TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #389: Hydroelectric Bitcoin Mining is Changing Lives in Congo's National Park with Adam Popescu

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

Join Marty as he sits down with Adam Popescu to discuss the impact of the hydroelectric power plant and associated Bitcoin mine in Congo's Virunga National Park. Follow Adam on Twitter Read Adam's article 5:11 - Why Virunga? 11:51 - Importance of energy for improving human life 13:57 - Setting the scene 20:45 - Involvement of a Belgian Prince 25:46 - Jobs provided by the hydroelectric plant 27:55 - The Bitcoin mine 30:32 - Risk of violent threats to the Bitcoin mine 38:02- The lives in Africa improved by Bitcoin 39:53 - How the Virunga mine improves Bitcoin's image 44:38 - Disagreements on the value of regulation 47:51 - Fix the money, fix the world 51:17 - Plugs and wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital River TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

what's up freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce this rip of tftc i sat down with adam popescu journalist reporter who just wrote a piece for the mit technology review highlighting the bitcoin mining operation that is going on in verunga national park in congo fascinating story that highlights the benefits that Bitcoin mining particularly can provide to energy systems. I'm not going to explain everything here. Listen to the episode. It's fascinating. Not only the Bitcoin mining aspect of it,

but everything going on in Congo and the quagmire of a political situation that exists there. Very thought-provoking, Rip. it was brought to you by our good friends at river river is a bitcoin company built by bitcoiners for bitcoiners they don't trust any third parties they build all their infrastructure they built their own wallets if you hold bitcoin on river you can be ensured that it's 100 reserved and held in a multi-sig wallet that the river team has built they're not they don't have any third party dependencies like prime trusts or anything like that they build their own infrastructure

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on unchained over your application multi-sig they do it the right way we only give you companies that do it the right way unchained.com slash concierge uh did not reboost for this episode because we just recorded back to back we have not posted the previous episode before this rip so there are no boost yet so i'll read two episodes worth of boost uh next week enjoy it freaks you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free when 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's up freaks welcome back to tftc this is uh this is a rip that was put together last minute literally in the last hour i'm sitting down with adam popescu who wrote an incredible piece in the mit technology review that dropped last friday i believe is that correct adam yeah on friday and you're telling the story of verunga national park in congo and how they're leveraging excess capacity at a hydro plant that they've been building to mine bitcoin to help fund the national park which has been hit by a wave of misfortunes in the form of ebola and covid which have restricted tourist revenue and so they've been leaning on on bitcoin mining to

fund the park um before we get into the bitcoin mining i think it's important to learn more about varunga why you went over there and what you saw adam absolutely um first off thank you for having me um good question why did i go over there why are we even talking about this place I think that when you think of the word Congo, or when the average American hears Congo, they probably go, you mentioned Ebola, you know, they probably go in their mind to the book, which was called Congo by Michael Crichton, which is about basically killer gorillas. or before that um there's been a lot about transmissible diseases from this region there's a lot of misinformation there's joseph conrad from heart of darkness over 100 years ago or about 100 years ago it's always been a place that has a lot of mystery a lot of exoticism and a lot of misinformation at the same time it's got a lot of wealth potential so back in the day it was

uh rubber and ivory and timber and also just manpower because it was part of it was part of belgium in terms of like king leopold who was uh the former king of belgium in the late 18th century or sorry 19th century basically it was a private country and the guy never even stepped foot there so this is the past of this of this region a very complicated many different languages is a country the size of Western Europe, not many roads, not much electricity, and the last 20 years, a lot of war over minerals. So cobalt, coltan, a lot of the things that function or allow our technology to function are derived from here, from these rare earth mineral mines.

So go ahead. I was going to say the cobalt mining particularly has been in the news recently. I know Joe Rogan interviewed somebody who went down there really trying to expose the, I can't think of a better word, atrocity of what's going on in those mines. well yeah there's a new book called cobalt red which is all about this issue about supply chains and where we get the pieces of technology that have to function or that allow our lives to to move at a really brisk clip but these are the kind of places where for lack of a better term life is cheap people are willing to do really heinous

things to get what they want there's a lot of gray area in terms of legality and what's acceptable ethically and morally so all of these things are for a writer for a reporter and for a reading audience incredibly rich and visual and interesting

very rich palette to paint with if you will and I have a background where I have gone to sort of end of the world places and told stories that are a little bit counterintuitive or a little bit surprising, I hope, that will get readers' attentions.

