TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #502: How Bitcoin Fixes Elections with Carliño

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Marty sits down with Carliño to discuss the events that led to Simple Proof and bitcoin being used to verify Guatemala's election. Carliño on Twitter: https://twitter.com/carlostoriello Digital Witness: https://digitalwitness.io Find Carliño on Nostr: npub14advhxua8w78gl2z7q8c4s20htxkzq4cu5mhj34ep0puf7smyqzszrd7qq 0:00 - Intro 5:05 - Riffing 9:24 - Poverty is the enemy 15:57 - Getting OFAC listed and discovering bitcoin 24:03 - Austrian influence and the state of Guatemala 29:21 - Events leading to Simple Proof 42:31 - Simple Proof in practice 49:09 - Utilizing Stakwork 54:39 - Mitigating bias 1:00:05 - After the election 1:09:04 - Funneling gamified auditors to bitcoin 1:14:09 - Next elections and implementing in American counties 1:26:05 - Election statistics, bleep the thing 1:31:39 - Reciepts of truth 1:39:18 - Darkest before the dawn Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Zaprite⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bitcoin Talent Co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Gradually, Then Suddenly⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 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

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them to tftc send you and enjoy this rip okay 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. Carlinio. Long time coming.

Yeah, man. It's good to see you, Marty. It's good to see you too. It's been a long week. Yeah, my head hurts. Yeah? Traveling a lot? A little bit, yes.

And a lot of BTC++, you know, nerding out more than usual. I did not make it over to the conference yesterday, but I did wind up going to dinner with a few individuals who were there, and they said it was pretty incredible in terms of the turnout and the depth of conversation. A lot of people there. A lot of script talk. I'm feeling bullish.

We got a lot of smart people working. What stuck out to you? I'm kind of in a very focused mode at the moment, so I'm just doing my thing. but um uh let's see uh arc is uh interesting uh i i wish them well i hope they work faster yeah was uh brought there no um tierra tierra yeah yeah or someone was there i think uh it's a very good very good timing that this conference is going on this particular week considering the fact that it seems rather pressing to make sure that uh bitcoin is as

robust resilient and permissionless as possible a lot of things to build and i'm glad there's a lot of people building so um yeah just i'm trying to do a little thing you know to do what i can in my little corner of the world and as long as everyone is doing their part i think no matter what happens there's i can't stop all of us yeah let's talk about that your little corner of the world before we jump into simple proof yeah man digital witness what you guys are doing to help make sure that elections are actually uh run properly and uh securely maybe not maybe make sure that the votes are tested to um properly is that the right so uh the way i would say it is lending new, more recent cryptographic tools

to an old problem and ensuring Bitcoiners understand that there is this opportunity where there's a consensus algorithm that happens out in the real world that's usually analog that a lot of people have a lot of really strong feelings about. And so why not use that consensus algorithm

to teach people about this other one that they may not have heard about or have whatever they've heard is usually the wrong thing and give them a different point of view and a different touch point so that, yeah, we see it as an opportunity to reach particularly normies or pre-coiners or just the general population with a different message.

Yeah, and I mean, you have a lot of experience this in your corner of the world so i think to set the stage for anybody who is listening is not aware of what you've done in the past i think you've done a lot of really cool things particularly in central america el salvador guatemala um a very good advocate for bitcoin and making sure that as central america adopts bitcoin it is done in a way that is true to the ethos of bitcoin as you know there's there's a lot of ways to do it and hopefully we do it in the best way that gets the most people to um get the most out of it in the least amount of time and uh my mission personally is uh to get all 50 million central americans to more or less

beyond the first wave of adoption so if we i see it as a race there's a billion other people and if this little pocket of 50 million is on the first wave, perhaps that turns into the fastest way to get out of poverty. And my enemy is poverty. That's, that's my only enemy. Everyone else is a potential ally. Let's, let's dive into that. What, why is poverty particularly your enemy? So I think, you know, systems and institutions sometimes can be co-opted. And at the end of the day, yes, individuals are the ones carrying out those decisions. And so yes, there are some very bad apples out there that we should do everything we can to neutralize and ideally expunge off of positions of import. But I think more often than not,

at least in my experience, most people are just trying to do a job, trying to get by, trying to do the best for them and their family and they'd be fine with their neighbors being better off. And in general, when everyone around you is better off, then there are less people that are pushed to the edge and pushed to a point where they decide to do something that's very bad for those around them and destructive. And I think more often than not, when bad things happen, the culprit is probably poverty or some form of it and um at least where i'm from there's a lot of that so what is the fastest way to lift 50 million people out of poverty uh and in the next 10 years i think it's bitcoin i'm sorry you're saying that poverty drives people to a point of

desperation maybe that makes them loose have looser morals that would when money is dangled in front of them they will well the other thing in in the case of guatemala right so guatemala for those that don't know is next door to el salvador it's uh 18 million people the uh you know biggest country in central america and our you know poverty levels last time i checked We were still at around 50 percent of people are living, you know, in conditions that are considered potentially even extreme poverty. Right. Our main source of economic stability at the moment and for the past 30 years has been exporting our hardworking people to the United States. And they risk their lives to sometimes cross a desert or get on a train, get, you know, mugged, raped, murdered along the way, often sending their children by themselves to do this, you know, illegal crossing. And if they do make it to the other side, they become second to third class citizens, you know, modern day slaves.

and yet you know fiat and the u.s empire has been successful in telling that person that that is success if you are working you're bought off seven days a week at three jobs in the u.s at a you know hotel or whatever cleaning toilets you made it for what most guatemalans and uh you know i've had people that i work with that suddenly uh quit and told me you know i just can't keep doing this And every time I can, I try to pay people, you know, better wages than other folks. And you see folks that even in those conditions aren't getting pulled into the U.S., right? And so, yeah, what's pushing them out is poverty. I haven't seen the latest numbers, but over 50% of our, you know, newborns are malnourished.

and for those who don't know there's a window of about a thousand days when you're born for your first thousand days as a human being are incredibly important for brain development and if you are malnourished at that during that period of time you um your brain is not fully developed meaning that over 50 percent of the guatemalan population adult population uh has a what would be the most appropriate way to put it underdeveloped brain not to its fullest potential and therefore that creates

just problems where even if you could sit down with someone and explain how this new monetary system works maybe they just can't understand you because they literally don't have the brain power to grok something that new and so the level of challenge that that presents is uh very tricky and so obviously if any opportunity shows up to uh be out of that level of poverty you usually people are willing to do

anything um and uh and then of course just the other consequences of that on on a larger scale do end up creating that people who get into positions of power um you know aren't it's not meritocratic system usually when you have that much poverty around you and generally you see hard-working people smart people frustrated and you know I've got a lot of friends that have decided to you know I studied up here in the states for college and most of the people in my position you know from Guatemala who were able to get to a school in the states did everything they possibly could to stay up here i was kind of a weird one that i went back my my dad studied up in the states he went back my grandfather studied in the states my mother um and they all

have so i my family has the tradition of going back to to try to you know give back right because the brain drain idea if if the best and the brightest leave then how are you ever going to get out of that poverty cycle yeah now i understand that there's a lot more at play and you know the underpinnings of the entire monetary system is behind generating these these forces that are pushing all of these these folks away um and uh yeah so i just want to do everything i can to speed up the process of people um adopting bitcoin and understanding it and using it as a tool that actually is helpful in their everyday lives so when you went back after college were you aware of bitcoin at that point no uh i wish i i graduated in 2009 so uh i studied economics

and entrepreneurship at chapel hill and uh you know a lot of keynesian uh studies uh no no austrians And I, you know, worked in the region, first in Belize, then Costa Rica, then back to Guatemala. And in 2012, I was working with my dad at a company that he'd started, you know, 30 years ago. And overnight, we were two of the businesses in our family enterprise were added to the OFAC list. Oh, lovely. Yes. For those that don't know, it's the Office of Foreign Asset Control's specially designated drug kingpin and terrorist watch list.

