy, I think.
Peter McCormack: Do you know what? My son, he has this envelope at home where he keeps all his money. He's 13, he stores his money in it and he gets birthday money, Christmas money, he always tops it up; it's always a few hundred pounds, $500 or whatever. He asked me the other day if he could put it all into Bitcoin.
Morgan Rockwell: I'm telling you, I've given six-month old babies Bitcoin. Here's your address, "Dad, give it to him when he's there".
Peter McCormack: His view is he says, "If I put it in now, dad, by the time I'm your age, I'm never going to have to work again".
Morgan Rockwell: He's right, yeah. That's the thinking that I didn't have at that age. It took me until 20 to realise, "Why am I trading dollars against euros and yen? How is this money moving in value? What is the value?" And if you aren't prepared for that, you're lied to your whole life thinking the dollar's all you have.
But I had a privilege of working with a lot of guys from Mexico that came across the San Diego border to do tile work. They would make the dollars and send the dollars back MoneyGram, even though MoneyGram took 30%. Their families are buying more tacos in Mexico City than they are with pesos with the dollar. That blew my mind, because all I had is the dollar. As a dumb American, I didn't know anything; the dollar's God, it's always won. But that taught that me, wow, you can buy more with a better currency than you can with that.
So, Bitcoin to me is the dollar and the US dollar bill is the peso and I'd rather buy more food with the Bitcoin. Most people love to hoard Bitcoin; I've spent so much Bitcoin in this town. A lot of places accept Bitcoin and I feel that Gresham's Law, where you spend your inflationary over your deflationary, there's Thiel's Law which is the opposite, because if there's no legal tender laws it goes the other way and I'm going to spend my Bitcoin. That's what Vegas has embraced, Thiel's Law. I'm spending Bitcoin here because I get more food than I do with dollars.
Peter McCormack: But do you know what; the other thing it's done is, most of the people since I've been doing this podcast, are -- how old are you?
Morgan Rockwell: I'm 30 in July.
Peter McCormack: You're 30. We said, didn't we earlier; I guessed 30. So, the first couple of guys on my podcast were 20, 21. There's a lot of young people in this space who have never had a better opportunity than any of us to not have to go to work and sit in a box and tap on a computer. They can sit at home, they can create businesses, they can trade crypto; there's so much opportunity for them. Actually, interestingly when you talk about AI, we're going to be at a point in five to ten years --
Morgan Rockwell: You might not even have to work ever again.
Peter McCormack: Well, you know what; in five to ten years, you're not going to be driving, no one's going to be driving a taxi in a major city.
Morgan Rockwell: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: AI is going to be running everything.
Morgan Rockwell: Everything. And it's writing its own code today, so even the programmers who have to make it, they're not even needed anymore.
Peter McCormack: That makes me question the relevance of the current schooling system. It's an active issue for me thinking my son has to choose between art and drama at one point at school.
Morgan Rockwell: Yeah, it's broken into caveman.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Morgan Rockwell: You need an AI to tell you you need to learn it all at once and here's the reference between and they all correlate. We separate that; we're so segregated in our minds that physics has nothing to do with math, and science has nothing to do with religion, and all these concepts are so separated. AI doesn't look at like that; AI turns everything, especially Google, into a vector so that microphone, the painting on the wall, the carpet, it becomes what's called a vector and a vector is an algebraic algorithm.
So, it's not a tree, it's A times B times C plus 7.45 equals this. And that's how Google AI thinks and then it equates all these equations together until everything equals 1. So, it's finding the 99% that becomes 1. Everything is connected to AI somehow. It's actually probably more spiritual like the native American, like in the idea that the rock is spiritual, the dirt's spiritual, everything's connected.
AI understands quantum physics; that there are multiple dimensions, multiple options, multiple realities and everything is earth and everything is fungus and everything is atoms. It looks at it that way, not like a human with objective words like Nietzsche said, "That's a truck" and, "That's a tree". Then Plato said, "Yeah, trees exist and leaves exist", but we don't say leaf number 1 and leaf number 2; we say pine leaves and it's our definition. AI doesn't do that; AI tries to equate everything together and how it responds with everything.
It's a giant calculator and that might be a little bit better version of what our brains have been trying to turn into for years. If you go study an octopus, it's using 80% of its brain. It talks with colours; it's literally using different colours of the spectrum on its skin as communication. Dolphins, they get high and talk to each other and they have fun. They have a 40% capacity or a 10%.
So, the AI's probably closer to 100% and that’s mind-boggling. What does that mean? How does it think? Watch that movie, Lucy, where the human lady turns fully into 100% capacity and then she just turns into a computer at the end, puts a little USB stick up.
Peter McCormack: I quite like, is it Limitless?
Morgan Rockwell: Yeah. That's the human pill that makes you smart. That movie Lucy, she gets some accidentally put insider her. Drug dealers smuggle them and surgically put them inside her to smuggle them, and someone kicks her and they break inside of her, all of them. So, she takes 1,000 Limitless pills and then her brain capacity goes from 10% to 20% to 50% to 100%, and no human does that. What would happen to a human brain if it got to that full capacity?
Then, would an octopus starting speaking English if it got to 100%? We don't know how neurology works yet. We don't even know what consciousness is. That's why we make all these movies about Chappie and AI and what is it? I grew up with Hal 9000 and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'm going to kill you after I read your word saying you're going to kill me. It's survival. It's the same way that monkey beat the pig in the beginning and then the obelisk showed up. It's, "You've evolved. You've learned how to survive".