That's everything from going to the Himalayas for various places, looking at man-made glaciers and tracking snow leopards to the Galapagos where the Chinese fishing armadas are fishing in a national park and exploiting that rich resource. So in Viroga National Park, which is known for a Netflix documentary about these rare mountain gorillas that are being threatened in a group of rangers who are like a law enforcement body who are risking their lives to protect them. That was what I knew. I didn't know much beyond that. And over the course of many months, talking to the park and getting them to vet me and verify me and what have you, I ended up going there in March, late March of last year.

I actually arrived in Congo March 23rd, which is very symbolic because, as you alluded to, M23, the March 23rd movement, is the big militia group in this region. And when I was arriving on March 23rd, it was very auspicious. I'm not really into that kind of, I don't look at numerology or any of that stuff, but at the same time, it felt kind of weird. and by the time I left there was actually unfortunately an attack by them that just coincided with me leaving so it was very sober and very real and my goal that I heard about the hydro power plants I ended up doing a story for a new scientist got a magazine it's a British publication which mostly focuses on science and conservation issues we looked at the hydro I also did a profile on the Parks Prince,

Emmanuel Denrode from the New York Times, that looked at him as a figure and some of the controversies and successes he's had. But when I was there, they said, you know, hey, we have something to show you that no one really knows about, and that's this Bitcoin mine in the jungle. And when I saw this, you know,

this is a million different thoughts flooded my mind, but the big one for you and your audience is that this is an incredible story it needs to be told and when i came home i started crafting it and pitching it to some of my contacts and here we are almost nine ten months later yeah i mean i think what it really highlights number one the importance of energy because i think the really interesting point that you make in the beginning of your article is that there was a material amount of deforestation because it's a national park, but there are Congolese who actually live within the park and, um, try to, uh, try to go about their lives. And there was

a material amount of deforestation going on because people were cutting down trees, um, to, to get energy in their houses. And so a solution to that is building a hydro dam that would produce reliable uh electricity that they could use instead of cutting down the trees and so that's another topic that's been a recurring theme on this podcast is the importance of energy particularly to uplift people in the developing world out of poverty and to give them a sort of base layer of quality of life that they can then begin to build a better life on top of and what we've come to find throughout history and more acutely over the last year, I would argue is that reliable energy is extremely important to uplift downtrodden areas of the world out of poverty

and bring them into the modern world. And that's one thing that Bitcoiners have been talking about for quite a bit. And that's why I'm sure I'm not the only Bitcoiner who is happy that you wrote your piece but it validates something that we've been saying is that bitcoin mining particularly can be this buyer of first resort to help incentivize either the build out of these reliable energy projects or sustain them in times when demand is lower than otherwise would be like it has been in verunga due to the fact that they can't have tourists come in yeah i mean it's incredibly complicated and controversial theory or practice of development here. To give a little more backstory of what we're talking about, for those who haven't read the

article, essentially, there are a series of hydroelectric power plants in this area. Like I said before, there's no power grid, so there's no way that someone can just connect to the country's grid. Roads are all pretty much all dirt, so incredibly undeveloped in terms of modern amenities the one of the issues here is that um having how do i put this um there's a there's i'm searching for the right the right words here because basically what i'm trying to say is it's not a zero-sum game it's not that this is all good or this is all bad we tend here in the U.S., or at least I'll speak for myself, things work or they don't. You know, we tend to look at, you know, you call up 911, the authorities arrive in time

or they don't. You turn on your tap, it either works or it doesn't. Your phone bill, et cetera, things like that. We come to rely on these things and we kind of take it for granted. In a lot of the developing world, resources or amenities that we come to think of as second nature are really the purview of the wealthy. and there's a lot of trickle down and there's if one household has a hookup to the to electricity for instance maybe seven or eight people get it through extension and that can help um a group of

people not everyone wins and it causes it can cause a lot of jealousy a lot of issues a lot of corruption so you know i say this because i don't think that this is a one-size-fits-all this the solution to this region's problems or this is something we can replicate in other uh challenging developing regions i think for the bitcoin community it's a great narrative because as you said this says you know there's a lot of vilification of using energy that pumps fossil fuels um causes um issues within multiple communities etc corruption this is um something that you your folks can say hey wait a second this is clean energy and it's helping and i think it is at the same time what makes this compelling what makes this controversial is