Oh, bad boy. King Jong-un and Osama bin Laden and two of our businesses were on there, amongst other people of course. And we found out overnight. And I didn't really understand Bitcoin at the time. But that experience, you know, losing a family business that had been built over three decades, employing 150 people, most of whom are probably up here now working in construction, because we were a metal construction company.

Some metal construction company. So metal roofing, metal structures, mainly warehouses, megachurches, big coal depots, Anything that needs a large roof, we could make. Yeah. Well, how does that end up on an OFAC list? It seems like a pretty... So, yeah, it's a long story, but essentially it was a mistake. A person showed up to a meeting in 2006

that got onto our company register, and that person, six years later, showed up on the OFAC list. And so anything, you know, apparently some button, and like that person and anything in her web of distrust or whatever that was automatically thrown in and we found out reading the newspaper, right? What? Yeah.

And so, you know, I reached out to people that I knew from college who worked at the State Department and tried to find out like, how do you, you know, what does a person do? And there was an email, right? know hello at ofac or something so hello mr faceless you know bureaucrats you know i found out today that we were thrown on this list and as a consequence our money in the bank like our guatemalan banks weren't cashing any of our checks and you know they've we've banked with them for 30

years we were also struggling and you know onto like our second bankruptcy that we were working through so it's like you know we don't have money right like if we were drug kingpins like you notice thank you the banking system knows all of this like it's it's it's cute how they you know anyway um it took us uh 24 months i checked the other day to finally get off the list we finally got a response two weeks two months after we sent the email uh asking for 15 years worth of audited financial statements which we promptly uh had to dedicate our entire lives to because otherwise all of our financial you know products or powers were were you know paused and they took another what was 19 19 months to finally you know tell us your businesses are

no longer on that list uh there was no sorry i looked it up the other day i read through the letter and it's uh it there's actually a kind of a veiled threat at the end saying we remind you that they have been removed from the list but the united states treasury department reserves the right to add you on the list at any time kind of like yeah and of course um by this time all of our competitors had been going around town telling everyone that we were either terrorists or jerk kingpins but definitely not people you should trust and you know forget the 30 years of honest hard work that we've been able to build and the fact that we built some of the biggest building roofs in central america and uh and of course that you know basically a scarlet letter

you know on our backs that you can't shake um and uh so yeah that you know went further into debt uh and eventually shut that business down in like 2018 after 36 years i've never heard that story and it's rather infuriating yes so imagine it could be somewhat radicalizing that wouldn't would be a saga that would make someone receptive to something like bitcoin um looking back i am thankful really thank you united states treasury department and faceless bureaucrat for you know disappearing 30 decades worth of of uh hard work because i you know very you can't unsee something like that and so the value of censorship resistant money uh is uh you know embedded into my dna and so i want to do everything i can in the rest of the time

that i have on this earth to make something else uh happen you know and um expose other people to that and and then through that lens understood much more intuitively uh why a lot of the problems that we have in guatemala are our problems right and um yeah i mean that was kind of my origin story and then throughout that process i volunteered in 2011 and 2015 in the election system in guatemala you know as a volunteer at a voting table i would my neighbor you show up i give you your ballots at the end of the day i uh count the ballots and so i uh participated with other people and in counting the votes in front of witnesses and you know as this saga is going on i'm exposed to this process and seeing the proof of work consensus algorithm that is the guatemalan

voting system and so it helped me learn and differentiate also between a proof of stake right like why proof of work is so such a much more valuable consensus algorithm uh it allows you to get to the truth as opposed to anything else and so yeah just fell in love with that process and saw it you know would try to just have conversations about censorship resistant money or or talk to people about what happened to us with our business and and you know get anyone to explain how that makes any sense and and why would you trust a dollar if this could happen to you and yet even that you know people that know me and our family for for decades it's incredible you know how even under that you know faced with an example like that you know most people just

gloss over and and and you know you explain executive order 6102 or whatever and they just you know did you see the draft last night did you see the game last night so it's um you know basically frustrated with uh with with all this and realizing you know i you have to at least i feel like i have to reach people with a different argument for them to really get it and in the case of guatemala it's also even more complicated because is we have a university that's Austrian economics inspired. It's probably, I think, the only Austrian university in Latin America. As far as I know.

Universidad Francisco Marroquín, started by a former student of Hayek, who came back to Guatemala and decided, I need to start an Austrian economics school here, with the goal of having the Austrian principles rub off on the conservative elite of Guatemala. And the funny joke is that it kind of was the opposite. The conservative elite kind of erased a lot of the Austrian philosophy. Regardless, they had a tremendous impact, particularly in the 90s, where this guy was able to lobby the government and a bunch of politicians

to create locks on our central bank. And so Guatemala, you can look at our currency. It's called the Guatemalan Quetzal or Quetzal. And you compare our currency to basically any other Latin American currency, potentially even all the world. We're one of the only currencies that has kind of appreciated to the dollar. And if it would be allowed to float, we would appreciate it significantly. And we'd fall into kind of a deflationary problem

because our exports would be uncompetitive. and um so guatemala actually the central bank intervenes to keep the national currency um you know down versus the dollar uh which is i don't think there's anyone else in latin america that that happens but that means that as if i'm trying to convince people about the value of bitcoin i'm talking to 18 million guatemalans that have lived in a very stable currency environment for the past 35 years and so the sound money arguments you know like we got it only now are people feeling inflation because we are essentially pegged to the us dollars so now people are starting to feel it but it's not like mexico or venezuela or brazil that have you know tons of hyperinflationary

periods and you know it's easier um we i had to get more creative and that's where this comes in yeah well before we get into that i'm interested since we have you on the show like how has exported us dollar inflation like where where are you seeing it particularly in guatemala is it similar to what's happening here in the states to see at the gas station store like just generalized uh increase in cost of living um of course uh real estate being perceived as the only store of value that can you know keep its wealth and so most of uh the economic elite chooses to invest in real estate locally and so that drives up housing prices when we already have a housing crisis where i think it's something like 70 percent of people live in what's called like under housing or

something like they um you know they have housing their housing reality is well below where they shouldn't like basically i have they don't have enough rooms most people have large families in guatemalan so if they live in a small shack and it's like you know six kids and they're all sleeping in the same bed like that's you could have a house but that's still like not not good um but then of course real estate is being the prices are being driven up and so the difference between the halves and the halves not just gets wider and wider and we're already i mean guatemala has a long history of a very extreme Gini coefficient. You know, the inequality is amongst the highest in the world.

