“You cannot have trust without some form of governance. And governance is basically rules.” Tim Bouma has spent two decades inside government building Canada’s digital identity framework. He’s also building on Bitcoin. This is the conversation about what he’s learned straddling both worlds, why centralized architecture creates problems that better policy can’t fix, and why the future isn’t about choosing between government systems and freedom tech—it’s about understanding what each reveals about trust itself.
You cannot have trust without some form of governance. And governance is basically rules. And if you look at the etymology of the word governance, it means to steer.
— Tim Bouma
Timestamps
02:15Tim's dual roles: government identity architect and Bitcoin builder—why this isn't contradiction
08:42The Pan-Canadian Trust Framework: designing trust infrastructure across jurisdictions
14:20Canada's decentralized structure prevents top-down digital ID mandates unlike Europe
19:55Why standardization enabled railways and how cryptographic primitives enable new social orders
26:33Safebox architecture: storing encrypted Cashu tokens on Nostr relays, accessible from any device
32:10Inverting the security model—everything relies on private key
38:45Trucker protest V2: untraceable payments and ephemeral encrypted messages via Safebox
Tim Bouma is Special Advisor to Canada's Digital Governance Council, on interchange assignment from Treasury Board Secretariat where he spent over a decade developing federal identity management policy. He was a key architect of the Pan-Canadian Trust Framework, working across federal, provincial, and territorial governments to create interoperable digital identity standards. He's currently building Safebox, a wallet architecture designed so no single entity can shut it down.