TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #177: Randy Brito

Episode Date: July 7, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Randy Brito, Co-Founder of Locha Mesh and Bitcoin Venezuela, to discuss: - Starting Bitcoin Venezuela - Co-founding Locha Mesh - The importance of mesh networks - How mesh networks have been used in Venezuela - How to incentivize individuals to use mesh networks - The Turpial device - Bitcoin as a tool to find individual happiness - Getting funding - much more Follow Randy on Twitter Check out Locha Mesh Check out to Bitcoin Venezuela

What's up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. I had the immense pleasure of sitting down with Randy Brito, founder, co-founder of the Loca Mesh Network and BTC Venn down in Venezuela. Randy's been doing incredible work trying to build out a mesh network that would allow individuals to send messages to each other in a peer-to-peer fashion. And this would help Bitcoin out because it would provide another transaction relay network that competes with the Internet. So you don't have to depend on Internet service providers, which could be a centralizing factor in Bitcoin in the future. So Randy is doing some very important work to help make Bitcoin more robust and defensible in the future. This episode of Tales from the Crypt is brought to you by our good friends at the Cash App. cash up you freaks already know all about them if you don't know about them let me tell you about

them they're helping us do many things including stack sets send sets receive sets and sell sets if you so please you've also made sats the standard within the app so we're not buying fractions of bitcoin anymore we're buying whole sats it's a lot cooler when you see that you're buying tens of thousands hundreds of thousands millions of sats when you're stacking sats they've also got an auto dca function you can start stacking sats automatically you can set it and forget it crock pot your sat stacking set it and forget it on top of this they have cash app investing which allows you to stack slivers of stonks listen i know many of you don't like stacking slivers of stonks but there's some of you out there who do and if you want to cash app

is letting you do that you don't have to buy a whole stonk either you can buy as little as one dollar because all this is connected to your bank account you can start stacking sats and stacking slivers of stonks today there are no four to five day waiting periods and hey cash app may even be your bank account now they have account numbers and routing numbers so you can get your paychecks direct deposited into the app it can be it can become your new bank uh should note the cash app investing is a subsidiary of square square square square a subsidiary of square and member sipc as always make sure you use the code stacking sats that's one word s d a c k i n g s a t s you're gonna get ten dollars and ten dollars gonna go to our good friends at owls lacrosse that's owls

lacrosse not that dirtbag ag who just started another podcast but owls lacrosse use the code stacking stats download the cash app and enjoy this episode of randy randy's doing very important work make sure you throw him a follow on twitter i'll put that link in the show notes um support btc ven support loca mesh they're coming out with a with a hardware device very soon um so stay on top of this project if you're liking the podcast make sure you smash that subscribe button and if you have friends family that are looking to learn about bitcoin point them in our direction have them sign up for marty's bent the newsletter uh trying to blow this thing up before uh we rip into this bull market this is not investment

advice but it could be ripping into a bull market who knows smash that subscribe button give us a rate give us a review if you feel so compelled and enjoy this episode love you freaks you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here

getting ready for a very exciting conversation we're talking about exciting tech here uh very pressing tech very much needed tech especially if we're going to make bitcoin as robust robust as possible i'm sitting down with the co-founder of locha mesh randy brito randy welcome to the podcast how you doing thank you for having me here i appreciate you taking some time to do this um you got to give a shout out to um to to a fellow bitcoiner who reached out to me and recommended that that i get you uh on the podcast because what you're doing on loach is a little underscored at the moment uh and again like i like i mentioned previously i think uh it's very much needed to Bitcoin is going to survive into the future.

And these, these mesh networks and we've had other, uh, people working on different mesh networks like Otena and TX Tena, uh, and Richard Myers. But what you guys are doing at Locha is a little different. It's a little bit more open source from what I understand.

So very interested to learn about the story behind Locha, uh, why you started it and, and how it's been going. But before we get that, before, uh, You started Loche, as you were saying, you got into Bitcoin pretty early and have been trying to educate the people of Venezuela about Bitcoin for some time now.

So what's the story behind that? Well, I started learning about Bitcoin around April 2011. And after reading for the whole year, the Bitcoin talk, the Reddit and also the mailing list, I learned enough to feel that I needed to set up a website where people could learn in Spanish and in Venezuela about Bitcoin from a more trusted source and not something that they could find on the Internet that could be kind of misleading. So I started a nonprofit organization, which is BitcoinVenezuela.com, and we started doing educational content and we started giving talks in Venezuela in the universities. I had some collaborators in BitcoinMetro.com that they started making meetups. They started giving away flyers about what Bitcoin is to people to get them introduced into Bitcoin and teach them about it as a way for them to circumvent the capital controls and foreign exchange controls that were in place in the countries in 2003. 2003. So we started teaching people about how they could use Bitcoin right away. So we were not into the mining scene directly. We were not teaching people about it. But

if people ask about it, we basically teach them the basics so they don't get scammed by some ASIC miner sellers in the country and things like that. And by 2014, 2015, there were huge demonstrations and riots in the country, all over the country, so we started taking advantage of the people with the signs, people with making gatherings in some streets and things like that, and we started teaching them about Bitcoin. So there was this situation where some people basically stayed up all night, like taking care of a street, for example. They were basically protecting a street because there were government thugs around and breaking

