TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #276: Starting an exchange in Guatemala, onboarding enterprise clients, and freedom money with the IBEX Mercado team

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

Join Marty as he sits down with Jose Lemus, Juan Pablo Lemus, & Estaban de la Peña; the IBEX Mercado founding team, to discuss: - Why they built the exchange - International banking restrictions in Guatemala - How they ended up with their non-custodial model - Communicating with regulators - Avoiding having to KYC kids - Banking the unbanked - Bitcoin's perfect incentives - much more Follow IBEX Mercado on Twitter Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app. Unchained Capital. Check out their white glove vault concierge service that will take you from zero to secure multisig setup in no time. Use the code TFTC and receive $50 off that package that includes 2 Trezor Model Ts and $1,000 in your vault. Braiins. Braiins are leaders in the mining industry; running Slush Pool, creating firmware to make miners more profitable (Braiins OS+), and building out Stratum V2 to help further decentralize mining and make Bitcoin more robust. Check out their mining profitability calculator. Compass Mining. Compass wants to democratize bitcoins hashrate and give everyone the ability to strengthen the network while mining bitcoin profitably. Thanks to Compass, it’s never been easier to mine bitcoin. Check them out at compassmining.io

What is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. I sat down with the team from Ibex Mercado, Jose, and Juan Pablo Limas, my brother co-founder team, and Esteban de la Pena to talk about what's going on in Guatemala and El Salvador. This episode will make you bullish, freaks. That's all I'll say. Please forgive I'm going to edit out I think I'm going to edit out The technical

I am going to edit out The technical difficulties In the middle Four years in More than four years in Still trying to figure it out Maybe I need a producer Anybody in Austin

Want to help me produce stuff Seriously I do want to get A studio set up Where We can easily do Video recording In high def

The correct way Willing to pay Let me know if you're in Austin Preferably in person this rip was brought to you by good friends at the motherfucking cash app catch up so you stack sets send sets receive sets sell sets if you so please we're saying sats sats sats sats sats sats sats sats sats sats sats sats for the standards 100 million satoshis and one whole bitcoin call them satoshis most people call them sats though you don't have to

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in their work on stratum v2 and other aspects of the open source bitcoin project enjoy this rip freaks there's good people doing very good things around the world to bring bitcoin to the masses you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, 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. probably should be awesome and we're live what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here on a lovely monday morning getting the week started off on a high note f1 week here in austin texas but we're here sitting down with a team from guatemala uh the ibex mercado team we're sitting down with brother co-founders jose juan limas uh and esteban de la pena gentlemen welcome to the podcast nice thank you thank you for having us marty well excited to be here long time listeners oh

well thank you for that big fans big fans that's uh it's flattering i'm big fans of you guys so i guess to set the stage for all the freaks out there i met uh one year i guess he's a lead engineer or one of your engineers carlino in nashville a few weeks ago when i was up there and he was telling me about everything you guys are building down in Guatemala and El Salvador as El Salvador rolled out their Bitcoin law this summer. And I just thought the work that you guys are putting in down there is extremely impressive.

I wanted to get you guys on the podcast to discuss what's happening in Central America because obviously I'm up here in the United States and in Texas now. This podcast has been very U.S.-centric and I just think it's very important to get a different perspective on the show and I think you guys have an incredible one considering the work that you guys have been doing the last six months particularly so I guess we can start Carter Lino get us a little background before we hit record here Ibex Mercado

started 2017 2018 is that correct and what what drove you guys to start the company well uh in 2017 i was basically out of out of a job by choice by choice i i wanted to you know um move away from what i have been doing traditionally and so in 2017 i finally could My girlfriend at the time, now my wife, had moved to the Netherlands to do her LLM, her master's in business. And so I went, I tagged along. And while I was in the Netherlands, I thought, you know, what can I do? So as everyone would like to do, I became a day trader. and and so uh but i had actually found out about bitcoin in 2012 and i i loved it and i tried to

buy some but at that time in guatemala like i was the only uh guy registered in local bitcoins and there wasn't really a market the only market was mt gots right and so i tried to send money yeah i was gonna say we have a local local bitcoins og on the show that's uh that's impressive yeah and then uh the empty docs thing i tried to send money to their bank account in japan but the wire kept getting balanced because of uh just uh guatemala was on the banking blacklist i don't i'm not sure if you're aware of that or how that works guatemala was why what was guatemala guatemala specifically on a blacklist well at that point i believe so it works that rating system for countries right yellow orange red black and so what happened was

that um guatemala because of their bank secrecy was on the blackboards and so nobody would take wire transfers from guatemala and be like you have to have a commercial contract the bank asks why you're sending money and you don't have a commercial relationship invoices and all that stuff you just get bounced so couldn't really buy bitcoin then i logged in was one of the first users in coinbase uh when they were giving away like 30 bucks or something like that but again because i'm guatemalan they wouldn't open the account which hurts me to this day because they keep sending me mails like why don't you finish your setup you don't want me and so finally yeah finally 2017 because i was living abroad i was able to buy my first

bitcoin and then reconnected with it started looking into it um and and then i called my brother and i told him listen you remember bitcoin we talked about it way back and uh and he said yeah i remember i'm telling him listen this is this is about to take off i have this feeling right and and i thought it was gonna be about to take off because it had just had a slight run-up on the use of Japan, making it a legal currency. Not legal tender like Yonzalawa, but just had legalized the use of Bitcoin in Japan. And there were stores in Japan accepting Bitcoin.

And so I told him, listen, one country made it legal. This is very big news. and so he started like we started putting a little bit of money in and a little bit of money in and um and then we started reading a whole bunch we got into the whole ico craze everything but our core was always bitcoin right and so at one point uh i told him something along the lines that i don't want to live in a world where bitcoin doesn't succeed so i'm gonna just see how much cash i can get together that i'm not gonna need and then i'm gonna buy I thought, everything else is going to go into Bitcoin.

