#801: Proving What's Real In The Age Of AI with Bryan Jacoutot

0:00 You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

0:28 I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Brian Jacatel, welcome to the show, sir. Thank you very much for having me, Marty. I've been a longtime listener, first time joiner of the show, so I really appreciate you having me on. Well, I appreciate you coming on and appreciate the work that you're doing behind the scenes.

0:51 As I was describing or explaining before we hit record here, you're working at the intersection of one of my favorite niche topics within Bitcoin, which is using the blockchain, the time chain, Bitcoin's timekeeping aspects to prove that certain digital artifacts existed at a certain point in time in a certain state. And so I think that's we're going to cover today so if you're interested to learn about how bitcoin can help prove that things existed at a certain point in time particularly as we barrel into the future of ai si whatever we're calling it these days i think you definitely want to stick around for this conversation but before we get into the comment that yourself and raphael cordon um sort of put

1:44 into the united states court system just a little background how'd you become passionate about this and what was the aha moment for you well i've been in bitcoin for a while um it's probably been we're getting close to 10 years now i think i i jumped in right around the very top of that bull market in 2017 and learned some hard lessons uh along the way i also started much more kind of distributed in terms of what my interests were in the space it was more crypto and i got i think i got in on the basis of ethereum actually because as a lawyer um you know the smart contract i I remember the smart contracts were like a huge thing back then. And so that was just my natural kind of entry point.

2:26 But I started trying to incorporate into my practice as well, because I do general commercial litigation, but I wanted to focus more in that blockchain space. And so when I started going down the rabbit hole, so to speak, and really trying to learn how the technology works from a first principles basis, so I could explain it to my colleagues and get them to join me in this great revolution and everything.

2:47 I realized that, you know, Bitcoin was different, that it wasn't just kind of the MySpace to everyone else's Facebook and now Instagram and all that TikTok, that there were foundational things that set it apart, including the fair launch, trying to do that, that very careful balancing of incentives and disincentives for updating Bitcoin's blockchain.

3:14 truthfully with a group of people who have no real connection to one another. And I realized that that didn't necessarily scale into everything the way a lot of the other crypto space was trying to kind of push it. So I then just kind of went straight into Bitcoin and essentially tried to fold that into my practice. And so for a few years, it was just that, right? It was just like looking for Bitcoin clients, you know, stacking sats, all that fun stuff. And then I came across the video put out by Carlos's team about the Guatemalan elections and how they used Bitcoin to help kind of certify and verify the authenticity of those elections.

3:55 And being a skeptic, as someone, again, who went into the blockchain space to revolutionize everything and then realizing there wasn't necessarily a whole lot of air there with a lot of those projects, I was very skeptical of what Simple Proof was saying. So I looked into it, though, and Carlos was gracious enough to disabuse me of my original skepticism.

4:12 And he was one of those things that's great is, you know, I think Bitcoiners get a especially Bitcoin maximalists get a reputation for being very toxic and, you know, not evil, not approachable. And Carlos was very much the opposite. And so I learned a little bit more about what he was doing. And then I asked him, you know, hey, can I can I help? How can we work together?

4:31 And so we started working about ways to essentially introduce introduced his tech and what he's working on into the American election systems, into American companies and things like that. And so that's what we've been doing. And of late, we've we've focused, too, on the litigation side of things in the courtroom side of things, because we realize that there's great potential for this technology there.

4:52 As as artificial intelligence kind of gets more ubiquitous and deep fakes get a lot better. We realize that there's there's some there's some use case here. And I don't want to go too much into it because I know we're going to talk about it as we go. So but yeah so that how I got connected with this project And now we just trying to incorporate into all these different areas where we realize that finding the digital truth is really really important And it getting more and more difficult to ascertain or to discern for the average Joe So yeah that how it all started Yeah, I think taking a step back, and Carlos has been on the show a couple of times now, this point has explained how Simple Proof and the Open Timestamps protocol works. But for

5:35 those who are listening now who may not have heard those episodes, maybe that's a good place to start is leaning into what Simple Proof was able to do for the Guatemalan elections and then in Screvin County, Georgia during the 2024 election cycle. Let's just hone in on those use cases and explain how things are working on the back end technically with Bitcoin.

5:59 Yeah, and I'll always definitely defer to Carlos and his team on the super technical side of things. I'm obviously on the more legal side and the practical application side. But in serving that role, I've got to understand the technology at a basic level. And so essentially, it is an offering that's built on top of Peter Todd's Open Timestamps Protocol, which is something that I think was introduced, I want to say around 2016. Might have been even a little earlier than that. But it basically allows you to append to any Bitcoin transaction, any sort of arbitrary digital data in the form of a hash. So the same way that SHA-256 underpins Bitcoin's cryptography and blockchain, it also underpins this service offering as well. And when you send a Bitcoin transaction,

6:47 you're sending a cryptographic transaction and putting that into a block. And then that block is getting a proof of work attached to it. And then another cryptographic nonce is attached on the end of that. And then you're linking your blocks through that protocol. And this just does the same thing. But instead of sending, you know, six Bitcoin to John on December 3rd, it takes any sort of digital file and reduces it down to a cryptographic hexadecimal hash, which is something where I think we're pretty familiar with. They look a lot like a Bitcoin address. And that serves as basically a timestamp of that digital file that it existed in a certain way at that point in time. So you've got kind of two things being verified here. You've got one

7:31 that the digital file contains the contents that make that hash. And then two, that it occurred in block, you know, 900,000 or whatever. So you have a time aspect and you've got a content aspect. And what Carlos and his team did in Guatemala is essentially take the election records, you know, the physical election records, they get reduced down into digital form, and then they're passed along for reporting purposes and things like that.