windows and trying to terror the people in the street. So they were basically vigilant in their own streets and they were like gathering together all night. And so we started, our collaborators started teaching them about Bitcoin while they were all those hours awake during the night. So they started learning a lot about it. A year later, we find out that not only educational content and also talks in the university and things like that

were currently needed in Venezuela. So we started collecting donations also for humanitarian aid. During the protest, we basically gave them medicines, we gave them things that they needed, like water and bandage, things like that. So we find out that some people were willing to donate to Bitcoin Venezuela to continue helping the people

in Venezuela and we started doing humanitarian aid by the end of 2015 until today we continue doing that. We help feed around, we buy groceries and food and provide electricity bill payments and gas for some sub kitchens and also that or elderly other elderly centers and also orphanage so we we help feed around 2,000 2,500 people daily currently in Venezuela with the donations that we receive in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that's incredible um what's it been like watching that develop over

time and and how uh how like has bitcoin as a payment rail made it a lot easier for you to to do what you're trying to do in this humanitarian effort yes indeed bitcoin is currently like the most liquid asset in the country so if you have bitcoin um we we for example have have been helping all these sub-kitchens and schools and hospitals in the country, and the situation in Venezuela is that they don't have a medium of exchange that they can really use. They basically go for whatever they need in that moment. So if they say, I need to get through surgery, I need cell dollars, for example, in a Bank of America in the U.S., so they charge you in cell dollars.

So you need to be able to pay in sale dollars to this person if you want them, for example, to give you food because they need it in that same payment method. So as we have all our funds in Bitcoin, we can easily do that. We can easily convert Bitcoin to sale dollars by paying someone in Bitcoin, this person making the sale transaction for us. We can pay in Bolivar if it's needed because there are some companies like the Buster Factory that we use. For example, they are intervened by the government so they can only operate in Bolivar.

So they need us to make them Bolivar bank transfers in order for them to give us pasta. So using Bitcoin enables us to be able to jump from one payment method to the other instantly. So we can get Bolivars in a bank account like in two minutes, and we can also get sale dollars or even US dollar cash or euros bill notes on the ground, just because we have Bitcoin. So Bitcoin is the one that has enabled us to do this. And we have tried over the years to pay some people directly in Bitcoin, and we have succeeded with some things. One of the examples is we bought a tractor for a farm that we are, a school farm that we have

been helping to reconstruct the past two years and it was like the most expensive uh one in in the in the credit list of the country you know this is mercado libre so people post there they are selling or buying things and it was the most expensive one so we said we don't want it we started looking for the others and the others were like hesitant to accept us dollars or whatever payment method and then we we came back to the one that was expensive and they updated and it said we take make coins and we said okay this is not the most expected well this is the only one who is willing to give up the thing that we want and they are even taking bitcoin now so this is the one we are going with and we made the trade within and we paid the bitcoin to the song and the father

gave us the tractor so it was the bitcoin is the only thing that enabled us to achieve all these actions and and help that we currently do in venezuela yeah it's fascinating to see how bitcoin is being adopted in venezuela specifically right because you have people like you and um others running bitcoin venezuela the humanitarian effort And then we see reports like last week where the Maduro regime is accepting Bitcoin payments for passport services. So it seems like both the citizens and the government are adopting Bitcoin in Venezuela. And I'd be interested to get your thoughts on the Maduro regime's use of Bitcoin and how you view that. What does that say about Bitcoin as a network?

and um obviously maduro has uh he he's seized mining operations in the past so is there like a conflict between the citizens and in maduro and um not a i mean is it rub you guys the wrong way that he's using bitcoin as well or is it just whatever well the thing is that the venezuelan regime like any other regime in the world it's composed of people so there are some people who believe that they basically need gold so they go to the south of the country and take all the gold out and they start selling it in the black market and they use military groups to do that and there others who prefer oil so they go to the east side of the country and start taking uh oil out of the

ground and start selling it to other countries like china or or russia or or other countries but there are also people inside the government and the regime who believe that cryptocurrencies more specifically not on the bitcoin because they basically like altcoins up to the level that they may they own um but the the thing is that the uh there are some people inside the regime who believe in cryptocurrencies as a way for them to achieve their goals and one of the things that they have just started doing is accepting bitcoin directly for the renewal and issuing of passports and well in my opinion that is a really bad idea because if you are getting your passport and that it's attached to your name uh it will also like

kind of be attached to it that you've paid with bitcoin for it so it is this is not a really good idea in a country like venezuela and the current regime and and for me it's not a good idea anywhere that you publicly saying and directly to the government that you are using bitcoin um and even sharing within the your past transactions and your addresses and things like that but just imagine that you you are able to renew your passport which is something that sadly is currently needed for to be able to leave anywhere even in the country in Venezuela or in other countries, you still need an ID document in this age. And the thing is that imagine that you not only disclose to the government directly that you are

using Bitcoin to get your electronic passport, but you also are linking your past transactions and your past wallet with it. And you use Bitcoin for that instead of just using other thing, i don't know better because they don't even take believers anymore but if you've got a couple petros you could pay with it if they are worth anything currently it's not very worth it and it is like one tenth of the government set price and the thing is that you end up using this and you disclose your past transactions to it and you end up paying with one of the hardest coins in the the world, which is Bitcoin. And then it passed like one or two years and you never get your passport because that's how currently the situation is in Venezuela with passports.