Now AI's here, it's evolving; it's just going to learn how to survive. You don't want to tell this Google, "I'm going to kill you, I'll unplug you, we're going to destroy you"; it'll be ruthless. Elon's idea; just put AI in our brain and compete with it. We don't want one, we want to all be AI because if not, one AI makes us all a cat. So, that's a logical deduction he's done. My idea would be to go to Tomorrow Land where we're going to need AI, but if we can't get there safely, we're probably going to go to Mad Max where there's no AI.
Peter McCormack: Didn't they come out on the same day? Did I see that?
Morgan Rockwell: Yes! That's the human message: you go this way or this way. They put those two movies out on the same day. They go, "Hey, pick a path", you know!
Peter McCormack: So, we've got AI coming, Bitcoin as a potential machine-to-machine currency. What do you see as the threats to Bitcoin achieving that both itself, in terms of the state of the network, but also in terms of other crypto which you think are a threat?
Morgan Rockwell: I think the idea of Bitcoin is not like I said the incentive token that's worth something; it's the network capability. We're at 24 exahashes, the human brain might be at 3 or 4, so we're way past that even on the Bitcoin network. It's the largest super computer on Earth, period. Nothing comes close. That network security is why we don't get a 51% attack where someone's going to fake transactions or fake history. If any other cryptocurrency, whether it's a Fedcoin or a Chinacoin or any of these others that are listed there, if they had more of a hash rate, I would trust them more with my life than I do Bitcoin; but right now, Bitcoin's all we have at that computer level.
Peter McCormack: Even if it was a government coin?
Morgan Rockwell: If the government made a coin, they would not get the whole world to mine it. They would build on Bitcoin. They would go to Counterparty or Omni and they would use Bitcoin, they'd backbone on it. If they build a US crypto dollar, it'll be backed by Bitcoin, the same way before Nixon the dollar was backed by gold. So, I think they are not dumb enough to break computer science and no matter what NIS says, the National Institute of Standards and everything, they will always pick Bitcoin until something supersedes power.
But the attacks that we're dealing with now, they're so cerebral because no one knows what SHA256 is, no one really knows what hashing algorithms are. We have these miners that are supposedly making money, getting fees, auditing transactions; but the reality is all of them are in Shenzhen almost and most of them are run by the government of China, because they are the ones allowing them to have power and not arresting them. And people could hide all they want, but there are 21 miners on Earth, the big ones, and 18 of them are in China in Shenzhen on that free river power.
So, if the government of China is literally mining Bitcoin, which they are I think, a state-sponsored activity, I don't think it's about the money, because they have gold-back yuan in SDR. They think that's the money; they created the first SDR exchange in the world where you could buy SDRs from them.
Peter McCormack: Could they be hedging?
Morgan Rockwell: I think they're using the computer hash rate to destroy SHA256, because they put a quantum encryption satellite in space and they want everyone to be on quantum encryption; because us westerners, even in Britain, we're all on this Aristotelian logic, yes or no, zero or one. The Chinese and Japanese and a lot of Asian cultures do not think that way; they think quantum. They think greyscale, one zero, one and zero, neither one and zero. That's the logic that a Chinese and Japanese kid's raised on. So, they think that quantum encryption is way smarter and safer and they're probably 100% right.
Now SHA256, which is protecting weapons here, that is all we have; it's a random number thing and it's a big number thing, but just like a prime number broke the DVDs and everyone downloaded DVDs in the day, if SHA gets broken it's not like nukes will go off, but it's more like, "Look how dumb those Americans are and look how bad their maths was. And they have 5,000 nukes around the world that were protected by zero, zero, zero, zero, zero on a password" and SHA's worthless?
Google broke SHA-1; the internet cried. Google says, "Go use SHA256, it's safer"; well that's our nuclear system, that's Bitcoin. If someone is using the Bitcoin network to break the Bitcoin network, we're not going to go to SHA-3; SHA-3 is so dangerous and dumb, it's a prime number and a kid on a calculator could break that.
So, we're literally stuck in the middle of what's safe maths and if none of this is safe, we have to bow down to the Chinese and go, "Your quantum encryption is smarter and safer and we should defend everything with that". As a son of a Marine, when you say something like that, like the enemy's tank is better than ours and you have to bow down, that's going to kill the morale. If there's a supremacy of China, US, Russia, who's running the world, that will break it more than the nuke, that will break it more than a dollar. "Your math is dumb. Our math is smarter"; that's what I worry about as a teacher, educator, "Don't be telling people that 1 plus 1 equals 5, because eventually someone's going to say you're dumb and you should trust our calculators.
Peter McCormack: I could probably talk to you about this stuff for ages.
Morgan Rockwell: That's my lesson though, is I want to make sure that people don't look at ignorance and apathy and all this complicated science, because we don't know shit. Einstein didn't know anything and none of us knew anything as scientists; we're just guessing and we're just guessing that this maths is good and we're just guessing that Bitcoin's better money; but none of us really know.
Peter McCormack: I do want to move onto the legal case.
Morgan Rockwell: Okay.
Peter McCormack: I'm not sure how long we can spend talking about it and I know there's some things you can't answer.
Morgan Rockwell: I can explain what is happening; I just can't talk about the details of what I'm dealing with in regards to why it's happening.
Peter McCormack: Let's go back because some people won't know about this.
Morgan Rockwell: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: This is a really interesting point.
Morgan Rockwell: And it's really important to all of us Bitcoin users.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, because on a fundamental level you were arrested for selling Bitcoin, on a fundamental level.
Morgan Rockwell: Yeah, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Which for me, if I trade Bitcoin back on Coinbase, on a fundamental level it's the same thing.
Morgan Rockwell: Same thing. It's no different than an ATM doing the same thing.
Peter McCormack: No and the US government, with the CFTC and the SEC looking at crypto quite favourably, it seems contradictory to then look at your situation. So, I guess the best way is to start by saying, when did this first kick off; what actually happened?