And I did. I could pretty much own my money into Bitcoin at that time. And then once I ran out of money, I called my brother again and I said, because he had done the same thing. We were moving together, right? And so I called him up and I said, listen, we put all our cash into this. We put all the money we put into this. but i want to do more i uh i want to put uh you know my work my energy my effort into helping

bitcoin succeed and and then we started like uh throwing ideas around what we could do in this space and you know we have this idea of setting up a bitcoin embassy and we had this a bunch of ideas just a bunch of ideas but eventually one day uh i you know talking we came to the realization that if you don't have access points you know on rent or bitcoin then everything else doesn't really matter and so and we knew that because coming from guatemala and having such a difficult time you know getting into bitcoin not because we didn't know about it not because we didn't want to but just because it was practically impossible to do it unless you had like a different passport or were abroad and that type of stuff we said it's really important

for our countries to have easy access to this and that's where i just started hell yeah so you noticed there's a disconnection in the market where bitcoin was taking off around the world you were able to access it in the netherlands uh you had not been able to access it in guatemala so you decided i can build my own exchange make sure that that people like me can can get access in guatemala and what was this pretty much little did we know what it would take let's get into that what what did it take what was it like starting from zero like all right start a bitcoin exchange what's that like well tough um you you have to know the first thing we built like we spent a year

building out a trading engine and this very sophisticated piece of software and we came to market and it was the oa just and and the reason was twofold one uh guatemala is basically a bitcoin importing country you know there's no miners people that earn bitcoin here it's not we don't have so much there's only by pressure and so that was hard and then the other thing that was really hard is that there's very little financial literacy so we go out and first you have to cross the hurdle of convincing somebody that they want to buy bitcoin right so that and that's a tall word that's that's very difficult as you probably know yourself but then once they get convinced and they say okay i'll buy bitcoin

with and with you guys and then we have to go to explain how how an order book works how a limit order works how a market order works how a filler kill and all of this just completely new world we lost them like people here wanted to just buy people like oh like you buy a t-shirt right you go how much is that t-shirt 15 bucks okay i'll take it and and so we just had to throw all of that work in the trash and start anew we hooked up with some pretty awesome liquidity partners in the u.s and uh and became more of a broker service and access point at that point in time and and That's where it really started to get traction. I like that phrase,

Guatemala's only providing buy pressure. That's something I like to hear. So first attempt, first go around, you had essentially trouble creating a marketplace, two-sided marketplace. And so you went to get liquidity via US- Not always a fine word. uh and so what what finally like started obviously it became more of a brokerage service and so it

just became easier for people to use ibex mercado to just buy bitcoin and is it true that you guys operate similar to the way swan bitcoin does here in the united states where people can't hold bitcoin or ibex or am i misconstruing that no that is correct we're non-custodial although because of how there's no banking apis in central america right we have to do everything manually so it takes a little bit longer to deliver the bitcoin so we'll keep it but we'll keep it a couple of minutes for a couple of hours not not forever them we're not interested uh part of it is is we want people to to hold their bitcoin because we think it's important but also part of it is has to do with uh liability exposure right

the less money you keep from other people uh the less problems you have yeah no and i actually sort like these market forced frictions that actually force people to to use bitcoin what many would deem the correct way off the bat um starting with self-custody just throwing people into the deep end some people say it's dangerous but people are gonna have to learn i think it's important 10 minute talk it's just really 10 minutes you explain you talk and that's it and it's totally worth it i think also in the learning part if i can chip in into that post it was um when you guys started out and and we started talking together because i met uh juan pablo in a in a hackathon i organized once back in 2017 and um i think also the the technical part people are not really used

too much of in using an app for for something this sophisticated like you know putting big amounts of money on something and you don't have a real person behind that is talking to you felt very weird for the market and I think one of the biggest success the keys to our success has been that you know we've been really straight up with real people at the beginning was just us three I remember and and the goal is you know by now what we do in a day is probably what we did in the first year you know it was really just the fact that they could our customers could talk to us directly and they would they would write to us and then you would explain to them in this 10 minute talk on why self-custody is important and how to do it and and then you know once you you do

the first step and once they start buying they automatically just creates more curiosity and then they go deeper into it and then they see and and you know you just provide the the tools for them to do the proper self-custody and that's it it's super easy really um and and i think by now um yeah when we've had a couple of talks like on the crashes when when our customers talk to us like i'm getting nervous should i sell and it's definitely nobody and sell here you can't sell here that's incredible well so you become like uh like their psychologist or therapist at some point i know what that's like like uh i've been i've been in that position as well as somebody been shilling bitcoin for quite a while and so what what are your recommendations when they come

to ask you about self-custody like go-to wallets or do you let them you push them towards information resources where they can decide for themselves what wallet works best for them you recommend mobile we recommend we recommend a couple of wallets and um not not to i don't know know if you feel about plugs or not here uh we're not working with them or anything but um through our experience and through us doing our custody uh we usually recommend pressure wallet for for our customers for cold storage you know once you get above a certain amount before uh a cell phone wallet is good enough we feel but let's say once you start keeping real money let's say over a thousand bucks we generally try to steer people towards a hardware wallet solution

yeah that makes sense sorry i'm adjusting my volume here they're doing construction i think on the block behind me that's what that loud noise was but no i mean again i really appreciate and like the fact that the people are being forced to to learn how to self-custody early on in their Bitcoin journey and I think like what would you guys say like obviously I'm sure you've heard uh the the alarm bells that some people will send off like oh you shouldn't push people into self-custody right away like they're gonna shoot themselves in the foot like from experience running this exchange what do you say you think that's a bit overblown you think people sort of get it and get comfortable with it I think I think there's a couple of things

you. First of all, there is a very big difference between banking in the U.S. and banking in Guatemala and our countries. Here, and it's one of the reasons that I really got Bitcoin, I would like to say I got 80% of Bitcoin's value proposition the first time I read the white paper. And it's because of what happens with our banking partners here in Guatemala. here you're very very aware that your money is not your money if you have it in the bank like it's profitable right it's front and center so for example here um you can't withdraw cash like i think the limit is like 10 000 it's on this which is like a little over a thousand dollars and if you go with a check that's bigger than that they won't give it out in cash um they uh i spin through

uh a banking bankruptcy one of our bands uh went actually in the 2000s two different guatemalan banks went bankrupt and and uh some of the money was just not you just gone and and then finally at any point in time the banks here can just freeze your accounts for uh whatever reason Like here, there's a weird thing that happens legally with presumption of innocence, where sometimes, depending on the charge, you have to prove you're innocent, and then you're considered guilty until you prove you're innocent. And so, for example, if an employee goes and files a claim against your business, your bank's accounts are frozen until you prove that what that employee said is a lie. And that can take years. I actually used to work for a company that was based out of Ecuador and Colombia. I do remember that being a thing.