That will be like the worst 10,000 Bitcoin ever. So you will always regret about doing that, using your Bitcoin for paying for that and then waiting and not even getting it. yeah that was um i wrote about it last week and that was one of the the main points people were making was like hey this is just a honeypot to identify bitcoiners and uh the bitcoin that they own and it's like it's fascinating they're using btc pay server so they're using it in a self-sovereign way um where there's no third party involved so somebody in the government knows how to set that up and run that and they sort of get that they need to do that And then, yeah, like handing over Satoshis for a passport service that may not come to fruition for years or ever for that matter is totally a bad idea.

But it's because it could be a good case study on how governments would move to confiscate Bitcoin or identify Bitcoiners and then try to pressure them to give up their Satoshis. Well, they already know that you are using Bitcoin. most people usually use bitcoin in custodial wallets and exchanges so uh well in spain i think around 3 000 people got a notice from the irs in spain which is called hacienda and they got a notice that we know that you use cryptocurrency so remember that you have to put them in the taxes so this is like something you got in your uh in your mailbox in your house so they do know that you are using it they basically don't care in the early years in the early years because it's a very little amount but if they see that the dollar signs in their eyes they obviously will

go again and to look for it uh there is also these uh information that someone that trump sometime a few months ago said something about go after that bitcoin so that they know it exists they are not completely ignorant obviously they might not understand it and they might not see it And some people, like most economists also do, they basically don't understand what's the actual, real reason why Bitcoin should exist, which is that it's not an unconfiscable mine. So something that most people don't understand

when they see why all those miners are losing money there, they might be doing it for profit, but the actual use that they are letting people, that they are enabling people to make use of is the uncensorable, the hardest money, which is uncensorable also, and the censorship resistant of it. So it's the real importance of why we need Bitcoins,

being able to pay others. And one of the samples is that most people gel on Twitter that why will I need to mine and get into the blockchain, I'm into the blockchain, written for all the history that I've paid coffee. And I said, I replied to the person because in some countries, just the action of buying that coffee is illegal.

So you do need to be able to do it in a censorship resistant way because you don't know when it's going to reach you or if you live in a country where you are not allowed to do it And your life depends on it. You should be able to do it. Even if no one wants you to do it,

you should be able to do it in a way that no one is capable of intervening in that transaction and no one is capable of reversing that transaction and no one is capable of preventing you from doing it. I completely agree. And that's why I think it's a perfect segue into Locha Mesh on top of the censorship resistance and hard-to-confiscate nature of Bitcoin.

It is pretty well known right now that Bitcoin is subpar in the privacy department. It is hard to attain privacy on the Bitcoin network if you don't know what you're doing, but I think what you're doing at Locha, especially at the P2P level, gets us a step further into being a more private network which is extremely important so what drove you to start uh locha was it the need for better privacy or need for better

and alternative transaction relay networks well the thing is that i always uh i've been out of Venezuela for many years, but I've always been connected to it on this fight for freedom since the money exchange control, foreign exchange control, capital control were imposed. I always try to find a way to let people use their money freely, asking freedom. So one of the things that happened in Venezuela in May 2018, it was that there was a black cow in a city for a whole week. So there was no electricity for a whole week in a city in Venezuela back then. And the thing is that when you have an electricity blackout for a whole week, the thing is that

everything started collapsing. So the current situation is that you have that the entire economy working on WhatsApp in Venezuela. So the entire economy happens there. So trades happen there. Deliveries happen there. When you bring food from the coast and into the center of the country, all the communication will happen on WhatsApp or calls or things like that right so the thing is that after a week of complete electricity blackout even the cell towers stopped working because cell towers have a power generator that if there is a electricity cut for a couple days it still is working but after a week it runs out of gas too so there is no cell tower even if you manage to charge your phone with your car battery with a

with a power generator or things like that your phone won't have any signal at all because there are no cell towers working and that's when i came up with um i wondered how how could you continue making payments and bitcoin payments specifically because i wanted to increase the the bitcoin adoption in the country back back then by uh creating the lucha uh a movement which is was was trying to translate, adopt, and adapt all the tools available for people to be able to use Bitcoin easier and in a more easy way. And I realized that it won't help much if I translate Electron into Spanish completely

and I start making it and make sure that it works on all versions of Android OS and things like that. It won't make any difference if people won't be able to use it when there is no electricity and it was right because a couple months later it the the electricity blackout happened in the whole country in all states for more than a week so that you had the entire country disconnected completely and the internet stopped working completely um and i i realized that we needed to focus on that to focus on on on the how can you use bitcoin without electricity or internet at all in a complete blackout and i started researching

mesh networks and mesh networks are very old so there have been a lot of attempts to to do this but most of the mesh networks in the past and even right now they make a mistake that is they are trying to share internet and the internet currently is a high bandwidth network of communications like to watch youtube to to be able to watch uh netflix so people need gigabyte connections the same like that so most mesh network out there are trying to do to replicate the same but in a decentralized and semi-decentralized way so we understood that that's not possible there is no way that you could have a gigabyte connection right now in your mesh network but but we understand we also understood that we don't need that for bitcoin to operate we also