Guatemala is a very rich country. For our size, we have a lot of resources. We're the energy exporter of Central America. We have a lot of resources, but they're concentrated in a very small, myopic, kind of just stale conservative elite that just prefers the status quo and so the real estate problems are are significant right and you know we almost went into civil war recently because the election outcome wasn't satisfactory to these folks and they tried to reverse it and

for the first time in about 40 years the revolt and the protests were i mean the pitchforks were were being you know sharpened and the fires were being set and they got the message they they had the the way i the way i explain it is guatemala has had 80 years of uh the same owners but different management you know every every so often you just change the manager and so yay democracy uh but it's the same ownership ownership right and so it's been 80 years uh since it's the same group of owners uh and this new manager i would the way i described this has a different owner and so uh that process was uh uh difficult and um yeah i mean that's kind of what we're what we did well what we're here to discuss this is the election that you guys played a

pivotal role in indeed yeah so let's explain simple proof and how it played into this particular election because it is it did not get enough tick in terms of the um the gravity of the situation that was unfolding in guatemala and um how simple proof by leveraging bitcoin um played a role in actually making sure that the outcome that the actual outcome was expressed proven so uh in order to get the simple proof there i do need to give a bit more context which is a digital witness so i lead digital witness it's an post-election audit effort so the idea of post-election audits is don't trust verify right like all right there's an election outcome but if it's a democracy you should have access to the documents

and, you know, you're not sending a starship to Mars. You're literally just counting, you know, it's arithmetic. And it's... Simple addition. Simple addition. We should... The reason I have, you know, it gives me hope is if you're able to at least come to an agreement

as a society on simple addition, that's the base layer. Be careful. they're trying to say that two plus two equals five here so well that's when you know it's completely off the rails but so yes um i tried auditing the election in 2019 and that's when i created digital witness the term in spanish is fiscal digital but uh fiscal digital is not what it means fiscal is a word for prosecutor or witness and so digital digital witness right so So we were witnessing or we were auditing the election and the system produces all of the documents digitally for anyone to be able to verify.

However, the trick is it's over 100,000 documents at this point with millions of data points. And so you've got a week to verify that was considered in Guatemala an impossible feat at this point. and so in 2019 my dad ran for congress a cousin ran for congress they asked for help and i said actually you know i won't give you money but i do understand how the voting system works and i can audit it and i kind of you know love the don't trust verify philosophy so let me add it you know in in bitcoin or speak let's run a full node on the election let's treat votes as transactions and consider an election a block. And if I can get my hands on all the transactions,

then I can reach the block and do the audit, which is what that is. And so in 2019, the documents were changing and there was this massive problem. And to my eyes, as a witness to what happened in 2019, I can't see it in any way of describing it other than the 2019 election results in Guatemala were fraudulent. When hundreds of thousands of documents are changing

over a span of six days, you can't trust it. How can you see the changes in these documents? So because I was working for political parties that had candidates, I had credentials to get access to the back-end system that the election authorities was making public. So there's this very obvious website that you can go in and it has all the tallies, the bar graphs, and you can go into the districts and you see the numbers, but you can actually also drill into the JPEG files that contain, that are the primary source data that feed that. And those JPEG files are pictures from the voting tables where I used to work that are handwritten by hundreds of thousands of Guatemalan volunteers simultaneously on election day. So the paper-based system of Guatemala has integrity.

All the documents contain all the data, and then they're scanned and put on the internet. Great. except the back-end access that I had where I was looking at the JPEGs, you'd expect it would go from 0 to 105,000, which was the total. It went from 0 to 10, down to 5, up to 20, down to 10, up to 50, down to 20, up to 80, down to 10,

up to 100, down to 0, up to 100, down to 0. So I'm literally looking at the database hitting refresh and that's like the total count of jpegs is going like that right and it crashed for you know they you go into the website you didn't see the data then it rebooted a few hours later with a hundred thousand the same happened the next day the same happened the next day so you're just like i mean what the hell's going on but i didn't have a you know fast enough connection or even the you know back-end tools to download everything as it's happening so you know it's different to witness a crime and be able to give eyewitness testimony than to say and i had my high definition camera

to you know take pictures and then i like you know took out my crime lab stuff and got all the fingerprints like eyewitness testimony is not the same as hearsay and so in elections you can't just make claims and and your opinions about how they stole the elections don't matter like you have to prove it right and so i downloaded everything i created software to try to get the crowd online and you know thousands of people to collaborate and read all of this in a captcha like game right so um just getting the data in front of people and asking thousands to to input the data but we failed um turns out it's hard to motivate people like thousands showed up but uh once the results were made official by the election authorities just volunteers went

down right and i didn't have any way to incentivize them and so i thought it wouldn't be nice if there were a way to um you know provide value for value to folks and so in 2019 there wasn't really anything to do that and so i just kind of waited oh and the other thing was i realized if we do succeed in 2019 and my audit this you know all the product of this work contradicts the election results technically that's treason and your audit is or the election results if you're elect if you audit and you publish you know and your election results based on the documents and you're saying this is what happened and it's not what the election authority is saying technically that's treason right the audit is treason if it contradicts the election authority it can be argued that

that's treason as in um creating a counter narrative to the supreme elections authority which is what we call it um in guatemala that that is potential treason uh hasn't been no one's been accused of that yet but my lawyers some friends recommended that we explore ways to avoid that and the best way was well if your audit was based on the official documents and you can prove that you didn't change the official documents then even if they charge you with this it means we can then argue in court that this is just what the documents say and it's your documents i'm just reading them right but of course the challenge there is if you are in a position where the state is suing you say in my case of arguing that i am altering election documents in order to create

the idea of a different election outcome um and i'm and i'm saying but these are my documents one potential possibility is that the state could say oh no those are not the documents these are the documents and so you have this problem of how do you trust a set of digital data is the same and cannot morph dependent on whatever the state's new prerogative may be yeah and so So they could produce different JPEGs. They did over a period of six days in front of my eyes. So I figured I can't put them past this. And so what could I use?

And so on day six, when they finally published their final version, we had a friend told me about Open Timestamps. And so for those that don't know, OpenTimestamps.org, a protocol developed by Peter Todd in 2017. I think earlier than that, yeah. I think like between 2015 and 2017. It's been around for a while. It's been around for a while.