7:53 and they started hashing the digital version as soon as it was reduced from the physical version. So essentially, once you got it to a certain point, there's obviously elements of fraud that could happen prior to that reduction to digital form. But once it's hashed, that is now unalterable for all intents and purposes once it's hashed into Bitcoin's blockchain.

8:12 So anything that happens after that point, you can be sure is the truth. And if you have any questions about whether someone altered it later, you can just go back and compare hashes. And so if there's been any alteration, then that hash will not match up. And so he did that with the Guatemalan elections, which I thought was very interesting.

8:31 And so then he started working with Screbin County. And that's where a little bit I get a little bit more involved. I'm here in Atlanta, Georgia. And Screbin County, I think in 2024, did kind of a basic certainly at the end of the 2024 elections. They certified the election result, which gets posted to Facebook and social media and all that.

8:50 they sign it, the election supervisor signs it, and that's it. But what they also did was they certified, they hashed and digital timestamped the election result as well, so putting it into the Bitcoin blockchain. So in 2024, this was probably less of a problem, although still in 2024, the gen AI is pretty good, even at that point. But once it's out into the internet, on social media, what have you, people can tamper with it. People can mess with it. People can make it look like you wrote something that you didn't write in or they can delete things that were in there. And so the idea was essentially that Stacey Scott, who's the election supervisor down there in Screven County, was able to, once she certified it and posted it, she was able to freeze it,

9:34 freeze that digital information in time by creating a hash and putting it into Bitcoin's blockchain. And so she got essentially an extra layer of security for her certification that other counties don't have. Now, 2024 obviously went kind of, I think, very well, pretty smoothly in terms of the election processes, but it's not always going to be that way. And we're hitting another election in 2026 here in, I want to say it's about a month away, or actually early voting starts, I believe, tomorrow here in Georgia. So it's going to be a tight one again. The whole control of the Senate and the House is in the balance. A lot of governorships are in the balance. So We are going to be in tight tight tight territory And what we did here in Georgia to kind of build on what we did in Scriven County is in Georgia we allowed to do what called Dropbox surveillance for our mail Dropbox

10:30 ballots so when you request an absentee ballot in Georgia you can fill it out mail it in or you can fill it out and bring it to your polling location and there's a little Dropbox kind of just out there and folks are able during voting hours just go in and drop it off and that kind of alleviates any potential problems with the United States Postal Service. And these drop boxes are required to be monitored 24-7, or at least when they're operational. So if you take them out, you put them behind a locked room, then you don't have to monitor them. But if they're operational, then they have to be monitored. And so it's either got to have a physical person there watching it, or you can use surveillance video. And a recent state election board rule says that you can live stream that

11:12 surveillance video. I think that's a pretty decent rule, pretty well-intentioned rule in that you You want to increase transparency and auditability around the elections. You want to show your people, nothing's going on in front of these Dropboxes. We're going to live stream it, right? We're going to record it for you, and you can take a look yourself.

11:28 The problem is now with the sophistication, increasing sophistication of generative AI, is that those Dropbox surveillance video recordings become a potential liability. and they may end up actually honestly kind of doing the thing that they don't want to do, what they're trying to prevent, in that folks can capture the live stream, run it through a Gen AI program to make it look like something nefarious is going on.

11:53 Maybe it looks like there's ballot box stuffing going on. Maybe it looks like there's voter intimidation. You can have someone standing out there and you can literally put someone in there just kind of looking intimidating and it'll look pretty convincing. I mean, it's shocking how good these programs have gotten.

12:09 And so, you know, what this guards against by what we did in Scrabins County is we take the video in real time and hash it into Bitcoin's blockchain using the simple proof method, using the open timestamps protocol. And so you have a definitive proof of what the video looked like at essentially like one or two seconds delayed from when it actually was captured, which is pretty nice because once these surveillance recordings are finalized and they're eventually subject to the Open Records Act here in Georgia, which means anyone can access them.

12:42 And once you access them, you can give them to whoever you want. There's lots. There's a there's an organization right now that just makes them available for folks who want them. And again, I don't think anyone's doing anything wrong here, but the potential for someone to do something wrong is very apparent because then they can take that, alter it, make it look like something bad happened.

12:59 And if you have a tight election, which we're probably going to have here in Georgia, you can really sow seeds of distrust, mistrust, and just generally have the population question what is otherwise a fair election. And it'll look really convincing. But what Screven County has, and unfortunately right now the rest of Georgia does not, is they have kind of presumptively valid evidence in the form of their timestamp of what the actual video looks like.

13:25 So when someone comes in with an altered video, doesn't matter how convincing it is, if we hash that video file that they have, and that hash does not match the one that's in Bitcoin's blockchain at a certain block, then we know that that was altered after the fact. And so we can use this to allay people's fears almost immediately as to the veracity of the election results, as opposed to having essentially he said, she said about what the real video is.

13:51 Grevin County or the state of Georgia saying one thing, manipulated video purveyor saying the other. And then we spend weeks or days or weeks or months litigating what's the real video, whether actually in court or just in court of public opinion. And all that time, we've sowed seeds of distrust in our elections.

14:08 So for us, this is like really low hanging fruit. It's something that everybody can implement pretty cheaply and pretty quickly. And it provides this great barrier against people trying to show seeds of dissent and associates of questioning in our election results. Yeah. I mean, to your point, it's extremely simple proof.

14:28 I mean, it's in the name. It's extremely simple, stupid, relatively cheap. But the implications are profound. The ability to, again, prove that something happened at a certain point in time or prove that something was in a certain state at a certain point in time, I think is wildly underappreciated right now.

14:49 And again, specifically due to the nature of AI, generative AI video specifically, it's going to be impossible to discern real from fake AI videos. It already is getting that way. I mean, I makes AI videos. We do generative AI content here at TFTC. We have been doing it for over a year. And just the progress that the video models have made within 14 months is astonishing.