need a few hundred kilobits per second in order to be able to sink the largest loss of the bitcoin uh blockchain and with that you'll be able to make transactions so we started researching i i met luis which who is the cto and co-founder of lucha mesh and he he and myself started looking for people capable of helping us make this a reality and in after six months doing research we we came up with the first prototype which we later realized that it was too constrained in the bandwidth to be used useful in the real life because it was based on a lot of antennas and that is something that can it could actually do in the real life around one kilobits per second to 20 or 50 kilobits per second only and that's making it unfeasible to be to be able to use this

in in a real life situation so we change uh our prototype to make it uh capable of doing other things and not only transmitting sms communication or pretty short messages for example that which is the thing that enables lora so we now have a second prototype which is capable of at this moment doing 200 kilobits per second which is enough to sync the latest blocks of the bitcoin blockchain as we have shown in the demo that we share on twitter but also to is enable us to do more things that are useful for real life like we have a full support of ipv6 so you are capable of running an electrical server for example and provide this service to all the other users inside the mesh you are capable of making gateways to the internet so you can let someone get through

your launch ms device to the internet and even connect to online banking if they need that or connect to what's our work connect to other things and we are thinking right now about ways that people could provide the services and get paid for it so we we will have a way to incentivize people running international connected to other networks as a gateway so this is currently what the current stage we are which is the second prototype and we are we have an alpha that is currently working for ipv6 support and we have shown on twitter on one of the videos how we are making not only bitcoin blockchain sync but also monero for example wallet you can use it and we are currently uh preparing the electron server and electronic user demo too to share it today

to the viewers and we are also working on app torrent so you will be able to rent files with others or inside the mesh completely off the grid in a peer-to-peer decentralized censorship system manner. That's incredible, and you sort of touched

on it a little bit. You're experimenting with ways to incentivize users to contribute to this mesh, and I guess that begs the question, how do you bootstrap these mesh networks? Is it getting the hardware in the hands of users is it um is it a a education gap what uh what do you think about bootstrapping this network

yeah we understand that as i i came up with the idea about how could you make bitcoin payment without internet electricity at all but but i understand that this is a small group of people currently that would like to do that it's pretty niche so we started thinking of what is the other use use that most people will make of it which is communications so we understood that we need your regular user to want to have these devices always on for example for chatting and email and sending, I don't know, emojis to others because they are banned or sending someone this new meme that you've made

and it's banned in Europe, for example. So these kind of things that are the common user are the ones that are going to build the peer-to-peer mesh network. Because if you don't have enough nodes, you won't be able to find a hope or a path to deliver the message or the big control sector that we want to broadcast.

So we understood that to be able to create a mesh network that has enough nodes to cover a city, a country, and connect countries with others, we understood that we needed a device that works out of the box, that is plug-and-play. So this is the TorPiel device that we are developing, which is a battery-based device with pretty low power consumption.

So it's capable of running with a small solar panels that you can have in your backpack, things like that. Or you can connect it to the USB port of your car so it's always on and you are a moving antenna around the city providing relaying messages to others and relaying data over the IPv6 port. So we understood that we needed something that you could connect to any smartphone because the smartphone itself is not made for messaging. It is made for what is made, and it's a pretty close source.

So we understood that we needed something that is as open as possible but as easy to use that anyone will like to have one. so you are capable of having enough nodes to make to bootstrap the network in order to then be able to use to bitcoin bitcoin blockchain and and be able to make transaction completely off grid and one of the things that is enabled is that the communication is completely peer-to-peer and decentralized there are no servers at all there are no coordinators we are making it as resilient as possible so there is no one single point of failure and this is why it is so difficult to do it we are not using like we don't have servers that contain all the path each note itself have enough information to be able to relay messages

to other through them so we are we are making sure that this is something that also provides you enough privacy and enough resiliency that you are capable of using it even if someone is trying to target you for example if currently in In Ethiopia, for example, there is a complete blackout because the government from time to time, like every three months or every year, something bad happens and they shut down the internet completely. Or in Kashmir, in India, where they are being targeted directly by the government and disconnect them completely from the internet.

So the thing is that we know that these attacks happen and we are thinking about how to circumvent them. you have a path through hops over the Locha mesh, and this path is somehow disconnected because there is interference, or someone is jamming the network or something like that, or someone is in the middle and they are cutting the path in order to not deliver the messages.

Our devices are capable of finding another path after a few tries because it is smart enough to understand the quality of a path and the, and the, um, and the, and all this is being built inside the device itself. So you can connect up to three mobile phones to one device. So it is more like a portable router or a hotspot, which instead of giving you access to the internet over 3g, 4g or things like that, it gives you access to the larger mesh. Okay.

So I think you answered my next question there. I was going to answer how are people sending these messages and emails? Does the Torpial device have a screen on it, but it seems like you could just connect it to your phone and instead of connecting to 3G or 4G or LTE, whatever it may be, you're connecting to the Locha Mesh and communicating from there. Yes, the device itself is like a portable hotspot. it's a portable router which gives you access to the logic mesh the logic mesh is a peer-to-peer

communication network so which uses mesh but so the thing is that you will connect to it with a smartphone over wi-fi so because it's a router and you'll be able to use uh applications in regular applications that support ipv6 but also applications that are made specifically for the for example, we are finishing our mobile app, which enables you to communicate with other, like a chat, so it is more like a WhatsApp, but it uses the Launcher Mesh completely. So if I have a 2PL device in my house

and you have another in yours, and there are enough devices in the middle between us, it can find a path doing hops to communicate with you. So I just have to have your ID inside the mesh, and I will be able to communicate with you privately and over an encrypted communication network because messages in the radio spectrum that we're using can be encrypted

with some radio communications cannot. this one is capable of doing it. So communication will be private, but also based on a peer-to-peer ID that you have just created by yourself by plugging in this device. So it is not connected to your ID. It is not connected to your home internet connection.