They were really worried about employees basically making claims like you just described and getting caught up. Yeah. And so the thing is that if you come from that environment, like Bitcoin's unconfiscated ability is absolutely you don't have to sell money on it. it's an old brainer absolutely nobody should have access to my money button yeah no i i love that this mentality exists and again like i said in the beginning of the episode we get stuck particularly here in america in this western view of the world and again that's that was sort of the thing that really popped into my mind like something that stuck with me for the few weeks after having a conversation with carlino in nashville is people people think like all these western companies are going to build the infrastructure of bitcoin but i think it's

going to be like the central america's africas of the world people actually have very very large problems like the banking problems you just described they're going to build bitcoin infrastructure the right way um which seems to be what you guys are doing in el salvador i'm sorry for the loud banks and the position of bitcoin is much greater in central america and latin america than it is in the western countries or the first developed first world nations because here you've got not just the custody part a lot of people i lived in mexico for a bunch of years and people just don't want to use the banks and you've got the devaluing currency the rapidly devaluing currency so bitcoin is only volatile upwards in this environment even if in dollars it loses half

its value in argentina pesos terms it's never been down this year so uh so the value proposition is like you take the value proposition of bitcoin and you multiply that by a hundred or a thousand And that's how we see it in these countries, how that what is considered difficult to use or a barrier to entry in some other parts. It's easier to to fix here or rather the value proposition is stronger in the Latin American economies. Yeah, I have this quote I like to say in the first world, Bitcoin is a luxury. In the third world, it's a necessity. I'm just going to repeat that because you froze. But to quote Jose, in the first world or in the developing economies, Bitcoin is a luxury.

And in our developing economies, in this one, it's a necessity. It's just a necessity. So if you look at the incentive structures, the incentive structure is there for us to push hyper Bitcoinization, you know, from the center of the world to the rest, because it just works. That's the whole point of Bitcoin. It works. So how do you see it progressing here? Obviously, we had El Salvador come out with the Bitcoin law this summer. they've implemented it you have president bukele uh shit posting on twitter about volcano mining and essentially he the law in el salvador has forced many multinational corporations uh to accept bitcoin and you guys have been helping them out with with the base of that functionality i

believe you some of the large car i saw i just took a spin down your twitter page today i saw tweeting about starbucks and helping them out um what other companies have you been helping out and what's that process been like uh are they coming to you like all right we have no idea how to accept bitcoin like what what are we doing here uh how can you guys help what do we need to be looking at yeah no well um the thing with the bitcoin announcement is that for as great as it was for for everybody in bitcoin right because we were just as caught up in the moment as everybody else uh the fact of the matter is it puts a lot of pressure on a lot of people that are not ready to accept and mainly confidence so um how we started like after the euphoria died down we sat down and

thought about this long and hard and all of the implications right and we thought listen this is this is great but we need to go about the business and business owners and the corporations for the individual like for example you have a bunch of wallets you can do self-custody fairly easily and everything but it's very difficult if you're a business that's kind of accepted because there are no there's no office

Jose, sorry to interrupt yeah, sorry to interrupt I think we might just need to cut your video to make sure that your audio comes in as clear as possible give me a second And I'll switch Wi-Fi really fast here. Maybe Esteban can fill in. Sure, I'll fill in.

I'll tell a little bit about the story of how it all came about. Because we were in Miami, a team of us with Carlos, me, Mario, and other friends, and Álvaro. We were in Miami for the Bitcoin conference when this came out. And everybody kind of knew something very important was coming, but nobody knew the actual that it was going to be you know become legal tender i mean positively i thought this was going to happen in the next five years realistically in the next 10 not now and in our neighboring country which is uh you know the second largest economy we have we interact with um guatemalan and salvador have very strong ties because they're so small

so we you know they bring a lot of stuff from us and and vice versa but they came out so we were jumping we were there with uh um with bitcoin beach um peterson michael peterson we were really jumping with him holding his hand almost crying you know just jumping around outside like crazy uh and and then as jose was saying the euphoria euphoria died down a couple of days it took a couple of days and then we were okay what are we gonna do what's what's the real deal here are we just gonna be an otc service as we're doing here in guatemala or not and and so guys just a quick check is this better yeah yeah you're coming in loud and clear yeah okay cool so what i was saying uh previously is that bitcoin is really easy for the individual but very hard for the corporation

for the enterprise because when you're a business and i'm not talking about you know You know, you own a bar and your finances are the bar's finances and vice versa. I mean, when you're a large corporation, when you're a Starbucks, when you're a McDonald's, how do you handle it? How do you bring it into your treasury? How do you spend it if you want to spend it? Who's going to have access to those records? And all of this, right now, it's all DIY.

So we thought we have to get some solutions ready for our, you know, the enterprise or corporations, because we have to onboard them. We cannot leave them behind. This is going to take two. Like Bitcoin takes more. And if we really want Bitcoin to take hold, we've got to get businesses comfortable with dealing with Bitcoin and using it. And so that was our focus when we started. And so the first thing we thought was, you know, Bitcoin, if you're going to accept the Bitcoin payments, the only reasonable solution is like, you have to forget about on-chain. on-chain transaction is for final settlement for other use cases if you want to go buy a cup of

coffee you use lightning and so we developed uh our our lightning infrastructure to push out to how intense is that super intense yeah like what's the channel management like a couple of words look at uh jp's eyes you know first of all you have to know that this uh thing is actually master of channels so as master of channels what uh what is the the uh maintenance of the lightning network implementation been like on your side juan pablo yeah a lot of sleepless nights a lot of unknowns still there's some intricacies with running channels i read someone published a really good article and it started out with managing your liquidity is more an art form than a science

for the time being this holds true and you don't know what to expect initially that was a big hurdle we reached out to a lot of the lightning community some shout out to the lightning labs guys we've got evan from cu's wallet we talked with the guys from cbd andre gave us some of his time with ben from lmbt all the community they were great they were very generous and i'm leaving a lot of people out and at first we didn't know what to expect and now that we have some metrics It's still a challenge because they are evolving constantly and keeping your channels healthy is not straightforward. And I want to segue just into a comment. I think that Bitcoin adoption will happen in different tiers of self-custody and also different tiers for the businesses that are handling Bitcoin.