15:20 If you project that forward, we're going to get to a point where you literally cannot discern. And so creating an environment particularly around critical functions like elections where you can have some semblance of truth anchored in the Bitcoin blockchain is extremely valuable Yeah absolutely And it you know it this energy and this computing power that you know, makes up Bitcoin's proof of work that's already all out there doing the great work of securing Bitcoin's transactions, why people are comfortable saving their life savings in it, you know, why they're comfortable saving their grandkids' inheritance in it. And so it's out there, you know, being used already, but we can piggyback on it. And, you know, I know we just had

16:05 our recent kind of, you know, hard fork problem with the BIP-110 and kind of the fork that came out of that. I understand the, you know, the criticism of, you know, we're being careful about not polluting Bitcoin blocks with just arbitrary data. I think that there's a real genuine argument for that. And I'm in support of the general concept of not doing that. And that's why this protocol is great because we're not, you know, you could take any amount of data, it doesn't matter how large it is and reduce it to a, you know, 56 bit or 56 hexadecimal hash, 56 character hexadecimal hash, whatever it is. That's real low weight in terms of data. So you can just do that over and over and over again. And, you know, I think everyone would be, you know, of the opinion

16:50 that we're not cluttering Bitcoin's blockchain with JPEGs and things like that. Yeah. So moving on to the letter or the comments that you, I guess, presented to the United States court system, moving from elections to just trials and cases in using Bitcoin as courtroom evidentiary standard as a standard to basically prove that evidence existed in a certain state at a particular point in time.

17:26 Again, seems like another low-hanging fruit. You came out with a thread. You have comments, which I can pull up here. We're probably not going to read the whole thing, but Logan, we will. We're definitely not going to read the whole thing, but just a flash on the screen. That's as brief as I can get as a lawyer.

17:43 We're worse than ChachiPT when it becomes being butlimous. 11 pages of comments here, but basically saying, hey, in the world of AI, there's going to be a lot of problems in terms of people trying to fake evidence. And we should create the standard around hashing data, digital data into Bitcoin to prove that evidence existed in a certain state at a particular point in time.

18:05 and you highlight some precedents of a few instances where this has happened already. And I think there was three cases, I believe, that you cited in the thread and in the letter as well. Frazier versus Southeast Georgia Health. Was that Mendones versus Cushman and Wakefield and one other, but basically a combination of AI generated video presented as evidence that proved to be fake.

18:39 Somebody, I guess, in the early 2010s, manipulating the clock on their Windows system to manipulate metadata to make it seem like something existed earlier or later than it actually did. And the third is escaping me, but I think these three precedents and instances highlight why this is a valuable function and how would hashing this data using a simple proof-like tool change the way we operate within the court system, particularly around evidence.

19:20 Yeah, so we – the rules of evidence are drafted on purpose to be a little bit broad. You don't want to draft a new rule every time a new piece of technology comes out because the rules take a long time to make. There's a lot of hoops you've got to go through, a lot of procedures and stuff. So you would be constantly playing catch up and never able to do so because the pace of technology changing is just dramatic.

19:44 However, there are certain times when technology becomes kind of so persistent that you maybe do want to address it directly. I think the idea of a digital hash is one of those, particularly the use of a digital hash into a distributed blockchain like Bitcoin. And so what we're doing is essentially saying that in general, you can prove that a digital file existed using the basic rules of evidence.

20:13 You can have these kind of burden-shifting framework where a proponent of the evidence says, this is my piece of digital evidence. Then the opponent says, no, no, no, that's been faked or that's fraudulent. And then you go through this whole kind of back and forth of trying to determine who was right.

20:31 you just use your basic rules of evidence and your basic evidentiary burdens, you know, in civil court, it's going to be preponderance of the evidence, you know, more likely than not, um, that this evidence is real or fake. Um, there's a lot of, there's so much energy and resources that goes into that.

20:47 And, you know, today I, I, litigate all the time. I very rarely use physical evidence in court, if ever. It's always some form of digital evidence. And so going forward, it's only going to be more and more voluminous in the amount of digital evidence you're having to deal with. And it's not just when you're physically in court. When you are doing the discovery process, if you've ever had the misfortune of being part of a lengthy litigation, you would know that the kind of most expensive and resource draining is typically the discovery process where everyone's exchanging information with each side to try to prove their claims. And so it's essentially all electronic now. There's very little physical

21:34 evidence changing hands. People are just handing over zip drives and things like that or links to portals and then boom, you're off to go look at a million documents. So it's hard, number one, it's hard to discern which of those are real and which of those aren't. So it would be great to have a, you know, just being able to sort of presumptively say our business practice, let's say, as us timestamp, every contract that we enter into with a supplier, every time we sign into it, right?

22:01 We do the docusign and then boom, we digitally timestamp our signed document into Bitcoin. That would be great to have to point to if you're in a business dispute and someone puts forward a contract that doesn't have a digital timestamp, right? You can immediately say, whoa, this is suspect. We're going to have to, number one, take a look at it.

22:19 And if it looks like someone on the other side of this was messing with figures, messing with numbers, we have a great piece of evidence to now give to the court to allow the court to make a pretty quick decision as to whether this is authentic or not. But assuming we don't have that, the process is crazy expensive.

22:39 For example, you go to Discovery. You change documents over. someone challenges one of the documents on the basis that it's been altered or is fraudulent. Then what will typically happen is you have to have a hearing before a judge. The judge will assess the challenge and say, all right, I'm going to need some briefs on the relevant state of the law surrounding this issue. So everyone goes back, writes their briefs, gives it to the judge. Judge considers them. Then judge says, okay, let's have some targeted discovery to see whether this other piece of discovery is authentic. So you got to go through a whole new set of targeted discovery. Then maybe you have to bring a couple of experts in to assess

23:18 the viability of the evidence. Then maybe you have a hearing and you finally decide and you get to resolution at that point. What I just described is months and months of time. It is hundreds of thousands of dollars at times. Getting experts in, lawyers in, all that. They're charging hourly. They're charging hundreds of dollars an hour. It gets crazy expensive. And then, you know, after you have your resolution from the court, there's a possibility of appeal, right? Like someone could always appeal the judge's order.