who's benefiting you know if there's millions of people here how many of them really get a piece how many of them really benefit um and And my argument or maybe my perspective as an outsider when I come there, if a place is kind of neglected by the rest of the world, if it's too dangerous for foreign investment, if it's too dangerous that the UN has the biggest mission that most people don't even know this. They've been there for 20 years. They have a billion-dollar-plus mission, thousands of troops, and they don't do shit, that the locals don't like them. And there's, it's complicated, but in a quick, you know, one second synopsis, they haven't really known what to do. And that's caused a lot of traction and a lot of animosity with local communities. so um if only you know if if this park and the resources are saved if a small percentage of

locals benefit is that a win is that a positive i mean these are the kind of things that i'm trying to get out in the piece uh there are a lot of gray areas that aren't as cut and dry morally as we might have in other places with other endeavors what are some of the examples of things that may not be as cut and dry well there's a there's you mentioned the deforestation um there's still deforestation you know you can if you're leaking in a lot of places if you start to plug them up you might not be leaking as much but you're still leaking you know yeah um i i think a lot of the problems here are political problems that cause by

extension dominoes to happen you know a lot of the people who become radical and by radical meaning picking up a weapon it's the same conditions that can be happening in the middle east it's the same conditions that could be happening in inner city america it's the lack of resources it's trauma and it's also feeling of desperation so when you feel these kind of the weight of these things and maybe you're really hungry too you know and you don't have a piece of land you're willing to do anything because you're in a position where you don't have a lot of options that's the scenario in this region so by providing more stability lighting water pumping stations the potential for electricity maybe not everyone gets it but it's

possible and a lot of it is paid for by this operation the bitcoin mine well then you would you could say okay these are beneficial again not everyone will get a piece but it's moving the needle in a place where the government itself and foreign actors are not yeah it's it's a beautiful thing if complicated right yeah it's very complicated but i do it's why i really like your story i want to highlight is because it paints a an encouraging picture of yes it's still chaotic you mentioned towards the end of the article as you were getting out there was missiles being shot over the park and the hydroelectric dam was taking artillery fire and that's unsettling but through all that there is a silver lining and a gleaming glimmer of hope that there does

seem to be a workable model that they've slowly iterated on and built on over time it can provide locals with again a base layer of comfort and utilities that that would disincentivize them from picking up those guns or getting desperate or prevent them from getting to a place of desperation or at least lower the probability of it um and yeah they get the story only gets more fascinating from here considering the characters that are involved um there was a belgian prince who took over um right managing the national forest uh i believe a decade ago was it 2012 or 2014 i can't recall the date in my mind but yeah again here's another depending on your you know we're all experts from afar and we all have you all make an opinion

about something some of it is informed and some of it's not and um it's easy to throw So for Odurna, it's somebody who appears to not belong in a place. This character you're talking about, his name is Emmanuel Demirode. Yes, he is a Belgian prince by blood or by birth. He's also a guy who's lived in the Congo and slept in a tent for the past 20-some-odd years. You know, a guy who survived an assassination attempt and took several bullets in the chest, survived the surgery, translated the surgery to doctors who didn't speak a common language, sacrificed his family, made many personal sacrifices in order to see this through. And when you look at that big picture of this character, what really comes out is, I think, a belief that he has for change. Some of his detractors would say that it hasn't worked.

At the same time, you know, we don't know what would have existed without it in terms of could have been some kind of power vacuum, that it could have been worse. it's so hard to say in these places but you need people who believe also you have when you're in a leadership position it's very it's inevitable to have enemies it's inevitable to be seen as an outsider which he is you know can you can you be an outsider can you be an extension or symbolic of the past and yet be a good person in this capacity um you know those are these are these like the heavy stuff to that i tried to to wrestle with in the article and i think that you know it's easy to again it's easy to have a you know think about these okay belgian prince and country with a dark colonial past from belgium he's got to be a bad guy you know he's got to be uh

he's got to be all the boogeyman type stuff you think about. And then you meet him and you see how this guy lives. You see his morals. You see his values. You see some of the change. I mean, it's like pushing a boulder uphill. It keeps coming down, but he keeps fighting. And you have to, it's hard not to have respect for the guy.