You might know better, but you're working with us. Yeah. You did more research on it. The way I'm saying it now, and maybe I'm wrong, and correct me if I'm not, but it was... It may have been implemented in 2017, but it's an idea I said for a while. And the way I explain this is sort of the compromise

between money maximalists and database users on the Bitcoin blockchain of what's the minimalist use of the Bitcoin blockchain as a database that a money maximalist would be okay with. And so I don't know anyone that's against the use of open timestamps, and I've talked to them, right? I love open timestamps. Remember, you had TweetStamp, where somebody was known

to tweet outrageous things and then go on to delete those tweets you could tag the at tweet stamp and it would hash the data using open timestamps into the bitcoin blockchain and you'd have this database you can go find the original tweet after they deleted it yeah and and actually that's how we heard about it's like the the tweet stamp becoming a famous you know or just a widely used famous amongst bitcoiners that uh they're no longer around and you know if you're out there come back yeah we need you we need you um that we found out and we were like okay so i've got all the the election authorities are going to give me a hundred thousand jpegs can i get this on bitcoin so i can prove that in the moment when i finally

got the authorities to give me this data i could hash that so i can say look like i never touched this like it literally went from your hands to my system and it's the same exact files so for those that don't know basically uh open timestamps protocol what it does is depending on how you want to do it but um in our case what we did was you take one jpeg you take the hash sha256 and then you append that hash to the sha256 hash of the next one and you know and i'm probably butchering this so go and read open timestamps.org for the actual like code it's open source um and so you can create a long string or merkle tree uh and end on your final hash and then one hash is sent to bitcoin via the op return function in the transaction so you pay the minor fee and

opportunity i think even like makes the output unspendable um but also it's optional data for nodes so if at any point a node doesn't want to keep this data on their node uh they can just prune that data and so it doesn't force anyone to carry any arbitrary data it's only nodes that choose to keep this arbitrary data on their nodes who carry it and so that means that you can have any set of data that for any contract that you have anything in my case it's potential evidence that would be used by the states to charge me with treason and so hash that timestamp it to bitcoin and now we can get started because it means that i can work on hundreds of thousands of documents to read them and figure out what they say without fear that when i come to the conclusion the state

just decides to create another 100,000 documents to say something different. If you don't have a foundation of reality, of shared truth, then you can't do anything, right? Then we live in a post-truth world where nothing is real. But Bitcoin is that anchor of truth

in the sea of lies. And so that was the backstory. We made a bunch of recommendations to the national elections authorities in 2020 in their like official process for modernizing and improving the election system. And some local nerds found that to be very interesting. And in 2023, they started this company called Simple Proof.

And I was last year creating the digital witness and getting it ready to work. And I was going to do my own thing. And these other guys that I know decided to build a system and then pitch it to the election authorities and tell them, you remember those guys that recommended that you use this system? Well, we built it and here it is. And not only does it enable people like me, Digital Witness,

to carry out an audit without fear that we get charged with treason afterwards, it also means that if a losing candidate of the election decides to attack the election system through artificial intelligence creating millions of fake copies well that's what i was going to ask is that how they were doing this they were essentially either were they physically writing new documents taking pictures loading the jpegs or were they just digitally manufacturing them uh in terms of like how the election fraud happened in 2019 remember i i didn't like catch them so i don't know how they did it but one option would have been creating an artificial intelligence engine and then trying to predict what the voting

patterns are going to be for certain voting districts and then getting you know the originals and you know substituting that with a you know altered version that hopefully goes unnoticed because you're you predicted a pattern a voting pattern that can get on going unnoticed um like that's one option i i'm sure there are other options uh of what people could do at scale right um but so these folks at simple proof they pitched the election authorities and you know to my surprise as a digital witness i was there ready to to do this i'm logging in to download all the data and when you go into the website there's the picture that you can download but then there's also a very conspicuous orange button that says verify hash and so you click the orange

button and it takes you to another website that's a different contractor so you have two different contractors two copies of the jpegs but then simple proof not only has the jpeg for you but it also provides you with the open timestamps file that is created through the protocol that gives you that mathematical proof right and so all you need to do and you know it's obviously the the pushback i get from bitcoiners is oh but this is causing blockchain bloat right then no again if you look at open timestamps.org essentially what you're you're pushing off the data storage so the jpeg storage um and then the proof storage onto the user so if you're a citizen that is interested in making sure that your documents that you can prove your documents

haven't been altered you just download your own personal copy of whatever the state has produced and you download the ots file which is the cryptographic proof and you store that offline So it opens timestamps is only putting hashes into these op returns. And then, like you mentioned, use this external system to basically make sure that it lines up with the hash. And so how do you do that with the JPEGs? Is it like stenography where you're so they're able to be like, oh, like to check against? Yeah. Well, the easiest thing is.

So what we did is we downloaded all of the JPEGs. We had that on our database. And so then we took out, we calculated the SHA-256 of the JPEGs we actually downloaded. And then we checked that against the SHA-256 hash that they're reporting, right? So don't just verify. All right, you're saying these are the hashes? Well, I went in on election night. I downloaded absolutely everything.

I took all the SHA-256. And the first thing we did was then compare those SHA-256 databases to one another. And so it's a very simple, fast way to quickly determine, have any of the, in 2023, it was 125,000 JPEGs. Are any of those SHA-256 hashes different? And to my great luck, they weren't. They were the exact same. So I was like, oh, okay.

So they're not doing that, right? They're not deciding to change anything. We can rely on a finite universe of JPEGs, which are 125,000. And so then it just becomes a OCR problem, an optical character recognition problem of grabbing each JPEG and extracting the handwritten data and turning it into a database. and then comparing our results against the official results to see if they match. And so to do that, so sorry to make sure to cover our bases.

So the election authority did that and I knew something amazing. I mean, something was going to happen. It was going to be a good story. And so I have this other friend, great friend that I've worked on film before. And so we were documenting all of this. We were interviewing people in Guatemala.

We interviewed Peter Todd. And so we created a short 15-minute documentary, 16-minute documentary called Immutable Democracy that tells that story. Just the specific story of, wow, the Guatemala National Elections Authority used open timestamps in real time on election night, published it to the press,

very proudly claimed to everyone paying attention to the election and voting system in Guatemala that everything in the Guatemalan voting system in 2023 is immutable and they well they use the word inalterable which is uh inalterable but you know immutable I think is a better translation and so that's the first thing that I invite people to to see if they're interested is a immutable democracy on YouTube it's free or you can go to film.simpleproof.com that's where i you know partner with these guys to uh you know contribute to what they did with by by telling their story and so then we began with the auditing work which is things get interesting yes so there i was very lucky to um stumble upon stack work and uh stack

work is a lightning company in the bitcoin space uh check them out they um provide hyper growth solutions to people so if you have a like work a problem that you need to do like many many many times they can help you out and essentially anything that you could potentially get someone to do on their phone for you you could work with stack work to do and have you know do it hundreds of thousands or millions of times and the stack work workforce can do the work and earn satoshis uh and get paid through the lightning network and so i was just like this i can't believe a bitcoiner already built the exact solution shout out to paul toy thank you sir uh and um they um you know helped i met them at the human human rights foundation event in miami and uh they

just liked what we were doing and and we partnered together and so we started working over a year ago uh to just you know train you know figure out how to do this and train all of because they also use ai on a bunch of things and just get it ready and so on election night and actually a week before the election we were already opening it up to people and inviting them to join us and practice and so you a week before the election you could log in to a website the digital witness dot io website you just put in your phone number we sent you an sms with the link to stack work and uh you're in you know unique user with that data people just clicked on it put in their user and stepped into a space of stack work where they got a tutorial just teaching them how to do this

and basically we're able to see snippets. Like when I say handwritten digits, it's literally like someone at a voting table wrote down 100 votes to Marty and 20 votes to TFTC and 30 votes to Sugar, whatever. And so you have to look at the data and turn it into digital data.