And the first thing is that people still denominate their lives in the local currency, in the federal dollar, it's dollars. So they need an easy way to keep receiving dollars, even if they are getting Bitcoin. And that's the first piece of the puzzle. And that can happen for the individual, mainly for the businesses. And if this is easy, the adoption will happen bottom up because at first you'll just take in dollars, but you're already using Bitcoin. And once you have the ease of just with a click of a button, instead of having dollars in your account, you have Bitcoin in your account, making the transition to holding part of your wealth in Bitcoin or part of your salary in Bitcoin or part of what you're taking in Bitcoin. yeah it's a it's kind of uh sorry no you're coming in loud and clear for me juan i was hearing it

i think it's all the side of the internet so yeah it's uh so you're gonna have a bottom-up adoption i think and people will the the most important thing we've seen is do people just get comfortable using bitcoin and if using bitcoin means doing it like they with a strike and i think that was a stroke of genius that you can keep your well i don't like usdt but that's beside the point but you can have that people can feel comfortable with having something they consider stable and then they can do the migration to bitcoin but they're already doing the bitcoin experience and once you do the lightning experience you don't want to go back to anything else it's mind-blowing how if you haven't experienced lightning go just download

one of the custodial wallets guys and try it out it's really life-changing and that's what i can see now it's so easy to use and it gives you control of your money because you are in direct control of your bitcoin and depending on your technical knowledge and how much time you spend on it you can go from full custody all the way through half and half maybe have custody on chain and have a self-custody on chain and like a custodial service for the lightning network or you can do a mixed custody and it's really great the flexibility it offers and i think that's the way to really adopt bitcoin on a personal level and then it will happen uh on a merchant level and on a business level and so how uh how has it been for the i don't want to again we

pre-discuss i don't want you guys to break any ndas or anything but i think this is a broad enough question like have you uh noticed any of your enterprise customers begin to grok bitcoin a bit more as you guys have been building out the tools to allow them to to accept it and potentially custody it um themselves have you seen any of them have somewhat of an aha moment like oh maybe i do want to keep 10 of this revenue in bitcoin or something like that well it's interesting because we do have a couple of customers that are keep of what they received in bitcoin because it's it's a percentage of sales and then if you keep that small percentage of sales in bitcoin it doesn't matter so we do have customers one was already a bitcoiner which

It was really good to find out. And then the other ones are, they weren't Bitcoiners before, but they're interested in it and they see it as a way of dollar cost averaging into it. I would like to tell a little anecdote on that one, because before the 7th, the week before we started training people how to use our tool. and we rented out a you know conference room and in a hotel and and then the customer started to I think over 200 people came in I trained them personally people just to clarify is that we're employees from the businesses that were using the bitcoin payment terminal we provided yeah so um in general what you have is Salvadorians had like PTSD just from the dollarization process they thought like everything was going to be super expensive and seeing the price of bitcoin at that time what was it 30 something they thought it was wow super expensive

so they thought everything was just going to explode and we took you know the hour hour and a half we had with them depending on on the customer i really took like 70 or more of the time just explaining bitcoin what what is bitcoin and the purpose of bitcoin and the opportunity that they have and and why they should self-custody right and um it's impressive when once they notice that you know this is actually deflationary and and you put it in terms that they can grasp like deflation what it means and because they've only lived inflation right so it's it's it's contrary to their nature to understand what deflation really means and and once you understand it then just an aha moment the bombs exploded in their head and it was funny because out of that

now i mean i think i hope those people they took down the like downloaded achievable and took out the 30 dollars that's what i also explained to them and how to use it our solution is so simple that took you know if much 30 it was just how to set up your user you create your bitcoin payment terminal and then you're pretty much good to go you just put how many dollars the product costs except you have a qr code you scan it and you pay it and that's it so that's all we had to explain so we really used that time to to explain bitcoin and in general um i think we're going to see it over time right now this push right now really helped and and what's happening right now in the price action is is for sure helping people to understand bitcoin and why they should save

bitcoin i think the general um idea and the the concept that we always convey and and and expresses you have to save in bitcoin that's the whole point it's the only savings technology that we've had as latin americans where right now uh we can have a little bit of a piece of the internet of money and internet money is going to be used by 90 of of everybody of the whole society so now you can you have the advantage to save it and as a salvadorian you have the advantage to saving it as a currency which means you're not paying capital gain taxes by the way here in guatemala there's also a law that backs us up that buying bitcoin you don't pay capital gain taxes so that has made a big big uh you know um and it's just a huge advantage we can hold as much bitcoin as

we can and nothing will happen you don't have to pay taxes so um but the law is different though Here in Guatemala, the law is different. It's based on if you have an asset that is in a foreign country, and it's earning or producing yield in a foreign country, you don't pay yield on that. And that was basically made for, I'll put it in very blunt terms, like for the rich people to buy, you know, shares of Tesla, whatever, and you don't pay taxes on that here. So that's not changing anytime soon. And that applies to Bitcoin as well. And that has given us a huge advantage in the market. I think a lot of Guatemalans are understanding that. And then again, that's why self-custody is important. But the effect that I'm going to, that I think,

I hope to see from El Salvador is that when people start saving and just a little bit, the remittances that start to come in are going to make such a big pressure. and now it makes sense to save that that will push throughout the region that i think remittances is going to push adoption a lot because it's just so cheap to to send money now to el salvador i mean it's three basis points or it's zero so you know how how are you going to compare that to 30 to 15 percent what they're usually paying the guatemalan is going to ask the salvadorian what you're not paying anything and you're still saving and it works well and so that leads me

to the question like do you think that puts pressure on other governments in central and south america to adopt laws similar to the one that el salvador did maybe not in the exact form uh that el salvador implemented but something that that makes bitcoin uh easier to use more acceptable and gives more certainty around individuals using using it as an everyday currency well what's interesting there matt is that and i think the ramifications of the legal tender status of bitcoin and cellar have not been fully realized is that there are bilateral trade agreements in most free countries

where you will recognize the other countries deal tender asset currency. So right now, I know there's a lot of pushback and politicians saying like, no, this is only real it's not a currency,

what have you, but this is going to impact, it's going to have wide reaching consequences because even in the U.S., you know, you have this law where you recognize another company's legal tender as a currency. So the thing is that this is not going to be decided here.

It's not going to be decided soon. This is probably going to be fought in the Hague. But unless you want to change your bilateral trade agreements and your current laws to exclude a particular currency or legal tender from this treatment, you have to say it is a currency, right? The law is very clear on this point. I know, I know.

It seems like here in the U.S. and in the Western world in general, all the politicians are just like trying to rub that uh brush that fact under the rug um just ignore as well in guatemala we we had there was a talk with guys from the uh super the superintendent uh the banking superintendent and he was saying like uh even if it's legal tender we don't have to, you know, it doesn't make an occurrence, right? Which is just false logic.

