Ben McKenzie

You were allowed one chapter of your bank, one physical location.

And so sometimes people would set them up as far away from their depositors as they could where the wildcats roamed.

And once they had your money and you had to get there by horseback or whatever, they could just run off with it.

And so there was a lot of fraud as well as instability.

Since the Great Depression, that's where securities laws come from.

Because there really weren't securities laws at the federal level prior to the 1930s.

And securities laws are basically predicated on disclosure.

Like you need to know who you're giving your money to and what they're doing with the money.

It's very broadly defined under American law because human beings are very inventive and we're always coming up with new investments.

A lot of them are legitimate, right?

The vast majority of them are legitimate even if they don't work.

They're well-intentioned.

But you need to have rules around it so that fraudsters can't exploit people.

And that's what we realized.

Because in the 20s, you could do anything.

You could corner the market.

It's essential because in October of 2008, this thing called the Bitcoin white paper is released on the scriptography mailing list, the small list of cryptographers that communicate with each other.

And the white paper just lays out the sort of intellectual foundation of Bitcoin, both their cryptography, but also the goals.

What are we trying to do here?

So it's the height of the subprime crisis.