And so you could do that on a phone. And so people just, we were inviting people to come in and practice on the 2019 election. So I used the fact that I never finished the previous audit, but I had the JPEGs to just expose people to it and start getting practice runs and just tell them, look, on election night, be ready, just practice before.

And so then on election night, we just put everything in and started doing the work. And we were able to audit all 125,000 documents of June elections within a two-week period. Holy shit. Yes. 70% of the data was read by machines, a combination of AI, OCR models,

open source models that I'm more than willing to share with folks if you're curious. And then the 30%, which was about, ended up being millions and millions of jobs that were done by people on their phones. And we marketed it to young people. Basically, you can't vote. it doesn't matter you can audit right which is that's powerful i mean you know for whatever

magical reason when you're 18 you can make this decision but if you're a 15 year old and you're 16 year old you know i don't know i was conscious and aware of all the propaganda and and you know there's all these young people that are exposed to the to the conversation around elections and yet they can't do anything right but give them a phone and get them auditing um and it turns out they they can do that much better than all the boomers uh they'll they'll work a lot on their phones and so we market it to young people and also anyone that you know had concerns about the election let's call them election deniers which is uh you know don't mean anything by it folks but um so also you doubt the elections like we we we do too right like we we don't we don't trust

we verify come and help us do this and i have a hard time imagining two better populations to bring into bitcoin than folks that are distrusting the voting system and young people and so we expose them you know they they did a bunch of work and uh we never mentioned anything about bitcoin it was just this is a point system this is a way to keep track and see who you know contributes more um because that's all it was to us and to guatemala however because it's within stack work then folks that choose to learn about lightning could turn those points and redeem them for satoshi's how do you uh just curious how do you remove potential bias of the human workers to see if you'd not show the candidates just the numbers?

We try to obfuscate as much of the data as we can so that people are only looking at numbers, but that was kind of hit or miss. Really the best way to do it is when a user came in, we had a series of control jobs, so basically jobs that we already knew the answers to, and we have a threshold of the amount of errors that you're allowed to make before starting to do real work and then you also have a threshold of

how often you give a person another control job to test them and they're indistinguishable from one another and so um if people try to game the system or what is more often the case my you know boomer aunt that's like oh yeah sweetie i'm gonna help you out and it's like i tried going in but your technology like your thing doesn't work sweetie like it's like no auntie it actually worked perfectly well thank you for confirming that we don't allow you know fat fingered uh people that can't follow instructions on a cell phone um and so yeah avoid getting garbage into the data and like the cool thing about how stack work works is you can like modulate all of that So if you have enough people, you could bring the level of trust that you require from users up or modulated down and even then segregate users into elite users where really gnarly problems, you get them in first and things of that nature that just allows you to work with data in an incredibly powerful way.

right i imagine you send the same picture jpeg whatever to thousands of people and it's like all right if 90 are giving a particular answer and so yeah the consensus algorithm for how do we accept the data was uh so the machines would read it and so it was if two different machines agreed on the same um on the data being the same then it was accepted uh and put into the database depending on the machines give you a certain confidence interval as well and so you can set gradients there but then we also set a manual threshold of you know if a number is above us you know two sigmas of so a large number you know because if they're going to steal the election the easiest way would be to get in hunt you know try to squeeze in hundreds of numbers here and there

And so anything above, I forget the exact number, anything above a certain amount always gets verified by humans. That way you're like the small amounts, you're not losing time on that. And then the human verification is, at least what we decided upon, was two people had to reach the same conclusion. If they don't, then a third. And if the third didn't, we just passed that on or put that into another pile of unreadable to decide after the fact if the unreadables needed its own process. Like so much data was unreadable that we need to come up with something different. And actually there wasn't like in the end, that wasn't a good enough model where our numbers were allowed us to reach precise conclusions. And so that was it.

And so we ended up doing about 8 million jobs in total. 50% of it was done by Guatemalan users. 50% was done by the global audience that works within StatWorks so that we had the ability to move. You had distrusting Guatemalans doing the data, so the data is useful. But then also you had people who didn't care about any of this. Impartial.

Impartial people. And so the best thing that, you know, I was happiest about was, you know, we're comparing a 3.2 million data point database and it was accurate or it matched precisely to the election authorities database on 98.3% of all cases. Holy shit. So it worked, right? This is powerful. It worked. And so, yay. which meant well what happened in 1.9 percent right let's hone in on that and that's the

you know one of the really powerful things about elections is if you got such you know the amount of data that that you would need to sift through is so large that what you need is a filter right you need to be able to find the signal and leave the noise right and then be able to say these places are the places that you need to focus on right because if you're just spending all your resources on the entire thing looking for needle in the haystack exactly right so we created a magnifying glass that finds needles in haystacks and yeah uh oh yeah about eight million jobs done by you know about a thousand guatemalans and about a thousand people around the world and we paid out over 1.2 bitcoin holy crap this is powerful this is the future this is the story

i needed uh at the end of this week after everything that's going on everybody's got their heads down worried about what's going on but what we can build with this the incentive systems the cryptographic systems the verification that comes from that cryptography it's very powerful and so with that in mind like again two weeks like how profound of an improvement is that on the process prior to implementing this? People considered this to be impossible in Guatemala. Literally, they would say, it's not possible. Don't even try.

So A, I'm hopeful that a new generation of young Guatemalan entrepreneurs would be technologists, understand the impossible is possible if you study Bitcoin. and two it is so you've the what simple proof did doesn't make election uh fraud impossible it makes it much harder you eliminate 99 of the attack surface which in the case of 2019 was six days worth of you know doing whatever you want with the data to you now have essentially

you know on election night that's that's all you've got and so if you're going to take the risk of trying to include uh altered jpegs well you don't have six days to find like where you can do it without getting caught you have to take the risk of all right let's just do it and so you know when people are instead of having 99 you know a large attack surface you have a very small attack surface and you force them to act quickly people make mistakes you know when people are rushed people make mistakes um and so it doesn't mean that it's impossible it just means that it's extremely hard and in our case it's um the outgoing government lost like i said the old ownership class and the management class lost the election the new management and ownership

won and in that transition uh they basically the outgoing government weaponized the justice department and accused the election authorities of election tampering right and for the first time in our democratic history invaded the election authority jurisdiction which legally in guatemala the only authority that has their jurisdiction is the election authority and they are they are they are part of the judicial system and so what is another part of the judiciary doing coming into and invading the documents and ripping them out and taking them which you know they broke the custody of the election documents meaning that now no one trusts anything because the documents the physical documents have been manhandled and like literally like thrown around and and so even