It is not connected to your mobile phone 3G connection. So it is not connected to your identity. So you will be completely private and anonymous in that network. only the person who has received the message or who is broadcasting the transaction for you knows your ID. So it is more so done by the Bitcoin transactions

and the Bitcoin addresses are, for example. So you will be able to, if I buy or I deal the Drupal device myself, following the do-it-yourself guides that we give for people to make their own in their houses from office shelf parts, you will be able to flash it with our open source software and plug it in and you will be already connected

to the mesh network and find a path to deliver a message without having to ever compromise your identity because it is an IP address that has been made out of thin airs right now and it's not connected to you at all. Yeah, so increasing privacy, which is incredible, especially in countries like Venezuela where they're trying to target bitcoiners now um so what are what are the range of these devices

like like uh how how close together do they need to be do you have something like a super node that people can connect to as well if they want to or well the small one portable battery-based device which is the one you can carry around it's capable of connecting with others up to one kilometers radius so if you you have in that radius and other device already in the same mesh automatically they talk to each other coordinate the path and everything and in the early days is going to be difficult to find enough devices in a city to be able to make it in one kilometer or four kilometers in the open where there is no buildings and things like that so the device can also

connect to a computer for example to because you have a monero mode a node or a bitcoin full node or an electrical server running there and you want to provide services to others you can connect it over the usb to the computer and that enables you like you have always power so you're not battery based so you can add a power amplifier and you can add a bigger antenna in your office or in your house and you can reach 50 or 70 kilometers distances so you're capable of listening and also uh broadcasting information to others who are in longer distances and that will enable gateways to work because you will have your computer also connected to the internet for example or connected to the bitcoin to the um block stream satellite to the law the bitcoin

blockchain from there so you will be able to provide that information also to users inside image who are around with their portable device for example or you can connect to a big antenna and make even longer distances if you have the enough equipment and you can hide it from the government obviously yeah so you mentioned the block stream satellite there so you're able to receive uh and verify data from from that source if you have a computer with the equipment that the Blockstream team recommends, your computer will be synchronizing the Bitcoin blockchain from the satellite directly. So you are resilient enough, for example, there is internet cuts in your house, you will still be able to sync your node from the Blockstream satellite, right? The thing is that if

you have that computer synchronized that way, because you are in the middle of nowhere, for example, you will also be able to attach a Turpial node to then provide others of that Lattice blocks and Lattice transactions. So people in your city, for example, will be able to query your Latchamage device for Lattice block data because they are in the city with their portable Turpial device and they want to broadcast a Bitcoin transaction that they have signed and and they are offline, or they don't want that big of a transaction to be associated with their 3G mobile ID and their personal identification, which is what happens when you use your mobile phone.

So they basically connect to the Lodger Mesh device, and they make the transaction over the Lodger Mesh directly, and they don't have to do it using their internet connection, or if they don't have it. And the thing is that the low charge is thought as we're all going to be able to have one. That's why we are thinking about it not the smallest affordable device, not only because we are thinking for Venezuelans and Ethiopians who cannot afford $200, $300 per device. are making it as a router because you can connect like three mobile phones to it so you have one for per family but it's also the idea is that it's affordable enough that we can have one of us is

each one of us one of the one of the devices so we there are enough nodes to relay message to others so this is important that for mesh networks that you have enough density and the only way to do it is also lowering the price of the needed devices because this is an extra hardware that you have to carry around with you. You most probably don't want to spend $500 in one device that you just carry around with your smartphone that is already three times that price.

Yeah. And that's actually, Matt O'Delly couldn't join us for this. He had to bail, but that was one of the questions he had is in trying to distribute these devices to people around the world uh he's wondering if you've if you've thought of running like a tom shoes model i'm not sure if you're uh familiar with tom shoes but um basically that model is westerners buy a pair of these shoes and tom donates a pair to to somebody in a developing country so if you were to set up a structure where somebody like

myself would buy a Terpio device and then I would pay a little bit more so that you can manufacture one to give one away in Venezuela or something like that. Yeah, exactly. We thought about that a year ago about selling the Terpio devices and we will donate one more to Venezuelans. So we thought about it. And we indeed currently have in our GitHub slash BTC Bing slash Locha. We currently have a sponsor's donations on GitHub that you can make a monthly donation or one-time donation to the development of the open source software, open source hardware.

And you can decide for each $200 that you donate, you can decide to get one 2PL device shipped when we have them, or you can decide to donate that to someone. So you could basically say, I want one device, and I'm going to make two-month donations of 200 each, but I want the second device to be donated to you or to a cause. So what we are going to do with that is that we'll set up then all around Venezuela. So we set up then all around Chile, where there are many Venezuelans that currently don't have even money to pay for the 3G mobile data, and they are completely disconnected from their families in the other country. And when they finally get data to communicate with their family in Venezuela, there is no electricity or communications in Venezuela. So they are completely disconnected. I mean, the hurdles that people have to jump through just to move money and communicate with each other in 2020, it's pretty shocking. But I say that as I sit here with pretty good internet in New Jersey, in the United States.