23:45 So then you go all the way up and you do that. As I said, it gets incredibly expensive. So if we have, on the other hand, if we have something like a digital timestamp associated with the contract or the piece of evidence, it's just part of the normal course of business of these operations, let's say, because everything has to kind of, this is all, none of this is post hoc, right? This is all pre-challenge or pre-issue. But if you have implemented this process in your business or whatever it is that you're doing, under our proposed rule, the courts will then be able to say, if someone presents a digital timestamp on Bitcoin saying, hey, look, here's our contract. Here's the hash of our contract. And then you look

24:28 into block 900,000, you say, here's the hash of our contract when we signed it. And those hashes match up, then the court's able, under our proposed standard, to consider it a rebuttable presumption of authenticity, meaning basically the timestamp matching the document that we have here suggests that the document is what it was when they say it was. Now, it's a rebuttable presumption, right? So that means that the other side is still free to try to challenge it, but you may have just cut off an entire, you know, that whole thing I just explained, you may have just cut off 90% of that or 80% of that just because you implemented in your business this common practice of timestamping. Now, technically, there's ways to do this now with the existing rules of evidence,

25:18 but you still have to bring in like a qualified person or potentially an expert to verify the timestamp and you sort of explain to the court how Bitcoin works, all that. What we're hoping for is to kind of really reduce expenses by just getting a rebuttable presumption embedded in the rule. And again, of course, it's not bulletproof. So that's why the other side can always challenge it. And they're more than welcome to. But we think this will very significantly cut down on costs and streamline litigation. Whereas AI in general is really making litigation a lot more complex.

25:53 It creating obviously you have these evidentiary problems but you also getting pro se litigants going to ChatGPT and filing lawsuits you to what ChatGPT says it should do and in ways that they never would before They're writing these massive briefs. They're having ChatGPT write the massive briefs and going to Core's pro se litigant, which is really cluttering resources. So this is actually one way to pull that back a little bit, and it just uses Bitcoin to do it.

26:20 What's up, Freaks? This rep was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. Got the new BitKey here with the screen. We've been talking for 17 years, not your keys, not your coins. How do you make that as easy as possible? And that is what BitKey is bringing to the market. It's a two or three multi-sig self-custody setup where you have the hardware device, you have the mobile app and a key and block servers in the cloud. There's no seed phrases.

26:38 It's easy to set up. You can go from opening the package of the BitKey to having a wallet and receiving sats within five minutes. I've done it myself. It's very easy to set up. On top of this, BitKey has incredible recovery and inheritance features. So what happens to your stack when you die? The usual answer is seed phrase and safe and a prayer your family figures it out.

26:55 Bickey has inheritance built in, a real design handoff, no multi-state coordinator spreadsheet, no lawyer holding your keys, no subscription. It's self-custody designed for decades, not just for setup day. It's part of the Bitcoin only block stack, Cash App Square and Bickey, built to move Bitcoin forward as actual money. So download Bitcoin today and use my promo code TFTC10 to get 10% off the new Bickey. All right, freaks, you know, I don't take sponsor money from products I wouldn't use myself. So listen up. The Avon Bitcoin Visa card is one of the most interesting things I've seen in the Bitcoin lending space in a long time. Here's the deal.

27:24 You can get a line of credit up to a million dollars backed by your Bitcoin without selling a single sat. No games, no annual fees, no minimum draws. And your Bitcoin is custodied by Bitco, one of the most trusted names in digital asset security. AVEN never lends it out. There's no rehypothecation. You stay in control.

27:40 You can lock in a fixed rate for up to 10 years. 10 years, that's 10 times longer than most lenders out there. Or go interest only for up to five years. Rates start at 8.99% APR. For a product that lets you keep your stack and still access liquidity, it's hard to beat. On top of this, that's what. You also get 2% unlimited cash back every time you use the card.

28:00 Spend fiat, keep your Bitcoin. That's the whole game. If you've been stacking for years and need liquidity without triggering a taxable event, this is worth a serious look. Go to aven.com slash Bitcoin. That's A-V-E-N dot com slash Bitcoin. Check it out. Let's double click on that. How fast is the emergence of AI beginning to clog up the courts?

28:25 And at what point do you think the pressure builds to such a degree that it forces the hand of the court system to figure out a solution to make sure they can cut out the noise and discern the actual signal of who has a legitimate case to bring to the courts in the first place? Yeah, I mean, it's a very good question. I don't really know what the point is, except to the point where it's paralyzed, right? If the system becomes truly paralyzed because we're getting too many pro se litigants filing too many briefs and motions and all that in cases, then I think what will likely happen is judges will be forced to be much more stringent with sanctioning sort of frivolous lawsuits.

29:15 And unfortunately, I think there's going to have a lot of people who get sanctioned for, you know, maybe they weren't wanting to do the wrong thing, but it was just it was just voluminous. And they kept filing motion after motion. I mean, it can be considered essentially harassment at a certain point.

29:29 And judges are going to have to police that they have the inherent authority to police their own dockets. And so they can I think they'll be lenient for pro se litigants because you do want to balance. Obviously, there are worthy pro se litigants who don't want to hire an attorney who want to go in and prosecute their claims.

29:46 They have a right to do. But I also see judges after a while saying, OK, if you're going to bring a claim, you've got to you've got to back up what you're saying. And if it is you can give me one bad brief, but if you give me another one with these hallucinations or just improper statements of law, all that, you know, you can get sanctions and having the take the claim thrown out with prejudice.