if months later the justice system says here's you know proof it's like well but you broke the custody of the document tampered the evidence exactly right and so i don't know if they planned on it but that does mean that the only evidence that is untampered is the evidence that's on bitcoin so now the election authority is facing an election tampering argument by the guatemalan election crimes unit are using the information on bitcoin to prove that the elections were not tempered and uh that just you know the justice department revealed their evidence publicly in a in a press conference and so what they were claiming happened is uh when you go into the metadata of the jpeg files the date created field of the jpegs out of 125 000 there were like 700

that were created prior to 6 p.m and though in their mind proving that election documents were created before the vote count occurred which was extremely concerning and i wasn't expecting that and we you know looked and poured over everything and it's in my report um what we found was that even though there was this small portion of documents that could potentially have been created prior at least according to the metadata which metadata isn't wasn't on bitcoin and is alterable you know metadata is not as reliable as other data regardless it does say that but then also when you look at it there was something like 40 000 documents that were created the day after the election like 12 months after the vote count and when you compare that to the information

that's on bitcoin that means that the following the the justice department's logic in the evidence they're presenting it means that those that metadata or those documents were created according to their metadata in the future when compared to the timestamps on bitcoin and so the justice department would have to present evidence of time travel in order to prove their logic or the more you know plausible explanation was if bitcoin is saying this what other patterns are in the data and what we revealed as um most the places that have those problems with the metadata are all in the same voting centers and so basically those machines that were used in those locations were misconfigured in their time zones and so the machine thought it was in the pacific island

or in you know africa and that's why the jpeg file contains the wrong time but because bitcoin was used the election authorities had the ability to disprove this had bitcoin not been used they would not have had any way to prove that the election tampering argument is false holy so um the court proceedings haven't begun the election authorities first decided to just leave the country for four or five months these are you know four of the highest ranking justice magistrates in guatemala like you have the equivalent of our supreme court and a few judges and then there's these guys so it's like the just the weaponization of the justice department against the guatemalan election system pushed the you know some of the highest judges in the land uh to flee the country

preventively uh but they actually decided to come back in february and present themselves in court and proceedings will begin and these kinds of cases take years but uh we'll eventually see whether or not a discussion of cryptography and open timestamps and bitcoin happens between a judge at the Guatemalan justice system and so I'm very concerned for Satoshi Nakamoto because the Guatemalan elections, sorry the Guatemalan

justice system might issue an arrest warrant against him and you know beg some explanations so yeah it's been a wild ride and so our audit we finished it in March of this year

I got I did FOIA requests so freedom of information acts uh to request access not not to so that not only did i have the 2023 files but i also went back in history and asked for everything um i got everything as of 2015. so election authorities had a tragic voting accident in 2011 and 2007 and you know they just you know forgot all the oh we don't have it anyway we don't have it anywhere so yeah my message to people that care about elections is uh go get go get access to the files before they disappear because they disappear and so then we the audit was not just about this election but the previous two

and comparing the comparing them and so we published it and it's got a ton of recommendations because my goal is to come back in 2027 our next election in guatemala and make the guatemalan election uh the most transparent election in the history of humankind um that is my my promise to to guatemala i will try i will i will die on that hill and um are you worried that you will literally die on that i hope not i hope not i will take extreme precautions to avoid that outcome but basically where we go next with this is uh i'm the only one that was able to run a full audit no one else had built all of this behind impossible that's according to folks and and so uh i don't want people to have to do everything that i did and so my recommendations i mentioned

70 of the data was read by machines and 30 of the data was read by humans and it cost us 1.2 bitcoin uh it's relatively cheap yes for sure like at the time what was bitcoin at like probably 30 30. yeah um which another caveat is when i come back i'll remind people of that particularly about the high scores because it's it's it's essentially gamifying election audits and so digital witness is an arcade you can go to digitalwitness.io our main page you can find a little arcade like what you used to if you went ever went to an arcade and you saw that the first thing you see is the high scores and so our top 10 users are high scores and uh number one earned 383 000 satoshis which um it's like 120 bucks no like today price is like 250 250 yeah um but so it

means that every four years i get the opportunity to remind all of guatemala how much bitcoin was worth in 2023 and so my one of my ideas is let's use the fact that democracies happen usually on a kind of four-year timetable which just coincides with the having cycles right um to remind people right the turn let's turn democracy voting systems into the 10 000 bitcoin for pizza moment but for for any everyone that cares about democracy that should make it easier you know when i come back in 2031 for the 2031 election 2035 2039 my goal is by 2039 everyone in guatemala is you know hotly bitcoin sufficiently orange peeled indeed um but so of course i don't want to like our the people that support us don't want to you know keep won't be able to keep investing you know 1.2

Bitcoin every time there's an election. So the idea is how do we bring the price down? What we do is we, our recommendations in this report are geared to how do we go from instead of 70% of the data being read by machines, 99.9% of the data can be read by a machine. And so the goal is to bring together an open source crew of engineers to publish code that would allow anyone to essentially download all of the JPEGs, so the election blockchain, and then download this software where they can chuck in the block and it would spit out the results running all of, you know, the open source OCR magic so that anyone that is willing to download 120,000, 150,000 JPEGs, which will probably run you at about, you know, like 200 gigs,

300 gigs. So anyone that's willing to download about 300 gigs worth of JPEG data and then learn how to run open source software that can read that data could generate their own audit and verify themselves and therefore because there were a lot of people that tried to audit like on social media a bunch of people became viral kind of like how we did it in 2019 so there's an appetite to do this but now we're going to say here's the open source it's all here click click these buttons learn how to run the software yourself and with a few friends over the weekend, you can audit the entire election running, you know, running open source software. And so everyone that gets to the end zone will then get prompted to download a Bitcoin

client and learn about how, oh, there's this other open source, you know, community where you can download hundreds of a few hundred gigs and you can run no uh you know an audit every 10 minutes of the entire financial you know system you're a great man carlina holy shit again like i said i think the the coverage of what happened in guatemala particularly digital witness and um simple proofs participation in that i mean it's profound um not well understood how profound it is by the public yet but i think i um i'm i'm to be honest happy that it is and kind of uh unhappy that i need to become a little more well known um but the reason that i i am more than happy to pop my head on is because uh so there is going to be an election

later this year seven months from now i'm six months that's the one question i had the dominion voting have anything to do with your elections oh in guatemala yeah um so there was an effort about eight months before the election in 2023 in guatemala uh to remove our paper-based system and replace it with some type of e-voting system. I think it was Smartmatic. For those that don't know Smartmatic, they're the Venezuelan voting system company. Yeah, very reliable.

That ran most of the Latin American voting systems over the past 30 years, including all of the Venezuelan elections, at least up until the last one, because the last one they decided to say no. But anyway, so there was a contract to hire these folks, Smartmatic, for I believe it was $80 million

that they were going to get for the contract and remove all the paper-based system. But fortunately, a lot of people in Guatemala fought back and they were forced to cancel that contract and go back to paper. I think paper is the way. It's the gold standard. It's the Bitcoin standard of voting.