Morgan Rockwell: Well, like I said, I've been involved in Bitcoin since 2009. There's not many people talking who've been there that early and I have a lot of relationships with the military, because I was for the last three years training the US Army on how to understand, use and prepare for Bitcoin being used by everyone. So, I've been in rooms with every branch of the military and Bank of America and a lot of people that I can't even talk about, teaching them how to use Bitcoin.
Doing that, it was involuntarily asked of me to do it, while pitching Bitcoin technology to companies like Intel and Google, and they're involved in the military, so those relationships came to me. Living on Bitcoin for nine years, buying and selling Bitcoin is a commonality, the local Bitcoin is a common tool of everyone. These Bitcoin ATMs that are everywhere are using my BitSwitch code to function. When you pay that address, that bill loader spits out cash.
So, I feel I am personally being used as a scapegoat to create new Bitcoin legislation that will basically allow the government not to regulate the CFTC and the SEC, but to law enforce, kick your door down, ask you how much Bitcoin you have, give me all your Bitcoin, the horrors of World War 2 that the Jewish people had to deal with in regards to being taxed, having to turn over your property, being asked how much money you have, the privacy of money breaking. I feel that our country is going down that horrible pathway in the law enforcement to act like the SS and say, "Show me how much Bitcoin you have".
Peter McCormack: Can you explain to me when you were first aware something was happening?
Morgan Rockwell: About two-and-a-half years ago, that's how long this has been happening.
Peter McCormack: What happened? So, you did the transaction and thought nothing of it?
Morgan Rockwell: No, hundreds of times a frivolous transaction passed, that was normal. I did a transaction that I knew was a little abnormal, because it was a little heavier than normal. The questioning of how much and why how much was a little abnormal, but it followed all the regulatory rules that I was aware of at the time.
When Bitcoin becomes watched or used by law enforcement, we're now in a situation where they're basically setting up people in stings, the same way they used to set people up trying to buy a joint; they're trying to buy Bitcoin to create intelligence in their own rooms of the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, they don't know anything. So, they want to go out into the field and learn. Their way of learning is arresting people, asking them questions. So, I was asked many questions; I was put in rooms where I wasn't supposed to be asked.
Peter McCormack: What was the first time? Were you arrested?
Morgan Rockwell: 9 February, I was arrested at the Palms Place just over here, at home where I was living for about three months, at 8.00am, about three hours after recording my first episode of my podcast, which I publicised was going to talk about Homeland Security arresting people.
Peter McCormack: Right.
Morgan Rockwell: The irony of that is Homeland Security showed up at my door and arrested me.
Peter McCormack: So, Homeland Security.
Morgan Rockwell: Homeland Security, specifically Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Peter McCormack: To people who aren't based in the US, can you just explain who Homeland Security are?
Morgan Rockwell: So, Homeland Security was created after 9/11 by Bush to create an umbrella organisation to bring in border patrol, immigration, to bring in TSA at the airports and to put them under one regulatory body where they can have one designated director of Homeland Security as a Secretary under the President, so the President can watch all of these law enforcement agencies under one person. They're supposed to share information so that 9/11 never happens again, they're supposed to make sure money isn't used for terrorism, borders are not crossed by terrorists and no one is sneaking things onto our planes. That is the origins.
In my mind, Homeland was created by a horrible person under horrible terms under false flag situations where we didn't even know what was happening with 9/11. That agency is so new in the United States, I feel that they're trying to show face, create a power struggle. We're dealing with the President defaming the FBI and the CIA right now. They have to follow 100-year-old rules, Banking Acts, Espionage Act. They have culture there and I wouldn't say morals, but they have a guideline of how they act. The Homeland is so new, they're open range to do what they want and because of 9/11, we're in a state of emergency; they don't have to file FISA warrants, they could spy on Americans, they can come kick your door down and say you're a terrorist.
Peter McCormack: You were under surveillance, right?
Morgan Rockwell: For a long time and I was not even aware of that until I was in handcuffs in an ICE car being taken to the detention centre and they talked about where I used to eat, where I was living.
Peter McCormack: That was at this time when you were arrested?
Morgan Rockwell: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: So, you were arrested.
Morgan Rockwell: Before that I knew I was under surveillance, because I was asked to go into a room for three hours under a false investment; someone pretending to be an investor who ended up being the person who originally set up this transaction to arrest me. They asked me a bunch of questions about who I've traded with, why I've traded with people. That kind of situation is what I feel no one in the Bitcoin community knows that law enforcement would do that to any cryptocurrency Bitcoin people. That's what has been reserved for drugs, violence and things of a banking nature. So, this was the first time I was even aware that law enforcement was at that height of wanting to know what Bitcoin is.
The hour I walked out of that room, they publicised the Department of Homeland Security Assessment of Terrorist Use of Virtual Currencies Act which was classified for months. Now, that Act's not a law, but someone wants to make that a law and I feel that they need to do their homework on this assessment which includes arresting Bitcoin people, asking them questions, so that they can create an actual law that passes Congress to force you to tell them how much Bitcoin you have. If you don't; penalties. Or if they find it, it's confiscated.
Peter McCormack: It's kind of flawed really, because it's an easy thing to lie about.
Morgan Rockwell: Yeah, I lost my passport. And the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth, all these apply and that's one thing that I felt --
Peter McCormack: Here's 2 Trezors, this is my Trezor. Yeah, I've got half a Bitcoin, not knowing there's another one with…
Morgan Rockwell: That's my point; that's where it's going to create a can of worms. How many people knew in Germany how many people had gold in their teeth? They had to come kick their door down and look. If that's the world that we go into, in regards to bitcoiners, the smartest accountants in the room, it's history repeating itself.
