The problem with conspiracy theories is that they put too much faith in central planning. I’m currently slogging through Whitney Webb’s two-volume Epstein exposé, One Nation Under Blackmail, and there is not enough Adderall on the planet for me to keep the cast of characters straight in my head.

Maybe I’m slow, but what if it’s not a conspiracy? What if individuals were acting in self-interest, and sexual deviants just happen to enjoy hanging out with other sexual deviants? Look at all those photos of Epstein and friends. Do these people look like they’re under duress? Do you see Larry Summers blinking B-L-A-C-K-M-A-I-L in Morse code?

Elsewhere, here’s Whitney Webb with FTX and the Curious History of Farmington Bank. In 2022, FTX invested $11.5 million in Farmington Bank, which was owned by a Hong Kong businessman named Archie Chan, who is a business director of Glorious Sun Enterprises, which helped launder money for former Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos, whose wife collaborated with Adnan Khashoggi, who was a client of…Jeffrey Epstein. Dun DUN DUN.

Wait, there’s more! In 2020, Farmington Bank was sold to FBH Corp, which shares a chairman with Deltec Bank and Trust, which provides banking services for Tether, which was co-founded by Brock Pierce, who attended a party in the Virgin Islands hosted by…Jeffrey Epstein. Dun DUN DUN!!

That’s some shady stuff. But, maybe the Curious History can also be explained by distributed self-interest: Scammy crypto projects opened accounts with Deltec because the bank was actively trying to attract new clients with lax compliance controls. Deltec literally advertises “remote offshore private bank accounts” with a $1 million minimum deposit. Adverse selection at work.

Webb then identifies a startup called Fluent Finance¹ working on a US+ stablecoin. Fluent Finance has a partnership with Farmington Bank, which has since changed its name to Moonstone. Webb surmises:

If Tether is set to unravel in the wake of FTX’s collapse, as some believe, US+ seems designed to be the “trustworthy” counterpart meant to herd the “legacy” financial system into the CBDC era.

There already exists a “trustworthy” counterpart to Tether. It’s called USDC and the CEO headlined at Davos last month. Speaking of scammy bottom-dwellers attracting the same – USDC has established a money market mutual fund with BlackRock, and is seeking access to the Fed’s overnight reverse repo facility for that fund. If granted, HODLing USDC will become the equivalent of holding funds at the Federal Reserve.

We know that globalist entities care very much about Central Bank Digital Currencies; the Atlantic Council even has a CBDC tracker on its website.
Still, it does not look like central planning so much as distributed self-interest. Circle began as a mediocre bitcoin wallet, and found that it could achieve competitive advantage by sucking up to regulators. Last August, following OFAC sanctions on Tornado Cash, Tether issued a statement explaining that the company would only freeze Tornado Cash addresses if requested to do so by law enforcement. This is in contrast to USDC, which preemptively blacklisted Tornado Cash smart contracts. Washington Post accused Tether of “defy[ing] US sanctions.”

In the current year, anything less than enthusiastic overcompliance constitutes defiance. There will always be scummy entities that obsequiously cater to the needs of regulatory bodies. Companies that try to strike a balance between regulatory compliance and censorship resistance (eg Coinbase) are NGMI. Fortunately, bitcoin also relies on distributed self-interest. Go crypto-anarchy or go home.

1. This is another case of scammers attracting scammers. Fluent Finance boasts a supposedly illustrious founding team with extensive experience in Central Bank Digital Currencies — Except that it’s all bullshit. All the articles praising their influence are press releases published by their own crappy company, and claims of having invented the Eastern Caribbean Digital Dollar are easily disproven.