30:07 So you can't bring it elsewhere again. And maybe even monetary sanctions to start to deter people from filing some of these claims. I don't think we're there yet, but I could I could see that happening. And I've already read cases where these some of these litigants were not only using AI to file the claims, but they were using AI to kind of alter evidence a little bit more in their favor.

30:30 And so that's a that's a quick sanction. Right. That one got kicked in and dismissed with prejudice. but nevertheless cluttered the court's docket for quite a while and it kept them from doing other you know meritorious cases and eventually that balancing is going to have to we're gonna have to find the right balance there because you don't want to deny someone their day in court but if you're allowing everyone to kind of abuse the system with ai then you are effectively denying someone their day in court just someone on the other side who's not using the ai for the case that was dismissed with prejudice, how did they use AI to manipulate evidence?

31:04 As mentioned, I believe in the comment, it might've been the one that escaped you, but I think they tried to alter the eight second video clip and it was found out and eventually it got dismissed and dismissed with prejudice So that means whatever the underlying claims were there, even if you had a good case, you can't bring it later.

31:26 So it's it is. I believe it's in the comment, though. So I don't know the exact citation. And getting back to implementation details of what would be necessary to have this actually make sense and be viable at scale. I mean, you said it can't be post hoc, it's got to be pre hoc. And so with that in mind, there's got to be practices and business flows at particular businesses and then personal flows when you're signing particular contracts to make sure that you're hashing this on the go.

32:03 And so the idea isn't that you want to present a case or you have a case brought against you and then you start using this to prove that something existed. at that point, it's almost too late. So there needs to be widespread adoption and normalization of doing this hashing into the protocol now so that in the future, if something happens, you can say, well, actually, I had this data hash in the chain. Here's what it looked like when I hashed it. Yeah. And I think it's a great way for Bitcoin companies to kind of lead the way, kind of like selling what we buy or buying what we sell, excuse me.

32:41 It's a pretty low-hanging fruit option. It's not intensive for the operators to do, and it doesn't cost a heck of a lot either. So you could implement it at scale across your organization. And the potential headaches that it saves you down the road are very real. And we've obviously discussed a few possibilities.

33:02 But even avoiding... Those are litigation possibilities. but even avoiding it altogether, even if there's a reasonable disagreement among parties and someone thinks they have the most recent contract and they just don't. And if the business ends of that dispute can work that out on the front end, being like, look, let's go compare it, right?

33:21 Let's go see. I know you got an email that was this version, but let's go see what we hashed. And, you know, you just avoid an entire litigation that nobody really wants to be in. So there's a lot of there's a lot of economic incentive to do so, I think. Yeah, completely agree. And so what are the next steps?

33:41 Obviously, you presented the comments. What's the process from here on out to make sure that you can use this as a rebuttal? And then where else could something like the comments that you and Rafael put together be presented? Is it state by state, county by county? Does it have to happen at the federal level?

34:00 How does this all work? Yeah. So at the federal level, it will the next step is the committee is considering it, I think, at the moment. They have a meeting in a few days where they will kind of publicly discuss what the what their agenda is for amending the rules, if anything. That committee is just like a subcommittee of a larger committee of the judicial conference.

34:23 and if it gets enough weight behind it, enough support, eventually it can be implemented by the Supreme Court, the United States Supreme Court, putting them into the federal rules of evidence. And that's how you amend the rules. You can also put it into a comment to kind of explain things. So it doesn't necessarily have to amend the rule itself if it's a comment kind of adding to an existing rule, maybe helping explain that this is one way you could satisfy this rule.

34:50 That would be helpful too. It's a little bit less, I think, burdensome to try to get that off the ground. On the state level, though, you can also go state by state because every state has their own rules of evidence as well. And I think it's probably a little bit more accessible for folks to try to do at the state level.

35:10 Your representatives in the individual committees are a little bit more responsive, I think. Although I will say the federal committee has been extremely responsive to us. They've been they're reading it. You know, we were able to go back and forth with them about, hey, we're thinking about doing this.

35:25 And they kind of told us how they'd like to see it presented to them. So kudos to the federal committee for that. But, yeah, state level, same thing. It doesn't go down to the county level. Rules of evidence are state by state or federal. And I think if we can if we can even get one state to change theirs along these lines, then all of a sudden you've got a nice kind of laboratory for the federal government to observe, see how it works in practice.

35:52 And that might be that might be maybe if this if this doesn't pan out this time, that might be the next logical step is to really focus in on a single state to get them to to adopt this standard and just show everybody how it works and that it works. And in a lot of ways, that's what we're doing with Screbin County on the election side.

36:08 We've got a great election supervisor there who's who's a big Bitcoin or big believer in Bitcoin and also a big believer in fair elections. So we're using her county to show that this stuff is workable. It's efficient. It not going to drain anybody budget And you know it a relatively rural county It not like it Fulton where you have this huge IT department And the idea being essentially if like we can implement it there we can implement it in any county What's the response within Georgia been to the Screbin County example of using this?

36:41 I think it is consistently, wow, that's really interesting. But I'm too busy to implement it right now. Every county or state level operator that I've worked with has instinctively known that that's extremely interesting and there's a great use case, but it's really about them. We're trying to make it as easy as possible for them. We don't want them to alter their lives at all.

37:04 And it's really, I think, again, having it continue to work in Scrabble County will create the window of opportunity for us to finally get it on a statewide basis. And to be honest, the discussions that I've been having lately indicate that that moment's getting much closer. I think people are ready to, there's just, in Georgia, there's so much discussion, as elsewhere, there's so much discussion around election security. It is one of the hottest issues. I mean, we're still a swing state right now. And although we, you know, I don't know if we're as much of a swing state as we were, but, you know, the map's changing a little bit. But nevertheless, everybody's interested in election security. And I just hope that we're able to get it at a statewide level before there's

37:50 an issue rather than after there's an issue. Because as we discussed, this is a preparatory measure. It's not really a reactive measure. So I think we're getting there. It's just about kind of continuing to bang the drum, TikTok next block for this as well. Georgia has also a part-time legislature. So they're only in session 40 days a year. And those 40 days are just hectic. Everything has to be done. Yeah, everything has to be done in those 40 days. And it's hard to get your foot in the door. But we've been hanging around, I think, just long enough that I do believe we'll be able to get something done at a statewide level as long as we continue doing what we're doing.