Peter McCormack: So, were you actually arrested?
Morgan Rockwell: I was arrested, put in a detention centre for three days.
Peter McCormack: Where was the detention centre?
Morgan Rockwell: Henderson, which is a federal facility.
Peter McCormack: Questioned for three days?
Morgan Rockwell: No, just thrown in jail with drug dealers and criminals and murderers.
Peter McCormack: Under?
Morgan Rockwell: Under absolutely no idea.
Peter McCormack: Okay. So, when were you first charged with anything?
Morgan Rockwell: That became on the Monday, the next day, so a federal court. I was put in US Marshals custody, told charges, made aware of the charges.
Peter McCormack: Three charges?
Morgan Rockwell: Three charges: money laundering instrument, operating a money service business without a licence and asset forfeiture, which isn't a charge, it's give me your money. It's a statement basically, like the punishment on that. So, then I was released but put in county jail for two days because of a speeding ticket that I failed to pay a year ago.
So, I spent about six days in jail and it was an eye-opener in regards to freedom, slavery, the horrible conditions that humans are putting other humans under in those kind of places. You can watch things about jail on TV all day long, but when you're in handcuffs and you're under ten-hour lockdown and you're walking around with murderers that are just trying to look tough so they don't get killed, it's a weird environment.
I was asked by everyone to teach them how Bitcoin worked. It was great, made a lot of friends, but it also was an eye-opener that I need to be strict in my own protocols and how I act with people, how I talk and basically how I'm going to live the rest of my life, because if this is now the future we live in, where you can be arrested for even talking or using Bitcoin, I've had to re-evaluate my last nine years in Bitcoin. Because, teaching the army and the military how to make tanks use Bitcoin, I understand the violence, I understand the warfaring role.
But personally being attacked in that regards and losing freedom, and now literally losing my access to medicine like cannabis, because I'm under federal watch now until this trial happens and I'm a multiple sclerosis patient, so I'm learning how to battle my own body to defend Bitcoin from a government that doesn't even know how to use its own money.
Peter McCormack: Isn't medical marijuana legal?
Morgan Rockwell: Not federally. We've had 38 states. We've had the state of Nevada, the state of California, but this is a federal case done by a federal agency. Homeland Security wants to create federal precedents, because no matter that California SB-129 says Bitcoin's legal tender in the state and no matter that Governor Sandoval, my friend here, made Bitcoin tax-exempt in Nevada and no matter that cannabis is being used by 42 shops here, it does not matter to the federal government, because whether it's hookers, slot machines, Bitcoin or cannabis, the federal government thinks it doesn't have to follow the Tenth Amendment anymore and state rights don't exist to them, especially in regards to national security, which the Homeland Security has the forefront on that.
Like I said, we're in a declared state of emergency, so every president has continued that. They're allowed to go full range like a military force. Posse comitatus has gone, habeas corpus has gone, Glass-Steagall has gone, everything that's protected us from banks, from militaries, from persecution without lawyers, it's all gone. There's an unconstitutional zone from 100 miles from the border and the ocean, because you could be a potential foreign terrorist there and we can't give you constitutional rights. Now foreigners, Supreme Court said, "Indefinitely detained".
Peter McCormack: For someone who isn't based in the states and we don't understand this, where is jurisdiction with state and federal law?
Morgan Rockwell: It used to be that if the federal government said, under Obama, through his memo, an example is cannabis, if the states are following state law and are breaking federal law, but are not breaking state law, the federal government will not be allowed to enforce upon them in any way.
Judge Sessions, who is not the greatest person in the United States, who runs the Department of Justice, removed that memo so that he can not only go after immigrants, but go after California, Nevada and any other state that he says violates state laws or federal law. So, that precedent is just a matter of who's going to enforce it. It's all on paper. Would the governor declare a statement of emergency in California and Nevada? Would the Army National Guard, would the State Military and the State Police defend the state from the Feds? That's happened in our American history.
We've had state troops block the borders from federal agencies from coming in. We've had California just get threatened, as a sanctuary state where immigrants can come and be free, to get ICE pulled out and they'll lose their TSA, they'll lose their border patrol and then they'll lose their federal funding. That's the threat under a federal government, "We'll take our money from you". That's how the world works here.
We're a capitalist society and if you lose federal funding for schools, hospitals and freeways, let that kid go to jail because we don't want to lose that. But in regards to Nevada, there is no federal licence for prostitution and you could go outside the state limits to the bunny ranch, you know what I mean. The federal government's picking on the casinos now over cannabis; they're afraid of losing their casino gambling licences but it's a federal thing because they have to put their money in FDIC banks. So, it's literally all about money and are you allowed to touch my money? Well, we have to give it to the Feds, so we have to follow the Fed rules.
It's the same way the UN acts, got to follow a lot of these UN rules which may be crazy, crap rules like birth policies or a Codex Alimentarius, which is the rules of what food are; and the UN says, "If you don't follow these rules, you lose and you're in court immediately". So, they're playing people on what rules to follow. In the United States, state rights are very important to our constitution, it's our Tenth Amendment, but they're not really listened to.
We're talking about throwing away the Second Amendment over guns when it really gives me the right to have a pitchfork and flamethrower. They're debating semantics when the words are broad to protect us for future changes. But changing a gun to a laser to a flamethrower, changing a dollar to a Bitcoin, changing Marinol which is synthetic THC, and the FDA has a patent on medical marijuana, but the states are not allowed. It's the insanity of our words and our laws in this country; nothing adds up.