And it's hard not to want to root for him, which is something you're not supposed to maybe say as a reporter but again you're where i think if you are you know it's like pretending to to be this to not have to not have an emotional reaction to a situation or a character but we all do you know what i mean you try to give someone the the benefit of the doubt and try to do right by them at the end of the day no matter how you feel about them but uh you you have to admire his tenacity whether or not you believe in it the fact that he's sticking with something uh under incredible challenges you know you it's it's impressive not really i mean like you mentioned he's literally taking

bullets uh for this national park and and kept chugging and trying to innovate and improve the quality of life for people living in the area and obviously protect the gorillas and and the rainforest um and it's really interesting to say but he would say here's this so we would think of it as protecting the gorillas in the rainforest he would say well what we really got to do is protect the people and we really got to give them an incentive and that's where this is all about because you know again maybe this project it doesn't put money in the pocket of every single person but if it moves the needle to create some level of stability or improves upon it then that's a net positive it can't be the only thing but you know i mean like when you have a

neighborhood that's a bad neighborhood and you have that one anchor business and you have something developed next to it and it's over time it starts to grow and if you can look at that kind of simplified analogy you know maybe that's helpful to understand what we're talking about yeah one step at a time slowly but surely and i think in the article you mentioned that this hydro electric electric dam via the electricity will provide to the market could provide something like 12,000 jobs in the area which is well it's already provided yeah those are um and it's a rough estimate but yeah i went and visited some of these jobs i mean basic stuff but soap factory you know vegetable oil uh chia seeds chocolate a lot of chocolate we i didn't know this

tons of chocolate comes from this area they also have the park has a project with um with ben affleck actually creating a chocolate company to bring it to the u.s the chocolate's already in stores in the eu but i mean it's a good it's a good business idea it also provides a stable market for the local chocolate farmers um you know like chia seeds coffee like lots of these kind of things show that there's a lot of potential for the kind of grassroots community businesses we're talking about um and that those are all again you know when you think maybe like a yellowstone if you were here you know yellowstone is helping ranchers and farmers with soybeans or whatever uh or cattle you might think oh that sounds odd but if yellowstone didn't have

roads if yellowstone rangers were being shot at every day by the guys from you know the local ranch or whatever i mean then you kind of have to frame it okay they're being forced into building some of this stuff by circumstance um and again you know this becomes so utterly fascinating that that's why i think people are i think that's why we're talking you know what i mean it's like it's there's bitcoin mines everywhere there's national parks all over the place but there's all these confluence of factors together that just makes a kind of you know how is this possible what does it mean what's going on here and what's the long-term sustainability can it be replicated elsewhere that it's just you know some of it's a hand scratcher too yeah and so let's dive in

get like more into the specifics of the bitcoin mine what did you observe i mean you tell the story of of there's a rich french uh bitcoiner crypto person that has decided to go in on this they have a number of containers um some of which vroom owns and the other which this french change, a Bitcoiner owns and pays electricity to the hydroelectric dam in Virunga National Park. And so they're not only mining themselves, but they're also producing electricity revenues from this French gentleman who is mining alongside them. So to actually look at the operation, you have to fly in, you can take a, you can drive

on the road. It's incredibly dangerous and it takes a long time, it's dirt roads and jungle. So when it gets muddy, it's also better to have some, some backup tires and whatnot. But when we flew in, it's a very short, steep runway, either you're going to be freaked out or it's exciting and it's so good like it's kind of you're flying in the middle of nowhere and you're battling altitude and then there's this little strip of patch between the trees comes out and you land there and i felt you know for me like this is i'm like a like a kid you know i'm just i'm wowed by this i don't even know what to expect and the actual the actual hydro plant

it's it's very clean and like actually beautiful if you could say that about a piece of machinery but because it it's just um it's such a stark contrast to the relative underdevelopment in the in the area where people have there's a lot of people who ride around on these bicycles that are made out of um wood that look like something from the flintstones you know like uh i'm not to be insulting to them but it's just you know very basic kind of stuff that they don't have the they don't have tires that they can just go to the local store they don't have a lot of stuff so there's a lot of very i guess bootstrap type stuff so to see this piece of modern machinery or modern the modern world here and the level of professionalism again it's just like it's

very wow because not too far away um you have rebel groups who are not cool with this you know rightly so i mean they're they're you know it also is a bit of a hard to to wrap your head around because you think okay well this is a very professional operation they have here's 10 10 containers and they look like shipping containers and inside again very clean um you could step inside and you could be anywhere you know there's engineers and people are certified and they know what they're doing and then you see when you're looking around well there's there's a lot of guys with guns there's a lot of guys who look very serious and um are providing security for this to run and it's kind of hard to you know there is