38:31 What's up, Freaks? This episode was brought to you by Simple Mining. I'm sure many of you listening to this right now, own Bitcoin and own it the same way. You go on an exchange, you buy it, sweep it to the cold storage, maybe keep it on the exchange and you pay full price. There's a smaller group of business owners, family offices and investors with sharp CPAs that are quietly getting theirs a different way. They own the machines that make it. Here's how it works.

38:51 You buy the miners at Simple Mining. Simple Mining hosts them, runs them at their facilities in Iowa on industrial power rates you can never get on your own. The Bitcoin they mine goes straight from your machine to your wallet. Two reasons I find this interesting right now. The second one is the one that nobody's talking about. One is the economics. Cheap power. This lets you convert your electricity into Bitcoin at a discount spot. You're acquiring the asset below the sticker price everyone else pays. Two, and listen closely, if you've had a big income year, you're making a lot of money out there. I know a lot of you freaks are making a lot of money. Miners are classified as computer equipment with a big, beautiful bill. Equipment means depreciation. Qualifying buyers

39:23 can write off the entire purchase in year one. It's the same playbook real estate investors have run for decades, pointed at Bitcoin. Your CPA will want to see this before the end of the year. And with attractive financing available, you can deploy without selling assets to do it. This is not a garage operation. Simple Mining runs over 40,000 machines, which just ranked the fastest growing company in Iowa on the Inc. 5000 chart.

39:43 They put together a valuable resource called the 2026 Bitcoin Mining Blueprint, covers the five mistakes investors make when allocating to mining and how to avoid them before deploying capital. You can access it for free at simplemining.io slash tftc. That's simplemining.io slash tftc. Freaks look at me.

40:01 I'm glowing. I've got like an angel's halo going around me. You know why that is? I feel good. I feel taken care of. I feel blessed, healthy, happy. And that is because I'm a CrowdHealth member. My family and I have been CrowdHealth members for five years now. Literally this month, five years ago, we joined CrowdHealth.

40:16 We've had two babies. We've had multiple health events and we're never going back to health insurance. CrowdHealth is crowdfunded healthcare. So you sign up for CrowdHealth. You pay a monthly fee. You help out with other people's bills. and it's significantly cheaper than health insurance. We were on Cobra as a family of three.

40:34 When I left my last job before I went full-time with CFTC, went on the crowd health. Now as a family of five, we pay, I believe, $700 a month. It's significantly cheaper. They're going to negotiate prices lower for you. They've consistently negotiated healthcare prices as much as 50, 60, 80% in many cases.

40:53 They help out with babies. If you have a pregnancy, you pay the first $3,000 and the crowd covers the rest. if you have a regular health event, you pay $500 and the crowd pays the rest. Go to joincrowdhealth.com. Sign up today. Use the code TFTC. Opt out of health insurance. I'm uninsured baby and I love it. Use the code TFTC at joincrowdhealth.com and you'll get $99 a month for the first three months that you're on the CrowdHealth platform in the community.

41:18 Bitcoiners, you found sovereign money. Now find sovereign health and sovereign healthcare. Yeah. So your point about being preparatory, not reactive. I think the Guatemala election is a great example. Like they were prepared and they were actually able to prove that the incumbent was trying to manipulate records after the fact.

41:36 Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating. And I guarantee you, like with generative AI getting to where it is, there will be at the end of this election, someone will use gen AI in a way that is targeted to undermine confidence in the elections. And I think eventually, once that's happened, folks will realize that this is a clear and present problem. And hopefully, they'll have enough to... That'll give them enough to implement this. And we'll be ready to go, right? Because we've been trying to tell them for a while. And the nice thing is, at Scriven county we've been able to you know pilot it and show that it works and next thing is just doing it at scale yeah i mean yeah my mind racing too like doing at scale

42:22 it's like you just get a docusign or sign now or one of these companies and say hey i'll pay five dollars extra a month for you to automatically broadcast a transaction that hashes the contract that i sign into bitcoin's blockchain yep It can be that simple, that automated. I mean, it's... What does Satoshi say in the white paper?

42:47 The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. So is this. Yeah, that's a beautiful thing. So what would you say to anybody out there agreeing, yes, we should do this? What can they do? What are the easy things that they can do? Pick up the phone, write an email, reaching out to representatives or should they reach out to the state court system?

43:14 How do more people get this on more radars of courtrooms across the country? Yeah, I think there's a couple of things you can obviously reach out to me or anyone at, I think anyone at Civil Proof would want to help you wherever you are. So if you want to say, I want to get this implemented in my state or in my county, obviously you want to talk to your elections officials, but I think you should talk to us so we could all coordinate together.

43:36 A lot of these election officials are somewhat challenging to get to get a hold of. So, you know, we've been working on that for a while. So we're getting pretty good at it. And so we would love to be able to help you with that. But really, it's about doing it in your local local jurisdiction. If you happen to be a lawyer that is interested in this, maybe talk to your talk to your bar association or folks that work on the rules of evidence in your in your state and kind of bridge it to them.

44:02 And I guarantee it'll take more than one touch. Right. Because most people go, oh, that's interesting. I'll think about that. And they go about their day. But if you're persistent and you're able to do it in your own locality, again, all it takes is just a couple of one, really, one of these taken off where something that was kind of a quirky side project becomes just part and parcel to the process down the road.