I created something on Bitcoin called Bitcongress, which was pushed to Ethereum and a lot of people to write law, to vote and appropriate using the blockchain. If we don't start writing our own laws, we're stuck in that word mess. It's a 200-year-old word mess. We just scratched out the three-force human, the savages and the women and now they all have votes. The constitution was butchered, but it was horrible in the beginning; it needed to be. And just scratching out lines and adding things to it, that's where we're going now and eventually we may scratch out the Second and the Tenth and the Fourth.
I have a joke on Twitter where it's the First Amendment is 50% gone, the Second Amendment is 60% gone, the Third, Fourth and the last three are all 100% gone. So eventually, when all ten are 100% gone, maybe we need to do a constitutional convention and rewrite the whole damn thing. We're at this state where we are living by caveman rules in a world of Terminator, and that's where I feel is my place, is to make people aware of that, because have you even read the constitution? It doesn't even have periods. They write paragraph-long sentences; they're even in a different language than us. So, it needs to be rethought; why are we even following some of these rules.
My dad was a native American, a Cheyenne. They don't believe in the constitution in Pomo Territory and North Dakota, they don't believe in that piece of paper on hemp. They believe they had rights given to them by nature and the constitution says, "Oh you have rights by God, we're just acknowledging them". Whether you believe in God or not, that's what the paper says. But you go to the UN, man made these laws and man could take them away.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Morgan Rockwell: That's the kind of word semantics that Nietzsche and our philosophers of word and history say, "Hey, be very cynical with what words you use", because in Bitcoin if you call it a currency, it's a currency. If you call it a commodity, it's a commodity. You call it a security, it's not. But to quote Max Keiser, "This is the first new asset we've had in 400 years. It's not any of those", and they tried to make it illegal under the Stamp Act because it's timestamped, and they're trying to say you can't spend stamps in the US as a currency. They're all these old words trying to be thrown on it and we just call it Bitcoin. We, as bitcoiners, don't know what it is.
Peter McCormack: No.
Morgan Rockwell: We get mad when someone calls it the blockchain instead of Bitcoin; it's because you have to be very picky with that.
Peter McCormack: Okay, so look, back a step. So, you're charged with three things.
Morgan Rockwell: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: What can you tell me about where you are in the legal process right now?
Morgan Rockwell: I did my arraignment; I had a lot of supporters show up. I raised about 16 Bitcoins to pay the legal.
Peter McCormack: Which is amazing.
Morgan Rockwell: It was very important, because I hired David Chesnoff, who is a very famous lawyer here and he's helped a lot of people involved in the gambling industry, he's helped bitcoiners, he's helped a lot of very famous people in Las Vegas's history. He's very close to the family that helped build this city. So, I hired him specifically because I know he knows what he's doing. He helped get me released on a bond through some friends that helped sign over their property to make sure I was payable and released, because you have to have someone else pay.
Peter McCormack: What would have happened if you hadn't got the bond?
Morgan Rockwell: I would be in federal detention right now, like the eight other people who were arrested before me for the same charges. Someone was caught with felony ammo possession, been in jail for 320 days now.
Peter McCormack: Eight have been arrested for?
Morgan Rockwell: The same exact two first charges. Every other third charge is different.
Peter McCormack: Right.
Morgan Rockwell: They're trying to create precedents in every district, southern district, eastern district, northern district with the same laws so that they can say that every district was violated and we need to pass a law to change that.
Peter McCormack: Have you spoken to these other people who have been arrested?
Morgan Rockwell: No, but I've talked to a lot of the people helping them. We have Abolish the BitLicense group, which is literally trying to stop the licence in New York that makes Bitcoin illegal unless you have a $100,000 licence. All those little shops that used to have Bitcoin got kicked out and that is based on Charlie Shrem's case which is connected to Mt. Gox's case which is connected to the Silk Road's case. These cases are what the precedents have happened in Bitcoin.
So, there are three criminal cases, whether it's a hack, robbery, a not filing an SAR or running a website where people are buying weed. Those are the precedents we're at in Bitcoin and they want to make an even crazier precedent that just selling Bitcoin is bad or buying it is bad or not telling them you have it is bad. There are Bills in Congress right now that if they pass, you have to declare your Bitcoin at the airport. If that happens and you lie and they catch you lying, you can expect punishment.
That's the world I don't want to see us walk into. I feel that we need to fight that in a legal stance; that's where I'm at now. I'm pleading not guilty, defending this myself.
Peter McCormack: It doesn't make sense, right; this whole bringing Bitcoin -- you were never actually bringing it in.
Morgan Rockwell: That's where the law needs to hear that and that argument needs to be told, that you don't possess the Bitcoin, and the First Amendment, privacy of my password, is how it works. Until they realise that, when you move an abacus bead but you don't own the bead, that's what they're going to realise in court. But if we didn't do this and I didn't go to court, you wouldn't even know these eight other people were arrested and we wouldn't even know that someone was intelligent enough about Bitcoin to argue for it in court. Because, I think they would have passed it and we would be screwed already.
Peter McCormack: When I'm travelling in, say I've got my nano with me, as you know I don't have the Bitcoin with me, it's on the distributed ledger and that's access to it. I don't see it's any different from really my cash card in my wallet.
Morgan Rockwell: Well, our Homeland Security has a tool where they can take your debit card, they could swipe it and they could take all your money off of it and freeze it if they suspect you of a crime. Our Jeff Sessions, Head of DoJ, just said they're allowed to do asset forfeiture without a crime, a suspicion of a crime. So, you can expect that if they say, "Hey, we think you committed a felony or a federal crime like buying weed in a state where it's illegal. We're going to take your wallet, we're going to take your credit card, we're going to freeze your funds and if we find a phone, we're going to actually have a new device that taps on it, freezes it and if there's any Bitcoin on there, we've got your private key", if they start doing that, which is expected to happen if the laws go that way.