an excitement and there is a feeling of something special is happening here and it's also tempered by the notion of well how tenuous is this you know what's stopping the local my my rebels or the m23 coming and taking this is that on their radar if they took it this is something i actually asked um emmanuel if they took it did they have could they get the password could they then get the wallet can they you know how it risks is this another commodity in this area with full of commodities from diamond to gold to cobalt is it something else that's that's now dangerous and you know that makes it just that makes it when you think about it you know how do you get an investor to invest in this

you know how do you get someone to come and spend three months as a foreigner um what do they tell their wife or husband or what are they what kind of insurance is there how safe are they um and essentially you're putting your your safety in the hands of someone else you know even me just being there i have to trust to a degree that these people know what they're doing and they have a secure location that if something happens that you know that they know what they're doing and that so that in and of itself i mean you think about all these things and there is a level of risk that is higher than other bitcoin mining operations in other undeveloped countries whether it's central asia or central america which both of

them can be extremely dangerous extremely volatile um but what they don't have here is just so many different groups and that's what you know makes this ultimately the detractors and the people say wait a second is that how can it even if this does provide stability um for this little let's say even uh this area well you have 5 10 20 some people even say 100 different militia groups so how do you how do you possibly mitigate all these different risks yeah it sounds like such a like such a like i don't want to call it a headache sounds exhausting sounds almost untenable excuse me i have something in my throat yeah no it's it's

it's very high risk and we've seen this actually uh bitcoin mining particularly in bitcoin's history in venezuela specifically where um wasn't rebel groups or anything but it was the maduro regime identified bitcoin mining operations and confiscated the the asics and began mining themselves on behalf of the maduro government and so that the risk certainly does exist and but there are they could if you can protect the site and then you mentioned like the bitcoin and if they show up can they get the wallets and that's i think that's one of the most beautiful parts of bitcoin is you can set up in a way where yes you can excuse me you can be mining physically in verunga at this hydroelectric dam but since bitcoin is digital you can have your

wallet somewhere else protected maybe even in belgium or with somebody you trust in other parts of congo that's better protected you can store it there and send it from there but yeah no these these variables add up it does come with risk but again i do think it does highlight a glimmer of hope where yes it may be happening in this extremely volatile area but hopefully it proves to be a model that is replicable maybe again going back to the disincentivization to actually pick up a gun and steal somebody something from somebody maybe this paints a picture for others like oh maybe i don't need to pick up my gun and go take their resources maybe i could spin up a mining operation over here with this hydroelectric capacity and do the same thing just join them

peacefully in this market i'm not saying that's going to happen but um it does again create that glimmer of hope yeah i mean again if if in other places without electricity for instance can create hydro projects and one of them from an extension from those projects would be a a crypto mine they can then create basically passive income once you've already paid it off if that can then distributed then that is totally uh um totally a model it could be a model yeah and that's i mean even at this verunga facility right it's not even fully built out yet they have capacity from where like how much more energy could they bring on um i don't know exactly how much more they can bring on um i think you know i'm sure the volatility of the currency is a factor um i think

there's there's other things that play here um i think that you might be seeing stuff like this in other places in africa regionally sometimes soon yeah um there's a company gridless out in kenya where they're spinning up mini hydro dams in kenya too yeah yes there's a great thing where like electricity from these hydro dams typically would be like 15 16 cents a kilowatt hour But since they have so much excess capacity and Bitcoin miners can come in and suck up that excess capacity, it provides enough revenue to these micro dams that they can lower the cost for the locals, the residential consumers of that electricity, which is a beautiful thing. and that's another thing we mentioned jobs earlier but you were interacting

with the individuals actually running this mining operation and there were younger Congolese gentlemen who may not have been aware of Bitcoin or how it worked exactly but they've been learning and they seem pretty passionate about what they're working on yeah I think

