Breaking (Down) The Chain: An Investigation Post-mortem
A concise post-mortem on The Chain series, a deep dive on the creation of the Bitcoin-Dollar system which names the names and explains the technology upholding the deflationary and highly-surveillable
Etienne Note: This article also appears in “Government”, Media and Academia Criminality Exposed, A digest of HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of articles exposing and suggesting inter-generational organized crime's control of the "Government," Media and Academia by the Art of Liberty Foundation. You can view the other articles or subscribe on Telegram: https://t.me/Government_Scams
Months of research and 82,000 words later, The Chain series has concluded – at least in its current online form. What began as a simple investigation into the stablecoin issuer Tether quickly unraveled into a decades-long web of figures, companies, investors, and technological mechanisms that conspire to build what is referred to as “The Bitcoin-Dollar” system. This financial instrument consists of two main components; the first being Bitcoin itself, a distributed digital asset boasting deflationary monetary policy and trustless settlement on a transparent ledger; while the second is privately-issued tokenized government debt that operates on public blockchains, known as dollar stablecoins.
The Chain of Custody: The “Mafia” Holding The Elite’s Bitcoin
The companies poised to dominate the digital financial infrastructure of Latin America have arisen courtesy of the self-described “mafia” multiplier, Endeavor. Flush with funds from billionaires linked to the US intelligence and organized crime, Endeavor’s influence over the CEOs it has championed promises that, with the ushering in of a new financial system, a wave of covert dollarization will shortly follow.
These two elements could not be further separated in regards to the publicly-stated ethos of their champions. Bitcoin will circumnavigate the government, and separate money from the State, while stablecoins aim to strengthen the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, provide much needed demand for government-issued debt reserves, and further perpetuate the U.S. dollar as the de facto medium of exchange to the unbanked citizens of the globe. At the surface, Bitcoin and the digital dollar appear as if oil and water, unable to co-exist in the same space, and molecularly opposed.
And yet, collectively, the dollar and Bitcoin are to form the backbone for an entirely new financial system, a yin and yang construction that allows an entirely new commodity class to co-exist with a hyper-dollarized world. It was my opinion before embarking on this research vein – see 2021’s The Birth of The Bitcoin-Dollar – that the coincidence of this structure emerging at the onset of the U.S. government’s greatest-yet threat of a debt crisis was likely not an accident. Upon further investigation of the primordial Bitcoin community, and the ensuing class of stablecoin issuers – not to mention the cross-section of these parties – I must unfortunately now conclude that the emergence of this system immediately after the 2008 financial crisis, and the subsequent phase-shifting adoption of Bitcoin by the institutional authors and beneficiaries of the pandemic’s financial stimulus, was the work of a modern intelligence community that has merged with the Silicon Valley technology meridian since at least the 1980s, but unabashedly since the formation of the CIA’s venture firm In-Q-Tel just before the turn of the millennium.
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The Chain of Issuance: The People and Patents That Built The Financial Surveillance Network
The patent hoarding developers and investors associated with PayPal and Google who built the first iteration of e-commerce and digital advertising have turned to the blockchain to fulfill their vision of total financial surveillance and the circumnavigation of government-issued money.
While not a popular opinion in many circles, the patterns are visible of the now-merged intelligence, organized crime, bankers, venture firms, and technologists within the story of The Chain, and thus the formative incubation of Bitcoin itself. Take for example, Brock Pierce, an early pioneer of virtual assets who worked with Goldman Sachs’ Steve Bannon and modern economists to trial monetary policy experiments in online video games, and whose fellow co-founders of the Digital Entertainment Network – Marc Collins-Rector and Chad Shackley – were both found to be sexual criminals with large stashes of underage pornography. As an early Bitcoin evangelist with his hands in the venture pie of nearly every important exchange and software company within the early blockchain space, the former Disney star Pierce reeks of a private-sector, blackmailed agent of the currency speculator stalwarts that have run the public sector in the shadows. Pierce tellingly commented that “if the government were knocking off people in this field, I would know,” upon the drowning of stablecoin developer Nikolai Mushegian just days after Mushegian stated that the CIA, the Mossad, and the “pedo elite” were going to kill him.
Operation Underworld, one of the earliest unions between organized crime and the early U.S. intelligence apparatus (dominated by Wall Street bankers and lawyers), demonstrated the need for the intelligence state to partner with mob affiliates for better data on ports of the U.S.’ east coast during the second World War, and thus this merger – as outlined eloquently and prudently at the onset of Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail – perfectly exemplifies the reasoning for the mafia and the State to work together – networks, information, and money. In the 1940s, the networks were smaller and slower, the information lossy and hard to transmit, and the money was greenbacks – paper bills that, while serialized, were quite hard to track.