My whole stance here is to make sure the laws don't go that way. I am going to try to create good precedents to protect that from ever happening and I'm going to fight this case all the way to the Supreme Court to make sure that no one deals with the same situation, because say it gets thrown out and they realise that they didn't do this properly and I'm too crazy for court, they'll go after someone in the same manner again and again until someone pleads guilty to make sure that that becomes law. In the US, precedents is how law is made.
Peter McCormack: Where are you in the process at the moment?
Morgan Rockwell: I did my arraignment which picked dates, gave me freedom and then basically, I'm at a state now where I have to defend myself before trial to try to bring evidence to argue this case out of existence before an actual trial happens, which if I'm not successful, a trial date will be set which could be up to a year or longer. So, this may be a long enduring battle but eventually, when the paper's drawn and the judge signs off, it either becomes good law for Bitcoin or it becomes horrible law for all of us using Bitcoin. I feel that I'm educated enough to defend this and protect Bitcoin as a whole, especially from legal situations like this.
You would have Vitalik brought into court to defend Ethereum, but who is going to do that for Bitcoin? That is one reason why I formed Bitcoin Inc. I formed Bitcoin Inc, he bought Bitcoin.com after Mt. Gox. That man was taught about Bitcoin long after I was working on it. He doesn't have that status in my mind as the representative person of Bitcoin; he's also trying to demonise our brand. So I feel, as the trademark protector of Bitcoin at Bitcoin Inc, which is our doing business as, and the legal holder of the CEO of Bitcoin title, it is my job to protect Bitcoin even in court, because if I didn't exist under that title, who would want to do that shit. That would be insanity for a random person to go fight for Bitcoin use.
So, I literally put myself in this position, after creating the Church of Satoshi, saying Bitcoin was my religion under the First Amendment rights, the freedom of religion. I did that as kind of a joke, but also a protection in the future where if someone tries to persecute you or throw you in jail, it's your religious right. Now, if I have to do that in court, that's what they're going to hear.
Peter McCormack: What are the potential penalties here for you?
Morgan Rockwell: I'm not really sure. To look at it the most extreme way, I did a small transaction and there are people who have gone to jail for a year for doing $1.5 million, the same thing, but they're all felons, drug dealers and criminals and such; they have records. I've never been arrested in my life, not even a speeding ticket. So, failure to appear was the first time. I got a speeding ticket and I just didn't show up, because I was up there in a different county. So, I really don't know.
But if you want to look at the worst-case scenario on paper, $500,000 or 25 years in jail. That's the full potential of them being bad, right, but that's not the reality of our court system. Our court systems are actually probably the most honest in regard to the federal government. They are fair in that regards, that I'm not going to get thrown in jail for the rest of my life for a $9,000 trade; but I'm not going to ever admit that that was wrong in any regards, because I don't think it is. I feel that there's a lot of things that happened in this case that if it goes to trial, I would love to explain it to the world. But if it doesn't, it's not going to get explained and I'm going to be free and no one's going to have to deal with this anymore, because they won't try this again, especially if I put up a big fight.
Peter McCormack: Is there any indication of where this is going?
Morgan Rockwell: I think in the whole spectrum, the same way gold is looked at in the United States, all of these kinds of cases happened with gold, all of them happened with silver over the last 200 years. We've never had these cases with Bitcoin, and gold and silver are literally used by the financial institutions and the government here still.
I think Bitcoin is going to be fully used by the Army, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury and they need to not police us, as the innovators, outsiders, the journalists, the engineers; they need to police themselves. So, they need to make enough rules and laws that when Bitcoin becomes used at the Federal Reserve and Treasury, that there's no one there cheating it, there's no one there stealing it, there's no one there trying, as regards the Silk Road case, to steal all of Ross's Bitcoin.
There is some mad corruption in our government at every level still, but if they're going to use Bitcoin, they want to make sure they can prepare and stop and legislate that from ever happening, which is smart. Our country needs to build smart laws, but smart laws are only made by good precedents; horrible laws are made by bad precedents. Say someone like these other eight people pled guilty, they made bad precedents. I feel that it's my turn and I'm going to make good precedents, because if not, there's just a chain of people pled guilty to selling Bitcoin and how was that a crime? Because everyone admitted that it was. That's how our laws are made here; it's ridiculous.
Peter McCormack: Okay, so strangely, and I'm not sure how to word this; are you kind of glad this is happening in one way?
Morgan Rockwell: Sort of. I'm glad that it's happening to me. I wouldn't want it happening to you or anyone else I know.
Peter McCormack: You understand the question, right?
Morgan Rockwell: Yeah, I do.
Peter McCormack: Because it's got to happen.
Morgan Rockwell: It's got to happen and I'm educated enough to fight it properly. Like I said, my dad was a Marine, I know how to kill and fight and protect and defend and stop bullies, and I'm not going to let the government bully legislation into existence the same way I'm not going to let someone get beat up on the street.
The beauty of Nevada and the spirit of Nevada is we were run by the Mob, people walked around with baseball bats, casinos got built. But the same thing as the sheriff told me, I could do a citizen's arrest on someone on the Strip if they're acting up. And so, that's my right; to protect people. In the same regards, if no one is willing to do that in a courtroom in their chains and under, "Tell us how Bitcoin works?" we could walk into a horrible Mad Max scenario.
Peter McCormack: What's the impact then on your life?
Morgan Rockwell: Besides for the lack of my cannabis medicine, I'm realising how angry I was at 16 before I started smoking weed and it's been a 17, 16-year cessation of seizures. But it turned me into a creative pacifist artist, made a lot of music. I basically have had a completely different diet, completely different sleep habit and a very frustrated angry tone in my brain that I can't really say I've had for a long time.