But just speaking from like a Bitcoin perspective, like something like Locha Mesh and using these mesh networks as the transaction relay layer of Bitcoin just seems like using Bitcoin better. like the internet with all the isps and governments sort of hooked into that and the telecommunication systems with 3g 4g and now 5g they seem completely co-opted by either corporations or governments that are able to spy and it seems like if we want to use bitcoin correctly in the long run something like a combination of satellites and mesh may be the way to go so i think this infrastructure is extremely important um and how do we get that message through to people because like if if let's imagine like daydream at some point in the future this is this is built out bitcoin's exponentially more robust than it is at at its current moment

correct and it's very important for bitcoin future to be able to communicate over a censorship system mesh network like the logic mesh which is enabling not only sms communications for sos but also enabling services and and also enabling communications more complex like ipv64 and be able to run for example the thing is that most there are a lot of people think that venezuela it's a very profitable country for mining but they like what they don't know and is that they have to struggle a lot they have to take care of a lot of things inside the country which is sometimes there is no internet at all so they have like two or three different internet connections they have cable they have 3g from one company and 3g for another country they get 4g for another one

and and they put all that in one asic so they are capable of uh of when there is a lost connection in one then they are easily and switching to the other they even program on that so the thing is that in in the future it's that's basically because of the lack of infrastructure or investment infrastructure in the communications in the country but what happened if it is basically the the ISPs blocking you directly, or the government completely disconnecting the internet in the whole country that it happened in Ethiopia, or also in Russia, or Cuba, where they used to have a mesh network of antennas, bigger antennas that they put in the roof of their houses.

And the government now say that, well, now that's illegal. basically have to shut down completely in california the ham radio operators now they got uh this notification that they either pay ten thousand dollars for a new license or they have to shut down the antennas so this is obviously that the ham radio operators cannot circumvent that uh that chronic draconian law because they have their ids connected to their hand radio operators they they they have a license if you need a license you are actually enough free to use it so the thing is that we are thinking on the launch image of not only being able to communicate and play others but you will be also able to sync your bitcoin you know you will be

able to make to make use of the rpc pay of monero to pay for websites uh access to website without having to rely so the website that doesn't have to relay completely on ads and advertisement advertisements or spy on you or get your data to sell to others, it will be able to get paid all the Lightning Network and get paid all the RPC pay feature and things like that. And the thing is, once the Locha Mesh has enough density, you will be able to make a transaction from the Locha Mesh device that you have connected to your phone. And someone will have an an electrical server running in another device or a computer or Raspberry Pi that is already also running lightning networks inside that to provide watchtower services, for example.

And then that will make a broadcast, which currently is going to be to the internet, because the Bitcoin miner and the Bitcoin pools are on the internet. But once everyone is connected to the logic mesh, you will be able to reach a miner or a pool directly over the logic mesh, and they will be able to mine that transaction for you and reply back over of the Dutch nation completely without touching the internet at all, which is an over-controlled survey communication network, controlled by governments that can do whatever they want with it, we'll be able to use this network, which is peer-to-peer,

and run by each one of us in a censorship-resilient way. Why isn't this more popular? You think it's because it's just hard to set up, Or is Mesh Networks sort of in their nation stage? ISPs have a long head start. Well, I think, as mentioned, that Internet has been sold as a way to get Netflix or watch YouTube until YouTube shutdowns the YouTubers that you like. And then you don't want YouTube. But the thing is that people, it's kind of difficult to sell. It's an idea difficult

to sell because most people are used to it. I myself, I don't like when the internet goes below the one megabytes per second, because I've been living in countries where at least you have three megabytes per second. That's not, you kind of get less than that. But I myself, I use the internet at 54 kilobits per second in the past uh i i don't know if you remember when the internet was sold by data plans when you run out of data you end up using the internet like a slower 300 kilobits per second or 50 54 kilobits per second so i remember that and i remember that that's enough for bitcoin so that's enough for chatting the thing is that that it is difficult today to sell this idea of the censorship resistant peer-to-peer communication network

if they are not capable of running Netflix on it. So that's what I think why people don't like today mesh networks, but just because they don't need it. The thing is when they realize that they are going to need it, it will be already built by people like us and people from the monitor transmission labs and people from the bitcoin radio and amateurs who are setting up meetups everywhere in the world right now there are we know about three different groups making radio communications and they are using the lucha mesh to make their test and and they are relying on us giving them all the instructions so they can join us on development and also testing this so this is why i think it's not so popular just yet uh maybe we as a team um haven't also marketed

very well the thing is that we don't have a marketing team right now that could do this this is like bitcoin this is completely open source it is free to use and if you want to to provide services to others, you want to charge them, you can do it. So the thing is that we are an open source, an open hardware project, and we happen to have a company to be able to make it sustainable so we can get investment from investors. But the idea is that it's open as Bitcoin, and Bitcoin doesn't have a marketing team either. So we are basically in the same situation. That's why I think we are, or the large image itself is not so popular yet but we're working on it yeah i mean you guys are still pretty early on in this game