And so, like I said, this is not going to be decided here. This is going to be decided in the Hague, most probably, which is where all of these international agreements take place. But as far as

law, as it's currently written, it's very unambiguous. If it's legal tender, we took care of this so exactly we should be we should just be leaning into this all around the world because i mean it's like it's an international trade agreement correct and yeah yeah and what will catapult this is having people just use bitcoin even if they don't know they're using bitcoin and what we're building out is making it easy for people to use bitcoin first in el salvador of bringing it to the other regions guatemala we're based here so bringing it to guatemala

and people are going to be using it already and if enough people have bitcoin they'll and use bitcoin they'll get interested in holding it and i really like a phrase stevan uses and it's it doesn't matter what price you bought bitcoin at what matters is how long you wait before you spend at bitcoin and that's what's gonna happen here enough time will pass with people using bitcoin that they will grasp they will live with the implications of using this hard money that is gaining value over time and this will make bottom-up pressure to adopt bitcoin and uh And local authority will not be able to just go out and say stupid things like, no, it's legal tender, but since it was not emitted by a sovereign nation, you cannot use it. We will not consider it valid.

That's crazy, man. And people will have enough interest vested in Bitcoin that they will push their institutions into accepting what is already written in law. Yeah, I have a little bit of a different perspective on this, and it has to do more with infrastructure. Our business, what we're really doing is we're building the financial infrastructure of the 21st century. And by we, I mean everybody that's doing work on the Bitcoin lightning slash lightning infrastructure. So this is going to be the infrastructure for the financial systems of the 21st century. There's a very clear and obvious reason for this. And the reason is everything right now is running on 50 plus year old technology.

everything in the banks like Swift I think it's 70 years old and everybody wants and what this does is that it creates an immense amount of friction at all levels because if we think that Swift is what underpins all of the financial ecosystem right now and then you start layering things right and then And you have finally you have the credit card companies, which is where your instant spending comes from, supposedly. So but that instant payment that happened when you go to Starbucks, so to speak, that's not instant. That takes days to settle. And that is the big difference between Bitcoin and everything that came before where it is instant settlement. even lightning transactions are instant

settlement. The reason why is because you have basically escrows so every Bitcoin in the lightning network has to be committed by somebody right so you cannot spend a Bitcoin in lightning that hasn't

been already put into the network however that happens. So you are having instant settlement across all your infrastructure and not only that you have way less friction so you know that's that that's what we're doing um that's that's what we believe in and i think the important thing here is being able to transmit all of these savings all this

new technology to businesses, to financial institutions, and they can see for themselves that it works better. And now we have to show them how to make money with it.

I mean, passively stacking sats can be a big thing for businesses. It's so simple and it's so difficult. But not only that, like for example right now payment processing is a huge issue right now most places in the u.s they pay like two percent right which you say okay it's not a lot but that's two percent

has to come out that comes out of your net right doesn't no it comes out of your gross not from your net. So for example, if you sell 100K, that 2% is 2K. But if from that 100K, you only keep 10% as net, then that 2% is 2,000 out of the 10,000 you were supposed to earn. So that's 20%. That's a huge amount of money for a business. And what happens if you move to lightning that goes down to what to one percent to half a percent to 0.3 percent to nothing percent yeah that is i mean that is money because then you're not talking about two percent you're talking about reducing that 20 to five percent to three percent you're gonna tell me businesses are not interested in that well not only are they interested i mean

you can you can make a very strong argument that it is in the best interest of shareholders to to adopt that i think if they don't and it is and it is it is absolutely yeah i think but we have to demystify it we have to bring it down to real world applications like i explained to you okay it's going to bring your 20 down to this person right by making this move and you have to give them the tools that they are in control of their finances, because that's the other thing here. We can't go out with some janky tools like, oh, yeah, and here everybody's going to have a wallet, and everybody's going to spend, and then you have to consolidate funds.

That's not going to work. We have to build enterprise-level tools for these customers, and they'll be incentivized to, you know, go out and ask their customers, you know, I'd rather you pay me in Bitcoin. I'll supersize your credit. I'll make another small promo. Pay me in Bitcoin. And I think that's going to happen soon

because what you just heard from Jose is I think it's also one of the key of why we have so many customers and so big ones because we were able to talk or Jose was able to talk in the correct language so that the accountant would understand. The accountant is the key person. Makes or breaks the whole thing

because you're paying him to tell you no, basically. That's what you're paying him. So you had to first convince the head, right? But the accountant, he needs a way to put it into his books. He needs a way to make monetary sense out of this. And the big hurdle with Bitcoin is that you can understand all these arguments and everything, but until you don't live it, you don't really know it, right?

So you hear it and you always start slowly, and then it just is suddenly and then slowly and then suddenly, right? Yeah. And that same way is just with human nature and how do we understand and use technology, you have to start very slowly. So I do hope that over the time, we start seeing that customers start understanding this

they start going down on the percentage of dollars that they have in their bank account and we made that function super easy it's just a slider you just have to slide it you know and and i think we spend a lot of time explaining that that function just have to slide it you know slowly you're not going to get 90 of your transactions suddenly in bitcoin i mean if if it's 10 that's awesome so you know go sliding if you're one of these multinational corporations like why not like like how large is the el salvadorian market compared to the rest of their operations and how much would it hurt to take 100 of those revenues and bitcoin just see what happens right yeah yeah it's finished but uh yeah also what's interesting here and i think uh

talking about stuff like we talked about the uh about the international implications of legal tender law there's another thing that that i wanted to touch upon which is very interesting and very germane to what we're all doing here is um we have to establish conversations with regulators a lot of what we saw here in in salva and now we're dealing with bottom eyes trying to get regulators comfortable with bitcoin one but also explain to them how it works Because at some point, let's say, let's live in a world where Bitcoin is successful, right? And then you're asking all of these AML, KYC questions, right? So the concept here is this.