Now that you can audit it easier, there's no... I would love for us to go back to... I'm not going to get into 2020 election conspiracies. I will say waking up in the middle of the night and seeing that that

jump is having me asking some questions how did that happen what's going on I think paper ballots that are audited by individuals load up the JPEGs test the data

or hash the data into the blockchain and then attest the data later makes the most sense what do you call it like a summation arithmetic or addition

simple addition simple addition it's not rocket science there is consensus between computer scientists

that you know paper ballots are the way to go the weaknesses are the compute of how do you process all of that

so that you can get results fast enough and that's how we ended up in this e-voting you know thing in the 90s

of course with computers being you know you know don't you know anyway e-voting

took off and what I will say is something that a lot of people don't understand is that the United States

has 50 states so it's still a federation and there's still competition between states each state has the jurisdiction

to decide their own election law and then more often than not and I'm not like super expert at this

but what I'm told and what I understand is that the actual election authorities who are charged with implementing the rules of the protocol set by the state legislature are the county clerks. And so there are about 3,000 counties in all 50 states. So that means that there's about 3,000 election authorities that may be faced with the same issue that the election authorities in Guatemala faced in immutable democracy. And so

often those folks are just you know hard-working honest people that care about their community uh more often than not boomers and gen xers who you know just you know feel a call to civic duty yeah and they don't really know computers and technology and you know maybe they've got an guy and i hope that uh but uh i would i am sure that there are many folks in that hot seat that every day that gets closer to november means less sleep at night more cold sweat running down the back of your neck thinking am i going to be the county that for whatever random reason come november the tornado of nonsense and the you know clown world decides to throw thrust me in the spotlight and all of a sudden i'm going to jail i'm in the hot seat i'm the one that's getting

accused of having tampered everything because the wrong person lost right and so my reason i'm i'm popping up for air is uh i invite people who have any interest in their local communities and especially if you know your local county clerk maybe went to school with you know them or no their son or their daughter their neighbor and just uh tell them about this ask them do you have a plan for november come november if for whatever reason the you know whirlwind that can be the the world nowadays decides to you know the eye of the eye of soren descends upon your county and you get thrust offer them this shield you know it's it's the you know gandalf standing on on on the ledge you know you shall not pass right just stop the madness the slow creep and you know it's cheap

it's it's it's not complicated it's uh reach out to simple proof uh they i'm sure they take inquiries um reach out to me on nostra i'm digital witness uh and um we can walk you through it but it's basically these folks uh there's cryptography out there to be able to differentiate fake information on social media and and and wherever from original i don't want to say necessarily true but official and so at least in our case this ended up being a an important piece of how the outcome was protected and i'm not saying that all elections are carried out perfectly but because it if election tampering had occurred this would have exposed it right when i downloaded all all the jpegs if there were a bunch that had changed i would have been able to say well these

changed you know and i could pinpoint to it and the system logs would have showed which user had gotten access and changed those jpegs right so we could actually find the in the specific individuals that decided to you know do something bad and destructive for whatever reason drove them to it uh instead of just uh creating a scenario where everyone's just pointing fingers at each other and we know we don't know what's going on and it's it it's a it's a matter of narratives as opposed to a matter of objective truth and so um there's three thousand opportunities to get this into the hands of your neighbor and give them a shield to protect against an onslaught

that's inevitable. And, you know, at least what the election authorities said in Guatemala is, wow, it's cheap. And it's like, yeah, I mean, if you can protect against some madness like that, it's very cheap. like not having needing needing insurance and not having it is much more expensive and so uh my uh message is wouldn't it be nice come december of 2024 that uh bitcoiners could credibly make the

case that uh the bitcoin blockchain through the open timestamps protocol protected elections in small local governments and if we are able to do that then i think we can credibly make the case that bitcoin protects democracy and if bitcoin protects democracy then if you're against bitcoin you seem to be against democracy you're fascist um and yeah at the very least it uh is a a use case that's objectively like clear and most normies can get it instead of fighting us against you know money and oh it's all just a collective illusion or whatever the arguments are against no intrinsic value there's no intrinsic value really it's you know it's not heavy enough um uh versus if it's about just mathematics and

cryptography and and the ability to differentiate artificial intelligence fake from real um that's pretty objective and so uh if miners ever get attacked because they're doing all these mathematical functions for you know no reason well here's a here's a reason and um do you like your elections to be uh to have some integrity yeah would you like that maybe you should let bitcoin survive exactly that's it you're letting bitcoin survive maybe you should stop fighting bitcoin as hard as you are exactly and so um yeah my message is uh i think a lot of bitcoiners have given up on democracy i i'm one of them i won't tell you to believe in democracy that's up to you and what i am saying is it's an opportunity democracy is

provide an opportunity to farm more bitcoiners it's a you can depend on another voting you know season like you can pretend like depend on the sun coming up tomorrow and let's just see it as an opportunity to reach people with um you know it's an educational touch point about how bitcoin's consensus algorithm is superior to what we have in uh this world yeah right yeah could you imagine the point at which let's imagine a world in which this is widely adopted and the only way

to manipulate an election is to reorg the blockchain. Which even then, like who knows if that is even effective. It also kind of means that

Bitcoin has an inherent advantage over other blockchains because uh why would you use a less secure yeah blockchain why would you use a proof of stake blockchain if you can use the most powerful proof of work and to be clear we're not storing votes on the blockchain no storing hashes that prove that something happened at a certain point in time that a number was existed existed at a certain point in time um yes i'm doing this because i want to have paper ballots i want to protect the proof of work consensus algorithm of paper that

guatemalans have which is you know it's beautiful it's it's something it's what i'm it's the only thing that i've ever been proud of of being as a guatemalan is when i'm there at my voting table and i'm with my neighbors and i you know meet other people and tell them look one plus one equals two yeah and we all agree the way it's going here in america you may you may be called a blast blasphemer for saying one plus one equals two um curious two things in the audit going back to 2019 2015 did you find any oh statistical uh divergences between yeah yes uh I saw it was here. It's basically, so every time we vote,

we have five, well, six different elections and types of elections because then you have the small and local government. And so basically what we found is that in the case of Guatemala, the national presidential election, which is that first line that you're looking at, is green.

So we did not find, And unless the JPEGs cannot be trusted, which in the case of 2023, the odds of that are, you know, you need to prove time travel. So on the national scale, those elections, because they're so big, have the benefit of large numbers. But it's the small elections, the local governments, the municipal elections in certain municipalities that for some reason, math just doesn't check out. I prefer you not point them out to be honest okay we can take that out yeah well potentially

not a bad idea we'll take that out basically what it means is the national election provides cover so that everyone's obsessed on the national scale and so no one's paying attention to the small places

and so yeah okay it's all out there it's just more being specific about it is potentially dangerous but

yeah no we put it out and it's that's the thing it's you can get away with it's the whole

bait and switch right it's like oh look shiny object don't pay attention to what's going on here at least that's

what's happening in Guatemala since 2015 so if we paid more attention to local government which is arguably where when it's most important

because it affects your local government affects you the most because you live in that locality and so you know

you're asking about Dominion or well e-voting in general I wouldn't say a specific e-voting system provider I would hope to

put together a plan that would allow us to get the help of Bitcoiners offer some bounties uh that we can you know basically offer some amount of sats so that we can answer certain questions about all 3 000 counties because i think we can systematize exactly which counties are most likely to uh benefit from this and swing counties well so again this is not about the national okay it's not about the president it's about the local It's about identifying the counties where either county clerks are Bitcoiners and want to work with us, or the system that they are charged with.