as well so i think uh as as people recognize the need for these mesh networks moving forward and your products and terpio gets more fleshed out i think uh i think it'll be easily become more popular because i mean it's hard to deny um the the orwellian steps that governments have taken and continue to take to cut off people from the internet and as you mentioned the internet is something that people are very deeply connected to and used to at this point in time so if a mesh network could at some point in the future provide the same utility I think building out that infrastructure right now is extremely important. But you were mentioning before we hit record the origins of Locha

and why you named the company Locha Mesh, which I think is very interesting. Why don't we jump into the etymology of the company? Well, you're referring to the name. Locha is a coin from the 1800s in Venezuela, which is one eighth of a silver coin a spanish silver coin so the the idea of calling it that way is like in venezuela there is a say that people basically say to each other how you doing and they say in la lucha por la locha which is fighting for the money because they are always trying to fight for their income this is like not only happening now it has always been that way

So that's a saying that they say in La Lucha por la Locha, which is fighting for the money. And so we thought about, I thought about adding something to it, which is in La Lucha por la Locha Libre, which is the fight for the free money, as in freedom. So this is our slogan, which is La Lucha por la Locha Libre. and I understand that's kind of difficult for some people that don't understand Spanish and don't even understand Venezuelan Spanish to pronounce but I feel very connected to it because that's how people basically say hi there so they are always fighting so the situation in Venezuela is like in many other places so this I just happen to be from Venezuela but I do fight for other places. And I understand there are people there fighting there too. There is one,

there is a few people in the Lightning and the full nodes community that who are setting up full node devices in places like Africa, in many countries of Africa, because they understand the the difficulties they have there. And I think they will also find it interesting how we name our project because I think they totally can connect to it on their experiences of their people, of their countries too.

Yeah, I mean, fighting for the free money, right? And that's... As in freedom, not the free money. itself because there is no free meal no no freedom money fighting for freedom money and and so do you hey this is something i've been saying and i'd be very interested to get your thoughts on this like i i believe like fix the money fix the world i think money is one half of every transaction it is um it is why things inequality specifically has gotten so out of whack is because the central authorities have control of the money and that throws everything

out of whack and do you do you see bitcoin as a way to help venezuelans and people under other despotic governments to to fight back and eventually take control away from those those governments since april 2011 when i learned about it so i've been focusing um on making people understand that Bitcoin is the only possible option right now that they have and they to actually make use of their money that they make so if they work for money and then that money basically disappear or get hyperinflated or it gets someone else get it free and you're so not longer have the same value and it's losing value every time in Venezuela it loses value every minute

and the lifting is that since I learned about bacon I understood the importance of it I've always been trying to make people understand the same thing even if Most people don't tell you, I'm not an economist, I don't like gold. So it is a lack of basic education on what money is, and all my talks circle around this idea of money. Because I understand that Bitcoin is a way for people to be free. So they currently are basically slave. I don't like taxes, for example. I think that there are many people right now in the U.S. fighting against slavery, or slavery as it was 200 years ago, 100 years ago, but they are not fighting against slavery as they did today. So people don't see 46, 52% of people's income, and then 21% more in that as a slavery. But I do see it as that.

I do believe that slavery ends at a 0%. So you need to actually be free, and Bitcoin enables that. And Bitcoin over the Lodz Mesh is the truly private, censorship-resistant, hardest money in the world. and people kind of need to pay more attention or we need to make more efforts to make them understand this. And if they don't want to understand the technology in order to be able to understand it, or they don't want to understand economics

in order to be able to understand it, they may need to be able to use it without understanding it. So that's why we have, I myself have been focusing on how to make it easier for people to use it, because there are a lot of people who won't need to understand Bitcoin at all. But once they realize how it is helping them to fix the bad situation or circumstances they are trapped on, trapped right now, they will use it, even if they don't get it. And that's one of the objectives. For example, one of the reasons I started helping the election developers by September 2011, because I understood that Bitcoin needs to be easy for people to use it, just as people use the euro or they have the dollars in their pockets. and they don't understand how it works behind it and they on this they don't understand that it's being hyperinflated or that it has it is being printed out of thing or something like that they basically use it because it is fixing or it is a tool for them to reach their liberty or their

or what they understand of happiness so that i want people to understand that bitcoin is their tool for them to reach their happiness too and the only way to do that is explaining it like a live fight so people need to use it before they understand it i completely agree um it is imperative for freedom in the digital age and and ux does need to improve there's a lot of conversations going on around that particularly right now but i think i had a conversation with a with a gentleman who's who's running the the bitcoin beach project in el salvador and el zante and if you really truly want to get it into just your comment the hands of the common man it needs to be as simple as possible and they may start out

with custodial apps but hopefully they educate themselves after using it because it's stoked some curiosity that that pushes them to become more self-sovereign with the apps that they use to interact with bitcoin but on top of that the self-sovereign apps uh the ux could always improve and it has improved over time i would argue and i think it will continue to improve and um i think lightning network's helping that and other other things as well there hasn't been many designers in the space it's been very back-end developer heavily yeah we don't we don't have We are not UX expert and UI experts on payroll. We are basically decentralized Bitcoin open source efforts.