Are we going to KYC AML our children? Because Bitcoin only lives digital. There's no physical representation of Bitcoin. You know, do you really want to walk down that road where we're K-1C five-year-olds, six-year-olds, teenagers? What does that do to their privacy? Because let's say I'm a dad. I want to teach my kids about money. Not big money, but money is now big, right?

do i have to go to a certain you know dmb like place get my kid a photograph so he can open a wallet yeah it's a very important point a very good point and something else that should be leaned into think of the children people always think that's it's one of the most strong the strongest one of the strongest arguments you can ever make to to get people's emotions going is about the children bitcoiners need to start leaning into the children no and then and it's really important because i think about that because i just had um my first kid right and i want to teach her about the coin and i want to give her some bitcoin when she's old enough and i want her to be able to go to the store and spend the point and you know have their own

them on extend if you will and am i going to be able to do that if we're kyc everybody because right now that's what we do right we have to kyc there's no customer through our doors that doesn't fill out like 10 pages of paperwork and now we're going to do that with our kids so i really encourage i don't know if any regulators listen to your show martina but i know i have an fbi agent that's about it everybody's listening and actually takes this question seriously because

we have and as a community I think we should you know call you know whoever we can that's in touch with the regulators and start having this discussion sooner than later

because it is going to be important that's an extremely good point I think we're going to need to fight this battle early and often because, again, if we don't, we can fall into the despotic hell trap of everybody's data just being out there and young people's data specifically. If I can do a quick, I think I'm not stepping on anybody's toes here. Let me see. Because most of the information here is public.

i'll just help you uh tie it up yeah i think i can say this so um i don't know if you recall when chivo launched that you know every transaction was uh had contained the name and the id and i think even date of the person birth date of the person who was making that transaction i don't know if you recall that yeah and then they switch it to matt alborg right yeah yeah well the reason why that happened is because they didn't understand like in technology the guys that were setting this up right and so they tried to use the memo field in lightning to id the transaction because that's what the law not not the law but like the um guidelines on how we have to handle uh bitcoin transactions said that's what they drafted what

the regulators drafted in the cellar like right now if you go to to to the line and sell out and read it the only reason they did that was because the regulators asked it they told them it had to to be there in every transaction. And you mentioned that security flaw, right? You hacked yourself. Congratulations.

Yeah. Congratulations. You played yourself. Yeah. And so that's why we need to also teach regulators how this technology works. How it's different than

what they're used to. And how we can, you know, get them comfortable with this. Because, you know, there's a lot of players. And if we really want to get this mainstream, everybody has to be comfortable with using Bitcoin. Fortunately, just to finish that one off. Fortunately, the regulations are there, really. It's drafted on the use of cash. so you just have to like make them understand that bitcoin on a lightning uh or bit bitcoin

generous actually did digital cash it's straight up what satoshi said is digital cash so on a regulation side you have to see it more as a digital cash version and on cash i mean i can give my kid uh five quetzales which is our currency here and he can go down to the store and buying he was kyc so why why should digital cash uh ask for this same thing if it's you know it brings the same purpose to it so um if you give them the hints and and show them this is you will already have it just have to adapt it then they feel comfortable in general i think because we talk a lot about the technical side but this is very um human and it's as human yeah very social first and foremost we're humans and we need other humans to explain this to us and

you know we need to feel comfortable and i think this is a shout out to all the bitcoiners out there man you're not just holding bitcoin for yourself you're holding bitcoin for the future generations and for the growth of humanity in itself so go out and speak out and and explain and be patient and you know don't uh don't be too cocky right now the etfs are open and it's and the other thing that i'm thinking a lot about is that we really really have to start pushing back and this is not only bitcoiners but i believe everybody should start pushing back against the criminalization of money i believe right now you have a bill being proposed that every transaction over six hundred dollars gets reported to the irs has to get reported

at some level you know irs or whoever doesn't matter the the thing there is that if that assumes that every transaction above 600 is criminal so where is the presumption of innocence in all this i believe our laws were built upon presumption of innocence if i'm not mistaken maybe they're supposed to be negative laws negative rights right exactly and there's a very important reason for this uh and it's the following it's very hard to prove out uh it's very hard to disprove a negative So, for example, if I say, Marty loves to do coke and loves hookers, right? And I just go out and say that. And then shouldn't the onus be on me to prove that is the case?

Because honestly, there's no amount of proof that you can present that it's going to be enough to satisfy that burden, which is what happens to companies. And that's why it takes years. We were talking at the beginning that companies here get sued by employees claiming with false or truthful claims. We don't know. But because the onus is on the employer to prove his innocence, and that is almost impossible to do. If I say, for example, Marty, you owe me $100,000. Perfect. Why? Prove it. No, but if I'm automatically considered in the right, and you have to prove that you've never, A, had contact with me. b i've never given you 100k how do you do that yeah you could just say hey i gave him a duffel bag full of cash it's like yeah i can't disprove that you can't disprove it and that's why we have you know we have to prove and right now with this criminalization of money loss

They're switching, they're inverting that process. So it gets very hard. We don't have 70% on bank or 80% on bank in the world by accident. We have it because we have all of these laws that make it so hard to comply with that there are potential customers that just get left behind. It's too expensive to onboard them. If, for example, there's going to be a guy here in Guatemala that's going to be depositing $100 a month, maybe, am I going to spend $200 on boarding? Absolutely not. And that's why we have on-bank.

That's why we have on-their-bank. And that's why we have to understand what these laws are, in effect, doing. they're switching around the onus of the proof of innocence right which is morally wrong in my estimation right

and then it's making it very expensive to you know onboard customers very expensive and so if we just take this new financial 21st century system

and we need to onboard new people and we'll be able to onboard more people to a point but we won't be able to onboard 100% because for example here we have a law and I think this law was drafted you know someplace in the US or

wherever where everybody has a receipt right everybody has proof of address right now there's a bunch of people in Guatemala that cannot open a bank account because they don't have proof of address why not they live in a village there's no running water there's no electricity there's no addresses

there's no bills that go to their house they have no proof of address but we're killing them economically maybe not with a gun but economically we're killing them yeah we're leaving them behind and now we have this wonderful technology that's able to solve this problem but we're gonna make the same mistake hey we're gonna make it criminal to own it unless you have proof of your existence well man always yells at me when i do this but that's why i love bitcoin right like afford you the ability to peacefully disobey to to exert civil disobedience and like that's what i hope personally is and the villagers in guatemala don't have proof of address and don't have the

ability to get onboarded via traditional means just disobey they download a mobile wallet or whatever it may be and they just start accepting bitcoin and just thwarting the owner's laws and here's the thing that I feel comfortable saying with this to you because I've already said it to the regulators and they understand they want to help honestly

most regulators are not bad people I'm sure there may be some malicious guy somewhere that's like you know kind of like Dr. Evil well your brother is doing that so I wanted to

yeah yeah no I remember this from I don't know if you had this cartoon I'm trying to probably date myself but there was this cartoon in the 80s of

a race they had this yeah the world race amazing race amazing race the amazing race the red baron so anyway but we've talked to the regulators and we've explained these concerns to them