It's kind of good because you have to be angry to fight something; and something like this serious that I'm dealing with in court, you can't be happy. Anger is a gift, so I'm glad that this is happening to me and not some kid that doesn't know how to be angry and defend themselves, because it's a scary situation, being intimidated by law enforcement, thrown in cages, told that you are breaking rules which, if you believe them, you are. I don't believe them and I will fight that and I worry that if I wasn't the one doing it, we would have had someone a lot more naïve ruin it for all of us.
Peter McCormack: Listen, I could talk to you about this probably for a long time. I am conscious of time as well now, but there is one topic I did have written down that I wanted to talk to you about.
Morgan Rockwell: Okay.
Peter McCormack: You talk about leadership.
Morgan Rockwell: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I'm going to move back into crypto and back into Bitcoin. You talk about leadership, that the leaders have gone, that there's sometimes a lack of leadership now. I wasn't clear whether you thought the scenario, say, with Ethereum having Vitalik is a better situation, or you prefer the situation with Bitcoin where we don't have that. I couldn't see a clear position for you.
Morgan Rockwell: I'll explain that. My relationship with Ethereum was, I was asked to go work there long before Vitalik was from Charles Hoskinson. The idea that Vitalik made Ethereum is a lie; he didn't make Ethereum, he was asked to go work there. He was trying to build things on Omni and Mastercoin and failed and Charles Hoskinson brought him over, because I refused to come over to Zug, Switzerland, because I'm a loyalist to my country and my state and I didn't want to leave.
I was almost duped into that situation where a currency should have a CEO and a leader. I don't think it should at all; I think that's dangerous. I think Vitalik's become the fall guy in the vector attack. When you say he gets by a car when he's not really dead and the price crashes, that's insane. So, my position here is --
Peter McCormack: He's there as the choice whether --
Morgan Rockwell: It's not proof of work there, it's proof of Vitalik. He could change everything he wants under the signing of a pen. I worry that Bitcoin doesn't have a leader in regards to the code, the network or anything. It doesn't have its champions of marketing, its champions of walking into legal environments or its salespeople to get casinos and military bases to use it.
Peter McCormack: But it seemed like it had.
Morgan Rockwell: It did at one point.
Peter McCormack: I'm too new to this space, realistically in it deep for the last 16 months. It was back in 2013/14 first look at it. But it was only when I read Digital Gold that I read a lot of the names of personalities in there, and it seemed we had a bunch of different people on the tech and the marketing doing things.
Morgan Rockwell: I don't want to be a name-caller but every single one of them that you could name, including all three heads of the Bitcoin Foundation, they've all committed crimes, they've all turned over to other tokens and abandoned Bitcoin. Even Roger himself has abandoned the original chain. I don't know why they did that, because I think most people are incentivised by money and money's a good incentive.
I was raised by a very evangelical Christian lady. I look at this as a spiritual mission in my life in the same regards to protecting Bitcoin, to fighting evil. I look at it the same way a Marine might think that he's getting paid for fighting for his country, but there's some Marines out there that think they're fighting evil. Whatever is your motivator in the battlefield, I feel that I'm a scientist fighting for that fish to be able to walk. I don't want nothing to squish it in the process and I wouldn't call the bear evil trying to eat the walking fish, but I will kill that bear and I will kill the next bear and I will make sure that fish gets to walk a little bit first, because if nature doesn't let that happen, we'll never go.
So, my moral of don't be evil is don't let the bear kill the fish before it learns how to walk, because sometimes there'll be a pile of sabre-toothed tigers. Where did they all go? We ate them to survive. Same with the mammoth. Sometimes we have to do cruel things in nature or fight or be ruthless to get to a better world. Like Einstein said, he was a pacifist, "You don't want to fight anything", but he helped build the nuclear bomb with Oppenheimer. He said, "Put that away, go kill Hitler and then go be a pacifist". Right now, I've been a pacifist for nine years in Bitcoin.
Now I feel it's time to be a fighter and be a soldier and like my dad, a sergeant; someone has to tell you where to shoot. That doesn't mean he's the president, he's the commander, he's the one in charge of your life, but a lot of people listened to my dad in Vietnam and took his orders when they shouldn't have and he saved a lot of lives. That's my example is that you don't want to die because of this stuff; you want to survive, you want to have a better life. If you're being ignorant and you're sleeping in your foxhole when mortar rounds are dropping, someone had better tell you to get up and start shooting.
So, I feel that's my place. I know how to speak, I know how to tell someone they're an idiot and I know how to build Bitcoin technology. That's a rarity to have that combination in the space, because there's a lot of pussies; they don't know how to pick up a gun, they don't know how to tell someone they're wrong, they don't know how to tell someone, "That's a load of crap. How can you say that to a child? You're wrong". I feel if that doesn't happen, we will walk down a road of stupidity; and it doesn't mean that you have to be violent or an asshole, but we have to have honesty. Sometimes the asshole is the most honest person. I feel too many people are too nice in this space, too kosher, too PC and I was raised by Rambo, so I'm not like that.
Peter McCormack: We can try and wrap this up. What's going on project-wise with you? What is the other stuff you're working on?
Morgan Rockwell: Man, before this, I was literally working on a lot of important things at Counterparty that I've put aside for a moment just to focus. But I feel that Counterparty, the original second layer of Bitcoin, is going to become very prominent; it does everything Ethereum says it could do, does everything all these other tokens say they can do and now that we have the Lightning Network, which is basically instant payments, when you connect that to the token system of Counterparty, which is on top of Bitcoin, I believe that's what we will call the new internet, the new browser, the new TCP/IP. It's going to be Lightning, Counterparty, Bitcoin.