So it might take some time for us unless some more Square teams start being, or Square sponsored teams are going to continue arising from other places. It's going to take some time, but it's okay as far as we know what we want to achieve. So this is not about paying coffee. This is more about making people, enabling people to live their life as free as possible from intervention and control from others. And Bitcoin is going to enable that, even if it's going to take time for them to be able to use it without the complexity of it. Completely agree. And so what outside of Locha Mesh is exciting you about Bitcoin right now?

What are you looking at outside of the Mesh network? Well, outside of the Mesh network, I'm currently very interested in the Lightning Network. I really like it to happen. And I really like how they are doing it. So they put a lot of effort and it took many years to do it because they wanted to add privacy features. They wanted to add a lot of complexity on it that helped people to be able to transact

more securely without any middleman, without the need of trust. So they have been trying to keep it as pure as possible. And I like that. I like other things about making it more accessible for everyone, but it's also a good way, for example, to incentivize people running full notes, which is something I myself tried in the past

when 21.co existed. I tried to mimic their idea of incentivize or adopt a note where some people donate for others to run the notes. I wanted to do that in Venezuela too. And the thing is that the Lightning Network have to bring that into the table. So now people want to run the notes.

So that's why you have full notes company making full notes, good looking full notes around and things like that. And this is one of the things I like a lot because I always prefer to use Electrum over exchanges because of the simplicity of it and and not so easy because there are no UX expert in that team yes but I always prefer it because it was the most pure way to use Bitcoin besides running your full node yourself so in that I

always I always understood the importance of your keys your Bitcoin and And I always try to teach people about that. And I like that from the Lightning community, the Bitcoin community, that now they are embracing this idea, because it is more important to be able to have more nodes, one for each user of the Bitcoin. and even if you have to at least like have one in your house that then you share with your family and then you have a lot of device connected to it to provide this no services to others and get paid for doing that i think that's the way to go because that will make the bitcoin network more resilient to attack and also more decentralized in so it is capable of circumventing any kind of attacks that anyone is going to try to, I bet anyone is going to try to attack the Bitcoin network very soon.

We are going to be prepared for that. Yeah. Well, thank you for focusing on this. It is, like I said, very underappreciated and very niche right now, but I think it needs to grow into a larger network as we move into the future and as Bitcoin becomes more valuable as a network. This stuff is imperative. um where can we find out more about what you're doing with locha with terpial um how can we help

what uh any any announcements to make or anything on the horizon that we should be paying attention to yeah we we are currently working on a new version of the second prototype a new revision of it uh we hope to have in a couple months because of the current situation we are basically working at the pace that we can but if anyone could help us not only on development you can already buy the development devices that we are using which is the do-it-yourself version of the touch ms2pl devices and you can find out about it on github.com slash btcvin slash locha and you can also donate to the open source development and open hardware development by making a donation to the LochaMesh team at locha.io.

So there you can make pre-order of the device by making a donation. That will help us continue working and you will get a LochaMesh 2 build device when we have them and when we have manufactured them. I think you guys deserve a grant from the square crypto bitmex uh chain code labs of the world too so if any of you guys are listening out there it's it's always it's always great to be helped and i i love that the bitcoin

community and also the monero community uh have understood the importance of this and they have helped us in the past and they continue helping us but yes you are right we need more money to do this if we wanted to do as a team but we are we also welcome people to help us in their free time or spare time if they want to go to the github and help with some prs or some comments or they want to test like those groups who are already buying the development and kits and they are setting know those devices in their in their houses already so they can help us test on the ground in some places, not only we in our backyard, in our garage, ourselves as a team, but also getting the community involved in this. And there are some that have helped

us setting up electronic server, for example, and setting up remote Monero notes also. So it is always welcome that anyone who would like to help us, we have translation, we have ui ux that we need help on but it's also important to get funds and if you have anyone that you think we should be talking to and feel free to email me at randy at lucha.io or contact me in any of the social media that i currently own and if you are more technical and you want to talk about advanced things feel free to message luis who is the cto co-founder and he understands everything about this and he's very advanced and technical so if you want to have like a very enjoy a very technical talk you can go to him directly so feel free to contact us the thing that we are working

on and ourselves we want you to be involved and this is important for us and for the bitcoin community to doing us bitcoiners completely decentralized way so we there is no single point of failure we don't want our company to be targeted by anyone so it is important to have teams all over the world working on the lacha mesh already i can't thank you enough for doing what you do very underappreciated project like I said, very underappreciated individual. Um, he's been working on this for years. Uh, I think, uh, very, very grateful that you're doing the work that you're doing. And, and, uh,

hopefully this conversation helps stoke some ideas in people's minds. It makes people more aware about what you're, what you're doing at Locha and why it's so important. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for coming on. Um, it's been incredible conversation. very excited to post this and i wish you well uh as you're as you're building this out and i'm very hopeful that it will be a successful project in the future yeah we'll make this a reality one way or another yeah that's i mean if bitcoiners are anything it's it's uh it's they're thorough and

they won't stop until until we get that freedom yeah right cypherpunks write code and also make hardware right this is going to be a hardware revolution as much as it's going to be a software revolution i say that yeah if we want really decentralized censorship resistant communication methods we need to get our hands dirty yeah cypherpunk future involves a lot of hardware get used to it freaks yeah ready thank you thank you very much for having me here hope thank you hope you enjoy the rest of your day that's all we got for this week freaks Peace and love. Tiki!