because they are concerned we're not saying you know ah there should be no loss it's not about that it's about including all the disadvantaged people and having a pathway forward and establishing groundworks and a framework where we can actually um service these customers right where you know underage people where our children have access to where the most important there we go i'm hosting a live streaming session here at the tftc thank you for listening in that was a great a great a great um loop so jp we're the new hosts of tales from the crib are we still live marty's on the hundred thousand subscribers now yeah i hope i hope marty comes back in there you go i should have i should have known esteban when you started fist pumping that the loop was going

on god damn it sorry that was fun that was fun what was the loop word uh sorry about that i'm buying a uh a new laptop this week so hopefully these problems stop and of course jose was just in the middle of a very passionate yeah we need passion speech yeah jose you're joining us again i'm sorry that that happened in the middle of your impassioned speech he's connecting audio but i mean i'll just echo what he was saying like it was important rather like we're transitioning to the digital age right like and we need to i think regulators politicians whoever may be need to show some humility and understand hey this isn't you can't form fit the uh regulations of the last century onto this miznation technology i think it literally doesn't work you're gonna make people

worse off for it um jose i'm sorry about that no worries i uh i left just in case that wasn't my that was me that one was me um oh sorry it's the tfp so so just to wrap up what what i was completely thought is that we have to have a way to bring in include everybody basically and um and i think that regulators sometimes and not because they don't you know they're they want to be bad and they want to be like oh i don't want the guys in guatemala to open a bank account right it's not that it's just that they probably never thought of didn't occur to them that there might be people living out there that have no proof of address and so we have to voice our concerns in a reasonable manner just like they do like their concerns are what if this

is being used for legal activities okay let's find a framework for them but it has to be a framework that doesn't exclude people there has to be a way we have to get creative we gotta put our heads together and there has to be a way where we can you know kind of marry that those things in the least harmful way you don't throw the baby out with the bath water and that's one thing i've been trying to explain to people too and really drive the point home is like those things like yes people may be buying drugs and doing illegal things with bitcoin but their illegal activities are external to bitcoin in a sense you need to focus on that external why are they committing crimes how are they able to um and where and when are they doing it and not throw the baby out with

the bath water when it comes to bitcoin and the ability to send and receive it for for every individual like you know i think it's pretty safe to say that most people in the world are not drug dealers and that use case will be very minuscule compared to the uh new volume of illicit trade in the bitcoin network and that's already been proven like for me the regulators here are anything i guess not really used for illicit activities um maybe we're just holding and on and on the upside we also have to look at what this presents right like okay listen those that's like the bad part of it right but let's look at the good let's look at what's enabled by this technology right and so we have to really help them understand these dreams of of seamless

cross-border payments and the thing is that right now we have this very narrow one and of international payments that are efficient. And that's between like 1,000 and $10,000 a promise, right? And once you go under $1,000, it gets very expensive, really fast, and once you go over $10,000, it starts to get expensive and complicated, right? And so that's this, but imagine all of the, let's go lower about,

I'm not gonna worry about big money. Let's worry about small money. So if we go lower bound and we can start doing $10 payments cross border, what about $5 payments? What about half dollar payments? What about less? Then you have to see that there's this opportunity

for international commerce that was previously unavailable to most everybody. Where you can have customers around the world, depending on the service or product you're delivering, where you can do micropayments or you can do payments, nano charges, where you can actually stream money, depending on the service you're going to be boiling. And that opens a whole new world of opportunities. and if you add that to all the creativity that's currently locked up because they don't have access to a bank account like i i keep reading stories of kids from africa that you know they develop this wind turbine because they need a water in their village right something like that doesn't But imagine if they could start interacting with the rest of the world on an economic level, the productivity explosion that could happen is going to dwarf anything we've seen so far.

I completely agree. Like, the Industrial Revolution had a little, you know, they improved, and there was an explosion of productivity and creativity. But now, with this technology, with including, you know, 70%, 80% of the world that's still waiting on the sidelines, so to speak, and we bring them in, that explosion is going to be, it's going to go off, absolutely. And so, let's not shoot ourselves in the foot, you know, that's all I'm saying. no I completely co-sign that message too and I like in regards to remittance to like I had this epiphany today and a family member who wanted to buy something and they were only accepting Bitcoin as payment and they didn't have they're in the Bitcoin but they keep their stuff I'm not gonna docks their

security but they didn't have access to their Bitcoin and the ability to send a transaction they just took a screenshot of a QR code and said hey can you pay for me i'll send you i'll send you cash or or bitcoin later um and i just paid it for them and so that like they're in a completely different state um here in the us and so that's just like an example imagine like remittance could get so granular that you have a family member in guatemala who's going to the store to buy food they're like hey can you pay for this real quick for me and boom done like imagine medicine you have a medical emergency you have your kid here your brother or or or father or whoever is in the u.s and and you have to have that medicine right

now you can go to the pharmacy and could be paid instantly in the middle of the night yeah it's insane it's happening it's happening it is happening in el salvador i mean micro remittances is going to put so much adoption and um chipping into the you know financial inclusion thing because a lot of banks talk about financial inclusion and regulators, and they use this as a big word. But I don't think they put into context the incentives. I think one of the beautiful things about Bitcoin is the incentives, right?

It incentivizes you to do good, and that's why you add value to the network whenever whoever joins in. And that's very difficult to do. But the incentive right now, as Jose was saying, for financial inclusion is just not there. And you have to be very blunt and honest about that. The financial inclusion is not working because there's no incentive to do so.

Because the business of the bank is to make money with more money. So why should they go to a region where there's no money? It just doesn't make logical sense. Now, in the economy right now, they're asking for financial inclusion. They're asking a track record. So everything is running on a track record. To get a loan, you need a track record of an income. And on top of that track record, you still have to have a collateral, right?

Some type of collateral to give. And then you have your income track record. And on that is how you get your loan. And that's just absurd. I mean, you're leaving really most of human beings out. And if you switch that to Bitcoin, you can actually build your collateral slowly, very, very slowly, you can actually get to a point where you have enough collateral to, you know, get out alone and work for yourself, whilst your underlying collateral keeps on growing, you have liquidity to act positively in your economy. So it's very simple. And I think when we do that jump and it's going to happen, probably it's going to happen in El Salvador within, you know, one or two years with people huddling their Bitcoin.

But when they realize they can do that jump and when they start in that process where the first year is, you know, let's say I have 125% of my collateral, I have $25 to interact. But the next year, Bitcoin kept on growing, right? 200% on average. so now i have 75 now it starts to get interesting and from 75 i have 150 so that exponential growth throughout the years is going to make a big a big change um so you know it's just it's just patience and looking at the incentive structure and banks in el salvador are think are starting to realize about this because it will be for them way more efficient to give out a loan backed by a Bitcoin than backed by anything else, as simple as that.

