Even with all the power that they have been granted, even with all of the billions of dollars

that have been spent on regimes like the Bank Secrecy Act and the KYC-A-ML regime, they are still

powerless to stop this type of activity.

Perhaps the answer isn't more power, but a fundamentally different way of looking at the

problem and a different way of looking at the solutions. It feels hard to

imagine how someone will summon up the political will to make that argument when it's so much

easier to say, look at all these corrupt billionaires hiding their wealth from you. One can hope.

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

The Breakdown is sponsored by Nidig and produced and distributed by CoinDesk.

What's going on, guys? It is Monday, October 4th.

And today we are talking about the latest in a

string of leaks dating back a few years that relate to offshore accounts and how the global

wealthy hide that wealth for sometimes legal, sometimes not so legal purposes. Of course, the specific bent we're going to

take on this is what it might mean for Bitcoin and crypto. I will say on the outset, there is not

much here that directly relates to Bitcoin or crypto. These aren't stories of wealthy Russian

oligarchs using crypto to move their wealth. These are the traditional financial world's ways of obscuring wealth through shell corporations,

offshore accounts, and other means like that.

These Pandora papers are the biggest in a string of leaks, but to understand their precedent,

let's go back and look at two other P-name papers.

The first that I want to reference is the Panama

papers. These were published in April 2016, and they detailed financial and attorney-client

information for something like 214488 offshore entities. Now, these all came from the former

...