In this solo talk, Bill Barhydt explains how U.S. banking regulators, empowered by the Patriot Act, have created a "choke point" that allows banks to terminate accounts for businesses they disapprove of, such as Bitcoin companies and legal marijuana dispensaries. He describes how this policy has been exported internationally, with U.S. pressure forcing Australian and British banks to shut down correspondent banking relationships unless they also block MSBs, leading to a near‑total shutdown of MSB services outside Western Union and driving up remittance fees for consumers. Barhydt shares how his personal anger at these restrictions sparked a decade‑long commitment to provide banking services to underserved, rural, and bottom‑of‑the‑pyramid populations. He uses humor and a metaphor of "blowing up City Hall" to encourage the audience to channel frustration into constructive action for financial inclusion.
Chapters
So in order to launch this service, I have now become more or less an expert in what all of this means. Now, that shouldn't have to be the case, but it is. And I'm not going to— unless you want to know, I'm not going to bore you with what any of this is. And maybe these days things have changed a lot. 6, 7 years ago, nobody in Silicon Valley cared about any of this stuff. Now, because of Bitcoin and other technologies, Everybody in that world knows what an MSB is, money service business, whereas back then nobody cared. And I'll tell you a small story about our latest and greatest incarnation of government value. Anybody here ever heard the phrase choke point? No. You're lucky. So in our— you're all familiar with Patriot Act, I'm sure. And so in our infinite wisdom, the US government has decided to basically give the banking regulators the power to choke off access to bank accounts for businesses that they don't like. And that was intended basically to cut off businesses that might somehow be providing money laundering services or payday loan type services that the government doesn't like, regardless of whether you agree with their opinion. So they're not valuing the the legality of those businesses, they're creating a value judgment as to whether they believe those services should exist at all. And basically, they empowered these banks to go in and terminate those bank accounts. So it's to the point now where if you're opening a money service business in California or any other state in the United States for the purposes of, let's say, running a Bitcoin company or a legal marijuana dispensary, You cannot get a bank account. It is almost impossible. And if any of your friends with people across the street that are in the Bitcoin business, trust me, it's impossible for them to get a bank account right now. And in some cases, they're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to do what you can do by walking into B of A for free, which is insane. Okay, but it's worse because now they've started going to Australian governments, British governments, and saying, hey, if you don't start shutting off these customers of your banks, we're going to shut off your correspondent banking access to the United States. And that's trillions of dollars of money movement every day. So if you're an Australian bank running a $100 million a year money service business through your pipes, and you're doing half— $5 billion in correspondent banking with the United States, what are you gonna do? You're gonna shut off the MSB account. So every single MSB except for Western Union has now been shut off in Australia. And customers are now basically paying 2x the fees they were paying to do remittances before because they're forced to do it through the banks. This wasn't the intent of their good intentions of Chokepoint, but this is what happens when we start to interfere as a society with free markets and things that are basically working to help people. And so this has gotten me— to a boiling point, right, that I just haven't— I've never experienced in my life. Now, I love stand-up comedy, right? So I'm trying to basically put this in perspective. And it turns out that— I was listening to your cheers before and your— I don't know what you were saying when you were all standing up before. And, you know, I think that, you know, motivation comes from different places. But ultimately, it's the reasons why you do things that matter the most. And anger is a dangerous thing, right? I mean, look at what's going on in the presidential politics today. But, you know, anger can also be a good thing, right? Because it's basically caused me to do things that I otherwise wouldn't be doing. If you had said to me that, Bill, you're going to be focused or be spending the next 10 years of your life trying to provide banking services to people in rural countries and in the bottom of the pyramid, I would say I wouldn't even understand what that meant, right? So the fact that I've had— I've spent all this time in that community trying to even understand that is, you know, it's been the biggest surprise of my life. But it was probably the anger that I felt about how things are that's driven me to that point. So anyway, so somebody sent me these quotes which I thought were hilarious. And so You know, I'll let you read them. I'm not going to read them out loud since I'm on video, but, you know, metaphorically speaking, while you probably— I'm not encouraging you to go out and blow up City Hall, I would say that you can, you know— well, physically speaking, I'm not suggesting you go out and blow up City Hall. Metaphorically speaking, you can go out and blow up City Hall by basically doing something about the things that you don't like, right? I don't like the fact that we are the biggest money launderer in the world through U.S. banks, but make it almost impossible for a legal immigrant to get a bank account. That makes no sense to me. That pisses me off, right? So I'm willing to basically stand up and spend a lot of time working and giving the next 10 years of my life to solve that problem. So I don't really recommend anger as being a key driver. But if you can funnel the energy and it gives you the motivation to stand up and take action, it can be a good thing. Thank you.