Jose, I want to tie this up with a concept that my brother, we used to throw out back then that we've really done a disservice to the younger generations with not teaching history, forgetting the lessons we've learned. And I go back a lot to Adam Smith and to Bastiat. There are a couple of very basic concepts that are easy to understand and that Smith laid it out. And it was a great observation that helped with the Andrásler revolution. And it was that the baker does not bake the bread for me because he is a good person. If I'm paying him, it doesn't matter if he's good, he's bad, if he hits his wife. for the other three what matters is that he's incentivized to bake the bread for me because

he sees a benefit from it and that this drives the economy this drives economic growth this incentive structures that let me thrive and by taking care of my own self-interest i am a part a valuable part of the community where i develop where i live and this type of incentives that having governments that lay the groundwork for people to voluntarily do commerce or do their economic activity this is what the government should do they should not be going in there and dictating what's good what's bad they lay the groundwork the incentives for people to voluntarily interchange their work and this will make societies thrive and then you there's this idea that bastiat mentions and it's if you write the law in a way where you have to choose between

acting morally or following the law you'll send the basically you'll send the society into chaos because both choices are detrimental to social well-being and this is what we're setting up right now with the type of regulations we're doing you either have to choose between acting morally and to me doing voluntary interchanges of products and services this is acting morally when it's voluntary and the two parties benefit and you're have to choose between either acting morally or following the law where you either have to provide a service that the person doesn't want or have to deny a service that the person wants because it is set in law then we are furthering the social sickness and spreading social sickness around so i think it's very positive that bitcoin

helps align people's incentives and this is the main reason that government should embrace it because it will help them lay the groundwork for social incentives that are beneficial to the community yeah you're channeling uh adam smith bastiat and thomas jefferson if the law is unjust the man is not only right to disobey it he's obliged to do so um i think that's awesome i I think I'm gonna have to leave them a little bit. So I just wanna wrap up with one last thought that I think is important. And it's basically this,

money is the bedrock upon which society is built. There's a bunch of reasons for this, but let's assume I'm correct. So money is the bedrock upon which society is built. And money is basically a tool that we use as human beings for a bunch of stuff. And the problem right now that we are seeing is that as we debase our currency,

as we attack the basic properties of money, which is, you know, scarcity, fungibility, transferability, or portability, and all of these divisibility, fungibility, We attack the basic properties of money, which is what we're doing right now with obviously deep debasement, with the printing of money no longer scarce,

with all the KYC AMO regulations and no longer fungible, no longer divisible, no longer all of this stuff. We're attacking, we're eroding the bedrock upon which society is built. And we do that at our own peril, because the crumbling of society, how the Roman Empire fell, was precisely because of this. And they only attacked scarcity and, I believe, transportability. Those were the two only. Now we're attacking all five at the same time.

all of the rumbles across society across the world i'm convinced have to do with the erosion of money as a tool and so that's uh you know that saying fix the money fix the world it's a hundred percent true and why is that it's because money is the ultimate agent of peace without money the only way to get what you want is through violence i again i don't want to uh i don't want to i feel like i said i completely agree a lot of times in this in this episode but i do completely agree with that and i think that's a powerful message we got to stop attacking the rock of human civilization and and begin getting freedom enabling tools which bitcoin is uh into more people's hands not only a freedom enabling tool

but a tool that fixes the money like you just said and i couldn't be happier uh to know that we have gentlemen like yourselves working to build these tools out the infrastructure out to to get bitcoin into more individuals hands in guatemala el salvador and beyond so i just want give an immense shout out of gratitude to you guys. Thank you for doing what you do. Like I said earlier in the episode, I had

somewhat of an epiphany talking to Carlino hearing about what you guys are building and I think you guys are building infrastructure in the correct way and I'm just really excited to see how what you're building proliferates in El Salvador and Guatemala and beyond again and

how that not only helps Bitcoin but helps the individuals um in central america leveraging it so you guys are doing god's work down there thank you for coming on sorry for the technical difficulties of course this is tftc we're gonna have some technical difficulties but it is always embarrassing and um i'm pumped that we were able to do this on such short notice so i don't know if you guys have anything you want to ended on uh jose just give a very impassioned uh speech there another one i think that's yeah i think it's difficult to follow that one it's very very difficult but i i think that's why we do what we do and we do it very passionately as you can see so um everybody reach out we have

twitter and everything ivx mercado if you guys want to reach out and talk we're very active on and we're on instagram as well and um yeah looking forward to to grow this this is it's a very interesting times to be alive i'm impressed like i'm just you know full of gratitude yeah it's hard not to wake up every day and be excited um i think i woke up i was like oh i'm talking with the idex mercado guys at 11 a.m let's go yeah awesome um yeah thank you marty i want to shout out to the people at bitcoin beach i always like to say that the guys in el salvador what they did was truly groundbreaking and they did their part and they're still doing it and now it's time for us to add to the work they're doing we're in living through a monetary uh what's the word

is that a word revolution when it rains a lot yes yeah we're we're living through that and now we're building noah's ark to protect everybody from it and we're trying to bring as many of the animals that we can on board starting by ourselves so join in guys to pitch in and it's been a pleasure margie thanks for the time yeah pleasure has been all myself to salad first uh basically to all of the lightning community i don't have time right now to go over everybody uh who helped us um we have to realize that lightning being a success or the success that it was in san lauro it wasn't just us it was everybody because honestly we reached out the first thing we did was we reached out to them

like juan said the lightning lab guys cdb ceos uh wallet of satoshi uh too many to count bitcoin beach of course and uh honestly everybody in lightning came in they pitched him we're standing on the shoulders of giants uh as any good project and then so that's one shout out i want to give and the other one i do remiss if i didn't shout out greg false who's been so kind to us he's uh been awesome as a counselor as somebody that we can lean on to get this perspective and who's just been awesome in the space as well and we love him very much at avx and i think you know i think you guys have talked a couple of times i'm loving for greg foss to officially take on jose as a mentor

your mentorship with greg and that would be great thanks for everything shout out to greg foss the boss doing doing the lord's work from uh from canada um it's been a pleasure again thank you for doing what you do thank you for joining me and keep fighting the good fight i think we're gonna win with people like you uh on bitcoin side i think we're gonna win um we will that's all we got this week freaks peace and love bye