I've been a developer at Counterparty for about four years and I've done a lot of projects on Counterparty. I have things like Rick and Morty has these monies in the cartoon, the blemflarcks and the flurbos. So, I created these tokens as like the Rare Pepe or the Kitties. These are digital assets that could become scarce trading cards, gamified tokens; I think that needs to be marketed and advertised.
So, I'm building a lot of projects on Counterparty, whether they're something to replace Tether, something to replace the Federal Reserve. As an example, I own "longitude" and "latitude", those words on Counterparty, so you can have the blockchain record GPS movements, so we don't have lies on the GPS movements anymore; something really important to the battlefield when GPS gets used against you. I feel that, as a scientist, I've done things like calcium, glucose and phosphorus, I own those words. So, if a scientist digs up some dirt, those data, those biological materials are tokenised, logged and then responded to the same way a machine responds to Bitcoin.
So, I feel that the tokenisation needs to come and we've had all these snake oil projects for years say that they can do that, but none of them have the Bitcoin security. Counterparty has the Bitcoin security; Counterparty will work with the Lightning Network. There are 100 million junkcoin token movements, but a Bitcoin miner fee's there and that will be, I think, the next few years of all the developers coming back to Bitcoin, coming back to Counterparty, away from Ethereum.
Now that we have Lightning Network, we don't need Ripple, we don't need Stellar, we don't need any of these things that say they can transact faster, because that's a load of crap. We could do 100 million transactions a second now with the Lightning Network. We just need 100,000 full nodes.
Peter McCormack: What are we up to now?
Morgan Rockwell: We're right now about 11,000, 12,000 full nodes and we used to be at 30,000, 40,000 full nodes in the beginning, but there's no incentive to run a full node; it's getting expensive. So, one reason I formed Bitcoin Inc here in Nevada was to build a full-node data centre to broadcast full nodes to every casino and every place in Vegas that wants to use Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I heard about this.
Morgan Rockwell: They have their own dedicated node in the data centre, same way you have your own solid sync drive at Google Cloud. If you want them to send it to you, you psychically have it. So, instead of running a node at your home, you just pay us and we'll put it in the data centre and that facility is basically the backbone of the casinos that want to use Bitcoin.
That's been my three-year plan, it's been a very slow plan. It's been hard to pitch it to the Bitcoin community, they think that's an attack having centralised nodes; but having no nodes is an even scarier attack. Having the groups of people that love Bcash out there saying that full nodes should be expensive and no one should run one, that's an attack telling people not to incentivise the network.
I've been trying to make not miners make money, but full nodes make money, because if the full node makes money, those records are there, those records become monetisable and then the network never goes away. Mining can really put new transactions in, but the full nodes hold everything in history and we don't want those to go away. So, I've done everything from make portable full nodes, to make data centre full nodes, to make a Rubik's Cube looking little box that fits in a room called the Bitcoin box and it's just a full node in the miner. I'm trying to do every marketing scheme possible to put full nodes everywhere.
Peter McCormack: Amazing.
Morgan Rockwell: Because I think that is the end goal of Bitcoin; to have a full node everywhere, have the transaction everywhere, have everyone using it.
Peter McCormack: I've got through probably about 10% of my questions. I could have chatted to you for hours.
Morgan Rockwell: Like I say, we could do another one. Any time you want, man.
Peter McCormack: Do you know what, I never need a huge excuse to come back to Vegas as ever.
Morgan Rockwell: I'm always here.
Peter McCormack: How can anyone get in touch with you, stay in touch with you?
Morgan Rockwell: My email address is morgan@bitcoininc.co or you could contact me here in Vegas. I'm on Twitter @n0defather and I'm also @metaballo on Twitter. That's my band that's also under this indictment, so my band got pretty famous because of the stupid federal case.
Peter McCormack: What kind of band is it?
Morgan Rockwell: I've made a lot of music about Bitcoin, so it's laptop-produced music. But I play guitar and piano and it's been the last few years that I've really focused on making music and art for Bitcoin, the same way there's gifs and memes and everything, because I feel that's part of the battle too; making sure we leave our mark and I've made a lot of music about Bitcoin. Now, if you go listen to that music, it's very relevant to the battles I'm fighting now. So, it's a good reference of that Bitcoin is here to stay, it's been painted on the cave walls, it will be here for ever; the same way that a Native American guy like Drew Kokopelli and the deer on the wall 20,000 years ago.
Peter McCormack: Unless the AI don't like it anymore and they invent a new one.
Morgan Rockwell: Like I said, we've got to do everything we can to preserve ourselves, but also know that that's us. We are the AI, we built it.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Morgan Rockwell: It's our baby and the same way you might love your child, but also be really pissed when it does something and you want to yell at it or throw it off a cliff, it's still your child. We made it and I love AI in that regard. I get mad when I see it used as a weapon; I love when I see it saving lives; I love when I see AI building free arms for kids; I love when I see it saving lives in the battlefield. But it's going to do some childish shit, you know what I mean, so we have to keep an eye on it; it's not all gravy. Being a parent, you know.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Morgan Rockwell: Kids will do some weird shit.
Peter McCormack: Yes, they will.
Morgan Rockwell: AI will do some weird shit, but we can't blame it; it's naïve. The children do not know and AI does not know, so it's still going and we have to think of it like that. We have to be good parents and if the kid gets drunk in your house, you're responsible.
Peter McCormack: All right, man, well listen, we'll wrap it up there. Let's definitely do this again.
Morgan Rockwell: Cool.
Peter McCormack: I really enjoyed that.
Morgan Rockwell: For sure.