Interestingly enough, it was likely the emergence of more advanced surveillance techniques by the Treasury, the IRS, and their law enforcement partners, that led to the arrest of many figureheads of the 20th century crime syndicate. But these arrests did little to stop the flow of goods from drug runners, bootleggers, and human traffickers, among the many other trades of the blackmarket. In fact, it appears that the intelligence apparatus simply stepped into the void left from the controlled take down of the mob, leading to further consolidation within the centralization of the off-shore dollar market. Off-shore markets are essential to the modern intelligence state, which fights to service the budgets of its black-book operations using clever accounting schemes to launder payments, while also investing via private-brokers into private companies built to privatize projects that were once fully-siloed within the national security state’s jurisdiction.
The Chain of Consensus: The Cartel Behind The Blockchain
While often pitched as decentralized, the key infrastructure upholding consensus on Ethereum has been dollarized by stablecoin issuers. These same entities, in addition to the currency speculators behind Block.One, were willing partners in the set up and take down of Terra-LUNA and FTX.
Take, for example, Peter Thiel’s Palantir, a CIA-cut out that developed as the private-sector iteration of DARPA’s TIA, or Total Information Awareness, which was founded after advisement from the CIA’s Alan Wade and the architect of TIA, John Poindexter. Today, Palantir feeds off of billions in government contracts to satisfy the brokering of data needs of both the public and private sectors. Their first customer was the CIA, who also provided the seed money for the founding of the firm, and they were subsequently funded by the CIA’s In-Q-Tel. They even accept Bitcoin. But before Palantir was officially incorporated, it began as the anti-fraud algorithm at PayPal, known as “Igor.” PayPal’s first institutional investor was the California tech incubator Idealab, whose founder Bill Gross would later go on to start Near Intelligence Holdings, the “world’s largest source of intelligence on people, places and products.” Gross’ GoTo.com/Overture holds the patent that upholds Google’s AdWords – the backbone of Google’s monetization, which remains critical to the U.S. economy. Palantir itself holds 160 patents for their global surveillance network that all reference patents held by Gross.
Even PayPal’s first board member Scott Banister was a Vice President at Gross’ Idealab, who lent his Palo Alto couch to PayPal’s cryptographer and CTO Max Levchin the week he first met Peter Thiel. The aforementioned Brock Pierce ran the Clearstone Global Gaming Fund formed out of the Idealab facility Clearstone Ventures, which was co-founded by Bill Elkus, a trustee of Jeffrey Epstein’s J. Epstein Foundation. Steve Bannon, Pierce’s “right hand man,” filmed Epstein for 15 hours as part of a failed effort to rebrand Epstein after arrests for sex crimes, and Howard Lutnick – the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald which holds the Treasuries backing Tether’s USDT stablecoin – bought the home neighboring Epstein’s own (which was previously owned by Epstein) for “$10 and other valuable consideration.” Lutnick, the current co-chair of Trump’s transition team, also sits on the board of the Tether-funded, Earth observation satellite firm Satellogic alongside former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, which aims to provide anyone with the funds to gather human movement data and commodity surveillance from their fleet of cameras orbiting the planet.
All this is to say, it can be hard to know where the lines between the mob and the intelligence state are drawn. But make no mistake, The Chain‘s construction was not intended to be as transparent as the blockchains they manage. Nor was it built in a day. Ironically, it was likely our government’s own want to circumnavigate their own legislation that pushed the intelligence state firmly into the private sector.
When bureaucratic red tape – see: The Constitution – prevents the acquisition of certain personal data of citizens from government-funded data brokers, the private sector becomes available as an enabling environment for otherwise unconstitutional surveillance. Many of the defenders of the free market, which are certainly rooted in well-read intentions, miss that the regulation and deregulation via the public sector leads to a further lack of competition in the formation of king-made networks and market monopolies, which often lead to further customer restrictions on speech, all within the framework of supposed free markets. The internet and Bitcoin’s blockchain take a similar misdirection dialectic, but via a differing philosophy – decentralization. Bitcoin is less decentralized in nature than it is distributed, with its consensus mechanism standing across rungs of infrastructure that uphold our internet, and the panopticon leviathan living inside its fiber optic cables. No longer will the Federal Reserve’s 12 regional Fed banks decide monetary policy or limit reserve settlement to those within their regulatory regime, but the energy generators, the chip manufacturers, and the internet service providers – at both the software and hardware level – become the new industries of consensus. The neo-banks, likely to emerge from FinTech-integrated social networks – an industry pioneered by Peter Thiel at PayPal and Facebook– are ready to embrace the oncoming regulation presumed to be imposed at the onset of Trump’s second term.
There were millions in campaign financing waiting for a candidate to so brazenly champion the blockchain industry, and thus Trump’s campaign pivot on Bitcoin should be of no surprise. It his affinity for stablecoins however – no better exemplified than his appointment of Howard Lutnick as co-chair of his transition team, whose firm Cantor Fitzgerald holds billions in government debt for Brock Pierce’s Tether (not to mention hundreds of millions in Bitcoin) – that offer a quiet-part-out-loud insight into his plans to service our ballooning debt via the sale of securities to the blossoming stablecoin industry.
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