44:22 Yeah. Beyond the intersection of the law and hashing digital records into Bitcoin's blockchain via open timestamps, what's your broad view on just like the status of the law as it pertains to Bitcoin privacy, custody rights? I saw that you were tweeting about the CFTC basically allowing non-custodial CoinJoin implementations to operate without having to get a money service provider license.

45:00 What's the state of Bitcoin in the eyes of the United States government right now in your mind? Well, it's a lot better than it was, I don't know, five years ago. So I think that one of the things I was tweeting about was the FinCEN rule where they had originally published part of these agencies. They're all creatures of the they're kind of like hybrid creatures of the legislature and creatures of the executive branch.

45:22 So when they they have this dual power to both make rules and regulations and also enforce them. So that's problematic under our Constitution for separations of powers reasons. So when they change their regulatory scheme to include other things, they have to do what's called a notice of proposed rulemaking where they say, here's the rules.

45:42 We're thinking about promulgating as an agency. Let the public comment on it and say, you know, basically either support it or say something that you don't like about it. And it's kind of a long process. So then, you know, they promulgate the rule. They do like a 90 day public comment period. And then they take it under advisement, essentially, and either issue a rule or retract the rule.

46:04 This time, the FinCEN was an NPRM on what they called structured transactions, which was basically just reusing or not reusing wallet addresses, you know, just doing a fresh address every time, which is pretty much Bitcoin 101 at this point. Like you don't want to be putting everything into the same Bitcoin address.

46:23 It compromises privacy particularly if you interface with a KYC exchange So it not even mixing right Like this is just this good practice for Bitcoiners But FinCEN was targeting it and was looking to classify it as a form of CVC convertible virtual currency mixing, which would have put you on the same playing field as Samurai and things like that for just not reusing an address. That was extremely dangerous. That came out, I think, during the Biden administration, I want to say it was 21, 22.

46:58 It got tabled for a little bit and was re-put out again, I want to say possibly under the Trump administration. They got the notice and comment period. Coin Center did a great job filing a comment. Other folks did a very good job filing comments saying, hey, this is way too much. And they just, the thing that I was tweeting about was, I think, FinCEN retracting that rule.

47:21 So that regulation is not going to be in effect. And I think that's a huge win that number one, it shows that these agencies are not just, you know, they're willing to listen to folks who comment. That means that taking the time to comment on these things, while it is a bit arduous, can be expensive, too, if you engage a law firm, which I mean, coin centers and nonprofits, they engage a lot of lawyers and law firms and things.

47:44 And but it's worth it. Right. You can actually change the regulation, change the future way that the United States government views your use of Bitcoin personally. And that's also part of like that's why we we filed this comment. Right. A lot of people might think it's shouting into the void. A lot of people might think it'll get overlooked or not even considered at all. But you never know.

48:06 You might just change the rules of evidence and make things really easy on folks going forward. So I think it's just great that the government is interfacing with Bitcoin in this way. Obviously, there's there's that it's not perfect. Right. Like there's there's a lot of things that I don't necessarily agree with.

48:23 I don't think, you know, you should be prosecuting mixers at all in any in any event. But, you know, it's it's good to see that they are willing to make adjustments and kind of backtrack on bad ideas when they're presented with new information. So it's great. It's great reason for us to continue to do things like submitting this comment here or submitting comments on proposed rules.

48:43 It's not sexy. Right. It's not going to typically doesn't make headlines. But it does the sort of grunt work of making sure that your your politicians and your bureaucrats are are still somewhat, you know, considering the common person in what they do on a day to day basis. what are some of the low-hanging fruits or some of the biggest wins that we could get from a legal perspective that we still haven't won yet?

49:13 I think the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act is a pretty good low-hanging fruit thing that we should be able to get. It keeps getting added into these laws. I think it was part of the structure the clarity act and so it didn't get passed but that's because it was plugged into a much broader kind of market structure bill that ultimately ultimately failed but it was great protection for for developers of blockchain software and application software and things like that basically saying that that you know as long as you're not you know custodying things and you can you can you can write code and not have to worry about getting in trouble for the most part which I think is a reasonable thing is writing code is,

49:56 is really just like speaking in a lot of ways. And we have the first amendment here. It protects one's right to speak, to speak even, you know, unfavorably. And so I think that that should be embedded in our way we approach code as well. And I think the, the, the BRCA, yeah, BRCA was one way to do that.

50:16 And, and I think it has in and of itself, it has probably broad consensus, but it got kind of intertwined with the clarity act. So I think if we could just do a freestanding bill just with that one provision, that'd be great. It'd be a great way to just get a small win for the industry and get Congress thinking about this as more than just, oh, is it a security or is it not a security developer, shadowy super coders, all that stuff, and just do some kind of basic good legislation and policymaking.

50:47 And that's what I think we should try to target first, probably, at least from a statutory perspective. On the regulatory side, you know, there's probably SEC and CFTC are now kind of joining together to issue regulation. So I'm sure that will require a lot of analysis and people looking at that as well to make sure that that looks good, too.

51:11 Chances of repealing the Bank Secrecy Act. What do you think? Not high at this moment I settle for maybe let take the USA Patriot Act out and leave the old Bank Secrecy Act pre Keep your privacy a little bit better But yeah, the Bank Secrecy Act has been a thorn in the side of privacy advocates, I think, for quite a while.