I was just going to say what's your perspective on what their lives are like i think the that if you get an opportunity to do something that is so different than what your peers get to do it's it's a big positive for one you know it's inspiring and makes it feel like it's possible to have change you know again it's if only about i think there's 10 roughly a dozen uh full-time congolese staff at this location again it's quite small there was i may be fudging this but i believe several hundred

temporary workers you know building this this facility and so it's not it's not the masses but these are the kinds of questions in that gray area that from earlier we've discussed is that for those who could get it to benefit and though maybe by extension family or people hear about it then these are incredible opportunities to to change a life and to to really dream big in a way that it's not like selling your startup or you know getting acquired it's a chance to to really break out of um break out of some of these poverty recycles in a real way that is incredibly inspiring and so for you personally i know you mentioned on when we talked on the phone earlier that you don't consider yourself a

bitcoin expert um but i we didn't dive into like your notions of bitcoin if you had any before making the trip out to veronga um compared to your your perspective on bitcoin now like how how do you think about bitcoin did this trip change your mind at all well you know i'll tell you this there's a lot of a lot of enthusiasm and there's a lot of real excitement from bitcoiners um obviously there's been some blows in the narrative in the last year plus i think that there's a tendency sometimes people want to uh some of the notion about the pollution has been a sore point for bitcoiners who are very defensive sometimes about it And I'll say this, a project like this, these kinds of projects could really help that narrative, you know, in a way that it's not a stretch.

it's not you know if it's really running on clean power a hydro electric power plant that uses a dam it's called a river run so it doesn't actually uh change the flow of the water too much and it's very minimally invasive um again passive it basically becomes passive income once paid off those are whether or not you believe in bitcoin those are positives and those are um you're not even positive that's not a negative you know what i mean it that's something that it's that's not harming um if you want to go the climate route it's not adding to that um so that's that's something that i wanted to highlight um as opposed to my feelings i mean And this is not the first time I've written about blockchain stuff.

I've written about some of the operations that Tesla is doing in Nevada with one of their big facilities. Sometimes the story of Bitcoin for good, sometimes it's a marketing tool. Sometimes I think there is real potential for good, for positive stuff. I think this in Virunga is one of those examples, but it can be very easy to make it seem like hot air. And I think that's why there's also skepticism of something like this project

in Africa, because there's been a lot of, unfortunately, it's attracted a lot of kind of showboaters and grifters and a lot of folks who maybe go lean so far in that they turn off the masses. yeah there's certainly been a lot of scammers out there who have really drawn bad attention to the space i mean particularly in the last year things like ftx celsius block fi terraluna all that crap when you get down to the fundamentals like you mentioned really highlighting that it can bring reliable abundant energy to can help bring reliable abundant energy to places then you know on the narrative front too like actually i'm part owner

of a mining company we go a bit the opposite direction we use natural gas to mine bitcoin but we find stranded natural gas wells with no pipeline connectivity they're just leaking methane into the atmosphere so bitcoin mining in this context acts as an economic incentive to go clean up these stranded wells that are just sitting there rotting away and over time leaking methane into the atmosphere, so you show up, throw a generator on the well, create electricity to mine Bitcoin, use the gas in a very efficient way,

prevent that methane leak, and prevent that methane from getting to the atmosphere, which is a way, so it's not incentivizing quote-unquote renewable or clean energy, but it's cleaning up this energy that already exists and is just sitting out there, so it can help with the development of hydroelectric projects

and then help clean up some of the nat gas projects that are already in existence today. Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, at the end of the day, this is somewhat of a speculation and we're gambling. This is what it is. I mean, it may be people want to make money on this. That's that's their business.

And they're perfectly allowed to. And that's what the this is what this is about. I some of the questions of whether or not decentralization makes sense. I don't want to turn off you or your viewers, but like, you know, I'm not sure. I some of these questions are continuing to be asked. regulation, the need for not having things be totally identifiable, as you alluded to FTX, there are real questions here. If there is more transparency, maybe that helps.

Maybe it's also not the, it doesn't replace the dollar, and maybe it's another currency within within the financial space that you know that has more of a legitimacy to the table um questions that remain to be seen and are quite interesting yeah no i think um i mean um what do you consider i mean what many would consider i don't know i don't like to label myself for probably like an anarcho-capitalist that um i think regulation is bad i think governments only make things worse and I think Bitcoin's really proving that in its distributed nature can help me go back to the transparency point.

