U.S. Treasury ATTACKS This Middle Eastern Giant's STRATEGIC BITCOIN RESERVE!!! | EP 1595

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The US. Treasury has launched another attack on Iran for using Bitcoin. But the more interesting thing about this story is the fact we finally got an answer to what many people have been wondering surrounding how much Bitcoin Iran has accumulated through the Strait of Hormuz. Or even put further for some people, has Bitcoin even been used for the Strait of Hormuz payment fees? And from what we're hearing, it's an amount of Bitcoin that would make Iran a Bitcoin juggernaut with a sizable strategic Bitcoin reserve. As the monetary reset quietly approaches, Iran is showing us what the world's superpowers will be forced to accept, which is Bitcoin as a neutral world reserve currency. It's happening in real time, guys. This is a... I was trying to think of the name for it. It's kind of like a test pilot, right? Iran, whether you love them or hate them, whether you think they're bad guys or they're fighting for their freedom, I think that is irrelevant at this point. It is confirming a lot of the theses that us Bitcoiners have been saying for a long time, that this is what Bitcoin was meant for. This is why Bitcoin is unstoppable. Though we will talk about that for a little bit once I get into the details about exactly what's going on. So without further ado, let me get into this. So we saw this yesterday. I'm sure you guys maybe saw it, maybe didn't. So at 2:06 p.m. yesterday, basically right when the show ended, the Treasury Department tweeted this. Today is part of Operation Economic Outcast, of course. We've seen the developments in the Middle East has, depending on how you want to view this, one read of what's going on in the war in the Middle East is the US is kind of realizing that the kinetic aspects of this isn't going to work, that we can't as, wait, am I, we can't just, I'm sorry, I'm trying to wait for two minutes, bomb the H out of Iran, like Trump likes to say, and get this war over with. I think that was the intention.

As of now, what we're seven months into this, they realize, well, that's not going to work out. So now they have shifted their strategy to an economic war, which obviously, I think, from the very beginning, has been part of the playbook. But now they're going full force and trying to sanction Iran, trying to basically cut off all the money. So just before I get into it, if you understand a little bit about what's going on in Iran, yes, their currency is hyperinflating, but on top of that, what we're seeing is there's very little cash in Iran. Hence, I think we covered this a couple of days ago that the Iranian regime is essentially open to, hey, look, we're not gonna stop Bitcoin use in our country because we need just money flowing in any way possible, by any means necessary. And so this is a continuation of this story. Again, I've said for a while that, look, it doesn't sound that good when I say it, but one of the silver linings or one of the big winners of this war in the Middle East is that Bitcoin has been put on the geopolitical landscape. It is a macro asset now because of all of the things we've seen happen around Bitcoin in the last couple of months. It is in the global mainstream conversation now. It's no longer just, you know, you nerds on the internet on Twitter using it. It's like, hey, this is a matter of survival, and we might have to look at Bitcoin very seriously. That's what we've seen happen. Again, it was very interesting to, here at the start of the Iran War, that Bitcoin was being used very prevelently. And further, there is a lot of rumors, and I will probably touch on that in a little bit, that Iran's been a big-time Bitcoin user for a long time. We have nothing official coming out of how big their quote, strategic Bitcoin reserve is, but this report here or this press release from the Treasury Department does give us a little insight into how much capital Iran is using in Bitcoin, in dollar terms, okay? So that's, it's super interesting to watch. Anyways, going further. The Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Asset Control, or OFAC, designated key components of the Iranian regime's digital assets-based sanctions evasion infrastructure. Targets include BitBank, a priority digital assets venture controlled by OFAC-designated Iranian financier, Babak Zanjani, BitBank's developer, Pistaz Samour, electronic trade company, and three associates of Zanjani. Now, going further, Scott Besson quote tweeted and goes, Today's designation of Iranian digital asset infrastructure make perfectly clear that efforts to finance the Iranian regime using cryptocurrencies are not beyond OFAC's reach. I will probably add a little commentary on that as we move further. If you support the Iranian regime, the Department of the Treasury will sanction you. So Scott Besson coming out here and throwing threats, throwing threats at everyone. Okay. Anyways, now let's read a little bit of this press release from the Department of the Treasury and it goes, Operation Economic Outcast disrupts digital asset exchange enabling the Iranian regime. Of course, today OFAC designated BitBank, a priority digital assets venture controlled by Babak Zanjani, as part of Operation Economic Outcast. Today's designation also includes a developer and three associates. Quote, today's designation of Iranian digital assets infrastructure makes perfectly clear that efforts to finance the regime using crypto are not beyond OFAC's reach, as I just read. Anyways, here's where it gets interesting. All right. Here's where we really get, I think, the meat of what is going on. It's not clear and cut. It's not a concrete. I was going to try to use concrete in the beginning, but it's kind of a vague, like they didn't give us the exact numbers. All right. So since June of this year, again, OFAC designated Hormuz Safe Marine Services Authority, which is the Strait of Hormuz payments. Remember that made the news headlines that, wow, okay, the US is going to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. And it looks like the ROGC was essentially trying to extort, extort all the, you know, the boats passing through the Strait of Hormuz and saying, hey, look, you want to sanction us off of the dollar system? Cool. We've been cut off. We're going to accept Bitcoin payments for passage through, or safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. And one of the companies is this Hormuz Safe Marine Services Authority. But it goes, they were using BitBank to transfer payment it received to the Iranian regime. The action directly strikes at the architecture Zanjani built to launder funds and transfer hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin to the IRGC, including digital asset platforms and their supporting developers.