So the election law has certain characteristics to it that are more similar to what we experience in Guatemala, basically paper-based systems with an audit trail that is eventually scanned and made available for anyone to verify. how can we identify within the 3 000 counties that exist in the u.s which ones those are in the shortest amount of time and identify who we would need to sit down with to share this information and invite them to use this shield to protect themselves uh so that uh we can reach out and because yeah some people will say there are specific counties that everyone knows about there's one particular in arizona that uh people always mention um and um i don't think that's the way to go it's like you don't want to you know clown world thrives on drawing a lot of attention to places that have problems and blowing it out of proportion right so that we forget that there's

all this good in the world still right and that's how they get you to hit your neighbor essentially i want to take the opposite approach i want to go to the places that are awesome and i want to make sure that they have the tools and to defend themselves from the slow creep right let's protect let's empower let's ensure that those communities that are thriving continue to thrive yeah and also not only prevent the slow creep but create a somewhat of a forcing function where it's like hey they're doing this why are we and exactly if if you empower those communities that are thriving with hey they are on the gold standard of voting which is paper based but the arguments used to be oh but you can't it's impossible to audit in real time and so we can well no it is possible we just

did it and so you eliminate the arguments that allow for the slow creep to go in and so you make those communities shine so much that it just forces you know the or just if other folks want to go down you know with the ship and you clap at it man we're just we're gonna go over here yeah this is awesome damn i'm sitting here like what the fuck am i doing with my life like how like if this is widespread not only at the county level federal level whatever what do you think this could mean for i mean the world i mean we're talking about i mean that forcing function we just talked on is very micro level county pressuring others but you can imagine

this gets enough traction enough people adopting this technology could be demanded by anyone and voting in any election around the world? Well, I'll say two things on that. The first quick thing is, I can tell you what it means to me in Guatemala, is now I can speak to people that are in the executive branch, the legislative branch,

and the judicial branch in Guatemala who understand that something serious happened and that Bitcoin is an important and powerful tool to protect against state-on-state violence, right? Inter-Gabal squabbles. And so when I go to talk to them about the importance of Bitcoin, their brains are open, right?

And something was able to kind of pierce the FUD armor that has been slowly built around it. and not just with you know potential decision makers in government but also in the private sector and just with my neighbor or my uncle who's like oh you know you're still in that bitcoin stuff that's just you know scamming everyone it's like all right did you did you listen at all to what happened to the elections like we're still democracy in part thanks to this and and they have to like that didn't happen in fantasyland and so it's making my uh job or my interest in talking to people about this in a curious manner easier and the second thing is um

this isn't just about voting it's i want to live in a world where if i ever decide to do something that might piss off the state like i did where i am concerned that the state might counter sue me or sue me based on lies that when we get to court and the justice is on the other side and you know the bureaucrat that is ticked off at me is the plaintiff presenting bullshit that i can say but you know here is my record of things and my record is time stamped to before that nonsense and so assuming the person in the justice cares about mathematics truth and truth then they'll throw that out right and so i think you know in my case it was in the voting system But there's plenty of other cases where for public records, for anything that has to do with the state, the state will maintain the monopoly of being the oracle.

They have the ability to decide what is true. When you do anything with the state, get a driver's license, buy a house or whatever, at the end of the day, you're going to rely on a state issued something or other. right and so that receipt that that that proof we should all have the ability to say all right you get to be the oracle and you get to decide what's true and and etc but what you don't get is the ability to change what's true after you've said that and that's essentially what simple proof is saying and and in guatemala we're already seeing so there was an interesting thing happening we did this with the election system and within two or three weeks before the executive branch changed and the new government took office once the outgoing government realized that they weren't

gonna you know be able to change the election um wouldn't you know it the it guy at the finance ministry that ran the cloud and the databases turned up dead and uh all of the database went down and uh so now you know years and potentially decades of financial information of the guatemalan state and of all of the contracts and everything that the state has been paying is gone and so shit uh we have this unique example of you have the election authorities with an immutable record that is able to prove and then you can't you counter that or you compare that to the fact that the ministry of finance lost all its database and so if the incoming government ever tried to make a corruption case against you know public officials that stole money

there's no evidence to prove it right or at least the primary evidence is gone and so people are opening up to the argument that wouldn't wouldn't it have been nice for the you know finance database to be immutable as well. Have simple proof. And just allow any citizen to download the database every day. And so, yeah, you could disappear the IT guy, which he was killed.

Like, I'm sorry for his family. And I mean, it's just terrible. It also means like if the databases can't change, well it guys won't be on the chopping block this is for your own good it guys um like there is this situation now where you know decades ago you might have had to like blow up buildings and set fire to stuff and that happened too back in the day but you know you've got witnesses you've got paper flying all over the place now you just need to off one guy and poof right so you know the juxtaposition of this is, you know, a little bit, you know, the cognitive dissonance for some people

in Guatemala is too much to bear. And so we're hopeful and very optimistic that this will lead to the use case in elections and the need that the state has to protect itself from itself gives us a chance to prove the use case. And then we can expand to other registries so that in the future every time you interface with the state they get to decide what's true but you you get you keep that and that can't mutate right we i want immutable record keeping and you know it's mildly you know equal footing between individuals and and government so holy shit that

you can see it forming see it begin to form why not at least I want to give it a shot the slow creep seems impossible but

it's I mean I didn't say it on air but I said it earlier today it's darkest before the dawn uh whether it's guatemala here in the u.s what's going on whether it's in regards to bitcoin in regards to this looming election later this year let's be honest with ourselves freaks things are looking pretty gloomy um a lot of desperation a lot of helplessness a lot of hopelessness out there um there's examples like this what you're doing a digital witness what

the simple proof guys are doing it's like if you look if you squint if you look in the right places uh there's good happening uh we are winning in some regards small wins can add up to winning more broadly and that's what we need is i needed this small win this week arlene yeah thank you for coming to the studio it's been it's been a long week That's my pleasure, man. I just need your help finding more people in counties everywhere. We have a couple of ideas of what we can do. We can get this in some hands, in front of some eyes and some ears. This is an episode that will be sent to some people I have connections with. I have a lot of connections, Freaks. Okay.

I'm kidding in all seriousness I do have a few people on mind who I'm going to text this to that may be able to do something with it

and reach out please digital witness on Noster we got cancelled on Twitter pretty you know

like back in 2019 and so never allowed back and Simple Proof also got cancelled in 2023 because Bitcoin in elections

kind of like you know sets off a bunch of alarms wouldn't you know it and so you know I'm on Noster

SimpleProof.com if you want to reach out to those guys DigitalWitness.io Immutable Democracy let's go let's do it I'm excited

optimistic thanks reinvigorated Carlina thank you thank you peace and love freaks dickie