Is Hunter Biden's $LAPTOP Coin a Scam? He Says the Wallets Prove It Isn't

Hunter Biden (0:00)

I don't want this to be personal at all, but Elizabeth Warren basically is taking the side of the banking industry. Like, what?

Like, what? Like, what are you talking about? Like, so, I mean, I don't get it.

Laura Shin (0:14)

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this pre-recorded livestream. And first, we'll take a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. This episode is brought to you by Oneinch Aqua, the shared liquidity layer from Oneinch. Back multiple liquidity positions with one wallet balance, and keep your tokens in your wallet until a swap fills. See how it works at oneinch.com/aqua.

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Today's guest is Hunter Biden, artist, author, and recovery advocate. Welcome, Hunter.

Hunter Biden (1:20)

Well, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Laura Shin (1:24)

Yeah, I'm excited to chat with you. So as far as I can tell, your foray into crypto was a tweet reply in June to someone who at least currently has about 2,000 followers, who knows how many they had at that time. This person asked you, quote, thoughts on the entire fiat and financial system being unicorn fart dust? You responded, fiat is a sham, the banking class is corrupt, decentralized digital currency and the blockchain are the inevitable future and the incumbents will fight it to the death.

Before this, no one knew you were interested in crypto whatsoever, at least not in the crypto community. Given the relationship your father's administration had with crypto, suffice it to say people were pretty shocked and surprised. What's your origin story with crypto? How did you fall down the rabbit hole as they say?

Sure.

Hunter Biden (2:19)

What began with me is a strange entry point, which I was the chairman of the board of an organization called the US-UN World Food Programme, which is the largest humanitarian organization in the world, and they're responsible for feeding over, I think, 75 million people in 80 different countries, and they're the first responders to any disaster, whether it's man-made or a natural disaster. And so we dealt with an enormous number of refugees, and those refugees come into communities or neighboring countries, and by virtue of our generosity through the United States government and through the UN and other nations that contribute to the World Food Programme, they end up cannibalizing economies that can't afford to be cannibalized.

And so we had started a program at that time at the World Food Programme, but the UN portion of the World Food Programme started a program to create digital wallets for people, because what we found is the ubiquity of cell phones among even refugees and the ability to transact digitally and to do so on a micro level. And we extended that out to places like Cabira and Dadaab and to other what were former refugee camps or fifth generation refugee camps. And then to subsistence farmers that were able to enter into a kind of a global economy that they had been locked out of because of the international banking system. And so I then was handed a copy of a book called The Internet of Money. And I became kind of a, and at least I felt like I got a better understanding through the eyes of someone who is a kind of a Bitcoin messiah, but more than anything learned about the blockchain. And I think I'll be proven right. I think that blockchain as a technology and as a tool is the future. And obviously, what I said about that saying fiat currency is a sham, is a provocative statement in one way, but fundamentally, it's not a very provocative statement at all. Historically, if you look at, for instance, the US dollar, and I know these are kind of like traditional talking points for people in the crypto space, for at least people that think about this, is that US dollar in and of itself has lost, what, 97% of its value since 1913, and any country and any government that can print money at will, or excuse me, print currency at will, fundamentally is not any real relationship to money, to anything that is real. So at the same time, obviously, central banks and what they have been able to do over the course of the last 150 years in the United States is potentially save us from depressions and major recessions. But if you just look at what happened in 2008, I mean, we printed trillions of dollars.