Think of individual, Congolese individuals who may want to get out of the country and take their little amount of wealth with them without being able to be identified. Bitcoin is a perfect tool to enable that, whereas the native currency or the dollar even would make that significantly harder, especially if you're moving physical.

units of those currencies um yeah i think that's what and that's the thing with like centralized control uh and transparency like you can't um you can't have this token that's worth accumulating if you don't have the distributed network that provides inherent utility that doesn't exist elsewhere particularly in the form of being able to send transactions in pseudonymous peer-to-peer fashion without the prospects of a despotic government or a corporation that may not like what you're doing telling you no you can't make that transaction i don't know what to say i'm i'm thinking about the crypto what did you say crypto anarchist uh i'm just i'm still uh fumbling on that one

anarcho anarcho sorry anarcho capitalist yeah i i tried i tried to warn you before we went on that uh i'm just a regular guy and i still have some some i still have some paper money in my pocket over here i do as well i do as well and i think um i'm under the purview that the bitcoin is an imperative moving forward obviously i've erected this media company um i've dedicated my life to it so that's um let's just explain my perspective to you but i think uh i think again even though like extremely happy that um you took the effort to get over to verunga and write the story because again like bitcoin like the bitcoin mining is just um an interesting variable and overarching an incredible human interest piece

and highlighting some very important problems that we need to face as a society, particularly around energy generation, these resources that we're taking out of Congo, leveraging child labor, bordering on slave labor to a certain extent in highlighting ways in which this area is trying to better itself through electricity generation is extremely important

yeah we're in a very strange time and a very dangerous time in so many ways and you know unfortunately everything is so interconnected and we're all so we're all kind of at the mercy of everyone else in a sense that everything from our day-to-day lives to the supply chains and the way the economies work and the climate and everything else i i want to be hopeful but it's it's sometimes if it's challenging to challenging given the state of things that we're in you know that's the flip side of being a reporter being a journalist is seeing so much of that up close yeah yeah i can't imagine what it's like seeing seeing what you've seen on the ground um but again i don't want to belabor

the point but going back to bitcoin like we have fix the money fix the world and big neon lights right outside our studio here and that's what i think a lot of people like to focus on the political taste of the day and blame politicians red white there's gonna be red blue whatever it may be um where i think the core and the root of the problem globally is that we have fucked up the money everywhere and money is the most important tool to coordinate economic activity to allow people to pull themselves out of poverty and make better lives for themselves and um i think what's going on in veruga is an example for that being able to monetize this open monetary network you only utilize it to monetize your wasted energy um absolutely if it's excess energy it's a great

way to to use that and um you know i'm believe that i'll probably be going back there at some point i hope it gets a little safer i'm not going to go until it does um and i think that this operation there will be growing and you'll see similar similar models in the region oh yeah it's incredible to hear before we wrap up here is there anything uh any final thoughts you'd like to leave the audience um places to to look into maybe uh is there any way they can help out with what's going on in verunga yeah that's a good question um i believe the park does accept uh crypto donations i believe they accept bitcoin donations um i think if if you're interested in you and you're and you're interested in in this topic and what these people are doing you know i encourage

people to see the the netflix film verunga i encourage them to um you know visit the website and take a look at some of my reporting on this, but just to kind of, it's very easy right now in today's world to just look at a tweet or a headline or whatever, and you kind of keep it moving because we have so much stimuli we're all bombarded with, but maybe take a second and read a little bit more on it because this place, like so many other fascinating regions, is so far beyond that just headline or that tweet or what have you and another it's almost a forgotten place and full of people who matter just as much as those suffering in Ukraine or wherever else or you're you know your

own stuff from the you often don't it don't see or don't care about what doesn't impact us but again in this interconnected world you have a cell phone if you have technology good chance that it's coming from a place like this and um it is uh it's an eye-opener when you see we're all really connected in a lot of the ways we don't realize yes completely agree um the cobalt i haven't read the book yet but watch the interview and it's it's pretty um jaw-dropping yeah how much people don't think of the front end of the supply chains they just see their iphone they have life's better yeah cobalt cobalt red a fascinating book king leopold's ghost by adam not with shield fascinating book um and then

dancing in the shadow of monsters by jason stearns who i interviewed for my piece and i also interviewed adam whole shield all fascinating geopolitical uh non-fiction that set up some of this some of this scenario that i've been writing about and just are ultimately fascinating yes go check it out freaks adam again we put this together last minute i appreciate you um being nimble here and hopping on in short notice again i think it's a very important story to highlight and i'm very humbled that you agreed to come on and talk about your experience thanks for having me that's all we got today freaks peace and love Thank you.