51:38 And Patriot built on that. And we've just been getting kind of death by a thousand cuts in terms of privacy land. the fourth amendment i'm not sure how much it really does at this point uh because we've we've we've endured so much so much uh you know kind of periodic incursions into our relative levels of privacy that i don't even know if we understand what our you know our parents parents knew and took for granted as privacy i mean i would take an inflation inflation adjustment alone just on the uh the minimums that trigger a suspicious activity report that would be yeah i mean yeah the fact that we're using, I think, figures from 1971, I think 1973 is insane. I mean, it's pulling in everybody. Yeah. And so really tying this together and bringing it back to the comments and using

52:32 open timestamps as a way to present evidence in the court system. I mean, you highlighted some of the benefits that that were provided in terms of the economic efficiency you're not going back and forth because you're able to quickly prove like hey this thing existed at this point in time obviously to election integrity being able to to give the the populace assurances that that elections at least to some degree are legitimate you can prove that certain things happened. Certain votes were cast at certain points in time, but even broader, like what do you think this does for society at large? If this were, if this practice were to be widely implemented across everything that we do in terms of economic coordination, obviously the legal side

53:24 is very important too, but what types of benefits overall do you think this can provide? Well, I think it would be phenomenal as we go forward into this increasingly challenging world with generative AI being so sophisticated where it's hard to tell what is real and what isn't. That problem is only going to get more acute.

53:46 we already there's a concept called it's called truth decay where people not only are people believing that AI videos are real they're now not believing that real videos are real so it's causing everyone to question their reality around them which makes for obvious reasons like potential catastrophe for social interaction and society in general if people can't tell what's real and what's not real on a day-to-day basis. Now, I'm not saying that this solves for that.

54:21 But what I am saying is that the more and more digitized our life is, when coupled with increasing sophistication of generative AI, we're going to need ways to prove digital truth as best we can. And if we can proliferate this into more aspects of our lives, then we're going to have a fighting chance to be able to do that. You know, it can be something as simple as, you know, I think the constitution.org website was hacked, the one that the government controls, and they removed provisions of the PDF on the Constitution, or not the PDF, but it was the website from the constitutional text. And people freaked out for a little bit. It's funny looking at it now, but people freaked out because the official website of the Library of Congress removes

55:06 provisions of the Constitution. And everyone said, oh my gosh, we're losing, we're going to lose liberties and Trump's going to take over or whatever. That's kind of a silly example, but that's already happening now. So just imagine three, five, seven years out, the level of the ability for generative AI to kind of scrape the internet and pull down certain long-held maxims that were on there and what were once widely known. And then just, again, it's instituting that level of confusion and just the skepticism, allowing people or creating situations where people don't trust what they see. That's a nation state or an adversarial attacker's dream, right? How do you want to topple a civilization? Get them to question everything around them.

55:49 Get them to not believe what they see and then believe things that are fake. It's very scary. And so doing things like this will help incorporate truth and give people a fighting chance to challenge that future order. And I don't want to be too much of a doomer, right? I'm not saying that going to happen But this I think is one one arrow in the quiver so to speak of attacking that future And I sure there will be others but there there a lot of potential here And I hope people take it seriously and I hope that they agree with us and look to implement it in their own day to day lives Yeah. So just think of the Library of Congress, take every document that exists there, which is hundreds of millions.

56:31 Yes. Or at this point, get hashed in Bitcoin so that we know, obviously. we're going to get a hash of the state of the document when it was hashed into the chain, but that'll be a good start. Right. If we start that now, we're looking pretty good. If we start that in 10 or 12 years, you might be hashing a lot of fake stuff already.

56:52 Yeah. And it seems like a no-brainer to me. I think push will come to shove. Hopefully it doesn't need to come to shove and people come to their senses earlier, but the earlier we're doing this, the better. And so thank you for spearheading this issue and making it a point to write briefs, write comments, to get out there and actually try to implement this.

57:20 Because I think it's increasingly not only important, but imperative as we parallel towards this generative AI future. And it's thankless work, I'm sure, most times. But I think future historians will look back like, oh, there's Bitcoiners and this crazy idea of hashing digital data in the blockchain actually helps save our ass here in the future.

57:46 So thank you for doing that. No problem. No problem. And I do just want to emphasize, while I work with Simple Proof and they do they do fantastic work implementing the Open Timestamps Protocol. It is an open protocol and anyone can build on top of it and kind of create their own product. So I guarantee you, Carlos and Rafa would say, hey, go start your own thing, too.

58:05 And let's all attack this together. Final notes, parting thoughts, calls to action. Where should we send people? If you're looking to get in contact with me, I'm just Brian Jacoteau on X. And my law firm is Clark Hill. I speak obviously for myself, not for them here. But if you have any legal needs that I can help with, I'm happy to.

58:29 I'm a commercial litigator, so I do a lot of that. But we're a full-service law firm, and we have our own Bitcoin and digital assets industry team. So we can kind of attack any problem for you from that. And then, yeah, just go check out Simple Proof, too. It's a public-facing website. Go play around with it and see if there's any areas that you think it might be a good place to implement.

58:50 And we'll try to do just that for you. Yeah. It's a beautiful thing. One last parting note I forgot to mention earlier. like even these ai companies training the models they're taking old text uh feeding them the train models and then deleting or burning the books essentially it's like okay guys just get the books put them in pdf hash prove it was a certain point don't delete history on us i know you guys are in a existential race to bring about agi but we got to have these uh historical documents so that we can we can understand where we came from at the end of the day yeah yeah the uh what was the library Alexandria fire was, you know, horrible, destroyed, you know, all sorts of texts.

59:33 But it was obviously an accident. Let's just not, you know, do it on purpose again here now in 2026. So but to the extent that folks are trying to do that, if, you know, simple proof is one great way to guard against that. We can't guard against burning books, but we can guard against the more kind of nefarious process of surreptitiously altering parts of them and things like that, because that's where things get real bad real quick.

59:58 Yep. Ryan, keep crushing it, brother. Enjoy TabConf this week. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate you having me on. All right. Peace and love, freaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family.

1:00:17 We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad-free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app and go to fountain.fm to find that.

1:00:43 $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free. Helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. thank you for your time and until next time okay