I think that the holidays feel like frozen noses. I love walking with the dog for long periods of time.

Hopefully it's snowing and you've got to wrap up warm. So I think a frozen nose is a sweaty armpit

because your wrapped up so warm but then you're climbing hamps and heath and you get to the top

and you're like, and then you can see the breath but then your nose is still freezing to touch.

Join in every sip with red cups now back at Starbucks.

I wonder if I can get you to play translator for me with the Treasury Department.

Sure. I'll try my best.

That's Jason Bartlett. He's an expert in international sanctions policy.

Among other things, he studies North Korea.

So he was the perfect person to help understand this statement from the Treasury Department from early May.

It says they sanctioned virtual currency mixer blender dot IO blender, which is used by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, aka North Korea,

to support its malicious cyber activities and money laundering of stolen virtual currency.

I wonder as an expert on all of this, if you could put that into plain English for me, what does that mean?

It was a very significant measure by Treasury because it was the first ever designation of a cryptocurrency mixer.

And why that matters is that for the past year and a half, the Biden administration has really tried to wrap its head around cryptocurrency

and how it is potentially used to finance that activity.

And if you use crypto to finance shady things like terrorism or nuclear weapons, you don't want a digital trail.

And that's where a mixer comes in.

Think of it as a technology where you put in one kind of crypto and another kind comes out.

So some mixers have different functions.

Some allow you to put in Bitcoin. It can come out of Ethereum or other times they allow you to switch around the addresses.

So it's really hard to tell who is putting the crypto when, where, and why, and how it's coming out.

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